The coffin was of grey sheet metal and it was heavy and awkward to manoeuvre in the confined space.

The pipe was pocketed, the chewing gum was spat out.

The coffin was lifted clear. She stepped forward. She laid the single rose on the coffin's lid beside the documentation that was fastened to it with adhesive tape. The wind seemed to come fiercer off the tarmac and she walked beside the coffin with her fingers steadying the rose until they were sheltered by the length of the hearse. The back door closed on the coffin and she could see her rose through the rain-blurred windows. It was driven away.

Was she being met? No, she had her own car… Did she need a lift? Yes, that would be very kind, to the long-stay car park…

Mary Braddock had brought her daughter, her Dorrie, home.

"I said we could go out and get something in a pub. I said I'd have a go at knocking something up. She wouldn't hear of it. Said something about being too tired to go out, and something about me needing a proper meal. She was into her kitchen and putting it all together."

"She's so strong, she's a grand woman."

"Sorry, Arnold, but it's a facade. It was all over her face, she'd been weeping, the poor darling, all the way home. I couldn't go with her, you see. Well, you know that… The contract is eleven million sterling, it's got to be in day after tomorrow. She said, anyway, quite definite, that she was going and going alone. Damn the little bitch… I married Mary, not her bloody daughter… You'll have another?"

Charles Braddock's hideaway, what he called his 'snug', was at the bottom right corner of the acre of garden behind the Manor House. The Manor House, Elizabethan brick and good timber, was hidden from them except for the tall chimneys by a succession of screens provided by the old azaleas and rhododendrons, and a yew hedge, and the wooden frame that supported honeysuckle and climbing roses, and the flint stone wall of the vegetable garden. Under the big bare branches of the oak and beech trees that separated the garden from a farmer's fields, he had designed, then built, the wooden hut that was his hideaway.