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referring to, but I just said, ‘No, Geraldine isn’t here.’
    ‘Well, when she does show up, just say that all this clothes-on-the-beach business doesn’t fool me for a moment. I want my money back, and I want it now.’
    ‘I see …’ I began, but the caller had already hung up, leaving me to try to identify her voice. Of course, Charlotte, Geraldine’s sister and erstwhile business partner. She had clearly fared no better than Rupert. I could only speculate how much she had been persuaded to part with. Charlotte was nobody’s fool, but she would resent the deception that much more in consequence.
    The probability that Geraldine was alive and had successfully left the neighbourhood with a considerable amount of other people’s money was becoming so strong that the next call came as something of a change of pace.
    ‘Good evening, sir. It’s Detective Inspector Cooke here. I’m sorry to phone you so late, but we’ve found a body. We think that you may be able to identify it for us.’

Four
    Perhaps at no time other than our own could a man reach comfortable middle age without confronting a dead body in the cold flesh.
    I had of course seen my share of corpses: Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda, South Africa, Bosnia had nightly provided a procession of bodies, mutilated and unmutilated according to the taste of the winning side, on my television screen. But not a real live dead corpse. Everything now conspires to separate the living and the dead.
    When my father died, I was away at university. We Tressiders were not the sort of family to leave bodies carelessly strewn around the house. By the time I returned home my father was safely boxed up and ready for disposal in the normal, seemly manner.
    When my mother died some years later, happy and prematurely senile in a hospital in Poole, there was some delay in contacting me and I arrived to find that she had been removed to the mortuary. A plump, unctuous young man with a smooth pink face asked me whether I wished to see my mother’s body. I must have paused for a moment, because he quickly added, ‘Many people prefer not to. It can be distressing. Very distressing.’ His gaze was directed at the floor rather than at me, but since the floor seemed unlikely to feel distressed, I replied on its behalf.
    ‘Most people prefer not to?’
    ‘Not under the circumstances.’
    I wondered what he meant. Then I remembered that my mother had, years before, agreed to donate various parts of her body for transplantation or research, as the doctors in their wisdom saw fit. Perhaps he meant that very little that was recognizable remained. Would it be in bad taste to ask which bits they had taken? Heart? Lungs? Kidneys? Eyes? Assorted offal?
    ‘Whatever you think best,’ I said awkwardly.
    ‘I think you are very wise,’ he said, softly congratulating the floor.
    Later it occurred to me, rather uncharitably, that at my mother’s advanced age she would have had little that even the most desperate transplantee would have coveted. Perhaps it was nothing more than that the modern etiquette is simply not to view a dead body. Or the young man may have just been reluctant to take me on the long walk down to the mortuary at the end of a hard day. But that equally uncharitable thought came much later.
    ‘There are some papers that we need you to sign,’ he said.
    I took a much shorter walk to an untidy office and signed them, thus missing my second chance to view a corpse.
    Now, in middle age, I had been offered another appointment with death, and this time I was not sure that I wanted it. There was, however, little possibility of escape. I was led inexorably along a corridor and into a room full of white tiles and gleaming stainless steel. In the middle of the room was a table and on the table was a shrouded form, with a provisional claim to being my late ex-wife.
    Perhaps it was the lifelong build-up to this moment, but the instant when the sheet was finally pulled back to reveal a