He asked the question in November.

That is a fact in a caseworker’s notebook in a drawer on Currie Avenue and it is not going away.

What I think — and I am aware this is a construction and that I will never be able to test it — is that he asked, and got nothing, and then did not ask anybody else.

I think he stopped looking on purpose, the way you do.

I think that by the end of November there was a shape in that man’s head that had a piece missing from it, and that he knew exactly where to go to find the piece, and that he walked past it for twenty-two days because he had worked out that the answer might stop him.