Then there was the fact that she had always loved Peter, fervently, protectively; when he was sixteen she was still cutting the crusts off his crab paste sandwiches, unaware that he’d been throwing them to the jackdaws in the graveyard since he was seven and buying chocolate bars for lunch with money he’d come by via the vicar’s trouser pockets. Yes, Patricia loved Peter, and yet I don’t know if she ever really knew him. She and the vicar had had some fairly clear ideas about who he should be, and in the end I think he consented to play pretend with them, to give them what they wanted, which meant, I suppose, that he loved them too.

At King’s Cross I made my way underground. There, the walls were papered with moving, glowing dreams. Descending on the escalators to the Victoria Line, I found myself thinking that if ads were really dreams, the preoccupations of the unconscious, then all we wanted to be was sexy. Because they all said sexy—the women coy, or inviting, or half-naked, the men white of tooth and thick of mane—so that must be what we were buying. Not good, or kind, or honorable, the qualities the vicar had once struggled to impress on us, just sexy.

I forced myself to march the few streets home, wondering how quickly I could get into bed and fall asleep. I was always tired at that time. Doing my job, sleep came at a premium, but even when I did get a chance to catch up, it was a tiredness that sleep could not cure. If I had divided myself into parts—body, brain, heart, soul—I would have been unable to tell you which bit precisely was so exhausted.

Once home, I didn’t immediately go to bed. Instead, I fussed about the flat, making tiny adjustments to things, passing a duster over the surfaces, even though the cleaner had been the day before. The fretfulness in Patricia’s voice had got to me. I wondered what Peter was playing at, which made me think of the wedding, of the last time I had seen Peter. He had wanted to talk about the manor, but I had closed him down.

As I laid out my clothes for the next day, I had no inkling that, in light of Peter’s disappearance, the manor and “everything that happened” there was a subject that was going to be thoroughly reopened. That in pursuit of Peter, I would see and speak to them all again except, of course, for the one who could no longer speak to anyone.