He shrugs, though I’m not sure why. I haven’t contradicted him. Maybe it’s some ghost of his own he’s still fighting. I remember Leah saying that artists should be pitied; they can’t get on with their lives like normal people because they’re driven to create by some inner demon. I suddenly realize they must have their own black wolves. Creating art is what feeds their white wolf.

‘Anything else?’ the man asks. He’s looking at me and I realize I’ve been staring out of the window.

‘You said you knew Rein Benner?’ I ask, trying to get back into the swing of it.

He breathes in through his nose and leans back in his chair. Beethoven crashes and judders to the end of a fast moment and then eases into a timorous slow one. Three? Seven?

‘Oh, I knew Rein all right. Him and his brother grew up here.’

‘What was he like?’

‘He was all right, bit of a handful, but then a lot of the kids round here don’t have the best role models. Rein and his brother didn’t either, truth be told. But there was something about him. He was … smart somehow. I found him in the garden once. I’d gone out for a smoke at night and heard someone crying in the bushes, just over there.’ He points to a cluster near the water’s edge. ‘I didn’t know what to think, so I tried to entice whoever it was out and eventually Rein appeared. He’d had some argument with his father, and from the look of things he might’ve been bashed around a little; he had a bruise on the side of his face. Wouldn’t admit it was his dad that had done it, though.’

‘Did he say what the argument was about?’

‘Yeah. He knew I was an artist so I think he maybe felt a bit more comfortable talking to me. He’d told his dad he wanted to be an actor and wanted to go to acting classes. Reading between the lines I think the father saw this as some affront to masculinity and showed him what real men do. His dad was, what do the kids say nowadays, a class A dick? In case you hadn’t got that already. Their mother had probably worked that out early on and left, leaving him with the kids to fend for themselves.’

‘What did the father do?’

‘Dealer of some sort. I don’t actually know that for sure, but that’s what he looked like to me. They used to spend the summer holidays up near the coast somewhere. Bergen, I think. I remember Rein telling me about all the spiders they found in the log cabin they slept in. Pretty much the only people around here who can afford holidays are dealers.’

‘So what happened to Rein after that?’