This, in my book, is a tour de force. I want to clap, and judging by the grin on her face, so does Evelyn. Not only has Mitch turned a career crisis into the blackest humour, but he’s also right. We are, by any civilized measure, doomed.

‘And Christianne?’ Nathan isn’t smiling.

‘Very dead,’ Mitch agrees.

‘And might that make your point?’ I ask.

‘Point?’

‘That we all face death? That death can bloody hurt? That some of us might choose not to wait? Regardless of the law?’

Mitch is eyeing the lengthening queue at the buffet. Like Evelyn, he can’t wait to get his hands on the glistening side of beef.

‘Indeed, it might.’ Mitch’s gaze settles on Nathan. ‘Do your guys make their own horseradish sauce here?’

After lunch, Mitch peels off. Over plum duff and custard, he’s secured the offer of a flight in Nathan’s Cessna and agreed a take-off time early tomorrow afternoon from Dunkeswell Airfield. He needs to take shots of the cliff face scarred by the fall, and of the pile of debris on the foreshore where Christianne’s coffin came to rest. I’m very welcome to come, too, but Evelyn has declined. Commercial flights, she told us, frighten her witless. The very thought of entrusting herself to anything smaller is out of the question.

And so now, with Nathan’s blessing, Mitch shambles away across the golf course, oblivious to a party of four teeing-off nearby. I watch him from the car park for a moment or two, wondering about the call I overheard last night. Despite his bluntness at the table, I know he’ll never join the race to the bottom. Like McFaul in some ways, he’s too difficult, too principled, too stubborn. He understands what sells only too well, but he’s a great deal brighter and more honest than most journalists I’ve met. In the shape of the coffin on the beach, an image that has gone around the world, he has the best possible start to whatever he ends up writing, but I know he’ll take the story way, way further.

Back home, Evelyn announces that she’d appreciate a little time alone in St Peter’s. On Sunday afternoons, she says the church is empty and when she says she needs a bit of peace and quiet to have a think about things, I tell her I understand completely. Peace and quiet, of course, is Evelyn’s private code for a prayer or two, but I know the aftershocks of Thursday’s cliff fall have hit her badly, and if God can help, then so much the better. She gives me a hug before she leaves.

‘I don’t know how I’d have coped without you, these last few days,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you move down full time?’