The defense barristers stand up to make their mitigation pleas. In the public gallery the defendants’ family members strain to hear what’s being said. We can just make out, “His career in the army is at an end. . . . Their home was provided by the army, so they’ve lost their home. . . . The children are suffering from panic attacks. . . . All three will have to leave their schools. . . .”

The reason why we can only barely hear this is because three pensioners in the public gallery are coughing uncontrollably.

Judge Rivlin says it was all just a shabby schoolboy trick. He says he doesn’t think this crime was about greed, it was about wanting to look good on a TV quiz show. He says the fact that their reputations have been so publicly ruined is appropriate punishment—and I remember what Charles said about how he hates to be thought of as stupid. Judge Rivlin hands out suspended sentences and fines totaling £60,000. On the courthouse steps, the paparazzi cough theatrically when Tecwen and his quiet son, Rhys, walk out.

The scrum is even more dramatic for Charles and Diana. Cameras and tripods and photographers crash to the floor in the violent scuffle to get pictures. “I’ve seen child murderers get more respect than that,” says one journalist. Other journalists and some nearby builders scream with laughter at Charles and Diana and chant, “Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!”

(An Indian diplomat named Vikas Swarup is at home watching the news reports on TV. Suddenly he has an idea for a novel. He will call it Q & A. The movie adaptation will be called Slumdog Millionaire. Later Swarup will explain his moment of inspiration to the Guardian: “If a British army major can be accused of cheating, then an ignorant tiffin boy [urchin] from the world’s biggest slum can definitely be accused of cheating,” he’ll say.)

I phone David Thomas to ask if Diana can give me the answer to my question. He says, “You’ve not fallen off my mental list.” I never hear from him again.

Instead I phone childhood friends to ask if they can remember anything about it. Most of them can. There were two Pollock brothers, they tell me. Bill and Arthur. They were in a family business together, making leather watch straps. There was a big falling-out in the family, and Arthur left the company. Bill became rich, driving around in a fancy car with the personalized number plate APOLLO G. His family were the ones who lived near me, in a big house in Lisvane. They had a son called Julian. Arthur Pollock never really recovered. He was left penniless and in ill health. His children vowed to pull themselves back up and never suffer the indignity their father endured. They would make something of their lives, they promised themselves. So Adrian and Marcus set up an estate agency together, and Diana married an army major. The estate agency failed. In fact, the whole thing failed.

Who Killed Richard Cullen?

(This story was published in the Guardian on July 16, 2005, two years before the global financial crash that began with the subprime mortgage crisis of July 2007.)

It is a wet February day in a very smoky room in a terraced cottage in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. A portable TV in an alcove plays the news. Everything in here is quite old. No spending spree has taken place in this house. There are wedding and baby and school photographs scattered around. Six children, now all grown up, were raised here. There’s a framed child’s painting in the toilet, a picture of Wendy Cullen. It reads “Supergran.” When I phoned Wendy a week ago she said I was welcome to visit, “Just as long as you don’t mind cigarette smoke. I’m smoking myself to death here.”

The “Congratulations! You have been pre-approved for a loan”–type junk mail is still pouring through their letter box. Wendy has just thrown another batch in the bin.

“You know what the post is like,” she says.

“I don’t get all that much credit-card junk mail,” I say. “I get some, I suppose, but not nearly as much as you do.”

“Really?” says Wendy. “I assumed everyone was constantly bombarded.”

“Not me,” I say.

We both shrug as if to say, “That’s a mystery.”

•   •   •

IT WAS A MONTH AGO today that Wendy’s husband, Richard, committed suicide. It was the end of what had been an ordinary twenty-five-year marriage. They met when Wendy owned a B and B on the other side of Trowbridge. He turned up one day and rented a room. Richard had trained to be an electrical engineer but he ended up as a mechanic.

“He loved repairing people’s cars,” Wendy says. Then she narrows her eyes at my line of questioning and makes me promise that I am not here to write “a slushy horrible mawky love story.”

“I’m really not,” I say. So Wendy continues. Everything was normal until six years ago, when she needed an operation. “I couldn’t face the Royal United Hospital in Bath,” she says, “so I went private. I took out a four-thousand-pound loan.”

She says she remembers a time when it was hard for people like them to get loans, but this was easy. Companies were practically throwing money at them.

“Richard handled all the finances. He said, ‘I can get you one with nought percent interest and after six months we’ll switch you to another one.’”

But then, a few months after the first operation, Wendy was diagnosed with breast cancer and Richard had to take six weeks off to drive her to radiotherapy. The bills needed paying and so, once again, he did that peculiarly modern British thing. He began signing up for credit cards, behaving like a company, thinking he could beat the lenders at their own game by cleverly rolling the debts over from account to account.

There are currently eight million more credit cards in circulation in Britain than there are people: sixty-seven million credit cards, fifty-nine million people.

He signed up with MINT: “Apply for your MINT Card. You’d need a seriously good reason not to. What’s stopping you?”

And Frizzell: “A name you can trust.”

And Barclaycard: “Wake up to a fresh start.”

And Morgan Stanley: “Choose from our Flags of Great Britain range of card designs.”

And American Express: “Go on, treat yourself.”

And so on.

Right now nobody knows how Richard Cullen’s shrewd acumen fell apart.

“He wasn’t a man that talked a great deal,” says Wendy, “and he never, ever discussed finances with me.” But somehow it all spiraled out of control.

Wendy first got the inkling that something was wrong just before Christmas 2004, when the debt-collection departments of various credit-card companies began phoning. Richard called them back out of his wife’s hearing.

“You know how men will walk around with their mobiles,” says Wendy. “He used to go out into the garden.”

She looks over to the garden behind the conservatory extension and says, “He was a very proud man. He must have been going through hell. They were very, very persistent. I don’t think he was even phoning them back in the end.”

Finally, he admitted it to his wife. He said he didn’t seek out all of the twenty-two credit cards he had somehow ended up acquiring between 1998 and 2004. On many occasions they just arrived through the letter box in the form of “Congratulations! You have been pre-approved . . .” junk. He said he thought he owed about £30,000. There had been no spending spree, he said, no secret vices. He had just tied himself up in knots, using each card to pay off the interest and the charges on the others. The fog of late-payment fees and so on had somehow crept up and engulfed him. He got a pair of scissors from the kitchen and cut up ten credit cards in front of her.