She flapped a hand nervously. ‘Who do I have…?’

‘Hi, Anita. I don’t know if you remember me. I was a childhood friend of Johnny’s and I worked as a roadie for The Harpers a few times. And I also lived in the same alley as you once.’ I leaned forward and smiled pleasantly. ‘I remember you anyway.’

She smiled back, a little embarrassed, absolutely aware that, if so, she was no longer as I remembered her. ‘I don’t think I…’ she mumbled.

‘Varg Veum. In the green house across the alleyway.’

She still couldn’t recall me, but that probably wasn’t so unusual. Her roller blind had been down most of the time. In the street I was a pup, two years younger than her, and when she and Johnny moved to Paddemyren, some regarded this as tantamount to cradle-snatching.

‘Have you got a few minutes?’

She smiled acidly. ‘If this is supposed to be a visit to express your condolences, then you might not be aware that Johnny and I’ve been divorced for more than ten years.’

I nodded. ‘Yes, in fact I was aware.’

She stared at me. The cat meowed a warning: Don’t listen to him. ‘Mm, now you mention it, there is something familiar about 202you. The green house, did you say? There was someone on the first floor who became a priest?’

I nodded enthusiastically. ‘Exactly. But we lived on the ground floor.’

She stepped to the side. ‘You’d better come in. It’s not very tidy, but…’

We went into a small hallway. The cat slunk away, keeping close to the wall, but not letting us out of its sight for a moment.

A staircase led up to the first floor, but she opened a door to the right and said: ‘We can go in here. It’s a room we don’t…’

We entered a dark, gloomy basement room. On the wall hung a somewhat amateurishly woven rug, two negress figures from the fifties, a couple of old photographs of long-deceased relatives and four collector-series dishes, painted in blue and white and dated 1967, 1968, 1969 and 1971. The furniture looked as if it had been bought on a rainy day from a Sally Army shop. The air was stale and musty, like in a burial chamber, which lent the cat, which was still following us, an Egyptian aura.

We sat down, me still wearing my coat, her in a red, green and white striped dress. She took a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from a pocket, lit up with a trembling hand and had almost put the cigarettes back before remembering that she perhaps ought to offer me one. When I shook my head she seemed relieved.

As she settled into the chair the cat jumped onto her lap, curled up and lay there, its eyes fixed on me, as though it were guarding Anita’s long-lost virtue.

She squinted at me through the grey cigarette smoke. ‘Well?’

‘Was that your daughter I met outside?’