‘If a meal is very large, the effort of digestion can be too much. Then the leaf dies without ever re-opening.’

Cooper had always hated flies, but he found himself feeling sorry for them – especially the ones that ended up trapped and half-digested inside the leaves of a dying plant.

Mrs Askew pointed into the terrarium.

‘There’s a leaf at the back that caught a fly about a week ago. It’s just re-opening now, look.’

Cooper peered between the teeth of the flytrap into the fleshy mouth, and saw that the plant had finished digesting its meal. All that remained on the leaf was the dried-out husk of its prey. The fly’s brittle wings and the shell of its thorax had been left intact, but its body had been sucked empty of its juices. The insect had been digested alive.

‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ said Mrs Askew with a smile.

Cooper turned, hardly daring to look at her face. He felt that sense of unease again, a discomfort in the presence of an unnatural fascination with death.

‘Mrs Askew, I have to go now,’ he said. ‘I have other people to visit.’

She looked disappointed. ‘Oh, well, if you must. But do call back if there’s anything else you want to ask me.’

‘Thank you. I’ll do that.’

She waited on the doorstep and watched him leave. As he got into his car, Cooper looked back and waved. He wished Mrs Askew wouldn’t keep smiling quite so much. He was starting to find the sight of her bared teeth a bit disturbing.

David Royce had his brother-in-law’s ashes somewhere, if only he could remember where he’d put them.

‘What’s in this cage?’ called Cooper as he waited in the sitting room for Mr Royce to search the cupboard under the stairs. The cage was covered completely, so it might be empty. But Cooper thought he could hear a faint clicking of claws.

‘That’s Smoky. He’s an African Grey.’

‘You have a parrot?’ Cooper tried to remember the last time he’d seen a parrot in a cage in someone’s house. There had been one a while ago, but he couldn’t recall where. And somehow David Royce didn’t seem the type to keep a cage bird at all. A large dog, perhaps. A Rottweiler called Tyson or Satan. But a parrot?

‘My sister asked me to have it,’ said Royce, his voice muffled by the interior of the cupboard. ‘It belonged to Jack. But after he died, she couldn’t bear to have it in the house. He taught the thing to speak, you see. And it copied his voice perfectly. It has the sound of him off pat, believe me.’

‘They’re very good mimics.’