Peter asked, “Do you have kids of your own?”

I shook my head. It occurred to me I hadn’t asked Peter a single question about himself, his life since school, his circumstances now. “How about you?”

“I never married,” he said simply. “I was a policeman—did you know that?”

I grinned; I couldn’t help it. Peter the school dork, a copper?

Evidently he was used to the reaction. “I did well. Became a detective constable. I retired early . . .”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Other things to do.” I would find out later what those “other things” were. “Look, let me help. Go see to the rest of the house. I’ll sort this out—I can fill a bin liner for you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“It’s okay. I’d like to do it for Jack. If I find anything personal I’ll just leave it.”

“You’re very thoughtful.”

He shrugged. “You’d do the same for me.”

I wasn’t sure if that was remotely true, and I felt another layer of guilt pile up on already complicated strata. But I didn’t say any more.

I started upstairs. Behind me I heard a dim bleeping, the baby-bird sound of Peter’s cell phone calling for attention.

My father’s bedroom.

The bed was unmade, the sheets crumpled, a dent in the pillow where his head had lain. There was a waist-high basket nearly full of dirty clothes. On the small bedside cupboard, where an electric lamp was alight, a paperback book lay facedown. It was a biography of Churchill. It was all as if my father had left it a moment ago, but that moment had somehow been frozen, and was now receding relentlessly into the past, a fading still image on a broken video.

I turned off the lamp, closed the book. I poked about the room listlessly, unsure what to do.

The dressing table before the window had always been my mother’s domain. Even now the rows of family photographs—my graduation, smiling American grandkids—looked just as when I’d last seen them, perhaps as she’d left them. The dust was thicker behind the photographs, as if Dad had barely touched this corner since she’d gone. There was some mail scattered on the surface, a few bills, a postcard from Rome.

Cancer had taken my mother. She had always been a young mother, just nineteen when I was born. She still seemed young when she died, right to the end of her life.

On his last night my father had emptied his pockets here, never to fill them again. I threw a grimy handkerchief into the laundry bag. I found a little change and some bills, which I absently pocketed—the coins felt heavy and cold through the fabric of my pocket—and his wallet, slim and containing a single credit card, which I also took.