Either she was making it up — which would have meant that the child we had brought home two days earlier was in a great deal more trouble than anybody had told us.
Or she was not.
On the Thursday I asked her, as lightly as I have ever asked anything, whether she remembered anything else about the man in the photograph.
And she said: “He had a red bag. And he did the singing.”
Silas had a red rucksack from the age of nineteen. It is in the loft. It was on the back seat of that car and it came back to us in a plastic bag from the police.
The bundle in the drawer.
There is a brown envelope in the bureau in our front room.
It came in the October of 2023 after the inquest. Inside it are the coroner’s findings, the collision investigator’s report, the statements, and a covering letter from a woman at the coroner’s office whose name I could not tell you.
