A pile of bricks with a dead bird on its doorstep. Only—the carcass is no longer there. I look around, somewhat nonplussed, in case an animal has dragged it and dropped it somewhere else in the vicinity, but I can’t see any sign of it. I start to poke in the overgrown flower beds at the end of the front lawn before the absurdity of that strikes me—am I really spending time hunting down a maggot-ridden carcass that I didn’t want to have to dispose of in the first place? I still have the echo of Carrie’s dispassionate assessment in my ears—That’s fucking disgusting—and I can just imagine her reaction to its unexpected disappearance: Good riddance! I should be considering it a bonus that I don’t have to clear it up. It’s not like with the bin bags; those were inside. Surely some animal has taken it and is currently delighted with the ready meal. I scan the garden one more time, but a black heap of feathers fails to suddenly appear, so I give up and head into the Manse. It’s not like with the bin bags. It’s not.

My father lives on the streets in Nice. The weather is generally warm, which is kinder to rough sleepers, though in latter years he has seen a growing threat from the influx of violent gangs from eastern Europe. On the days when he is able, he draws chalk pictures on the pavements, copies of old masters created from memory, although he couldn’t tell you where or when he learned to love these paintings. He couldn’t tell you much about himself at all. The chalk drawings can win him enough to buy a decent lunch or a bottle of wine, but the days when he is able to draw occur less and less frequently. There’s a fog that has invaded his mind, that’s been there for a great many years, growing and expanding to cloak more and more of his synapses with every passing week. One day he will lie down to sleep on a bench, and only his heart, not his mind, will wake up.

FOURTEEN

The next evening we spend together, I show Carrie the inscription, and she shocks me by saying, “Mum told me about this!”

“What?” I’ve climbed into one of the high-backed dining chairs, my feet tucked under me.

“I’d completely forgotten about it.” She reaches out a finger to touch it, to trace it, a half smile on her face. Like me, she stops before she makes contact. “She said she lived in a house with a strange inscription, that the man she was living with was obsessed by it.” She glances at me, realization dawning. “Oh my God, she meant your dad.”

It had never occurred to me that Mum would have talked to Carrie about the Manse, even obliquely. “What else did she say?”