I said no.
Her solicitor did not look up from her file for about two seconds.
Then she asked me the same question in a different shape, which is what they do, and gave me the chance to have misunderstood it.
I said no again, and then I said where they actually sleep, and the name of the town, and roughly how many nights.
Briar made a sound behind me. I did not turn round.
The judge asked me three questions of her own and all three were short.
How long had this arrangement been going on. Since June.
Had I ever been to the house in Ashcombe. No.
Was there anything else the court ought to know.
That is the one. That is the question I had been sitting in that corridor for two hours deciding about.
And I told her what my granddaughter had told me about the door.
I did not say he was hurting them. I did not say anything I did not know.
I said: there is a hook and eye on the outside of the children’s bedroom door and it is fastened at night.
The judge wrote for about fifteen seconds and then she adjourned until the afternoon.
What happened in the afternoon was not what Kristoffer wanted either, which I did not expect.
The children did not go to him. The court ordered a welfare report and an officer visited the house in Ashcombe on the twenty-second.
The children stayed with Briar throughout. They have never been taken from her. Not for one night.
Tarquin Oyelowo-Beck moved out in the November. I do not know the details of that and I have not asked.
The final order in February gave Briar the children and Kristoffer alternate weekends, which is roughly what she would have had anyway.
So the whole thing cost her nothing in the end, in the only terms that were being argued about.
It cost me both grandchildren.
Briar has not spoken to me since the fourteenth of September. Two years in a fortnight.
I send two cards a year each and I do not know whether they are opened.
I see Juno sometimes, from the car, at the end of the road by the school. She is eleven now.
My sister Marguerite says I should have said the words and sorted the door out privately afterwards.
She says I had a conversation and a social worker available to me and I chose a witness box.
She is not stupid and that is not a stupid argument.
Kristoffer sent me a letter in the January thanking me. I did not answer it and I will not.
He was not kind to her for eleven years and a letter does not change that.
People want me to say whether I would do it again.
I was sixty-five years old, under oath, and I was asked where two children sleep.
Juno is eleven and she still does not know I am the reason, and Briar has never told her, which is the single decent thing in all of this.
The hook and eye came off that door on the twenty-second of September.
That is the only fact I have that I am certain about.