‘Good? It’s bloody frightening. Well, Joan couldn’t stand hearing the old man’s voice in the house when she knew he was dead. It was tearing her up, poor lass. Every time she came home, she heard his voice. I didn’t really want the thing myself, but I couldn’t refuse, could I?’

‘What does it say?’

‘I wouldn’t claim it has a wide vocabulary exactly,’ said Royce.

He came back into the room and pulled the cover off the cage. The parrot opened its eyes and looked at Cooper.

‘Hello, sweetheart,’ it said. ‘Where’s Jack?’

Then it switched its attention to scratching under its feathers with the claws of one foot, and Royce went back to his search.

‘Is that it?’

‘Well, I haven’t tried to engage it in conversation,’ said Royce. ‘But sometimes it says “crap” if it doesn’t like what’s on the telly.’

‘And is that often?’

‘Yes.’

‘They live a lot longer than people, don’t they?’ said Cooper.

‘Do they?’ Royce sounded surprised. ‘Bloody hell. I was hoping it’d die a natural death before too long, like my kids’ hamsters do.’

‘Not parrots. They can live to over a hundred. Winston Churchill had one, and it died only last year. It was a hundred and five.’

‘I bet Churchill didn’t teach his parrot to say crap.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure.’

Cooper went out into the hall to see what progress David Royce was making. All kinds of stuff had been pulled out of the cupboard: toys, boxes of shoes, a spare TV set, the ironing board.

‘I think it might be upstairs,’ Royce said.

‘Can I help you to look?’

‘Yes, take a wardrobe.’

After another ten minutes, Royce decided they must have scattered the ashes in the garden and thrown the urn away.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry about it.’

Cooper walked back into the sitting room. At least the parrot remembered its owner, even if it had survived him. In fact, if it was a young bird, it might outlast everyone now living in Derbyshire. Winston Churchill’s parrot had seen out not only its owner but nine other prime ministers, right up to Tony Blair. To a parrot, people must seem to come and go like flies in summer.

As he passed the cage, the parrot stopped scratching and fixed Cooper with a sharp eye.

‘Crap,’ it said. ‘Where’s Jack?’