The telephone guy is there when he returns, his van pulled up to the kerb. A young lad, mid-twenties perhaps, not much older than Mark, he carries his bag up the steps to Number 14, following Anton, a stream of conversation coming out of him. There’s a sparrow lying dead on the doormat, and the telephone guy peers at it. ‘Poor little thing. Must have flown into the window above, cracked its head against the glass.’

‘Yes. They do that sometimes,’ Anton says.

After he’s removed the bird, using a coal shovel to carry it down to the bin, he comes back into the house and closes the door.

‘Just moved in, have you?’ the young man asks. He’s kneeling on the floor in the hallway, running wire along the skirting board.

‘Not really. I’ve been away.’

‘You must have been gone a while, by the look of it.’ The guy laughs, holding up an old telephone fixture, like some ancient relic. ‘I’ve not seen one of these since my training days!’

Anton smiles like an indulgent uncle. ‘Yes. A good while.’

‘Where’ve you been? Anywhere nice?’

He’s just being polite, but the blitheness of this young man’s manner is unsettling. His presence in the house is disturbing. Too loud, too chatty. Like someone talking on a phone in church.

Oh, if only you knew, Anton thinks, where I’ve been. The things I’ve done. ‘Here and there,’ he says, turning away and entering the kitchen.

He busies himself putting away the shopping he picked up on his way home. Two plastic bags of groceries. He moves from cupboard to fridge automatically, as if at a muscle memory – after nineteen years, he still remembers where things go. But, then, he has always been an orderly man. A man who values systems and process. A place and time for everything.

‘Do you want a phone upstairs in the bedroom?’ The guy stands in the door to the kitchen.

‘I … I don’t …’

‘It’s a big house. People like it. Especially older people. Saves them the bother of coming downstairs.’

‘Good Lord. How old do you think I am?’ he asks, laughing to take the sting out of it.

The young man grins in the doorway. ‘Dunno. Fifty?’

‘Fifty-nine,’ he declares, with a note of triumph.

Ridiculous to feel so gratified by the error, his vanity coming to the fore. Anton prides himself on his full head of hair, gunmetal-grey. During his long stay at the hotel, he took care to use the gym regularly. His musculature remains firm, no premature hump on his upper back. A woman he once knew told him he had the body of a welterweight boxer. Rose Gleeson it was, he thinks.

He’s not some doddery old fool whose knees are about to go. There is still life, still vigour in his meat and bones.