Dead Men's s Boots

On top of the piano was an old framed photograph of a family – presumably the Seaforths – posed awkwardly for a cameraman they didn’t know and who had done nothing to put them at their ease.

‘Please sit down,’ Ruth Seaforth said, and she disappeared through another door. I crossed to the photo instead and examined it. If it was the Seaforths, the period had to be the mid-1950s. Father and mother at the back, arm in arm but with no real suggestion of intimacy: the man smiling, although the look in his eyes was a little stern and serious.

Three teenaged boys, then, forming the middle row: all much of a muchness, all broad, boisterous, manly self-satisfaction, looking as though they’d been caught in a rare moment of stillness and balance.

Then Ruth and Myriam, gazing solemnly up from where they sat in the front row. I was probably imagining things, but they didn’t look happy. The look in the eyes of the girl on the left, particularly, was like a message in a bottle: Help, I am stranded on a desert island and I need to be rescued.

Juliet had sat down on the t«t d behree-piece’s sofa: I went and joined her on it.

‘Feeling any better?’ I asked.

She gave me a sour look. ‘Castor, the next time you ask me how I feel I’m going to break the little finger on your right hand.’

‘I’m left-handed,’ I pointed out.

‘I need to be able to escalate for repeat offences.

Ruth Seaforth came in with a tray on which there were three glasses, a jug, a plate of biscuits and a neatly folded stack of napkins. She set it down on the table in front of us, poured the lemonade and then sat down in one of the chairs. ‘Help yourselves,’ she said, indicating the refreshments with a slightly trembling hand.

I picked up a biscuit, took a bite – it was about as tasty as dried Polyfilla – and washed it down with a sip of lemonade which was ice-cold and refreshing and so sour that my lips were sucked down into my throat.

‘It must have been devastating,’ she said, ‘when Myriam was executed.’

I winced at the bluntness, but Ruth took it on the chin. She nodded. ‘It was hardest for my father,’ she said. ‘He had to meet people every day, and he felt as though they were all looking at him differently now: as though they saw Myriam when they spoke to him.