‘Shall we hit the sauna?’ he suggested to Matt.

Luckily it was empty. Will closed his eyes and exhaled. ‘Surreal, isn’t it, Matt? All of this.’

Matt sighed. ‘You can say that again. How are you doing, my friend? You looked really worried when Mitch asked you if you wanted to go to the Chapel of Rest.’

‘I simply couldn’t do it, mate. I made the mistake of seeing my mother at the funeral home, and I went crazy. I can still hear myself screaming, “This is not my mother! What have you done with her? Where’s my mother?” It was awful. I swore then that I would never do it again. My memories of the dead when they were alive will suffice.’ He sat up. ‘But it wasn’t just that, I just felt so stressed and I didn’t understand why. I mean, my great worry was Sophie’s future, and that couldn’t have turned out better, could it? So why was I feeling so panicky?’

‘Because you want to get it right, for Eva’s sake. You want to do what your sister would be happiest with. And your grief is getting in the way of clear thinking. And then there is Kate, of course.’

Will shook his head and gave another sigh. ‘Yes, Kate.’

They sat for a while in silence. ‘I keep seeing those awful paintings, and they scare me.’

‘People do use art therapy to express their darkest fears on canvas, Will,’ said Matt practically. ‘Perhaps she’s doing that. Perhaps it’s a good thing. Perhaps it’s a channel for all the bad stuff in her head.’

‘Maybe. And it’s true that artists can have “black” periods. Come to think of it, some paint that way all the time.’

Matt looked confused. ‘Art’s not really my thing. Didn’t crop up in police training.’

Will chuckled. ‘Didn’t in mine either, but Kate was always dragging me round the art galleries. I went under sufferance, but eventually I began to look a bit harder. I found some paintings fascinating, while others bored me rigid, and some were simply beyond my understanding. There was one artist called Hieronymus Bosch. I seem to recall he painted some pretty hellish creatures.’

‘Actually, I had a case once, involving a major insurance fraud. The guy we were investigating was an art collector. The stuff he collected really gave me the creeps. I can see it now, and the case was years ago. He said it was inspired by the Holocaust, so you can imagine what they were like.’