‘Time for a sort-out,’ he says.

‘Someone’s coming round?’

‘Yeah. Tonight, fingers crossed. Coffee?’

I follow him into the kitchen. I also have his veggies from the allotment, which I leave on the table. Instead of the jar of instant coffee, McFaul spoons ground coffee into a new-looking expresso machine. The smell alone tells me this man is into serious spring cleaning. Good, I think. Good, and maybe long overdue. A disease as vicious as MND takes many victims, and not all of them die.

At his invitation, I unpack Pavel’s MacBook and do my best to explain. Pavel ended up imprisoned in a body that didn’t work, but his brain was as huge as ever and he could still talk, just. H spent a great deal of time poring over the specialist literature and finally laid hands on the software that could turn speech into text on screen. This was no use to Pavel, who was blind, but I tell McFaul it helped the rest of us no end. No longer need Pavel keep his best ideas to himself. We could all share them.

This little quip raises barely a flicker of amusement. McFaul picks up the MacBook, examines the various ports in the back and then takes me next door. The master bedroom lies at the back of the house. It’s a biggish space with a scatter of Afghan-looking rugs on the polished floorboards. The walls, sea green, are patterned with carefully framed black and white photos and a plain wooden cross hangs above the double bed. I’m looking at the photos. I’ve seen these faces before, all of them young, all of them black.

‘Angola? Am I right?’

McFaul nods, says nothing. Already, he’s taken a seat at a smallish desk in the corner of the room, away from the light flooding in through the window. His own laptop lies open and the screensaver, beyond a torrent of icons, shows a dusty yellow landscape rolling away towards the far horizon. A stand of trees casts long shadows, and a lean-looking mongrel dog lies sprawled on the parched grass.

‘Africa, again?’ I nod at the screen.

‘Portugal. That was the view from our kitchen window.’

‘And the dog?’

‘Vasco. He was always wandering off, little bugger.’

He’s found the cable he’s after. Moments later, he fires up Pavel’s MacBook and bends to the keyboard. A flurry of commands opens Pavel’s screensaver. Unsurprisingly, I’m looking at a lovely shot along a bridge at dusk, the blackness of the cobblestones shiny under a thin rain.

‘Prague,’ I murmur. ‘I should have been there last week.’

‘And?’

‘They turned me back at the airport. I had Pavel with me.’

‘I thought he was dead.’

‘He was. That was the point. Never try and smuggle ashes through an X-ray machine. Body remains turn out to be on the restricted list. Pavel would have died laughing.’