I did though, during my conscientious researches through Sharon’s mystic library, come across a theory of rebirth that I found horribly feasible. It was held simultaneously, though with regional variations, by the Tlingit Indians of south eastern Alaska, the Pimbwe tribe of Tanzania, and the Yorubas of Nigeria, and without going into the small print I can tell you that they believed reincarnation was something kept strictly within the family, a sort of ancestral recurrence, like hereditary warts. No sooner had you got rid of grandpa than he was back again, squalling his little head off as his own great-grandson, trying to climb out of the cradle he had straw-plaited himself, ninety years before. This sounded to me exactly the sort of nasty trick that families would play on one another, and I found myself quickly relieved to remember that Hardy had died childless. No daughters for me, I remembered him croaking, from the back of my throat, when Harry Vilbert had quizzed him about Florence; and there were no sons either, Sharon assured me. I breathed easier but I didn’t feel altogether safe; there was always more than one line of descent – families branched out like Triffids. And so when, at about the same time I was discovering the Yorubas, I came upon the case of a man with no fingers who was able to regress, at the drop of a hat, into Artur Rubinstein – the very pianist his parents had always hoped a child of theirs would one day emulate; when, that’s to say, I compounded my knowledge of the frightful atavistic habits of the Tlingits with the realization that a fellow might invent a new personality not to please himself but the little grey-haired couple whose dreams he’d dashed, then I thought the moment had perhaps arrived for me to put a few discreet questions to the senior Fuglemen.

‘Did granny ever come back flushed from a holiday in Dorchester?’ was just the first of them.