‘A phone upstairs would be fine. Thank you,’ he says politely, then directs the young man to the bedroom at the front, the one with the bay window overlooking the park.

He listens to the clatter and banging upstairs, wonders why he gave instructions to install the phone in the front bedroom, when he has absolutely no intention of ever sleeping there again. He will take Mark’s bedroom, or Cassandra’s at the back. But not the front room. He wonders whether Charlotte’s clothes still hang in the wardrobe, whether her brushes and cosmetics sit atop the dresser. Does the room still smell of her perfume? Chanel No 5 – the scent of that Nazi collaborator. On his last trip, he had bought it for her in Duty Free, as he always did. Brought it back here to Number 14, placed it on the kitchen table. A week later, she was dead.

Upstairs, a drill is going, buzzing through the wall. It reminds him of another time when Charlotte had had the bedroom redecorated. New linen, new carpets, new wallpaper. Tradesmen wandering through his house for a week. ‘We need to spice things up a bit, Anton,’ she’d told him, and he knew she wasn’t just referring to the furnishings. He remembers her leaning over the railings to chat with the tenant downstairs, saying: ‘I’ve got three men in my bedroom right now, would you believe?’ and then the gale of her laughter. She had been fond of innuendo.

The flat downstairs had been their rental property. ‘A little bit of extra income,’ Charlotte said. ‘Keep the wolf from the door.’ Young couples, newly married. The odd family. People biding their time until they could buy in the area. It had that second-rate look of a rental – bland and inoffensive, lacking any character. There had been the occasional tenant who made a stab at personalizing the place, a few pot plants out the front, some fairy lights strung up over the patio at the back. ‘There’s no point in making the effort,’ he used to say to Charlotte when she’d glide downstairs with a bottle of wine and some welcome roses from the garden, eager to make new friends. No point getting to know people who will move on in a year.

And now Mark has found new tenants. ‘You need the money, Dad,’ he’d told Anton firmly, overriding any notion that Anton just wanted to be left alone. ‘You won’t even know they’re there.’

He hasn’t seen anyone come or go yet. Hasn’t heard any noise travelling up through the floor. Not that he’s been listening out for it. If anything, he feels the opposite. Anton wants to forget all about the flat downstairs. If he had his wish, it wouldn’t be there at all.