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Julie grinned. ‘Well, since you ask … the pond needs a bit of a mucking out, but not too much as I think there might be frogs in there. And the drainpipe beside the bedroom window has come loose and rattles when it’s windy.’

‘Are you getting plenty of sleep?’

Julie lifted an eyebrow. ‘Which one of us is the mother here? I should be asking you that.’

‘I’m just trying to look out for you.’ He paused, took a sip of his tea, figuring he might as well bring up what was mostly on his mind. ‘Has … he … contacted you yet?’

‘The Lord Jesus Christ? To ask which plot I’d like in the churchyard?’

At her smile, Jacob couldn’t help smiling back. ‘No, the one who thinks he is.’

‘Oh, your stepbrother?’

‘Yes.’

‘After you called me the other day, I’ve been keeping an eye on my phone for any unfamiliar numbers or messages. There was a nice chap from Bangladesh who needed to talk about the release fee on his army general uncle’s multimillion dollar fortune that’s apparently been left to me, but otherwise none of note.’ She took a bite of her scone, wiped a crumb off her chin, and added, ‘You don’t really think he’d contact me, do you?’

‘I’m more worried about him showing up here and hassling you.’

‘There’s nothing I have that he could possibly want.’

‘You know that’s not what he thinks. After the fire … he thinks you hoarded what was left. That you’re keeping it hidden somewhere.’

‘I wish I was. Does he think I’d be living here if I had all his father’s hidden money?’

‘He doesn’t live in the real world. Not as we know it, at any rate. Who knows what he thinks?’

Julie finished her scone and stood up, wincing a little. ‘Perhaps I’d better get the ladder out, get you up fixing that drainpipe. I really don’t want to talk about James or Bill, I’m afraid.’

Jacob nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’

They went out into the garden, Jacob taking over as Julie stumbled towards the shed, grimly in denial of her chronic back problems. In the end, she settled for perching on the edge of a flowerbed wall and giving instructions, while Jacob climbed the ladder and tightened the screws securing the loose section of drainpipe to the wall.

‘You know, if you really wanted to make me happy, you could come back and live with me,’ Julie said. ‘Your room’s always there if you want it.’

‘I know, Mum. If they put my rent up again, I’ll think about it. I’ll come and stay over Christmas for sure.’

What his mother considered to be Jacob’s room was a closet-sized second bedroom at the top of the stairs. That he was aware, there wasn’t even a bed in it, just a pile of boxes of his mother’s old things, still waiting, years after her move, to be sorted through.

‘It would be nice to have you around more,’ Julie said. ‘Sometimes … I even wish Colin were still here. I know what he did and everything, but I didn’t know that until after. The man I thought I knew … he was a good man.’

Very little made Jacob angry, but thinking of his dead stepfather made him seethe. He stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets, clenching his fists tight, waiting for his heart to stop racing.

‘I tell you what,’ he said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘You put on the kettle, and I’ll get the box of Christmas things down from upstairs. Then we can set up the tree together. You know like we used to do when I was a kid.’

Julie sniffed. ‘That would be lovely.’

Jacob stayed for lunch, then said goodbye to his mother and headed back into Brentwell. Her condition had been better than he had expected, but he made a mental note to call Sandra at the home help service to check. Then there would be social services to call, to ask if there were any other facilities available to help his mother. She wasn’t quite ready for stairlifts, but the time would come, sooner rather than later. She had worked diligently as a nurse for more than thirty years, working long hours for low pay. As far as Jacob was concerned, the government owed her. Whether it would pay up, or whether he would have to get a part-time job and save up, remained to be seen. He could always move back in and save rent on his own place, but no matter what he said, he understood his mother. She valued her independence, as he did his own.

His fingers were freezing by the time he reached town. With December on the way, it was time to start wearing gloves, maybe even a hat and scarf. Thinking about it gave him an idea, so he headed back to his flat, above an estate agent in the centre of Brentwell.

On the upstairs floor of the two-storey red-brick building, the access was down a little alley between the estate agent and the charity shop next door, leading to a tiny internal courtyard where he secured his bike to a fence and climbed a rickety set of metal stairs to the door set into the wall on the upper floor.

Once, his flat had been a storeroom of sorts for the shop downstairs, but someone had seen an investment opportunity, blocked the internal stairs and added the door and the metal staircase leading up from the courtyard. With the fittings rusty and loose on one side, Jacob always felt like he was stepping off a gangplank onto a ship, and sometimes wondered if one day he’d open his front door to find the staircase had collapsed. He kept a length of rope in a cupboard just for this very purpose, but the truth was that if he squatted down and hung over the edge, he could probably jump it without much difficulty. Getting back up, however, would take a little more effort.

While the building looked nice enough on the outside, his flat was basically a bedsit with a plywood wall separating what was supposedly a bedroom from the kitchen-diner area. The reality was that it was too small even for a bed, so he slept on a sofa bed against one wall and kept the pseudo-bedroom for storage.

He put the kettle on, then went into his storeroom and came out with a big cardboard box.