“How about the man she left your uncle for?”

“What are you saying?” I wasn’t sure why this disconcerted me so much, unless I was troubled by Roy’s way of thinking. “The drug couldn’t have brought him,” I said.

Roy laughed, but not much. “I’m saying where was he when she was on the roof.”

“Presumably not with her, or someone would have said. We couldn’t even track him down to get in touch after my aunt died. My parents thought he might have gone for good by then.”

“Maybe she was screwed up because he left her.”

“My mother thought that might have been part of it, but I don’t think she ever really understood her sister.”

“I’d like to. Did you ever go where she died?”

“It never occurred to me, and I have to say—”

“She says somewhere you never know what’s anywhere till you go and look. It might help us understand her better. Don’t you want to, dad?”

I’d begun to feel disloyal to my aunt’s memory, and I didn’t want to quash Roy’s enthusiasm. “We can drive there if you like, but don’t expect too much.”

As my car unlocked itself on the drive hemmed in by rhododendron bushes, a thin insistent screech approached the station – the cry of brakes on the track. A concentrated sun appeared to have parched the sky, leaving it white as eggshell and even less substantial. In ten minutes we were travelling under the river, through the clinically pallid tunnel. On the far side the Liverpool streets had been robbed of all their shadows. Outside the city fewer buildings hid the flatness of the land. Extensive fields shone fiercely with the sun, and some looked drained of colour. Scattered spires marked the horizon, but when I turned off the motorway towards Stonefield there wasn’t a church to be seen.

I was expecting less than I’d told Roy he should. The tower block where my aunt died had been derelict then, and I assumed it had been demolished since. Then the tops of several blocks rose ahead as if they were supporting the edge of the sky, and soon I saw they’d been renovated. The five of them dominated the overspill estate, which otherwise consisted of identical terraces of houses – ranks that resembled containers with windows – and ungenerous promenades of shops, quite a few of which were defunct or at any rate shuttered. An elongated concrete church with a perfunctory steeple lay low behind the first tower block, as though it had been flattened or designed to hide. It was no taller than its neighbours, a row of vintage cottages with thatched roofs and small gardens, the last remaining predecessors of the estate. For a moment they distracted me from realising “I don’t know where it happened. It could be any of the blocks.”

“Can’t we ask?”