‘Zaboga! Beauty, eh? Only two types in the world?’ Racic extended one foot and rolled up his trouser leg. Wexford’s was already rucked up. In the lamplight they peered down at each other’s calves from behind. ‘Yours are all right,’ said Racic. ‘In fact, they are fine. In the beauty class.’

‘So are yours, you old professor and boatman.’

Racic burst out laughing. ‘Tesko meni! Two elderly gentlemen who should know better, airing their limbs in an ankle competition! Whatever next?’

‘Well, I shouldn’t,’ said Wexford, ‘but next let’s finish up the Posip.’

When the Wedding Was Over

MATRIMONY,’ SAID CHIEF Inspector Wexford, ‘begins with dearly beloved and ends with amazement.’

His wife, sitting beside him on the bridegroom’s side of the church, whispered, ‘What did you say?’

He repeated it. She steadied the large floral hat which her husband had called becoming but not exactly conducive to sotto voce intimacies. ‘What on earth makes you say that?’

‘Thomas Hardy. He said it first. But look in your Prayer Book.’

The bridegroom waited, hang-dog, with his best man. Michael Burden was very much in love, was entering this second marriage with someone admirably suited to him, had agreed with his fiancée that nothing but a religious ceremony would do for them, yet at forty-four was a little superannuated for what Wexford called ‘all this white wedding gubbins’. There were two hundred people in the church. Burden, his best man and his ushers were in morning dress. Madonna lilies and stephanotis and syringa decorated the pews, the pulpit and the chancel steps. It was the kind of thing that is properly designed for someone twenty years younger. Burden had been through it before when he was twenty years younger. Wexford chuckled silently, looking at the anxious face above the high white collar. And then as Dora, leafing through the marriage service, said, ‘Oh, I see,’ the organist went from voluntaries into the opening bars of the Lohengrin march and Jenny Ireland appeared at the church door on her father’s arm.

A beautiful bride, of course. Seven years younger than Burden, blonde, gentle, low-voiced, and given to radiant smiles. Jenny’s father gave her hand into Burden’s and the Rector of St Peter’s began:

‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together . . .’

While bride and groom were being informed that marriage was not for the satisfaction of their carnal lusts, and that they must bring up their children in a Christian manner, Wexford studied the congregation. In front of himself and Dora sat Burden’s sister-in-law, Grace, whom everyone had thought he would marry after the death of his first wife. But Burden had found consolation with a red-headed woman, wild and sweet and strange, gone now God knew where, and Grace had married someone else. Two little boys now sat between Grace and that someone else, giving their parents a full-time job keeping them quiet.

Burden’s mother and father were both dead. Wexford thought he recognized, from one meeting a dozen years before, an aged aunt. Beside her sat Dr Crocker and his wife, beyond them and behind were a crowd whose individual members he knew either only by sight or not at all. Sylvia, his elder daughter, was sitting on his other side, his grandsons between her and their father, and at the central aisle end of the pew, Sheila Wexford of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Wexford’s actress daughter, who on her entry had commanded nudges, whispers, every gaze, sat looking with unaccustomed wistfulness at Jenny Ireland in her clouds of white and wreath of pearls.