My neighbour stripped every apple from my late husband’s trees the day we buried him. By morning I’d laid something across her front lawn — and she screamed so loudly the whole street came out.

But she did not know about the spray. She did not look at the shed door. She did not know about the waiting time.

She was a frightened, broke, humiliated woman who did a mean thing on a bad day, and then, when she found out what she had actually done, she screamed.

And I had known for four hours before she did.

There is one more thing about that lawn that I did not see at the time.

When the man from the council came on the Monday, he asked who had put the display together, and I said I had, and he looked at it in a photograph on his phone for quite a long time.

Then he said: that’s very clear. That’s a proper warning, that.

And I felt good for about a second, the way you do when somebody official says something nice.

And then he said, not unkindly, just as a matter of procedure: what time did you find the shed door?

I told him. Half past five.

He wrote it down. He did not say anything else about it. He did not need to.

PART 5

Now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.

I could have gone next door at half past five.

In my dressing gown, with a torch, and knocked, and said: those apples aren’t safe. Where are they? And we would have had every single bag back before anybody on that street had had their breakfast.

I did not do that.

I spent four hours making her lawn into a display.

And in those four hours, three doors down, Joanna Lark put one of those apples into her seven-year-old’s lunchbox.

It had been left on her step at seven, in a bag, with Glenys’s note. She thought it was kind. She put one in his lunch because he likes them, and a little sticker on the bag, and zipped it up.

She found out from my lawn.

She went white. She ran back inside and took it out of his bag about four minutes before he left for school.

He had not eaten it. He was seven and it was not lunchtime.

That is not thanks to me.

I have said that sentence out loud, to Joanna, in her kitchen, about two weeks later. She listened and she did not say anything for a while, and then she said: I know. And then she put the kettle on.