‘Detective Romano. Your photo’s been in the papers. Those murders? Congratulations, by the way. You got her.’

‘Yes, we did. Thanks.’

‘I assume you’re here to see the house?’

She might have been thirty, with the casual air of a Pre-Raphaelite heroine, one wearing baggy jeans and a shirt of a wilfully dull green colour.

‘The old deeds have your name on them,’ she added, as they stepped through the door and found themselves in the front room. ‘I mean, your family’s name. Gustavo, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. My granddad,’ he said, shocked to find that he had almost no recollection of how the place had been all those years ago, when he’d played there as a kid.

It now looked like something from a magazine, the home of an aging rock star or a venerable actor: book-lined walls, a mixture of old and new furniture, nothing even vaguely Scandinavian, framed paintings and a vintage hearth so utterly original that it took him a while to work out that, of course, it wasn’t original at all.

‘My grandparents saw him once.’

‘Him?’

‘Gustavo Romano. They saw him perform.’

‘Jesus, that makes me feel old!’

‘Charlie Cairoli, too.’

‘I bet. Good old Charlie! My granddad became his agent, you know? Grandma hated him!’

‘Cairoli or granddad?’

‘Just Cairoli, I think!’

She smiled, nodded.

They stood for a while in silence.

‘Everything seems so… different!’ he said.

‘Oh, it’s mainly a lick of paint and some new curtains.’

The walls were a dark grey-green, the matte paint so sombre and unforgiving that it added a kind of gravitas, perfectly setting off the paintings, which were in various styles, but mainly modern.

She seemed to enjoy watching him as he spun very slowly around, taking it all in.

‘My partner teaches at the university,’ she said, indicating the bookshelves that had been built into the recesses on either side of the hearth, crammed full of books, until not an inch of the wall behind could be seen. ‘There’s mine as well. I mean, you just accumulate books, don’t you? I hate to get rid of them. There’s tons more upstairs.’

‘Yes, it’s hard to know where to put them all,’ he lied.

His entire collection amounted to four removal boxes, none of which had been opened since they arrived back in the UK. They were still in the space under the stairs in his rented semi, the boxes neatly labelled: uni, fiction, non-fiction, work/misc. Several times he’d considered throwing them out, only to find himself unable to do it.

‘So,’ she said, ‘is there anywhere in particular you’d like to see?’

‘Actually, there are a couple of things, if it’s not too much trouble. You know, it might seem strange, but I’ve always wondered whether the old mangle is still in the cellar.’

‘Ha! Follow me!’