He smiled to himself as he recalled the scene at Watersaw House stables, with the horse passing its opinion on Fry in a way that the owners had been a little too polite to do. He’d never seen Fry quite so angry before. Her nostrils had flared wider than the horse’s.

Alicia Forbes had been all right, though, hadn’t she? Well, for a pony girl. He wasn’t sure what she’d meant about giving the wrong impression, though. Lots of men his age weren’t married – either because they hadn’t decided to settle down yet, or because marriage just wasn’t regarded as the social obligation it once was. Perhaps it was different in the circles that the Forbes moved in. But what had owning a cat got to do with it?

Then Cooper looked at the cat, and the cat stared back at him in disgust. The wrong impression?

‘Sorry, Randy,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid she thinks you’re gay.’

He went back to his computer screen, recalling another interesting fact about the black rat that he could have mentioned to Fry. The one group of people who had never been affected by bubonic plague were the nomadic tribes of central Asia, where the bacteria had first originated. Those nomads lived close to their companions, the wild horses of the arid Asian plains. And the one thing that rat fleas really hated was the smell of horses.

When the photos from Claire had finished downloading, Cooper clicked on the first attachment and opened the jpeg file with a strange feeling of reluctance.

He’d never really been keen on photos of himself, particularly in family snapshots. Now, they reminded him too much of his mother, who had always loved showing off the family albums, pages and pages recording the growth of her children from new-born horrors through the adolescent monster stage and into adulthood. Mum would have loved a snap of her sons together, treasured it as a testament of her crowning achievement in life. But without her being there to appreciate the photo, it was just one more embarrassment to suffer.

In this case, the picture was also too recent. It reminded him too much of the visit to the police memorial on Sunday. The comments made by Matt and Claire were fresh in his mind, and they weren’t what he wanted to be thinking about right now. ‘Persecuting law-abiding people instead of going after the real criminals.’ ‘Police officers standing around doing risk assessments while someone is dying.’ Dad would never have done that. No, of course he wouldn’t.

And when Ben saw the picture full-size on the screen of his laptop, he realized something he hadn’t noticed at the time. He’d been too busy staring at the camera, wondering if he should try to hold a smile, or look serious because of the occasion. And wondering, too, whether he looked ridiculously windswept from being outside, those little bits of spiky hair sticking out like devil’s horns. When someone pointed a camera at you, your attention was automatically focused on yourself and the lens, it was such a peculiar moment of intimacy. You forgot completely about what might be around and behind you. Even the photographer did that. It was an error that had caught a lot of people out.