Coming back downstairs, he paused on the first-floor landing and looked down on the back garden through a round leaded window. The sky had darkened with clouds, lending the house an even more morbid air. The garden was huge, the far end of the untended lawn lost in a tangle of overgrown bushes, hedges and brambles. A contorted elm rose from the wild flowers and vegetation, its trunk wound tightly with strings of ivy and its leaves in their October colours. Hobbes pressed his hands on the glass. There was something of interest down there, in the garden, hidden in the overgrowth. He descended to the ground floor and made his way to the kitchen. The ambulance team had arrived and were taking away the body, lowering it on to a stretcher.

‘Could you check his pockets for me, please?’

One of the men did so, and found a folded sheet of paper. Hobbes opened it and read the single line of handwriting.

Dearest Adeline, I’m so sorry. For everything.

So, then: Leonard Graves’s final thoughts were not with his wife, Mary, but another woman. A daughter or sister, perhaps. A lover, a mistress. Perhaps the couple had not been so devoted, after all. One thing was clear: it wasn’t for his wife’s sake that he had ended his life.

Hobbes opened the kitchen door, walked out into the garden and made his way to the wilderness at the end. The rear of the house was protected by a high stone wall, impossible to see over, its top studded with diamonds of broken glass. Mr Graves really wanted to keep people out. Hobbes pushed on into the overgrowth, bending aside brambles and heavily scented weeds that clung to his clothes as he passed. Some of the leaves were already yellow and orange; a mulch of them squelched underfoot. It had rained heavily that morning, and now everything stank of rot and overabundance. Hobbes felt nauseous. He stepped in something soft, and his shoe vanished into it, almost to the ankle. An animal moved away through the tangled darkness ahead, causing the stems to tremble. Dark, slithery, unseen.

Hobbes was sweating by the time he reached the garden shed he’d spotted from the landing window. The wooden structure was almost hidden by clinging vines and tendrils. He stared through a filthy, fly-spattered window and saw only a dark space within, a grey mist. He walked around the side, again fighting his way through the plant life, and found the door. It was unlocked. He pushed it open against some obstruction, or just the weight of years bearing down on it. The air was foetid, damp. Cobwebs strung themselves around his head as he made his way inside. He brushed them aside and looked around. A workbench, rusting tools on the walls, many crumbling away at the edges. A vice, tins of nails and screws. Each item in its rightful place. But unused, unused for years. A metal bucket rested on the floor, filled to the brim with rainwater that had dripped down from a hole in the roof. The linoleum around the bucket was brown with rot. Hooked on the single overhead beam was a clothes hanger, with another dress of the same blue and yellow material hanging from it. Another scarf around the neck, another pair of shoes placed on the floor. The dress was moth-eaten, covered with dirt and cobwebs, barely an object in the world: a filigree, a web itself. One touch might crumble it. The bloodstain around the tear was ages old, its crimson paled almost to a shadow.