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husband to consult a clergyman. He’d refused and called her a fool, and there’d followed a shouting match in which Mrs Hardy added her pennyworth, informing Dr Potter he was the only fool she knew of and that she cursed the day Beatrice had ever married him. Later, Beatrice told Mrs O’Gorman she was worried it was the restless spirit of her dead father that was causing the mischief - which was the reason, this particular morning, for my being so early in the house. I intended to play one last joke.
    I went first to the dining room. The curtains were still drawn and the room in darkness, but I knew it well enough to find what I wanted. Picking up the strip of Persian runner from beneath the windows, I crossed the hall to the study. The light of a gloomy dawn was already stealing though the glass, outlining the tiger’s head where it nudged the fender beside the desk. Pulling the rug out through the door, I laid the runner in its place at the hearth, and then, keeping an eye on the stairs, began to drag the tiger behind me. I froze instantly, for the creature’s claws screeched on the tiled floor and I was forced to hold it up by the paws and waltz it into the dining room.
    I had intended to arrange it under the windows, where it used to lie when Mr Hardy was alive, only I was chuckling so much at the absurdity of my dance through the hall that I dropped it in a heap and helped myself to a mouthful of port wine from the decanter on the sideboard. Though some of it slopped to my jacket, most went to my head, after which it struck me it would be more of a jape if I draped the rug over a chair and had the beast’s head pointing at the door. I drew back the curtains the better to see the effect. Beyond the windows the frosty orchard gleamed.
    I was sitting at the kitchen table when Mrs O’Gorman rose from her bed. She made a fuss of me, which she always did, and seeing I had my boots off and was rubbing at my toes to get them warm, poked the fire into a blaze and put the kettle on the coals. I played up to her and let my teeth chatter, for I knew she had drink in the cupboard, having supplied her with it myself, and bought with my own money.
    Not quite mine. Leastways, not at the start. It came from the proceeds of an investment provided by George Hardy some years past, to do with a woman whose memory he wanted stilled. He was a fool in the ways of the world, the woman in question being too addled with drink to remember anything longer than the immediate moment. I used the money to purchase a camera and the necessary chemicals, and once my enterprise was up and running I treated Mrs O’Gorman. She was an ignorant soul and I owed her nothing, but I hadn’t a family of my own and it pleased me to buy her little extras.
    Sure enough, when the kettle had steamed, she set before me a tumbler of brandy and hot water, to revive me, she said, and a slice of cold mutton to go with it. She wanted to know what Master Georgie needed me for at such a time in the morning.
    ‘We’re off to William Rimmer’s uncle in Ince Woods,’ I said. ‘We’re going to do something with an ape.’
     She didn’t hear me right away, and when I shouted louder and she understood, she screamed, ‘An ape...a wild beast?’
    ‘Dreadful wild,’ I hollered. ‘It was transported yesterday from the Zoological Gardens in West Derby to Mr Blun-dell’s place. Mr Hardy and Mr Rimmer are going to cut out its eyes.’
    She grew quite pale and said she’d never heard of anything so horrible. That was a lie, or forgetfulness, for hadn’t she suffered worse agonies of her own? Last Christmas, around the time young Mrs Hardy underwent her third miscarriage, she’d told me, weeping, that she herself when little more than a child had borne an infant by an older brother who’d buried it alive in a turf bog.
    It took an age to get all the photographic apparatus loaded. Twice, we were half-way down the lane before George remembered something else that