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it was a stroke of luck or a blow of fate, he could never quite make up his mind, but when he had been a police constable for a year he found himself and his companion outside a jeweller’s at the precise moment that a couple of men had broken in. One of them had the owner at gunpoint while the other ransacked the safe. Duncan didn’t know where he got the courage from, he had no memory of what happened immediately before the gun was fired, but hehad flung himself at the gunman while his companion pulled the jeweller to the ground. Of course the gun went off, one bullet passing through Duncan’s shoulder and another shattering the glass-topped counter. Reinforcements arrived and an ambulance, and the two men were arrested.
    Duncan got a special commendation and a bravery award. But something strange had happened to him. He had lost his nerve. Whatever had impelled him to risk death saving that jeweller and his goods was gone now. The thought of even having to reprimand a couple of misbehaving teenagers filled him with fear. He left the police and returned to his other love, motor vehicles. He set about looking for a job which would combine his fondness for cars, his expertise with their engines and the pleasure he took in solving puzzles. The one he was offered and took was exactly what he wanted. It was with a breakdown rescue service and he worked for it for thirty-five years, driving his blue-and-yellow-chequered van to track down cars in difficulties or completely broken down on motorways, arterial roads, suburban streets and country lanes. One of the things he liked about it was that the rescue service’s clients were always so pleased to see him. It was like being a guardian angel. Another was that nineteen times out of twenty he was able to solve the problem and the one time he wasn’t, to arrange for a tow-away service and to transport the unfortunate motorist home. The advent of the mobile phone and later of satellite navigation improved things further. He had even met his wife through his job.
    Eva was a young woman whose Mini broke down on the A12. She filled in the form he had to ask clients to complete but added to all the boxes she had ticked as excellent, that he was ‘a lovely man who was so kind and nice’. It turned out that she lived with her parents quite near where he lived. Standing there on the muddy grass verge five miles fromChelmsford, he asked her out and six months later they were married. It was a successful marriage and they were happy, though without children, perhaps (he sometimes thought)
because
they were without children. An only child, Eva had inherited her parents’ house and their modest savings which had enabled him to buy number 3 Kenilworth Avenue when he retired two years after her death from cancer.
    Duncan thought of some of these events in his past life as he moved from his own bedroom and the spare bedroom next to it to tidy one of the cupboards in the room at the back. He had brought a large carrier bag upstairs with him and into it he began putting the last of Eva’s clothes. Most that she left behind her had long gone to Oxfam. He hardly knew why he had kept these, there was nothing special about them, they had no smell of her scent, none of them was a favourite of hers. Perhaps they had been left because when he got rid of the others he wasn’t able to carry any more. He tied up the handles of the bag, looked out of the window. It was a funny thing, he thought, but when you went into a room you seldom entered you almost always did look out of its window.
    During the hours he had worked the fog had lifted. A little snow was still lying. Patches of it lay in the shady places of next door’s untended garden and on the peaked roof of the little summer house which stood up against its rear fence. Duncan called it a summer house because it wasn’t a garage but next door to the garage and it was too big and – well – nice, to be