To get to the crematorium office, he’d have to pass through the porte-cochere, where the cortege had just pulled up. Rather than trying to push his way through, Cooper stood and watched as four drivers and bearers gathered at the rear of the hearse. Billy McGowan and Vernon Slack were among them, but he didn’t recognize the other two. No doubt they’d be on the staff list when he eventually got around to asking Mr Hudson for one.

McGowan and the others all seemed to have flat shoulders, like shelves designed specially for carrying a coffin. Were bearers made that way, or did they develop flattened shoulders as an occupational hazard, like a police officer’s bad back?

Cooper watched one of the bearers open the tailgate to reveal the coffin and its covering of flowers. None of them spoke to the mourners. Instead, they stood looking at each other, or at the ground, shuffling their feet a little, uncomfortable in their black suits and ties. McGowan looked particularly out of place. His shaved head and prominent jaw gave him an aggressive look that didn’t fit the occasion at all. The collar of his white shirt was too big, and it made him seem to have no neck. Yet when a late mourner arrived with an armful of flowers wrapped in cellophane and didn’t know what to do with them, it was McGowan who went across to relieve him and put his flowers into the hearse with the others.

Then began those awkward few minutes while the party waited outside for the previous service to finish and the chapel to be vacated. Everyone knew that someone else’s coffin was just sliding through the curtains into the cremation suite, but they all tried to look as though they weren’t aware of it. A female relative began to cry. A mourner smoking a cigarette by the roadway threw it down and stubbed it out with the toe of his shoe. A thin trickle of blue smoke rose from the butt until it was dampened by the rain and died.

Cooper started to feel as though he was intruding. He didn’t always find it possible to be a detached observer, unaffected by other people’s grief. But it would seem odd and disrespectful just to walk away now, so he waited until the bearers had slid the coffin out of the hearse. Hudson stepped forward to help the four men raise it on to their shoulders smoothly. Then they lowered their heads in a practised movement and entered the chapel. Gradually the mourners followed them, until they had left Cooper standing on his own in the rain.