The bell began to toll, and Doug Bentley was one of the first to stiffen, straighten his back, and wipe the smile from his face. The sound always killed the quiet chuckles and murmured stories. The former lance corporal in the army’s Pay Corps had come to do a job, as had the friends around him. It was the forty-eighth time he had been to the town’s High Street in the previous eighteen months, and he had missed only a very few of the occasions when the tenor bell, cast in 1633, had been rung with the slow, sad beat that recognised the approach of death and its cortege.

The town, its bell, the church of St Bartholomew and All Saints, and the High Street had become part of Doug Bentley’s life in that year and a half and, truth to tell, he wondered sometimes how he had found any purpose in his life, since retirement, before the opportunity had arisen to make the regular journey there. He knew all about the town: the coaching inns and the fine fossils that appeared in the mud springs, the unusual architecture of the town hall, built on columns more than four centuries before and donated to the community by an earl of Clarendon… He knew all of these historic points because the town was now central to his existence, and Beryl seemed not only to tolerate what he did but supported it. He needed her support each time they came on the number 12 bus from Swindon – no charge because they were senior citizens. This day, as on every day he came to the town, he had checked the varnish on the staff for his standard and satisfied himself there were no blemishes; he had renewed the blanco on the large gloves he wore until they were virgin-snow white; he had buffed his black shoes, shaved carefully, and put polish on the leather support for the bottom end of the staff. Beryl had pressed his grey slacks, ironed a shirt and inspected his tie; she had brushed dandruff flecks from his shoulders, picked fluff from his beret, and made certain that the bow of black ribbon that would top the staff was not crumpled. When the bus dropped them off, she would leave him to the company of his new veteran comrades, and he would not see her again until the ceremony was finished. The bell tolled and, as always at that moment, he felt his stomach tighten.