The grey-curtained cubicle was attached to Intensive Care. Minnie’s eyes were closed, her breathing hollow and somehow detached. Merrily had heard breathing like this before, and it made her mouth go dry with trepidation.

It’s rather a bad one, the ward sister had murmured. You need to prepare him.

‘Let’s go for a walk.’ Merrily plucked at the sleeve of Gomer’s multi-patched tweed jacket.

She thought he glanced at her reproachfully as they left the room — as though she had the power to intercede with God, call in a favour. And then, from out in the main ward, he looked back once at Minnie, and his expression made Merrily blink and turn away.

Gomer and Minnie: sixty-somethings when they got married, the Midlands widow and the little, wild Welsh-borderer. It was love, though Gomer would never have used the word. Equally, he’d never have given up the single life for mere companionship — he could get that from his JCB and his bulldozer.

He and Merrily walked out of the old county hospital and past the building site for a big new one — a mad place to put it, everyone was saying; there’d be next to no parking space except for consultants and administrators; even the nurses would have to hike all the way to the multi-storey at night. In pairs, presumably, with bricks in their bags.

Merrily felt angry at the crassness of everybody: the health authority and its inadequate bed quota, the city planners who seemed bent on gridlocking Hereford by 2005 — and God, for letting Minnie Parry succumb to a severe heart attack during the late afternoon of her sixth wedding anniversary.

It was probably the first time Gomer had ever phoned Merrily — their bungalow being only a few minutes’ walk away. It had happened less than two hours ago, while Merrily was bending to light the fire in the vicarage sitting room, expecting Jane home soon. Gomer had already sent for an ambulance.