Four hundred here. Eleven hundred there. Across about three years, on invoices for things that were ordered and delivered and are perfectly real.
He says he went to the accountant on his own. Twice. In the April and again in the June.
He had it checked properly, by somebody who had no reason to protect either of them, and he says where the copies are — which is a sentence of about eleven words that I have now given to a solicitor.
He says he has not gone to the police.
Because it is his brother. Because their mother was seventy-eight that summer and had already buried a husband.
And because — and this is the only point in four minutes where his voice does anything at all — he says he keeps thinking there will be a right moment to put it to him.
He says he has moved what he could out of the business into something in my name.
That it took four months. That it is not finished and that it will not be finished for a while, and that if it comes to it, I am to go to the accountant and not to anybody else.
And then, at about three minutes and forty seconds, he says the thing I have listened to about four hundred times since.
He says: “If anything happens to me, Carys, don’t let him do the paperwork.”
And then, after about four seconds: “He’ll offer. Don’t let him.”
And then the last twenty seconds.
I am not going to put those in here. Four people have asked and I have said no four times.
They are to me. He says my name twice in them and that is as much as anybody is getting.
PART 5
The accident was an accident.
I want that said plainly and early, because of where everybody’s head goes and because four separate people have asked me the same ugly question in eleven weeks.
Nobody did anything to that boat.
Not his brother. Not anybody. That is the first place every single mind goes — it is where mine went for about eleven hours on the Tuesday night and I did not sleep at all.
It has been looked at again. Properly, in the last eleven weeks, by people whose job it is, with the original photographs and the original report in front of them.
It was a fault in the boat. It was weather that came across in about forty minutes. It was bad luck of exactly the sort that kills careful men and that is the whole of why careful men are careful.
Four people have now told me that in four different ways and I have believed it each time for about a day.
My husband and my sons drowned in a lake. That has not changed and it is not going to and no video was ever going to change it.
What the video changed is everything that happened afterwards.
The phone was never lost.
Roscoe hid it. In his own house, in a box of tackle in the garage, underneath a tray — in the one place he could be certain nobody would look for years, because he knew exactly what this family is like.
He knew that nobody in this family would go through those boxes until somebody in it was ready to start giving things away.
He had buried his own father. He knew exactly how long that takes and he put a number on it.
He hid a message for his wife in the slowest possible place on earth. On purpose.
Because he had worked out that if anything ever happened to him, I would not be able to open a box of his things for about five years.
He was out by one.
It took me six. And it was not me in the end — it was a twenty-three-year-old standing in a garage on a Saturday saying Mum, come on.
And here is the part that has taken the ground out from under six years of my life.
Garrison was not there for me. Not once in six years.
I have told everybody, for six years, that I do not know what I would have done without that man.
I have said it at two weddings, into a microphone at one of them.
I have said it to his face about four hundred times, and to his mother, and to a woman at the church who repeats things.
He was there for the paperwork.
Every single thing that man did in this house was real. The boiler worked. The fence is still up. He sat with Minna for about four hours on the night of the inquest.
And all of it sat around the one thing he actually needed, which was to be the person standing next to me whenever a document came out of an envelope.
Not most documents. Every single one, for six years, without one exception that anybody has been able to find.
