Mrs Parker smoothed down the front of her skirt. ‘I received information that the man we once knew as Jean Favre was travelling under a passport belonging to a Marcel Defouloy. He’d applied for the paperwork to come to England. One of the families I wrote to in Alsace – they told me. We told Christopher. We’d tried to put that life behind us and now it was walking up to our door.’

‘He was coming here to kill me,’ said Mr Parker, pulling his arms in tighter. ‘To skin me. To burn me with coins … He saw me. Out in the woods as I took my walk. I ran. Came home. Hid, like a child. But he went to Fairfax.’

I understood, then. Fairfax was the man in whom the Parkers had chosen to confide.

‘Fairfax knew Abel’s story,’ said Mrs Parker. ‘We told him everything, even though we knew it was wrong. He was a good man, always wanting to learn about the people around him. Always asking questions. We told him who Abel was on the promise his story was not told during our lifetime. It seemed right, somehow. He was Christopher’s father, after all. And then this monster, this terror whom we had spoken of – he walked up to Fairfax’s door. When he realized who he was talking to he contacted us.’

‘And?’ asked Cordelia, staring at the side of Mr Parker’s head.

‘I took care of it,’ said Christopher, from across the room.

There was silence for a time. Cordelia was thinking. Mr Parker was playing with his dead bird.

‘How did he die?’ I asked, and I was shocked as anybody to hear me ask.

‘As well as could be expected,’ said Christopher, and I think he might even have given me a little smile.

‘Why the crypt?’ asked Cordelia. ‘Outside your own father’s front door?’

Christopher had the grace to look reproachful. ‘It was only meant to be temporary. Opportunity would arise to remove him properly. He seemed safe where he was. Then the tree came down.’

‘And Fairfax knew?’ I asked. ‘That he was in the crypt?’

‘He saw Favre die,’ said Mrs Parker. ‘When it happened. When he died. Things got difficult. Pike might have seen. Fairfax understood. He said that Favre was an evil man and that he deserved to lie, unmourned, somewhere that nobody would ever find him. The day Fairfax died he was coming to tell us that the crypt had been compromised. He needed us to know that the body had been discovered. That must have been what killed him – the shock of it. He crashed without ever telling us what had happened.’

Cordelia was looking at Mr Parker.

‘Why did you tell him your story?’ she asked him.

He shook his head at her and his wig slid a half inch to the right. He was a pitiful figure. He’d been broken by what he had endured.