‘When are you going to check it out?’ she said.

‘When I get back to town,’ I said. ‘Tonight.’

‘Pick me up at West End Central?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because I’m coming with you.’

I almost laughed. ‘You’re not coming with me. This is off the book.’

‘And that’s exactly why I’m coming with you,’ she said. ‘It’s off the book and I found him and I’m coming with you.’

I figured we could argue about it later.

‘Who is he?’ she said. ‘Who’s Edward Duncan?’

The fox had paused in the centre circle of the football pitch. He sniffed the air, then pointed his face at the dirt and began to dig furiously.

‘Edward Duncan is a dead man,’ I said.

It was a shock to see Captain Ned King again.

He wore the immaculate black dress uniform of an officer in the Royal Gurkha Rifles, but he was unshaven and red-eyed, as if he had come to the Potter’s Field College Chapel straight from Brize Norton, as if he had spent last night on a Hercules transport plane. But what shocked me was how alike Ned King was to his brother, yet how totally different. They sat side by side in the ancient chapel, as Peregrine Waugh glared out from the lectern. Ben King with his smooth politician’s face, Captain King with his scarred soldier’s face. Although I remembered it wasn’t soldiering that had scarred his face.

Salman Khan was by Ben King’s side, and he was looking up at the stupendously tall Head Master, as if he might be asked questions later.

‘We gather today to remember Mr Philips,’ Waugh said. ‘An old boy. A master. A friend.’

Like most good public speakers, Waugh was a bit of a ham. He told us to look at the memorial leaflet. He told us to look at the year when Guy Philips was born, and the year when he died. And he said that they were not important. That what mattered most was what came between them. What mattered most was ‘the dash’. His life.

He talked about Philips as if he had been a cross between Mother Teresa and Jesus Christ.

I thought of poor dead Piggy. I saw him hurting Natasha at Hugo Buck’s funeral. I saw him making his pupils roll in the mud. It seemed to me that he had spent the dash bullying.

But Waugh was a commanding speaker, and I could hear the wet noses and choked throats of emotion behind me. Yet as I looked at the Head Master’s stone-hard face I could not decide if Guy Philips had meant everything to Peregrine Waugh.

Or nothing at all.