Someone in the packed congregation cleared their throat. Captain King began to speak.

‘Death is nothing at all,’ he said, reading with the clipped, careful delivery of a man accustomed to public speaking. ‘I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I, and you are you.’

My eyes drifted to where he had been sitting. The other three were all there.

Ben King.

Salman Khan.

Guy Philips.

The dead man’s oldest friends, in their places of honour, in the front row with the parents of Hugo Buck and his widow, Natasha, her face hidden by a long black veil. Buck’s parents were in their late sixties but tanned, attractive, looking as though nothing bad had ever happened to them in their lives before now.

Natasha turned her head and stared at me. Behind the veil her face was impassive and showed absolutely no sign of recognition. I had seen her chauffeur when Mallory and I had arrived at the cemetery, sneaking a cigarette out on the street as he waited with the other drivers. Even now he had seemed like her driver rather than her date. I wondered why the hell that even mattered to me.

‘Whatever we were to each other, that we still are,’ Captain King said, his voice rising in the high vaulted chapel. ‘Call me by my old familiar name. Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference in your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity.’

Mallory leaned his head towards me and his one word was less than a whisper: ‘Look.’

Salman Khan was crying. I could not see his face, but the man’s shoulders were clearly juddering with sobs, and his hands were over his face to hide his grief. I watched as Ben King slowly turned his head, muttered something consoling in Khan’s ear, then turned back to watch his brother. Guy Philips watched the exchange with a kind of cool indifference.

Khan swabbed his face with the palm of one hand. His crying seemed to stop.

‘Life means all that it ever meant,’ said Captain King, and I saw the shadow of a smile flit across his handsome, ruined face. ‘It is the same as it ever was – there is unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?’ He paused. ‘I am waiting for you – for an interval – somewhere very near – just round the corner.’ King folded his notes. ‘All is well,’ he said.

I looked at the mourners. Almost all of them were young. Men and women in their thirties, some of them carrying new babies or trying to control toddlers, all of their faces white with shock at the early and brutal death of one of their own generation.

Captain King had returned to his seat. The vicar was talking.

‘Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world.’