Alastair had been vicar to the village on the Surrey/ Sussex border for seven years, had come from an industrial parish in the West Midlands, and liked to say that he had been hardened to misery. He had been taught to say the right things, and say them briefly. Mary thought he had made a useful job of the address, highlighted the positive points, which must have taken him some soul searching, of a young life taken. He had said that only the superficial side of human character is displayed and it was arrogance for the living to dismiss un shown quality in the dead… Well done, Alastair. She stopped. Charles stumbled because the halt was sudden. His wretched mind would have been absorbed with the Seoul contract and he had let her know, and no mistake, that the funeral of his step-daughter did not come convenient. She stopped and Charles stumbled because the undertakers had halted to get a strong grip on the trolley that carried the coffin. They lifted the trolley from the path, onto the grass. The coffin was heavy, expensive, the last gesture of throwing money at a problem, and the wheels of the trolley sank deep into the wet grass. They moved forward again, slow because of the sodden ground. Justin, her first husband and Dorrie's father, coughed behind her, it might have been a snivel. The reptile had a cheek being there and it was rotten of him to have paraded his second wife, the little shrew. It had been Justin's going, running off with the little shrew, that had been the kick-start of the problem. An open and pleasant child had become a moody and awkward and bloody-minded horror story, and hadn't grown better. She hated herself for it, for thinking of those times, but they lined up in her memory, the times when her daughter had driven her beyond distraction point… The autopsy report said that her daughter had suffered a knife wound at the throat and a compressed fracture of the lower front skull as with a blow from a blunt instrument, and a gunshot wound (entry) above the right ear. She despised herself for thinking the bad memories of her child, her daughter, who had been knifed and bludgeoned and shot to death.