I spent the best part of a day checking through all this material, trying to close down any loose ends. There were actually some bits of work my father hadn’t completed, a few fees he hadn’t collected, but they were all for small amounts, and everything was resolved amicably. I came away with a short list of requests for the return of some material. Most of the contacts were his friends—I knew a couple of them myself—and most hadn’t heard of the death. The round of calls was painful, and the friends’ reactions brought back the immediacy of it all.

I checked through Dad’s most recent bank statements. Most of the statement lines were unremarkable. But I did find a few orders for foreign checks. Some of these were for more than a thousand pounds, and they went out every month, usually in the first week. I had no idea what they were for. I considered calling the bank branch, and wondered if they would tell me what was going on.

But then I came to a month earlier in the year, without the regular foreign payment. It wasn’t like Dad to be so untidy as to leave this gap. On an impulse I checked his check stubs. And sure enough, one stub showed how he’d bought a thousand pounds’ worth of euros from a travel exchange desk in one of the Manchester stations—that transaction showed up in the statement. On the back of the stub he had written, in his neat hand, “March pmnt. To Mry Qn of Vgns, overdue.” I imagined him parceling up the currency and pushing it into the post—an unwise way to handle money, but fast and effective.

“Mry Qn of Vgns.” To the eye of a Catholic boy that cryptic note unraveled immediately: Mary Queen of Virgins. But I had no idea who this was—a church, a hospital, a charity?—nor why Dad had been handing over so much money to them for so long. I found nothing else in his correspondence to give me any clues. I put it to the back of my mind, with a vague resolution to follow up the lead and close down the contact.

The personal stuff was more difficult than the financial matters, of course.