After dropping my husband off at Houston’s airport for a business trip, my eight-year-old daughter grabbed my arm and whispered, “Mom, please don’t take us home
And the text — stick the heating on the second you’re in — which is the single sentence that stopped my heart in that car park, is not what I thought it was either.
He sent it at twenty-nine minutes past seven to find out where we were.
He wanted a reply. He wanted just getting in now so that he knew he had a window.
I did
not reply, and he did not know where we were, and at twenty past eight he put a crowbar through his own back door anyway.
That is what the court heard. A man so far down that he could not wait for an answer to a text message.
What it does not change.
He put an eight-year-old’s home in that position for money. He bought a petrol can on the Monday from a place on the Moraine road and he kept it in his mother’s garage.
