I felt terrible about the camera and I want that on the record.
Three years of a man being extremely careful not to be identified, and my response was to buy surveillance equipment. Ro said it was fine. Ro said, “You’re allowed to know who’s in your garden,” which is legally and practically true and did not help.
What I told myself, and what I still think is roughly honest, is that I was not trying to catch him. I was trying to stop needing to.
Because by the middle of the second winter it had got hold of me in a way that wasn’t good. I had a spreadsheet with a chart. I was working out Thursday constraints. I had started, on bad nights, constructing whole biographies for a man I had never seen, and some of them were quite obviously about Tom, and I knew that, and that is a bad place to be living.
I put it up in March, on the porch, pointing at the drive. Not hidden. If he’d looked he’d have seen it, and I half hoped he would, and he did not.
He came on the nineteenth of March at 5:12 in the morning.
I have eleven seconds of him and I have watched them, at a conservative estimate, four hundred times.
Here is everything in those eleven seconds.
A man comes up the drive from the left, on foot, pushing a mower. He is not young — you can tell from the walk, the slight forward set of him. Heavy jacket, dark beanie, work gloves. Somewhere between sixty and seventy-five; I could never do better than that.
He gets to the top of the drive. He stops. He looks at the front of the house for about two seconds — not at the camera, at the house, at the upstairs windows.
Then he takes the mower down onto the grass and walks out of frame.
That’s it. Eleven seconds.
Two things in that clip mattered enormously and I did not spot either of them. Ro spotted one and my brother-in-law spotted the other on a laptop at Easter.
Ro’s: the mower is not a lawnmower you would own. It’s a commercial one, the sort with a big rear roller, and it is battery-powered.
That is why I never heard it. A battery mower at fifty feet through a closed window is about as loud as a fridge. I had spent three years assuming a supernatural quality of stealth and the answer was that the man had good equipment.
Danny’s, at Easter, leaning over the laptop with a beer: “That’s a works jacket.”
I said what.
He said the jacket has a logo on the left chest, and paused it, and blew it up, and it is four pixels of pale green on dark green and it is completely illegible, and Danny said, “Yeah, but it’s there. That’s not a man in his gardening coat. That’s a man in a uniform, at five in the morning, before his shift.”
So: a man in his sixties or seventies, in a work uniform, with commercial equipment, cutting a stranger’s lawn before dawn, on a rhythm that bent around Thursdays.
He was doing it before work. Or between jobs. A man that age still in a uniform at five in the morning is not a man with a lot of spare capacity, and he had been spending it on my grass for three years.
That was the week I stopped being able to leave it alone. Not out of curiosity any more. It had tipped over into something like distress — the feeling of being in debt to somebody who has gone to enormous lengths to make sure you can’t pay them.
I did one more thing, and it is the thing I am least proud of, and it worked.
I went round the neighbourhood with a still from the video.
Not the face — the face is a dark shape under a beanie at 5 a.m., there is no face. I printed the mower. The big commercial battery mower with the rear roller, blown up, on a piece of paper, and I knocked on about thirty doors over two Saturdays and asked people if they’d seen it.
Nobody had. But on the second Saturday a man three streets over called Errol, who does gardens himself, looked at the picture for a while and said, “That’s a Kessler. That’s a nice bit of kit, that. You don’t buy that for your own lawn.”
I said what do you buy it for.
He said, “Municipal. Schools, parks, that sort of thing. Or a big contract.”
And then he said — and he was being helpful, he had no idea what he was handing me — “There’s only three places round here run those. The council, the golf place, and whoever does the schools.”
The schools.
I want you to understand that I did not know why that landed the way it did. I stood in a stranger’s doorway on a Saturday in April and something went through me like cold water and I could not have told you what it was.
I said thank you and I walked home and I sat in the kitchen for about an hour.
And then I got out the box.
There is a box. Everyone has the box. Ro had packed it in the June after Tom died, because I could not, and it had been on the top shelf of the wardrobe for two and a half years — his wallet, his watch, his phone, his lanyard from work, and the stuff out of the car.
I had never opened it. I had specifically never opened it.
Tom worked in facilities management. He looked after buildings — heating, cleaning contracts, grounds. For the last nine years of his life he had a contract portfolio of eleven sites.
Nine of them were schools.