‘Here’s to Fairfax,’ said Stubbs, who had pulled himself a pint of muddy brown ale. The other drinkers joined him in a salute and they spent the next few minutes talking about what a menace he had been with his questions and his jokes and the pride he had taken in a car he had bought which so ill-suited the local roads.

Hearing about the dead man’s life only made me regret his death all the more. I sipped at the next drink. Took off my coat and hung it over the open hatch that led behind the bar.

‘We don’t get many ladies in on weeknights,’ said Stubbs. ‘Nice to have a pretty face instead of these ugly mugs.’ He gestured at his regulars, who obliged him with harmless scowls. ‘You were in before, weren’t you? You and some lass dressed like a daffodil. Busy night, that one. Sorry if you didn’t get to see the place at its best. Not everybody’s so forward thinking.’

There was a sharp laugh from the man with the black hair.

‘Aye, there’s a couple of cavemen, right enough. Couple who reckon a lass should be home and not in here with the likes of us.’

He turned to me as he said it but there was nothing unpleasant in the way he looked at me.

‘Changing times,’ I said.

‘Pike doesn’t think so.’

Stubbs pursed his lips and blew out a lungful. Took a cigarette from the packet in his shirt pocket and lit it, blowing out a lungful of smoke and resting his elbows on the bar as if settling in to tell a story.

‘You know Pike?’

I shook my head. I may have heard the name but couldn’t be sure.

‘Lives next to that church you like. Scruffy place.’

My memory filled with pictures of the tumbledown cottage with the holes in the roof and the sheets at the windows; the peeling paint and rusting machinery on the scrap of lawn.

‘Lives there with his old mum. Reckon they built that house around them and when it falls down he’ll still be inside. Bit of a terror is Pike, if you don’t know how to take him. Banned him from here a dozen times though it’s never good for trade. He just tells the regulars what’ll happen if they come in drinking when he’s not allowed. I always end up inviting him back.’

‘I don’t think I’ve seen him.’