The funeral was held in an Anglican church on a hill just outside the ancient spa town of Bath. Over a thousand years old, the church was no bigger than a chapel, and its driveway was too small for the reporters and photographers who jostled each other for a good vantage-point. It was a warm day, the smells of grass and honeysuckle drifting across the graveyard as the mourners arrived. Some deer, which were used to coming here in the afternoons to nibble moss from the gravestones, were startled by the activity. They bounded away, leaping the low stone walls and disappearing into the surrounding forests.

As people filed into the church two women stayed outside, sitting motionless on a bench under a white buddleia. Butterflies swatted and flitted around the blooms over their heads but the women didn’t raise their eyes to look. They were united in their silence – in their numbness and disbelief at the string of events that had led them to this place. Sally and Zoë Benedict. Sisters, though no one would know it to look at them. The tall, rangy one was Zoë, the elder by a year; her sister Sally, much smaller and more contained, still had the round, uncluttered face of a child. She sat looking down at her small hands and the tissue she’d been kneading and tearing into shreds.

‘It’s harder than I expected,’ she said. ‘I mean – I don’t know if I can go in. I thought I could, but now I’m not so sure.’

‘Me neither,’ Zoë murmured. ‘Me neither.’

They sat for a while in silence. One or two people came up the steps – people they didn’t recognize. Then some of Millie’s friends: Peter and Nial. Awkward-looking in their formal suits, their formal expressions.

‘His sister’s here,’ Zoë said, after a while. ‘I spoke to her on the steps.’

‘His sister? I didn’t know he had one.’