‘Interviewed every bugger. Spent plenty time with me and my Keith. Must have been ten years ago he got round to me. Asked questions he already knew the answer to, like where I went to school and where I lived and where I met Keith. His pencil was a blur. I don’t know what he got out of it. I talked to him about both wars though I felt uncomfortable about it. He was off fighting in the first one and his son died in the second so why he’d want to remember, I don’t know.’

‘What else did he want to know?’ I asked, and the query sounded unfamiliar on my tongue. It suddenly struck me as odd how rarely I asked such honest questions.

She scratched her head. ‘Wittered on about the drama society during the war. The athletics team from the camp. They built the first 400-metre track in this country, did you know that? Some of it’s still there. You ever go up the castle? You can see the old buildings. Old cells too.’

I realized I was chewing my lip. Did it matter? Was it in some way connected to the words beneath the church floor?

‘Why did he ask you about it?’ I said.

Pat screwed up her face. I swear, her lower lip almost touched her forehead.

‘I think I were just there to make it chatty,’ she said. ‘You know my Keith. Ask him how he is and he’ll tell you “fine” – even if there’s an arrow sticking in his forehead. I get him talking even if it’s just by correcting the bits I get wrong.’

‘And what did he want to know about from Keith?’

‘Well you know as well as I do that his father was a master mason and afore the sickness, Keith was no slouch. They did a lot of the work on the big buildings around here. Manor house, castle, vicarage, churches.’

‘Churches?’

‘Of course. Magdalene and yon church at Denton. Out Longtown way too.’

‘What was he asking?’

‘Designs. Whether he still had old draftsman’s sketches and whatnot. Then he got onto talking about the camp.’

‘The POW camp?’

‘O’course. Keith and his father were among the contractors who put the place together. ‘Twere just a field, if you remember it. Next thing it had to accommodate thousands of men and not all of them were happy to be out of the war. Some wanted to keep scrapping. Fairfax was asking Keith about what he saw. About the men who came. Where they were from. What countries. What languages. What uniforms. Honestly, this went on an age.’

‘And this was years ago, was it?’ I asked, unsure of the relevance.

‘Aye well, Fairfax started his research around the time the Romans left but there were never a time when he weren’t pestering us for little bits we might have forgotten.’