He passed his hand across his face and tried to force his thoughts elsewhere. Some five minutes later Max emerged. He looked gray-skinned and exhausted. Pulling on an old Barbour shooting jacket, he took Rowland by the arm.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Come on, Rowland. I need to think. I need some air.”

Max’s first action, when they returned to his Land Rover, was to try to call Charlotte on his car phone. Both numbers were busy. He tried several times, then gave up.

“Let’s get home.” He glanced at Rowland. “Look, would you mind driving? I’m feeling—I feel like hell.”

When they were in the car, neither spoke for a while. Max lit a cigarette.

“You don’t mind?”

“No. I don’t mind. In fact, you can give me one.”

“You don’t smoke. You haven’t smoked for years.”

“Come on, Max. Just give me one, okay?”

Rowland drew on the cigarette, which Max gave him without further comment. Instantly, the nicotine steadied him; it was as familiar, and welcome, as it had ever been before.

“The thing is,” Max began in an abrupt way a few miles farther on, “I’ve never seen a dead body before. Not even a stranger’s, let alone someone so young, someone I knew. Pathetic, isn’t it?”

“No. And it’s not unusual now.” Rowland kept his eyes on the road ahead. “Your parents are still alive. So are Charlotte’s. Besides—these days death gets tidied away. It takes place in a hospital, behind a screen. Don’t feel guilty, Max. What are you supposed to do? Take it in your stride?”

“I’ve led a sheltered life,” Max replied. “I suppose that’s what I’m saying. Just now… I rather despise myself for that. You wouldn’t understand. It doesn’t apply to you.”

Rowland said nothing. He was thinking of his father, then of his mother dealing with her death as grimly as she had dealt with her life, in a North London hospital cancer ward. He thought of the two climbing accidents he had witnessed in the Cairngorms, of the drug murders he had covered in Washington. He did not think, would not allow himself to think, of a summer’s day in the chill of a Washington police morgue. If you could just make the identification, Mr. McGuire. She’s… you’re prepared?

“Do you know what they told me?” Max still had his eyes on the road. “They said they’ve had drugs flooding into this area recently.”

“They told me that as well.”

“Jesus Christ, Rowland. Ten years from now, it could be my children buying that stuff. Ten years? It’s even less—Alex is eight. Cassandra was just sixteen years old.”

“I know.”

“When we bought this place, we thought—” Max gestured angrily at passing fields. “We thought, bring them up in the country, keep them away from London. Give them an old-fashioned upbringing—dogs, walks, a village school, fresh air… We thought it was safe. We thought—I suppose we thought values were different here.”

“Nowhere’s safe now, Max. You know that.”