My father is dead. He was mugged in Antwerp for the money in his wallet, but the thieves got rather more than they bargained for when they discovered the diamonds on him. They were minor criminals, nothing major-league yet, but the oldest of them—a hard-faced youth not yet turned twenty—had aspirations. He knew that a theft of gemstones would attract rather more police time and effort than a stolen wallet, and therefore their choices were to either eliminate the crime, by returning everything to my father, or eliminate the witness of the crime. He didn’t find it a difficult choice, which is how my father’s body came to be tossed into the Albert Canal, where it currently lies beneath layers of silt and detritus. That same hard-faced youth has killed many times since, but he remembers my father’s murder with particular fondness on account of the extraordinary stroke of luck that led him to that unexpected windfall.

TWELVE

Fortified by scrambled eggs, I enter the box room the next morning armed with damp kitchen roll with which to attack the dust, and with a marker pen and a plan: I will check the contents of every box, without sorting them through; the sorting can come later (I stomp firmly on the question of when that later might be). I start by scribbling Charity on the boxes of books, wondering as I do so whether a charity shop will even want them—after all, isn’t everyone reading on a Kindle these days? The box of floral scrapbooks gets the label Albums and no further scrutiny, and another box gets the same treatment. Two boxes are full of dated household items: a clock, a couple of ornaments, a random collection of utensils and a lamp base that might go with the beige tasseled lampshade. I scrawl Dump.