The back bedroom was the only room in the house that had been arranged.
Everywhere else was storage, and storage has its own logic: dense, stacked, efficient, nothing facing outward because nothing needs to be looked at. Ninety per cent of that house was a warehouse run by a very careful man.
The back bedroom was not a warehouse.
The two hundred and six refused things were in it, and they were on shelves — proper shelves, put up straight, painted — with space between them. Each object had a foot of clear board around it. Nothing was stacked on anything.
The briefcase from Workington was on the middle shelf with its handle facing out.
The wedding ring from the 0715 from Ulverston was in a small dish on the windowsill.
And the room was clean. That is what stopped me in the doorway on day eleven with a clipboard in my hand. Every other surface in that house had thirty years of dust on it. The shelves in the back bedroom had been wiped, recently enough that a man of seventy-nine who died in February had done it within a few months of dying.
He dusted the things nobody wanted.
I sat on the floor of that room for a while, which is not a thing I do.
There is a version of this that is macabre and I want to head it off, because when I have told people about the back bedroom that is where a few of them have gone. A shrine. A trophy room. Something wrong.
It isn’t. I have been in the houses of people who kept things wrongly and it does not look like that. It looks furtive. Things are hidden, or hoarded in a way that is about having, and there is a particular quality to a room like that which you notice immediately and cannot mistake.
This was a room where objects had been put carefully because there was nowhere else careful to put them.
Two hundred and six people had said, in effect: I cannot keep this and I cannot throw it away and I cannot be the one who decides. And he had said, all right. And then he had built shelves.
The wardrobe in that room was his.
That is where I found Alec Ferris, in the middle of a house with thirty-eight thousand other people’s possessions in it, and it took ninety minutes to catalogue him.
Four shirts. Two pairs of trousers. A suit, which had been altered — taken in at the waist, badly, by hand, at some point. Boots. A coat. Two jumpers, one with a repair at the elbow done in wool that did not match.
A shoebox of photographs, of which more in a moment.
A biscuit tin — and I noticed, because I notice, that it was the only container in the house without a label on it — with a watch in it that had stopped, a folded certificate, and two rings. A man’s, worn thin on one side. A woman’s, smaller, with three small stones.
He had not been wearing his. It was in the tin.
And a bank book, and a pension statement, and a letter from the council about his bins.
That was the man. In a house with ninety-two ring binders and eleven thousand letters and four thousand successful returns and two hundred and six pieces of other people’s grief on dusted shelves, Alec Ferris owned about forty things.
The photographs were the shoebox and there were not many.
Him, young, in a bus depot in what I would guess is the mid-seventies, with four other men, all squinting.
Him and a woman on a beach, and the same woman at a table, and the same woman in a garden with a spade. Maybe eleven photographs of her altogether, spanning — by the clothes and the film stock — a decade or so.
A wedding photograph, 1971 by the look of it. Register office. Six people.
And that is where they stop.
There is nothing in that box after roughly the mid-eighties. Not one image of him at fifty, or sixty, or seventy. Nothing of a Christmas, or a garden, or anybody else at all.
The photographs of that house stop, and the labels start, and the gap between them is about a year.
I did not know that when I found the box. I worked it out on day thirty-one, standing in the loft with a torch in my teeth, when I found the file with his own name on it.