My 8-year-old son gave up his lunch money to buy a little girl with Down syndrome a red dress—the next morning, our lawn was covered with lunchboxes, but what was inside the biggest one made him go pale.

Thirty-one years of cash. Five and ten dollars at a time, out of a laundry wage.

She left it on our lawn at eleven minutes past five in the morning.

The Farrows at number 30 have a doorbell camera and it caught her going past on the pavement, twice, at 5:09 and 5:14 — going down and coming back — and you can see she is carrying it with both arms in front of her like something heavy.

She is sixty-six and she walked one and a half miles from the bus stop at Kilner Road at five in the morning carrying that box, because she does not drive and because she was not going to hand it to me.

Then she got the 5:40 back and was in her own flat, forty minutes away, before Felix woke up.

I rang her at ten past eight.

She let it ring out. I rang eleven times over that day.