WHAT LILY TOLD HIM

Lily is ten. She had the baby on her chest in the back of the car, the way she had been carrying him for six weeks by then, which is a thing nobody in the family had really looked at properly.

She told him through the glass, before he had the door open.

She said: dad, that man took mom's case. And then she stopped, for about a third of a second, and then the rest came out much faster than the first part, the way it does with children when the second half is the part that frightened them.

She said: and said we saw too much.

That is eleven words. He had eleven words and a navy leather briefcase going through a revolving door on the other side of the forecourt, and he had four minutes.

I have listened to Lily say those eleven words in a room with two lawyers, and she says them exactly the same way every time, because she is telling the truth about what she heard.

She was not telling the truth about what was said. Those are different things and it took eight months and a great deal of money to prove that they were.

I want to be fair to my brother here, because everybody who hears this story gets to be clever about it afterwards.

Put yourself on that forecourt. Your wife has been dead nine days. Your ten-year-old is holding your six-week-old son because you have not worked out yet how to do both. She tells you a man took your wife's case and told her she saw too much.

There is no version of a father who hears that and walks over to ask a polite question.