Peter asked, “Do you have kids of your own?”

I shook my head. It occurred to me I hadn’t asked Peter a single question about himself, his life since school, his circumstances now. “How about you?”

“I never married,” he said simply. “I was a policeman — did you know that?”

I grinned; I couldn’t help it. Peter the school dork, a copper?

Evidently he was used to the reaction. “I did well. Became a detective constable. I retired early …”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Other things to do.” I would find out later what those “other things” were. “Look, let me help. Go see to the rest of the house. I’ll sort this out — I can fill a bin liner for you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“It’s okay. I’d like to do it for Jack. If I find anything personal I’ll just leave it.”

“You’re very thoughtful.”

He shrugged. “You’d do the same for me.”

I wasn’t sure if that was remotely true, and I felt another layer of guilt pile up on already complicated strata. But I didn’t say any more.

I started upstairs. Behind me I heard a dim bleeping, the baby-bird sound of Peter’s cell phone calling for attention.

* * *

My father’s bedroom.

The bed was unmade, the sheets crumpled, a dent in the pillow where his head had lain. There was a waist-high basket nearly full of dirty clothes. On the small bedside cupboard, where an electric lamp was alight, a paperback book lay facedown. It was a biography of Churchill. It was all as if my father had left it a moment ago, but that moment had somehow been frozen, and was now receding relentlessly into the past, a fading still image on a broken video.