Then there had been a reason for it. Edith had been alive, sharing the existence and the fear, ageing visibly and trying to hide it. ‘ I didn’t know it was going to be like this, Edith. But trust me. We’ll beat the bastards.’ And so she’d trusted him, like she always had. But he hadn’t beaten them. At the moment when it had mattered, when he thought the vengeance hunt had been abandoned, he’d relaxed. And the bullet meant for him had taken away half her spine.

Charlie shook his head, an angry, physical gesture. The recollections of Edith were in the closed, no-entry part of his mind, the place of the deepest guilt. Always came out when he drank too much.

Charlie struggled up, moving through the pot-cluttered kitchen, opening cupboards and then the refrigerator, staring disappointedly at the age-wrinkled tomato and some forgotten celery, limp like he would probably have been if the whore hadn’t crossed the road. He’d meant to bring something back from the pub, but he’d forgotten: he seemed to forget a lot of things lately. Charlie groped back into the main room, staring around as if seeing it for the first time.

The home of the nobody man. There were no mementoes or souvenirs or photographs, not even of Edith. It was like a doll’s house setting, which real people never occupied, a small settee and two matching chairs and a cabinet with some books he could never maintain the concentration to read and a television which bored him with its inanities. A place to come to, out of the rain, when the forecasters got it right.

Directly inside the bedroom, Charlie halted in near fright at the sudden, sag-shouldered reflection in the wardrobe mirror.