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With Victor?’
    ‘No. I’m looking around first.’
    ‘Okay. Who was your London boss?’
    I hesitated. ‘Sir George Henderson.’
    ‘Don’t know him. Well, look, give me a call. Soon.’ He clapped me on the arm and moved off. I felt as if I’d been strip-searched. I joined the crush moving into the church. I couldn’t see Anna anywhere.
    It was a good service, I suppose you’d say, very professional. Parts of it moved the people around me to tears, especially when Curtis’s brother delivered a heartbroken eulogy, but I couldn’t feel anything. It all seemed so remote from the two blokes I’d known. Only the pair of caskets, side by side on the altar steps, stopped me short, metonymy in spades.
    But afterwards, outside the church, I had to face Owen’s wife, Suzi, and that was painful. She was weeping and looked totally washed out, as if she hadn’t slept in days. We hugged each other and she whispered her thanks to me for coming. I hardly knew what to say, and mumbled some platitude. Really, there are no words, are there? She was twenty-five, a pretty but not very bright girl with few options. A little boy was clinging to her hand, looking confused.
    ‘Do you remember Thomas?’ Suzi asked, sniffing and wiping her eyes.
    ‘Of course. I used to babysit you. Can I have a hug?’ I bent down and the boy gave me an awkward peck on the cheek.
    Ranked behind Suzi were the families, her parents and Owen’s holding the second child, a baby, and then Curtis’snext to them, with Curtis’s brother. I shook all their hands, and they said they recognised my name and knew I’d been a good friend to the two young men.
    Anna was outside the church, standing in the shade of a large tree, the morning sun turning hot.
    ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘You okay?’ I saw that she’d been crying too, a little smear of make-up in the darker skin beneath each eye.
    She hunched her shoulders. ‘Did you see Damien?’
    ‘Briefly. He seemed in a rush. He said a few words about the boys and then grilled me on my CV. Very focused.’ I was remembering a more carefree Damien, a lad with an eye for the girls, who fell for him with bewildering speed. We never understood why because he wasn’t particularly good-looking. We’d quiz the women afterwards, but they didn’t seem to know either.
    ‘That’s what happens to us,’ she said. ‘A couple of months filling in six-minute charge-out time sheets and calculating his Christmas bonus, and Damien has turned into a wage-slave like the rest of us.’
    ‘True enough. Want a bite of lunch?’
    ‘I haven’t got long before I have to get back to work,’ she said, checking her watch. ‘Let’s talk over a sandwich, then you can drop me at the station.’
    We found a café not far from my car, and sat at a window table. She ordered turkey on Turkish with a mineral water, and I a large cappuccino and a ham sandwich.
    ‘Did you get a chance to read the cuttings?’
    ‘Yes, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said. It seems to me that Curtis and Owen felt that they’d been negligent in some way. Maybe they persuaded Luce it would be easier if she unclipped her harness, or maybe they had an argument about something that made her go off on her own.I don’t know, it could have been a dozen things, but when she fell they blamed themselves. They were ashamed and didn’t mention it at the inquest, and so, in his dying moments, Owen felt compelled to say that they’d killed her, and that it hadn’t happened exactly as they’d said. But they didn’t
murder
her, for goodness’ sake. Nothing like that.’
    She stared at me for a long moment, considering this, and then she said quietly, ‘Are you really sure about that, Josh?’
    I had a sudden feeling that I’d underestimated Anna all those years; that, from within the shadow of more glamorous friends, she’d learned to observe and become rather more perceptive than I’d given her credit for.
    I shrugged. ‘I just think, maybe