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As the back stories build you get a growing sense of the happenstance in life and how one moment's decision can change everything and resonate down the years. The sense of hidden truth – of repressions and cover-ups and gradual revelation – makes the book not only gripping in an understated way, but also emotionally satisfying. Their pilgrimage, underlined by a brief stop in Canterbury, ends with them casting their friend’s ashes to the turbulent April winds. We know about that loan request from Vince, and now we hear about how Jack wanted Ray to be lucky for him just one more time.

What is the relationship between what the characters do for a living and the alternative careers they wished for, but did not take up?But the voices are nuanced enough for us to recognise differences, the care different characters take over how they describe things. The prose is constructed with great care, the characters come to life and the various locations (a Bermondsey pub, Canterbury Cathedral, Margate) are vividly evoked.

She also hadn’t taken the first available lift back to the north, and makes more knowing remarks about the Sergeant Pepper clichés in her life. In 2003 he published The Light of Day, which explores a private investigator’s relationship with a client convicted of murdering her husband. Lenny has never forgiven Vince for his treachery concerning his son-in-law and the stolen car, but it comes out as outrage that Vince is daring, with no agreement from the others, to attempt to take the lid off the jar holding Jack’s ashes.

like, Ray’s wife Carol has left him, but either he doesn’t really know why, or he’s in denial, or he’s simply not telling us. It’s only after the fight, and after he’s scattered a token handful, that we see how deep this goes with Vince. Do we wish to believe that Amy and Ray will take up their love affair again, now that Jack is gone and Amy has decided to stop visiting June? Nine times out of 10 it fades, as dreams do, but just occasionally, and always to my amazement, it turns into the extraordinarily concrete, complex and permanent thing that is a written narrative.

Similarly, I don’t think I’ve ever lost touch with the enchantment of reading those first stories, long before I’d written any myself or even knew how to. When all I do in the normal course of work is box ’em up and book ’em in for their twenty minutes in the crypt.Then he reseals the jar and they all drive on to Canterbury Cathedral, acting as if nothing has happened. George Webb, a divorced ex-cop and the narrator of this fine novel, works as a private investigator in London specializing in "matrimonial work": finding evidence of philandering. Vince had had an infatuation with Lenny's daughter, Sally that lasted through most of his childhood. this was somewhat confusing to begin with as there are fequent shifts in the narrator and it takes time to work out the relationships between people.