‘All this fucking time – reception? And you fucking knew?’

‘Well, I didn’t want you to go upstairs, for reasons of my own, obviously, so I wasn’t about to tell you, was I?’ Basil gave me a cheeky getting-away-with-it smile.

‘You little shit!’ The urge to clock him rose up and then passed and I rolled my eyes at him instead. ‘You know you really are a smart-arse.’

Basil ducked his head and smiled. It was good to see him smiling. ‘Come on, I’ll show you,’ he said.

I picked up my phone. Was I really going to do this? Could I do this?

We sat the lamp on the entrance floor and shone it up the stairs, which held just fine as we climbed. At the top of the stairs Basil said, ‘This way,’ and we passed through the top room to the secret room entrance window. Basil put his hands on the sash.

‘It won’t open,’ I said. ‘I already tried.’

‘You mean, you tried when Dad was still in there and had it locked?’

I laughed at myself. ‘Oh yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.’ And then the strangeness of that hit me, that my uncle had been sitting there quietly behind that window.

Basil hauled the window up easily, reached an arm around inside and flicked a switch, and a standing lamp threw yellow light around the room. He climbed through the window and I leaned in after him. A good quality mattress lay on the floor, with clean sheets and a plump pillow. The floor was swept clean and the opposite window looked as if it had been washed to capture the view. A bar fridge was plugged in and humming. I climbed in through the window and opened the fridge. It was full of fresh green and orange and red vegetables, a bag of apples. Some milk, within date. All the groceries Basil had bought. Basil came over, got out an apple, crunched away on it. ‘Apple?’ he said, with his mouth full.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘This is amazing. You did an amazing job.’

‘Thanks,’ Basil crunched. ‘I know.’

On the floor next to the bed was a small pile of paperbacks. The covers were bent and faded and in the seventies and eighties style geometric designs seen mostly in second-hand bookstores. Jamaica Inn, Jane Eyre, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. One book had its cover flipped open. I toed the book shut to reveal a dark cover with a lighter portrait of an emerging face, a beautiful image of a thin-faced man and the title The Picture of Dorian Gray. It was strongly reminiscent of the Dutch paintings in Hessel’s sitting room.

I looked at the cover for a moment, the young man’s pale face emerging from the dark and staring solemnly at me. I knew a bit of the story, that this was a picture of a person arrested in time.