He passed the town hall, its façade boasting four decorative pillars. The building had been edged with stones carved in a wavy pattern, and there were so many of them that local people had nicknamed their town hall ‘The Wavy House’.

His feet tangled for a second in the tattered remains of some party poppers discarded on the pavement. Office parties would be going everywhere tonight, as they had been last night – and would be tomorrow night too, of course. By the morning, council workers could expect to have far more than a few party poppers to clear up.

Within minutes of him arriving, the streetlights were coming on, and it was dark in the corners of the market square. Workers were stripping the awnings and dismantling the tubular steel stalls, clanging and chattering, wheeling racks of clothes over the cobbles. The dipped headlights of cars swept by from the roundabout. A tractor came towards him with a yellow warning light flashing, towing a trailer to collect the dismantled stalls.

When he entered the lounge at The Oaks to see Raymond Sutton, the other residents fell silent, watching him. He supposed they thought he was just a visitor. Perhaps they took him for Raymond’s grandson or something. They’d be asking Raymond questions about him as soon as he left. With a sinking certainty, Cooper thought it was probable that some of these old dears never got a visitor of their own from one year to the next.

The Oaks reminded him of the Old Vicarage, the nursing home his own mother had been in towards the end. On the surface, there weren’t all that many similarities. Residents of The Oaks were just old and needed some help with their day-today living. They were the frail and forgetful, the tired and confused, the ones who just couldn’t cope and had no one to look after them. They probably went on outings and had bingo evenings and sing-songs. Isabel Cooper had never had any need for those things.

‘We’ve had a bit of an issue with Raymond this afternoon,’ said the care assistant, Elaine, when she let him in. ‘He got a bit upset.’

‘What was wrong?’

‘It’s difficult to say. We have a couple of care workers here who are from Lithuania. They’re nice girls, but Raymond doesn’t like it when they speak to him. I think it’s because he doesn’t understand them properly. It must be awful not to understand what’s going on.’

‘I feel like that myself sometimes.’

‘He’s all right now, anyway. He soon calms down.’

‘Does Mr Sutton have any old photo albums, do you know?’ asked Cooper. ‘Photos from his time at the farm?’

‘Not that I know of. Only women keep photo albums, don’t they? I can’t see Raymond sitting around in the evening sticking pictures of family weddings and christenings into an album.’