Hoskins knew that Gillard was being ultra-cautious about the identity of the body, and wondered who had leaked the report. Still, he wasn’t at work now. With the barmaid now serving in the other bar, Hoskins leaned over the bar for the TV remote, and switched back to the football.

Sunday

Except for weddings and funerals, Gillard hadn’t attended a church service for decades, not since staying with his aunts in Devon as a boy. This was the first Sunday that socially distanced religious worship could resume following a change in the rules. He arrived early at St Crispin’s to be greeted by Sheila Ransome and a couple of other elderly ladies, masked up and spraying hand gel liberally on those arriving. ‘I hope you haven’t come to arrest our lovely vicar,’ said one of them, her eyes twinkling.

‘No,’ he said in response, and smiled under his mask. Although directed towards the front of the tiny church, he sat at the back in a rather quaint box pew with its own door and latch. Over the next few minutes the congregation grew and grew. There was the usual collection of elderly, mainly female, worshippers, mostly carefully spaced, but a surprisingly large number of young women, who crowded together in the first two rows and chattered excitedly through their masks. Finally, at ten o’clock, the medieval door behind them closed with an echoing crack, and an unmasked Reverend Cleaver strode down the aisle towards the pulpit carrying a single guttering candle. Once he had mounted the wooden dais, he turned to the congregation and in a powerful voice proclaimed, ‘Jesus said: I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’

He held up the candle, and the small flame seemed to fill the nave. If he had looked piratical before, now he looked almost Christ-like. He then proceeded to declaim a great long passage of scripture, ending with a prayer. Even as an agnostic, Gillard felt the power of the man, his hold on the congregation. After a hymn, whispered rather than sung, he began a sermon on his own conversion to Christ.

‘In my life I have done many bad things, I think those of you who know me well have heard some of the stories. I was in drug gangs in Manchester, and I was imprisoned for many years, which gave me a chance to consider my sins. I realised I had the choice of a path of goodness or of evil. I had free will, and I have exercised it. It is a choice we all have and can transform our lives.’