Jeremy’s face is puffy. ‘I must look a mess,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t keep it together. What the boys said was so beautiful.’

‘Yes. They were wonderful.’

He moves closer. I recoil and feel embarrassed. All he wants is to bond over a shared loss. But I want to hold on jealously to mine.

‘Gil . . . Would it be OK to tell you something, in private?’ he asks. Hell. There is something a bit creepy about this bloke. I fight my instinct to ward him off, and steer him a few paces away from the mourners, through the colonnade, towards the floral tributes and terms of endearment for another beloved and departed mum. ‘Of course. How can I help?’

‘I’m being ridiculous,’ he begins, glancing over at me. I give him an encouraging smile and he continues, ‘There’s something not right about how Clare died.’

‘What do you mean?’ What he’s saying is clearly the voice of grief. In that freezing colonnade, next to countless marble plaques, it is my duty to listen.

‘The bicycle helmet. It’s the bloody bicycle helmet. It literally makes no sense that she wasn’t wearing it.’

Not this again. My mum, young Luke, now Jeremy, all fixating on the missing helmet, because Clare was perfect. For once in her life she made a mistake.

‘Look, Jeremy. People misplace keys, lose wallets – even their pagers. People drink too much, and they smoke, and they make bad choices or they just forget.’ I’m wound up. It comes out loudly enough to draw a glance from a cousin whose name I momentarily cannot recall. Why can’t anyone accept Clare was human and fallible?

‘Clare wasn’t scatty. She wasn’t reckless,’ he persists. ‘You know that. And it wasn’t that she forgot her helmet. It vanished. She was looking for it before she left the office.’

‘Jeremy . . . You told me yourself it was on the shelf all along. She must have been in a hurry and not noticed it. These things happen. We all do it.’ I am making a great effort to hide my impatience. I turn, to start heading towards the car park. The mourners have begun to drift off to the wake and if I am late it will be another black mark against me.

‘I didn’t say that!’ he calls after me. ‘I said it was back there when I looked the next morning. I don’t know whether it was there all along. And there’s another thing.’ I turn round. ‘She was behaving strangely in the last few weeks.’

‘Is this the thing about her missing meetings? You already told me.’

‘Yes. And other things.’ He won’t let me go. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, but she had a blistering row with the Chancellor in front of his private office staff. It was extraordinary.’