In the living room I checked the bookcase. There were paperbacks of Ludlum, Higgins and le Carré, a few military biographies and popular history books and, lying flat on the bottom shelf under a pile of magazines, three volumes bound in dark-brown calf. They each had Ted’s initials, ELT for Edwin Lawrence Thompson, blind tooled on the front. Inside were pages of notes, all in Ted’s handwriting. The pages were dated, and a quick flip through them revealed that the time-span ran from the Fifties to the early Seventies.

These were Ted’s fragrance notes and formulae. Some of them had the names of customers against them – occasionally Yardley or Coty, more often ET&P, which had been the name of his company. The P stood for Partners, although I wasn’t aware that he had actually had any. One formula was labelled ‘for Janice, August 1963’, another just ‘Linda’.

They weren’t young any longer, these women of Ted’s who had danced and kissed and promised all through his best years. Maybe they weren’t even alive now. But the perfumes that he had devised for them were still here after forty years, perfectly preserved in the dense pages of notes. I read some of the scribbled lines. ‘Amyl salicylate 600cc. Geraniol 100cc’. ‘Give lift, 1% aldehydes’. The formula for Janice’s perfume ran to thirty-five ingredients, Linda’s had six more. It would take only Ted’s deft work at the perfumer’s organ of ranked bottles in the lab to bring them back to sparkling life again, the essences of Linda’s and Janice’s young selves.

I couldn’t close my eyes and summon up the compound fragrance from the dry lists, as Ted had been able to do, or even capture the separate essences with their redolent names like frangipani, neroli and orris. But still the ghosts of his women and his work and Ted himself swam up at me, the thick drift of memory. My throat choked with it. This whole house was full of fumes, of too much scent and his deceiving cologne, and the spores of mould.

I snapped the book shut. I took the three heavy volumes with me, along with the silk scarf and the envelope of photographs, the old silver-backed brush and his heavy brass cigarette lighter. I dragged the sacks of rubbish out to the dustbin and parcelled up his clothes for the charity shop. But even when I had locked the door on the silence, even when I was back on the M1, I didn’t feel any sense of relief. The pressure inside my skull was there again, and within my chest as if a dam might burst and release some black flood tide that would wash me away.