The notebook was on the arm of her chair in the front room with a pen in it.
I picked it up because it was her notebook and because I thought the chemist’s details might be in it.
I read four pages standing up in my mother’s front room, and then I sat down in her chair, which I have not sat in since I was about twelve, and read the rest of it.
Then I took it out to the car and gave it to the officer and said: “I think you need this.”
She asked me whether I understood what I was doing.
And I said yes.
That is the single most consequential thing I have ever done and it took about ninety seconds, and I have never once wished I had put it back on the arm of the chair — which I want written down, because there is a version of me that would have.
Why the dinner happened.
Everybody wants this to have been a woman losing her temper over something.
It was a Thursday. It was arranged in the first week of November. It was the first time all six of them had been in our house since the wedding.
