Mr. Hubert Parkes

Parkes belongs to the ordinary machinery of law and property that surrounds the Cheyne family, the kind of man whose presence at a door or in a letter seems unremarkable until it isn't. Cheyne finds himself unable to account for Parkes's proceedings, and the gap between the man's bland professional surface and the strange errands attached to him becomes its own quiet unease. He matters because he embodies the puzzle's central question: who is really acting, and on whose behalf, in a world of solicitors, detectives, and postmen who may be more than they seem.