Dead, it said. Dad’s dead.

Saul’s knees buckled. The men behind him held him upright, but he was utterly weak in their arms. He moaned.

‘Where’s my dad?’ he pleaded.

The light outside was the colour of the clouds. Blue strobes swirled on a mass of police cars, staining the drab buildings. The frozen air cleared Saul’s head. He tugged desperately at the arms holding him as he struggled to see over the hedges that ringed Terragon Mansions. He saw faces staring down from the hole that was his father’s window. He saw the glint of a million splinters of glass covering the dying grass. He saw a mass of uniformed police frozen in a threatening diorama. All their faces were turned to him. One held a roll of tape covered in crime scene warnings, a tape he was stretching around stakes in the ground, circumscribing a piece of the earth. Inside the chosen area he saw one man kneeling before a dark shape on the lawn. The man was staring at him like all the others. His body obscured the untidy thing. Saul was swept past before he could see any more.

He was pushed into one of the cars, lightheaded now, hardly able to feel a thing. His breath came very fast. Somewhere along the line handcuffs had been snapped onto his wrists. He shouted again at the men in front, but they ignored him.

The streets rolled by.

They put him in a cell, gave him a cup of tea and warmer clothes: a grey cardigan and corduroy trousers that stank of alcohol. Saul sat huddled in a stranger’s clothes. He waited for a long time.

He lay on the bed, draped the thin blanket around him.

Sometimes he heard the voice inside him. Suicide, it said. Dad’s committed suicide.

Sometimes he would argue with it. It was a ridiculous idea, something his father could never do. Then it would convince him and he might start to hyperventilate, to panic. He closed his ears to it. He kept it quiet.

He would not listen to rumours, even if they came from inside himself.

No one had told him why he was there. Whenever footsteps went by outside he would shout, sometimes swearing, demanding to know what was happening. Sometimes the footsteps would stop and the grille would be lifted on the door. ‘We’re sorry for the delay,’ a voice would say. ‘We’ll be with you as soon as we can,’ or ‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘You can’t keep me here,’ he yelled at one point. ‘What’s going on?’ His voice echoed around empty corridors.

Saul sat on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

A fine network of cracks spread out from one corner. Saul followed them with his eyes, allowing himself to be mesmerized.

Why are you here? the voice inside whispered to him nervously. Why do they want you? Why won’t they speak to you?

Saul sat and stared at the cracks and ignored the voice.

After a long time he heard the key in the lock. Two uniformed policemen entered, followed by the thin man Saul had seen in his father’s flat. The man was dressed in the same brown suit and ugly tan raincoat. He stared at Saul, who returned his gaze from beneath the dirty blanket, forlorn and pathetic and aggressive. When the thin man spoke his voice was much softer than Saul would have imagined.

‘Mr Garamond,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that your father is dead.’

Saul gazed at him. That much was obvious surely, he felt like shouting, but tears stopped him. He tried to speak through his streaming eyes and nose, but could issue nothing but a sob. He wept noisily for a minute, then struggled to control himself. He sniffed back tears like a baby and wiped his snotty nose on his sleeve. The three policemen stood and watched him impassively until he had controlled himself a little more.

‘What’s going on?’ he croaked.

‘I was hoping you might be able to tell us that, Saul,’ said the thin man. His voice remained quite impassive. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Crowley, Saul. Now, I’m going to ask you a few questions…’

‘What happened to Dad?’ Saul interrupted. There was a pause.

‘He fell from the window, Saul,’ Crowley said. ‘It’s a long way up. I don’t think he suffered any.’ There was a pause. ‘Did you not realize what had happened to your dad, Saul?’

`I thought maybe something… I saw in the garden… Why am I here? Saul was shaking.

Crowley pursed his lips and moved a little closer. 'Well, Saul, first let me apologize for how long you’ve been waiting. It’s been very hectic out here. I had hoped someone might come and take care of you, but it seems no one has. I’m sorry about that. I’ll be having a few words.

‘As to why you’re here, well, it was all a bit confused back there. We get a call from a neighbour saying there’s someone lying out front of the building, we go in, there you are, we don’t know who you are… you can see how it all gets out of hand. Anyway, you’re here, long and short of it, in the hope that you can tell us your side of the story.’

Saul stared at Crowley. ‘My side?’ he shouted. ‘My side of what? I’ve got home and my dad’s…’

Crowley shushed him, his hands up, placating, nodding.

‘I know, I know, Saul. We’ve just got to understand what happened. I want you to come with me.’ He gave a sad little smile as he said this. He looked down at Saul sitting on the bed; dirty, smelly, in strange clothes, confused, pugnacious, tear-stained and orphaned. Crowley’s face creased with what looked like concern.

‘I want to ask you some questions.’

Chapter Two

Once, when he was three, Saul was sitting on his father’s shoulders, coming home from the park. They had passed a group of workmen repairing a road, and Saul had tangled his hands in his father’s hair and leaned over and gazed at the bubbling pot of tar his father pointed out: the pot heating on the van, and the big metal stick they used to stir it. His nose was filled with the thick smell of tar, and as Saul gazed into the simmering glop he remembered the witch’s cauldron in Hansel and Gretel and he was seized with the sudden terror that he would fall into the tar and be cooked alive. And Saul had squirmed backwards and his father had stopped and asked him what was the matter. When he understood he had taken Saul off his shoulders and walked with him over to the workmen, who had leaned on their shovels and grinned quizzically at the anxious child. Saul’s father had leaned down and whispered encouragement into his ear, and Saul had asked the men what the tar was. The men had told him about how they would spread it thin and put it on the road, and they had stirred it for him as his father held him. He did not fall in. And he was still afraid, but not as much as he had been, and he knew why his father had made him find out about the tar, and he had been brave.

A mug of milky tea coagulated slowly in front of him. A bored-looking constable stood by the door of the bare room. A rhythmic metallic wheeze issued from the tape-recorder on the table. Crowley sat opposite him, his arms folded, his face impassive. ‘Tell me about your father.’

Saul’s father had been racked with a desperate embarrassment whenever his son came home with girls. It was very important to him that he should not seem distant or old-fashioned, and in a ghastly miscalculation he had tried to put Saul’s guests at their ease. He was terrified that he would say the wrong thing. The struggle not to bolt for his own room stiffened him. He would stand uneasily in the doorway, a grim smile clamped to his face, his voice firm and serious as he asked the terrified fifteen-year-olds what they were doing at school and whether they enjoyed it. Saul would gaze at his father and will him to leave. He would stare furiously at the floor as his father stolidly discussed the weather and GCSE English.

‘I’ve heard that sometimes you argued. Is that true, Saul? Tell me about that.’

When Saul was ten, the time he liked most was in the mornings. Saul’s father left for work on the railways early, and Saul had half an hour to himself in the flat. He would wander around and stare at the titles of the books his father left lying on all the surfaces: books about money and politics and history. His father would always pay close attention to what Saul was doing in history at school, asking what the teachers had said. He would lean over his chair, urging Saul not to believe everything his history teacher told him. He would thrust books at his son, stare at them, become distracted, take them back, flick through the pages, murmur that Saul was perhaps too young. He would ask his son what he thought about the issues they discussed. He took Saul’s opinions very seriously. Sometimes these discussions bored Saul. More often they made him feel uneasy at the sudden welter of ideas, but inspired.