My mother-in-law turned up on my porch with three suitcases and called the police when I wouldn’t let her in. Then the officer asked my husband one straightforward question about who owned the house — and the silence that followed was the ugliest thing I have ever stood through.

Six years. That is where six years started.

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PART 3 — FORTY-ONE THOUSAND

Here is what Norma Delaine said on my path, in front of a police officer, with her daughter filming.

She said she had put forty-one thousand dollars into this house in 2018 and that she was not being kept out of a property she had an interest in.

I had never heard that number in my life.

Officer Beckwith wrote it down, which at the time I thought was odd and which was the single most useful thing anybody did that afternoon.

In the February of 2018, Norma Delaine transferred forty-one thousand dollars to her son.

She has the statement. She kept it because she is seventy-four and that generation keeps everything.

Ardan told her it was going into the house on Oriel Street and that it would be looked after.

It did not go into that house. It could not have. There was no transaction on that property in 2018 and there is a land registry entry that has said the same thing since 2016.

Where it went was a personal guarantee.

He had a partnership in a fit-out business that came apart in the autumn of 2017, and he had signed personally, and in the February of 2018 he was eleven days from something extremely unpleasant.