In the next house, a row of unmatching straight-backed chairs stood in the bay window, as if set out for an audience at a performance. Then Cooper noticed that other incongruous furniture had been crammed into the room between the sofa and the armchairs – a wrought-iron seat from the conservatory, an office-style swivel chair, and a low, squishy object that his mother would have called a pouffe. A long table had been pushed against the far wall and was loaded with plates and dishes covered with cling film or draped in tea towels.

‘I hope I’m not intruding,’ he said. ‘Is it a bad moment?’

‘It’s my mum’s funeral today. But it’s OK, we’ve got everything ready early,’ said Susan Dakin.

‘People are coming back here after the funeral?’

‘Of course. We don’t know who’s going to turn up exactly. I don’t suppose there’ll be many.’

It felt as though the Dakins were preparing for a party. At one time, a death would have meant a silent house and hushed voices. Not here, though. Susan Dakin seemed entirely content that her mother should be joining her father, wherever he’d gone.

Later, Cooper visited a bungalow at Southwoods where two old women with tight perms sat eating Belgian chocolates shaped like sea horses. He called on a Hucklow couple who had lost their child in a road accident and had never spoken about it since scattering her ashes in the paddock where her pony still grazed.

‘My grandma used to say we should draw the curtains and cover the mirrors, as a sign of respect,’ said one of the old women, licking a coating of chocolate from her finger. ‘But I say that’s just daft. Life goes on, doesn’t it?’

‘She still lives in my heart,’ said the child’s mother. ‘Every day.’

In a house on Manchester Road he met a mother and daughter who both wore cropped jeans and ankle chains, and a ring through the right nostril. It was almost as if they were trying to look like sisters. But where the girl had a studded belt and jeans cut low enough to reveal bony hips, the mother had a smooth roll of fat. The daughter was fashionably pale, but her mother was tanned – though it was the sort of tan gained in a cubicle on the High Street at thirty-nine pence a minute.

‘It can bring you closer,’ they said, almost together. The father had nothing to say. His ashes were in the brass urn they allowed Cooper to sign for.

His last visit was to the Devonshire Estate again, where Maureen Connolly told him that her sister had stolen their mother’s ashes.

‘She had no right to take them. They belonged to me. Good riddance to her, I say. She was always a tart, anyway. My only consolation is that she’ll be suffering for it, wherever she is.’

‘She’s dead?’