On the next street was a church, redbrick and dumpy. The door was open and I went in. It was inferior to our church, our church being mine and Peter’s. This one was brightly lit and had a carpet. I took a seat. There were chairs rather than pews. Peter and I would have scoffed at that. Not Peter’s father though. The vicar said God was at home everywhere, even in the Methodist church where they served the elderly dinner on Fridays and which smelled of gravy.

Sitting there, I wondered when Peter lost his faith. While I knew these things happen gradually—the doubts, the whole things starting to feel like an ill-fitting suit you’d inherited from a relative—there must be a moment when the faith you have can no longer keep subdividing, the moment when the thing is actually gone. And in that moment, when the thing is gone, if your heart doesn’t heave, if there wasn’t a kind of grief that remained in spite of logic and reason.

It was all coming back: the hard pews, the ridiculous singing—Mr. Harris, a verse ahead of everyone else and twice as loud—Peter’s father’s sermons. The He with a capital H. Our Lord. His Son. The intoning. The sitting and standing, the kneeling and Amens. But I had paid attention. Children are all ears, aren’t they?

I remember Peter’s father in the church telling the story of Jesus and Pilate, and jesting Pilate asking Jesus what the truth was but then not staying for an answer, and so we never got to find out, not any of us, not ever. I was so disappointed and on our way back to the vicarage, hell-bent on my share of the roast dinner—chicken, chicken, let it be chicken!—I pestered the vicar, “But why didn’t the disciples ask him instead? There he was on the cross, it’s not like he was going anywhere. Why didn’t they ask him?” With his hand on the gate, he turned. A watery smile. “Sometimes Andy, I think you are the only one who is listening.” Which, of course, was no answer at all.

Nor was there anything in the Gospels that shed light on what Jesus would have said about Joe. I don’t remember anywhere in the Bible Jesus meeting a truly wicked man. It was all tax collectors, moneylenders, and Pharisees. A savior for the poor, the meek, the oppressed, but what did he actually say?

In my pocket, my phone went on beeping and buzzing, work stuff.

Joe had been from the Midlands and drove a battered black Merc. Came and went as he liked, a fat wad of notes in his pockets, no job but always off on business. I was thirteen. Life had been chaotic before but I was used to it. My mum had an eight-octave emotional range and more black keys than most.