My husband took our three sons out on the lake and none of them came back. Six years later my daughter found a phone he'd told me he'd lost in 2017.
PART 1 — THE DRIVEWAY
We had six. Three boys and three girls.
Ewan was fourteen. Harris was eleven. Noll had turned seven in the May.
Gethin took the boys to Barrow Water for a weekend every August. They did it four years running and those three talked about it from about March.
They went on the ninth of August 2019.
I stood on the drive and watched them load the truck. Two cool boxes, the rods, Noll's bag which he had packed himself and which had nine toys and no socks in it.
They argued about who was going in the front, which Ewan won on the grounds of being fourteen.
And I took a photograph of the four of them by the tailgate before they went.
I have that photograph. It is the last one and I did not know it was going to be and I am glad about that.
They were due back Sunday night.
Sunday night went. I rang Gethin at about nine and it went to voicemail, and I rang Ewan at about ten and it rang out, and the other two were too young to have phones.
By midnight I rang the police.
They found the truck the next morning by the ramp with the trailer still on it and no boat on the trailer.
The boat came ashore that afternoon on the far side, damaged.
There was nobody in it.
They searched for about five weeks. Boats, divers, the helicopter twice, and about two hundred people off the shoreline on the Saturdays.
Nothing was found. Not one of them.
The finding was that the four of them went into the water from the boat and that the conditions took them.
And overnight I was a widow of forty-two with three girls and a photograph.
One thing from the five weeks, because it is the only part of that period I can still get at.
On about day eleven a man called Ferris came to this door. He runs the sailing club at Barrow Water and I had never met him.
He had a list in his hand. Eighty-one names, in biro, of people who had put their own boats out to look, with the dates they had each gone.
He did not say anything about hope and he did not say anything about God, which by day eleven about forty people had.
He gave me the list and he said: "I thought you'd want to know who."
I have still got it. It is in the drawer in the front room with the photograph.
Four of those eighty-one names are people I have since fallen out with and I have never been able to make myself cross them off.
I am not going to do the six years. Everybody thinks they know what that is and nobody does, and the only thing I will say about it is that you keep going because the ones who are left need their tea.
But it never sat right.
Gethin was not careless. He was the opposite, to the point of being annoying about it. He would not let a tank go under half. He checked the forecast four times before anything. He had a bag in that truck with a blanket and a torch in it that I used to take the mickey out of.
And he knew that water. Four seasons on it.
Every time I said any of that out loud, his brother said the same thing.
"You need to stop going over it, Ailsa."
Keir was in this house constantly after it happened. He did the garden. He fixed the boiler twice. He drove the girls to things for about two years when I could not get in a car.
And he told me, about nine separate times, that picking at it would only make it worse for the girls.
So I stopped saying it.
In the May this year Rhiann finally talked me into going through their things.
She is twenty-one. She is the eldest and she has been managing me since she was fifteen, which is a thing I am only now admitting.
Six years of boxes. Clothes still folded. The fishing stuff still in the bags. Gethin's coats where he left them, because taking a coat off a hook is a thing you cannot do for a very long time.
She said we could start with the church and that we did not have to do all of it.
And that evening I was doing something at the hob and she came and stood in the kitchen doorway with a phone in her hand.
She said: "Mum."
And I knew which phone it was from across the room, because it has a green case on it and we had an argument about that case in 2016.
Gethin told me he had lost that phone in the spring of 2017.
Rhiann's hands were going.
She said: "There's a video on it."
PART 2 — THE EIGHTH OF AUGUST
He told me on a Tuesday. He said he thought it had gone at work and that it would turn up.
It did not turn up and we got him another one in the April and I was irritated about it for about three days, and I said something at the time about him losing his own head.
I have gone back to that fortnight about four hundred times since the May.
Because the thing about that phone is that it worked. It is not a dead phone in a box. It charged in about twenty minutes when Rhiann plugged it in.
A man told his wife he had lost a working phone in 2017, and then two years later recorded a message to her on it, in a garage, and put it back in the box.
I have no idea what that phone was for between the April of 2017 and the eighth of August 2019. There is nothing on it. No messages, no calls, four photographs of a gate.
And I have decided, and I am sticking to it, that he kept it for no reason at all — the way men keep things — and that he picked it up that night because it was the thing nearest his hand on a shelf.
The other explanations are available and I am not having them.
We bought him another one. I remember being irritated about it.
It is two minutes and nine seconds.
The date on it is the eighth of August 2019. The day before.
It is him. He is in the garage, sitting on the step with his back against the door frame, in the blue T-shirt, and the light is going so it is about half eight at night.
He is talking to the camera. To me. He says my name four times in it.
I am not going to reproduce all of it, and I am not going to give the girls' bit to anybody.
What it is, is a man explaining himself in advance.
He says that he has been going round and round about something for about a fortnight and that he has decided what he is doing, and that he is recording it so that there is a record, and that he will probably delete it on Monday and feel like an idiot.
He did not delete it. He put that phone at the bottom of a box in the garage and three days later there was no Monday.
And about forty seconds in he says what it is about.
He says: "It's the boat, Ailsa."
Rhiann had already watched it twice before she came into that kitchen.
She has told me since what she did in between, and it is the thing about my daughter that I cannot get past.
She watched it once in the garage sitting on the floor. Then she stopped, and went upstairs, and shut her bedroom door, and watched it again on her own.
And then she went and found her sisters and told them that she had found something of Dad's and that she was going to show Mum first and that nobody was to come down.
Twenty-one years old, and in about eleven minutes she had worked out that her mother was going to need the kitchen to herself.
Cait is eighteen and Elsie is fourteen and neither of them has watched it. That was Rhiann's decision before it was mine and I have left it exactly where she put it.
We watched it on the worktop with the phone propped against the kettle, because neither of us thought to sit down.
PART 3 — THE BOAT
The boat was Keir's.
Not jointly. It was his. He bought it in 2014 and Gethin used it, four or five times a summer, with Keir's blessing and with Keir doing all the work on it.
That is how it had always been. Keir is the one who is good with that sort of thing and Gethin was not, and Gethin was perfectly open about not being.
In the July of 2019 something went wrong with it. I am not going to try to describe what, because I have had it explained to me twice by a marine surveyor and I could not do it justice and it does not matter for this.
What matters is that it needed a part, and that the proper one was about four hundred and ten pounds and had a lead time, and that Keir did not do that.
He put something else on. Cheaper, available, and not for that job.
Gethin found out about it on the twenty-sixth of July because he was there when it was done.
And they had a row about it. Outside, by the garage, and I was in the kitchen and I heard the tone of it and not the words, and I did not go out.
In the video Gethin says that he told Keir he was not happy and that Keir told him it would be fine until the autumn.
And then he says the sentence that I have now heard about two hundred times.
He says: "I've decided I'm taking them Sunday anyway."
Two minutes and nine seconds of a man working out loud, on a step, in a blue T-shirt, why it is all right to go.
Because they have been on about it since March. Because Noll has had the bag packed for a fortnight. Because it is one weekend and they will not be going far out and he will keep it in close.
Because it is Ewan's last one before his GCSE year.
And then at the end he says he will sort it properly with Keir on the Monday, and that if anything about it ever comes up, I should know he knew.
You should know I knew.
There are two other things in those two minutes and nine seconds that I have not given to anybody.
The first is that about halfway through he laughs. Once, at himself, because he has lost his thread, and he says something about how he sounds like his father.
That laugh is the only one I have had in six years and it is eleven seconds in from the middle and I know exactly where it is.
The second is that he talks about Keir.
Not angrily. He says his brother is not a cowboy and that he has done nine jobs on that boat and all of them properly, and that this one was a July and a lead time and a man taking a view.
He actually defends him. On a step, on the eighth of August, into a camera.
And then he says he is going to sort it on the Monday anyway, because you don't take a view with three kids in the back.
Which is a sentence I would like to have been able to read out to his brother in this kitchen in September and did not, because by then I had been told what you can and cannot say to somebody who may end up in a process.
That is my husband's last sentence and it is to me.
PART 4 — KEIR
I watched it four times that night and then I rang my sister and then I did not do anything for eleven days.
I am not proud of the eleven days. I have been told by two people that eleven days is nothing and I do not agree with them.
Then I rang a solicitor, and then there was a surveyor, and then in the September there were two officers at this table for about three hours.
Here is where it has got to, and it is not where anybody wants it to be.
There is no prosecution.
The boat was looked at in 2019. It was. It is in the original file and I have now read that file, which took a lot of asking.
The report from the time says the damage was consistent with the impact and that the condition of the vessel was not found to have contributed.
The surveyor I paid for this year has looked at the same photographs and says that he cannot exclude it and cannot establish it, and that six years and a boat that was broken up in 2020 is the end of the road.
So what I have is a video of a man saying he was unhappy, and a part that nobody can now examine, and a brother who says it was signed off at the time.
Keir has not denied the part. He has never denied the part.
He came to this house in the September, before the officers, and he sat at that table and he said yes, he had put the other one on, and yes, Gethin had been unhappy, and that it had been checked afterwards and cleared.
And I said: "Then why have you spent six years telling me to stop asking?"
And Keir Rowntree sat in my kitchen and did not answer that question for about a minute and a half.
And then he said: "Because I didn't want it to be that."
I said that was not an answer.
And Keir Rowntree said: "It's the only one I've got, Ailsa."
I asked him the other thing then, which I had been sitting on for eleven days, and which I asked badly.
I asked him whether he had thought about it on the Sunday. The actual Sunday. While it was happening.
And he said: "I was at my mother's."
Which is not what I asked, and we both knew it, and he knew I knew.
He has since told my sister — not me — that he was at that lake on the Monday at about seven in the morning, before anybody rang him, because he had seen the news about a boat.
Nobody had told him it was that boat. There were about forty craft on Barrow Water that weekend.
He got in a car at six in the morning and drove forty minutes on a feeling.
That is the thing I have, and it is not evidence, and my solicitor has told me as much twice.
It is just a man getting in a car.
PART 5 — THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF JULY
Which brings me to the day after the row.
The twenty-seventh of July 2019. My mother's seventieth, here, in this garden. About twenty-five people.
Gethin was on about the boat.
He had been on about it since the day before and he had already told my sister and he was telling my brother-in-law when I came past with a tray.
And he had his phone out — the new one — and he was showing him a photograph of it.
And I took it off him.
"Give me that, love — not at the table."
And then, with the tray still in my hands, in front of my mother and about four other people:
"You've been on about that boat for a fortnight. Let it go and go and see to the burgers."
Let it go.
I said that to my husband in front of twenty-five people thirteen days before he and three of my children went out on it.
And he laughed and said something about being right and went and did the burgers.
He did not raise it with me again.
That is the part. He had thirteen days and a wife and he never brought it up in this house again, and the next place it appears is a two-minute video recorded on a step on a phone I thought was lost.
I have had people tell me that a man does not record a message to his wife because she took his phone off him at a barbecue.
They are right. He recorded it because he was worried and because that is what that man was like.
But he recorded it instead of coming inside and saying it to me, and there are only so many reasons for that, and I have had six years of practice at working out which one.
There is one more thing about that afternoon and it is Noll.
He was seven. He was in that garden with a water pistol and at some point he came over to where his dad was standing with the phone out, because he wanted to look at the picture of the boat.
And Gethin showed him. He crouched down and showed a seven-year-old a photograph of a boat, and Noll said something about it, and they both laughed.
I came past with the tray about ninety seconds after that.
So the last conversation my husband had about that boat in this house, before the video, was with the youngest of the three children who went out on it.
I did not see it. Cait did, and she is eighteen, and she told me in the June because she had been carrying it since she was twelve and had worked out it was a thing that mattered.
She said: "Noll liked the boat, Mum."
She said it to make me feel better.
Where it is now.
Keir has not been in this house since the September. The girls are three ways on it and I am letting them be.
The video is with a solicitor and with the police and I have a copy and I have watched it four times since the May and that is all I am going to watch it.
Rhiann has it on her phone as well. I did not give it to her; she took it off the old one before she gave it to me, because she is twenty-one and sensible and did not trust that either of us would still have it in a week.
And the thing I have had to come to, which has taken most of this year.
It might have been the water.
That is the honest end of it. Four people went into Barrow Water on a Sunday afternoon in August and nobody will ever be able to tell me whether a part worth four hundred and ten pounds is the reason.
I do not get to know.
May you like
What I do get to know is that my husband sat on a step the night before and said you should know I knew — and that a fortnight earlier I stood in my own garden with a tray in my hands and told him to let it go.
THE END
