Dead Men's s Boots

The Breathers, as we dismissively call them, are radical dead-rights extremists, and they view us ghostbreakers in much the same light in which staunch Catholics tend to see abortionists: you can always rely on them to break up the funeral of an exorcist if they get a tip-off that it’s going down. Most likely the priest or one of the sextons was a closet sympathiser and had sent the word down the line.

Things were starting to wind down now. Carla threw some earth into her husband’s grave, and a few other people got in line to do the same.

Then the sextons took over for the serious shovelling. Now that we’d made that ritualistic nod towards ploughing the fields, we were free to scatter as soon as was decent. Carla’s earlier plan for a post-funeral gathering at her house in Mill Hill had been cancelled at the last moment for reasons that weren’t entirely clear – and the service, which on the black-edged invitations had been set for three p.m., had been moved forward to one-thirty without explanation. Maybe that was why Juliet hadn’t showed.

But, just as I was congratulating myself on getting away easy, a shout from back towards the main gates made me turn my head in that direction. There was a man there, running towards us at a flat-out sprint which sat oddly with his immaculately cut Italian suit. By and large, people don’t wear Enzo Tovare to go jogging: all the muck sweat’s not good for that delicate stitching.

This johnny-come-lately looked pretty striking in other ways, too.

His mid-brown hair was back-combed into an Errol Flynn-style college cut, and he had the Hollywood face to go with it – hard to get without plastic surgery or sterling silver genes. He looked to be about thirty, but there was something in his face that read as either premature experience or some kind of innate calm and seriousness. He was old for his age, but he wore it pretty well."

"And he had a folded sheet of paper in his hand which he was holding up like Neville Chamberlain for our appreciation.

That plus the sharp suit made it less likely that he was what I’d taken him to be at first: one of the Breath of Life guys trying to disrupt proceedings with a paint bomb or a noise-maker.

He slowed down as he got in among us and I noticed as he passed me that he wasn’t breathing =""-;t breahard, despite the run. I wondered if he worked out in Italian linen, too.

‘Mrs Gittings,’ he said, offering the paper to Carla.