‘You take care, too.’ He pauses, and I remember how tenderly he looked after me when I was being sick. ‘There will be better days, Charlie.’

‘Than this? Yeah, I bloody hope so.’

It’s late afternoon when find Daphne in the weight room of her care home. She’s benching half her own body weight, which I’m fairly sure I can’t do.

‘You’ve come to interrogate me,’ she says, sitting up with an effort and mopping the bench thoroughly with a little gym towel. ‘Let’s go and get one of those protein shakes. Strawberry for me.’

‘Daphne, I’ve come to give you some news. About your sister.’

‘I notice that she isn’t with you. This is the second time. I suppose she’s ill again. Would you like banana?’

‘Sure, banana.’ I’m not sure if she’s forgotten what she did or if she’s dissembling.

We sit on Swiss balls sipping our drinks.

‘She passed away yesterday. She died in her sleep.’

Daphne’s hands are trembling. She gives me her drink and puts her face in her hands. When she takes them away her eyes are still dry, but she continues to shake. Maybe her arms are just tired.

‘I suppose that’s a blessing,’ she says in the end. ‘It was her time. She didn’t suffer.’

‘Daphne, about the last instruction you got. From the Agency. Did you save it?’

‘I never save them. Of course not.’

‘But you still have the birds that came home to you, right?’

‘Yes, absolutely. They’re in the dovecote. Let’s look. I’ll show you the one that brought me the last message.’

We go up to the dovecote, to the familiar smell and shuffle of pigeons, but even though they have come in for the evening, she can’t find the one that brought the message.

‘I remember it clearly,’ she says. ‘It was one of the birds we had as children. All black with a star on his back. O called him Mephistopheles. He was always my favourite.’

‘You had this bird as a child?’ There’s a feeling like a cold hand on the back of my neck.

‘Yes, well, now it’s a ghost, isn’t it? It’s a ghost pigeon. It was here yesterday, where’s it gone?’

‘So it’s possible that not all of the pigeons were strictly real.’

‘That depends what you mean by “real”. The Agency isn’t real, is it?’

‘Erm . . . I don’t know. Is it?’

She laughs and gives me a little push. ‘Well, you’re an agent now. You should know. There was a bird. I saw it. I read the message. I followed instructions. But I can’t find it, I can’t find the one . . .’

She’s becoming distressed now, and I make her go back inside.