Which was when, looking down, I saw it, at the foot of the chair, as incongruous as a dream image: a red telephone box, six inches high and made of molded plastic, the kind sold in the tourist traps around Piccadilly alongside models of busby-hatted soldiers and teapots in the shape of Big Ben.

This one had been customized. I picked it up and held it in the palm of my hand. The windows of the telephone box were blackened and in places the plastic had melted and twisted. As I turned it this way and that, a sooty, oily residue came off on my fingers. It smelled poisonous, like the bonfires Mr. Hackett used to have at the back of the cowsheds, old tires and baler twine smoldering away in a metal drum.

To almost anyone else it would have meant nothing. But I knew it. I knew what it meant. It spoke volumes to me, and I waited there, holding it in my hands as the minutes stretched out.

Later I would wonder why I was so convinced, how I had taken off so keenly down the wrong path on the basis of such a small thing. Perhaps because it chimed with certain thoughts I’d had over the years, certain suspicions. That melody on the piano, Peter’s face when I came in the morning we found the body. The possibility that in the book written by Peter’s angel was an entry I’d do anything not to read.

Or perhaps it was because—unable to imagine a future, little better than asleep in the present—there was something I had lost among the ruins of the past, something of myself that I had to retrieve. That, in the end, the clue said nothing about Peter and everything about me.

CHAPTER 8

DIAMONDS

Like all children, I kept a list of the things my mother didn’t give me. Mine was more substantial than most: a father, siblings, family in fact of any kind, answers to the most basic of questions. What I had was Peter, and to some extent the Whites—usually good for a roast dinner after church, despite Patricia’s mixed feelings about me—and I had Mrs. East. Mrs. East, who made me cups of tea, and doled out fags and sponge cake, and told me things. Like, when I was a babe in arms, my mother had turned up with me one day in a taxi. Colin, Mrs. East’s husband, had come out to see if he could help with the bags and she’d told him to piss off.