And a fire in that house at half past eight on a Tuesday morning, in a terrace, is a thing that does not stay inside one set of walls. There is an eighty-one-year-old man called Wilf in number nine.
He is not a man who planned to kill his family. He is a man who planned a fire in a row of houses and
thought that was the careful version.
Nobody in Lark Hollow has ever accepted the distinction and I have stopped making it out loud.
The eleven minutes in that multi-storey, which I have had to listen to, because the call is evidence and I have heard it four times.
I know how I sound on a 999 call. I have listened to about nine thousand of them.
And I sound textbook. Location first, then the threat, then the description, then the hazard — petrol, crowbar, gas supply — and I give the house number twice and I spell the street.
