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idle platitude. He truly cannot imagine how it would feel to lose one that he loved, and then to have them restored.
    ‘So, we got him back. The hubbub died down soon after. Sarah asked him to give up the sea and he agreed. I don’t think he took much persuading. Took a job at the docks. Worked there for nigh-on thirty years. Retired with a bad chest. Every once in a while he’d get a phone call from a writer or a journalist asking him for his story, but he’d always say no. Then when Sarah died, I think he got a glimpse of his own mortality. They only had one daughter, and she upped and left when she was a teenager. He suddenly had itchy feet. I honestly think if somebody had been willing to take him on he’d have gone back to trawling, though there’s none of that these days.’
    She begins to stand, but a pain in her knee makes her reconsider. McAvoy, without being asked, returns to the work-surface and grabs the wine bottle. He refills her glass, and she says thank you without a word passing between them.
    ‘Anyway, not so long back he rings me up, telling me this TV company’s been in touch with him. That they’re doing a documentary on the Black Winter. That he’s going out with them on this cargo ship to lay a wreath and say goodbye to his old mates. Of course it was completely out of the blue. I’d barely thought about all that in years, and I think to him it had just become a story. He said once he felt like it had happened to somebody else. But I suppose he must have kept it all inside. For him to go and do this.’ Her bottom lip trembles and she pulls a tissue from her sleeve.
    ‘Perhaps they were paying him for his story?’
    ‘Oh, I’d say that’s guaranteed,’ she says, suddenly smiling and giving the photo-wall a quick glance. ‘He always knewhow to make money, our Fred. Knew how to spend it too, mind. That’s trawling for you, though. A month away grafting then three days home. A wodge in your pocket and a few hours to spend it. The three-day millionaires, they called them.’
    ‘So that was the last you heard?’
    ‘From him, yes. We got a phone call from the woman at the TV company three days ago. We must have been listed as his emergency contacts. Said he’d disappeared. That one of the lifeboats was missing and that Fred had got himself a bit upset talking about it all. That they were looking for him. That she’d keep us informed. That was the end of it. All seems bloody silly to me. After all those years. To end up dead in the sea, just like his mates.’ She stops and looks at him, her blue eyes suddenly intense and probing. ‘It sounds awful, Hector, but why didn’t he just take pills? Why do all this song and dance? Do you think he felt guilty? Wanted to go like his mates from ’sixty-eight? That’s what the telly lady seemed to be hinting at, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing he’d do. He’d do it quiet. No fuss. He liked to tell a story and spin a yarn and charm a lady, but he wouldn’t even talk to the papers when all this happened, so why would he want a dramatic bloody exit now?’
    ‘Perhaps that’s why he agreed to be filmed? Because they would be passing the area where the trawler went down?’
    She breathes out, and the sigh seems to come from deep within her. It is as though she is deflating. ‘Perhaps,’ she says, and drains her drink.
    ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Stein-Collinson.’
    She nods. Smiles. ‘Barbara.’
    He extends a hand, which she takes with a cold, soft palm.
    ‘So what happens next?’ she asks. ‘Like I said, I don’t think he’s been taken care of particularly well. He’s an old man, and they let him wander off and do this! I’ve got plenty of questions …’
    McAvoy finds himself nodding. He has questions of his own. There is something scratching weakly at the inside of his skull. He wants to know more. Wants it to make sense. Wants to be able to tell this nice lady why her brother died, forty years after he should have