In truth, it must have been only after he’d finished all those everyday, habitual actions that he looked up. Richard—and it is at this exact point he begins thinking of the man as Richard, rather than Dad—is hanging from the groaning banister, a thin red cord cutting deeply into the folds of flesh at his neck. They try to hide the detail of the rope’s origin from him, but he finds out. It’s Japanese bondage rope, bought the week before. They find the receipt on his study desk, with the receipt for the paracetamol. Perhaps he had plans to claim them back on expenses.

Richard’s eyes are bulging from his face as though, at the end, this event has taken him by surprise. There is crusted vomit still drying on his collar and chest, and a puddle of urine soaking into the deep shag of the hallway carpet. There is the stench of loosened bowels. Does he remember these things? Or are they, like the silhouette, just ghosts of memories? Things he has put together after the fact. Things he has learned from attending similar scenes.

Much later they say his father was on the take. Bent as a nine-bob note and about to be found out. They say he had a broken marriage and an estranged son. They say he was struggling to cope as a single parent in charge of a wayward teenager (it’s the first time Tyler realizes he’s wayward). They say he was overworked and underpaid and struggling to handle the stress of the job. They say he took enough paracetamol to fell a horse before lowering himself over the banister. They say it wouldn’t have made any difference if the lad—that’s Tyler—had been home an hour before, or two hours, or had come home sick from school the minute he’d got there; Richard would still be as dead as England’s chances of winning the European Championships. But in Tyler’s mind is the thought that, as Richard hung there, perhaps regretting his decision and clawing at his throat, perhaps just waiting patiently to be found (and truly it doesn’t matter which), at that exact moment, his wayward son, the last hope in Richard Tyler’s crumbling life, was using silly string to draw a giant cock-and-ball motif on the back of a butcher’s stall in the Castle Market.

They don’t have all the answers, though. They don’t explain why he canceled the hired help that day, but didn’t consider his sixteen-year-old son would find him. They don’t explain why he would go out and buy a bottle of paracetamol when there were packets of the stuff—used for years by his strung-out wife to self-medicate—in the medicine cupboard already. They don’t explain why he didn’t leave a note, some explanation for young Adam. A final farewell. An explanation for yet another abandonment.