The back door was propped open, letting an eerie gray slant of light into the basement and up the stairs. The four men in the garden looked like a tableau out of a painting or a morphine dream. The heavyset morgue boys in their pristine whites, leaning patiently on their stretcher among the tall weeds and the broken bottles and the nettles as thick as cables; Scorcher, sharp-edged and hyperreal with his slick head bent and his black overcoat flapping against the worn brick of the wall, crouching to stretch out a gloved hand; and Kevin. He was on his back, with his head towards the house and his legs splayed out at the wrong angles. One arm was across his chest; the other was doubled underneath him, like someone had him in an armlock. His head was thrown back wildly and turned away from me, and there were big uneven clots of something black matted in the dirt around it. Scorcher’s white fingers were probing delicately in his jeans pocket. The wind whistled, a high crazy sound, over the wall.

Scorcher heard me first, or sensed me: he glanced up, whipped his hand away from Kevin and straightened. “Frank,” he said, coming towards me. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

He was peeling his glove off, ready to shake my hand. I said, “I want a look at him.”

Scorcher nodded and stepped back, out of my way. I knelt down in the dirt and the weeds, next to Kevin’s body.

Dying had caved his face in, under the cheekbones and around the mouth; he looked forty years older than he would ever be. The upturned side of his face was ice white; the lower side, where the blood had settled, was mottled purple. There was a crusty thread of blood coming from his nose, and where his jaw had dropped I could see that his front teeth were broken. His hair was limp and dark with rain. One eyelid drooped a little over a cloudy eye, like a sly stupid wink.

It was like I had been shoved under an enormous battering waterfall, like the force of it was ripping my breath away. I said, “Cooper. We need Cooper.”

“He’s been here.”

“And?”

A tiny silence. I saw the morgue boys glance at each other. Then Scorcher said, “According to him, your brother died either from a fractured skull or from a broken neck.”

“How?”

Scorcher said, gently, “Frank, the lads need to take him away now. Come inside; we’ll talk there. They’ll take good care of him.”