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.

Tyler shivers. The sun is setting, and the trees round the graveyard have draped him in shadows. The parallels between his life and Oscar’s are astonishing. A missing mother. A dead father. The only difference being that Richard didn’t kill his wife and bury her in the cellar. What would Tyler have done if he had? Would he have taken the law into his own hands? Taken revenge on Richard?

Gerald Cartwright was a bad man. A liar, and a thief, and a murderer. No doubt a terrible father as well, far worse than Richard. Did Oscar lash out one day? Perhaps it was an accident. And of course Lily and Edna would help him cover things up. They would want to protect their precious little boy, just as Diane Jordan had tried to protect him.