“Told me to go fuck myself as I recall. As part of the group, I mean.”

“I think you might have been collateral damage,” I suggested.

With an only-half-listening shrug, Uncle Jim moved on. “But yes, we were close. Thick as thieves. But that’s the thing about thieves. They’re not especially famous for being nice to each other.”

He lapsed into a melancholy silence, and I let myself think back on what I knew about David and James Blackwood. They’d always struck me as of a type, the kind of bluff, untouchable older man who’d been raised to see no difference between humour and cruelty. They’d had something of a ringleader-sidekick vibe about them, certainly. And perhaps that was all you needed to know. After all, who was more scared of the school bully than the school bully’s best friend?

“He was a good man, our dad,” Uncle Jim was saying, as much to himself, it seemed, as to anybody else. “Honest, hardworking, wouldn’t stand for nonsense. Made sure David and me got good careers that set us up for life, and I’m grateful for that. So was David.”

Leaning forward, Oliver did his best to engage. “I suppose I didn’t know him that well.”

“No. He wasn’t the affectionate sort. Approved of grandchildren, but didn’t care for them.”

“I remember,” said Oliver, his own voice growing a little distant now. “He stopped giving us birthday presents the moment we turned sixteen.”

“Old enough to earn a living,” agreed Uncle Jim. “And David was just like him. Not quite as…as of that generation, of course. But a lot of the same values. Neither of them had any time for layabouts. Or weaklings. Or sissies.”

I wasn’t quite sure where this was going, but the shape of somewhere it could be going was beginning to schloomp together out of the haze of rain and reminiscence in front of me.

“Did Father often make you feel like a sissy?” asked Oliver, who seemed to be seeing the same schloomping possibility that I was. A possibility that made a depressing kind of sense for an unmarried man in his sixties who’d spent his whole life in the shadow of an older brother with no time for anyone he didn’t approve of.

“I looked up to him.” The fact that Uncle Jim hadn’t entirely answered Oliver’s question wasn’t lost on either of us. “Tried to be like him. Wasn’t.”

“That might have been for the best,” Oliver pointed out. “I’m not sure he was the sort of man it’s a good idea to emulate.”

Now Uncle Jim was staring fixedly into the middle distance. “You know, they say you can’t put old heads on young shoulders, but I’ll tell you this. You worked that out far sooner than I did.”