‘I’d say that’s round about the point he lost his wife, God rest her, and there were nowt to keep him focussed. I can barely make any of it out but it’s not as faded as the other stuff and it’s in pen, not pencil and he’s using more pages and not cramming everything in so it must have been after rationing stopped …’

I found myself grinning. ‘That’s proper detective work,’ I said.

She shook her head at that but seemed pleased. ‘Stuff about local landmarks. The wall. The fort.’

‘The fort?’

‘Roman fort. Chats with somebody whose name I can’t make out, page after page talking about types of stone and architecture and gargoyles and the sort of stuff you’d only read if you had bugger all else to do.’

I looked a little disappointed. ‘Nothing about a Frenchman?’

‘If there is I can’t make it out. I’m disappointed, despite myself. The page under the church floor was at least legible. Like he’d made an effort with it.’

I breathed out, rolling my head this way and that. I felt stiff and cold and hungry but had no desire to warm up or eat anything. I just wanted to understand.

‘The tape recorder,’ I said, closing one eye. ‘If he’d started recording conversations then he could listen to them back and not have to scribble it all down as people were talking. Maybe the page you found was a transcript. Something from a recording.’

Felicity opened her eyes a little wider. She twitched, like Bogart, as though something suddenly pained her.

‘There’s no tape recorder here,’ she said.

‘Have you been through the whole house? Top to bottom?’

‘No, of course …’

‘Well, let’s do that.’

It took better than three hours and by the time we had finished the house looked as though a tornado had blown through. We found no tape recorder. It was a sad, dispiriting trawl. Felicity went very quiet when we found ourselves in Christopher’s old room. Little had been touched since his death. It looked as though he had simply popped out. There was a notebook on the windowsill, next to some battered paperbacks and a chunk of rock. The bed was made up with a sheet and brown woollen blanket. The cupboard and the chest of drawers were different types of wood and a sketch of Lanercost Priory hung on the chimney breast against a cold blue wall. I couldn’t bring myself to open the notebooks. Nobody had disturbed the dust in years: the thoughts of a boy dead for twenty years still safely imprisoned beneath the covers.

We were standing on the upstairs landing, looking dejected, feeling grey, when the bird hit the window. There was no warning. There was just a sudden, startling bang on the glass and then the window on the landing erupted inwards in a sudden geyser of flying glass and feathers.