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Clive pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘Very funny place, Michelle. Very funny. People who work there go doolally quite regularly.’

Graham agreed. ‘Driven bonkers by the work,’ he said.

‘And when they do die unexpectedly, my God, all hell’s let loose. Coroner’s officers, police, forensic pathologists, even men in black suits with suspicious bulges come knocking at the door.’

‘Who are they?’

‘SIS. Special Intelligence.’

‘But why?’

‘Because the balloon goes up if somebody who might know things dies suddenly, just in case it’s suspicious – killed by the KGB with a poison dart from an umbrella – or, if they did it to themselves, it was because they were being blackmailed and finally decided they’d had enough. They have to cover all the bases, at least until they’re sure.’

Graham said cheerfully, ‘Bloody hard some of those guys are, too. Bloody hard. You can see it in their eyes.’

‘We had one senior GCHQ guy in here once a bit like Davina in there, only he floated his boat by auto-strangulation. Used to stand on a chair in the kitchen dressed only in a rather fetching bikini and with a rope around his neck tied to an old butcher’s hook. Took the weight off his feet by bending his knees and waited for bliss to come. Unfortunately one day he went too far, panicked, kicked out and knocked the chair over. After that it was very rapidly – “licence revoked for Mr Bond”.’

‘There was a bloody great fuss about that one,’ agreed Graham. ‘Strangely enough, the precise details of how he came to hang himself never got out.’

Clive nodded. ‘Can’t think why.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t suppose the same discretion will be shown when it comes to Davina.’

I looked back into the body store while drinking my coffee. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Mrs Harcourt. It seemed unfair that she had not only lost her husband but was going to lose her dignity too.

TWENTY-TWO

Nobody realized what was going to happen that July when it started to rain and then just didn’t stop. It had been a very wet few weeks – raining most days – and the rivers were already high, but around here that’s not unusual. Especially in autumn and winter, it’s quite common for roads and villages near to the Severn to be under water for a few days at a time, although this doesn’t usually happen in the summer. Consequently, even though there were flood warnings in force, I don’t think anyone thought much about it.

In the morning of that Friday we beavered away in the PM room with Peter Gillard on good form doing his pottering about trick and being told off by Clive for leaving trails of blood spots wherever he went, while outside it rained. Late in the morning Ed came down for some chat and coffee but, apart from Graham moaning about how little wildlife he’d managed to blast to death that week because it had been so wet, nobody said much about the weather. We were all used to it by then.

At three o’clock, Graham and I were doing a thorough clean of the PM room when Clive came in, looking concerned. ‘You lot had better get off home,’ he said. ‘There’s traffic chaos in the middle of town because they reckon they’re soon going to have to close the motorway and a lot of the side roads are flooded.’

‘What about you?’ Graham asked.

‘I’ll hang on a bit, just in case any undertakers come knocking.’

As I left the mortuary I saw Ed rushing off to his car; he lives a good way out and was clearly worried that he would have a bit of difficulty if the motorway was shut.

My usual twenty-minute journey home took over an hour. It kept raining for the rest of that day and during the whole night; in fact, it was still drizzling the next morning when Luke and I took the dogs out. The ground was soaked and there was a huge amount of standing water where the drains had just given up and died; in one or two places small lakes had formed. The local TV and radio told us of the true extent of the flooding. The Severn and the Wye had burst their banks in numerous places; Tewkesbury, where they converge, was almost