The Thursdays got more regular as he got worse, and I have been telling myself that is because he needed me more.
It is in a diary in my own handwriting and it goes the other way round.
ITEM 8. THE CHARGE SHEET.
Two thousand and forty dollars.
I got a look at the itemised list afterwards, because Bertie’s solicitor let me, and I made a copy.
Four months. About thirty visits.
The biggest single item on it is nine dollars forty.
There is not one thing on that whole list that any person would steal. It is soup and bread and batteries and cat food, thirty times over, which is exactly what is on those four pieces of paper.
Rossiter’s had the receipts for January and February in their own system. They had four years of a man coming in twice a week and paying.
Nobody looked.
The girls on the tills noticed. Three of them, by the summer, had started saying something to each other about it.
None of them had the authority to do anything but report it, so they reported it, which is what they are told to do.
ITEM 8a. THE GIRL ON THE TILL.
Her name is Carrie and she is nineteen and she is the one in most of the footage.
I went in and found her in the December, because I wanted to say something to her, and it did not go the way I had planned.
She told me she had tried.
In the June she went to the duty manager and said she thought there was something wrong with the old gentleman and that it was not theft.
She was told that it was not for her to decide, which it is not, and that it had been logged, which it had.
In the August she did it again.
Then she said the thing I did not want.
She said: “I didn’t know he had anybody. He always came in on his own.”
Nineteen years old, on a till, and she spent four months trying to get somebody to look properly at a man she assumed had nobody in the world.
He had somebody. She lives thirty feet away and had been having tea with him every Thursday since the April.
ITEM 9. THE CAT.
Two tins, on every list.
He has not had a cat since 2019.
Merle went the year after his son, and he did not get another one because he said at ninety-four it was not fair on the animal.
He has been buying cat food for seven years.
It is in a cupboard in that kitchen and there are about ninety tins in there, stacked, in date order, because he does them in date order.
I found it in the April and I did not say anything about that either.
ITEM 10. THE BIRTHDAY CARD.
Last on every list.
His son Gerald was born on the nineteenth of May and went in 2019.
There is a drawer in that house with the cards in it. Seven of them, bought and written and not sent, one for every May since.
They all say more or less the same thing, because he will have written them from the same place in his head each time.
The one from this May is the shortest.
ITEM 10a. THE ELEVENTH OF SEPTEMBER.
The morning of the hearing.
I did not decide in that courtroom, which is how I have told it and how it looked.
I decided at about seven o’clock that morning, in my own kitchen, and I know because of what I did next.
I got the four lists out of the drawer where I had put them and I chose one and I put it in my bag.
Then I put the other three back.
A woman who stands up on an impulse at the back of a courtroom does not have a document in her handbag that she selected over breakfast.
I have let people have the impulse version since September because it is better, and because the other one has a question attached to it.
If I had it in my bag at seven in the morning, I could have been at his house at half seven.
He lives thirty feet away. The hearing was at ten.
I could have knocked on that door with the list in my hand and done the thing I promised him in the April, with two and a half hours in hand.
ITEM 10b. WHAT HE DID WHEN I STOOD UP.
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