I thought that the Head Master was going to join Ben King in his bloodstained army jacket. Then I thought he might stand with the stiff fierce lines of the Combined Cadet Force. Instead he disappeared into the crowd, and the next time I saw him he was standing beside a small, snivelling Potter’s Field boy. Waugh had placed a large white hand on the shoulder of the boy’s green and purple blazer. I saw the Head Master’s mouth move.

‘There, there,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘There, there.’

The hearse was passing now, the windscreen wipers swishing once, twice, three times to clear the driver’s view of the flowers that threatened to cover the glass. Roses, orchids, lilies – expensive flowers bought and thrown by the people of the town.

The boys of Potter’s Field brought no flowers for the homecoming of Captain Ned King.

But later, as I walked through the deserted school grounds, past the chapel and into the small graveyard, I saw that someone had placed a single lily on the tomb of King Henry’s dogs.

Chapter 33

33

SATURDAY MORNING IN Smithfield ABC.

I was down on the mat stretching my back. Upward-facing dog – hold it; downward-facing dog – hold it. The pain seemed to release itself. It still hurt but I was not contained in one tight slab. It was looser. It was better. I could feel it.

This was the quiet time in Fred’s gym. Otis Redding on the sound system and the sound of fourteen-ounce gloves smacking pads.

There was a young woman banging the heavy bag, an older woman watching the business news as she ran on the treadmill, and, up in the ring, Fred wearing a T-shirt that told you PLAY HARD OR GO HOME as he took some kid in his late teens on the pads. North African, a big toothy grin, either a pro or thinking about it. The kid was fast, slick, hitting the pads very hard without apparently making much of an effort.

‘Get that right all the way back to the chin,’ Fred was telling him. ‘Don’t let it fade away. And don’t stand there taking photographs. Get out when you’ve done your work. And throw punches in bunches, punches in bunches.’

When the bell rang Fred would look down at me, the pads still on his hands, and he would name the part of my body that needed to be stretched.

‘Hamstring . . . calves . . . abductors . . . Did you do your abductors? Do your abductors.’

I laid the front of my left leg on a bench, placed my right foot on the floor and gently eased my shoulders back, feeling the stretch in the muscles at the top of my leg and the bottom of my spine.

Then Ben King walked in.