He had recently started working his way through an anthology of English verse he had found in the secondhand bookshop off the market square, often out in the garden with a cup of freshly brewed coffee first thing in the morning. Early encounters with Chaucer and Spenser had almost defeated him, but he had skipped them, along with a number of other unintelligible contemporaries, and moved on. The old ballads presented him with no problems. He already knew most of them from recordings by Martin Carthy, June Tabor and others. He also knew some of Thomas Campion’s songs from Emma Kirkby and Iestyn Davies recordings. Next he breezed through the selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets, then Tichborne’s “Elegy” moved him almost to tears. Now he was feeling a bit bogged down in Pope and Dryden, who probably thought they were wittier than they really were, but he was certain there were more delights to come. Not knowing what was coming next was part of the fun.

It was well after dark and the bats were flitting all over the back garden. Mark Knopfler had finished a while ago. Wearily, Banks, put his empty wineglass in the sink and went up to bed. It was no insult to the beauty of the music that he fell asleep with his earbuds in, listening to John Tavener’s Lament for Jerusalem.

4

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO ONE OF THESE BEFORE?” Annie asked Gerry as they clicked along the corridor to the postmortem suite, footsteps echoing from the high ceiling and green-tiled walls. The antiseptic smell made Annie feel vaguely nauseated.

“No,” said Gerry.

“A lot of firsts these days. Nervous?”

“A bit. I don’t want to make a fool of myself.”

Annie flashed on the time, not so long ago, when she got out of a helicopter feeling airsick and went straight to the scene where half a body had burst out of a bin liner. The left half. As if the victim had been neatly sliced in two from top to bottom with a chainsaw. She had been sick. “You won’t,” she said. “Besides, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Even Alan gets a bit green around the gills when he has to attend one of these. It’s like a murder scene. You never get used to it, but you learn to cope. I suppose the advantage with this sort of thing is it’s all scientific. Sterile. Clinical. Not like finding a girl’s naked body dumped by the roadside.” Or the left half of a body spilling from the plastic bag on the windswept valley bottom. She turned to Gerry, taking something from her briefcase. “Here, put a dab of this under your nose. It’s Vicks. It really does help a bit. The smell in there’s the worst.”