it had, if anything, intensified.
'Miles,' she said, 'you know the council ... with your dad - and Parminder Jawanda resigning too - you'll want to co-opt a couple of people, won't you?' She knew all the terminology; she had listened to it for years. 'I mean, you won't want another election, after all this?'
'Bloody hell, no.'
'So Colin Wall could fill one seat,' she rushed on, 'and I was thinking, I've got time - now the business is all online - I could do the other one.'
'You?' said Miles, astonished.
'I'd like to get involved,' said Samantha.
Krystal Weedon, dead at sixteen, barricaded inside the squalid little house on Foley Road ... Samantha had not drunk a glass of wine in two weeks. She thought that she might like to hear the arguments for Bellchapel Addiction Clinic.
The telephone was ringing in number ten Hope Street. Kay and Gaia were already late leaving for Krystal's funeral. When Gaia asked who was speaking, her lovely face hardened: she seemed much older.
'It's Gavin,' she told her mother.
'I didn't call him!' whispered Kay, like a nervous schoolgirl as she took the phone.
'Hi,' said Gavin. 'How are you?'
'On my way out to a funeral,' said Kay, with her eyes locked on her daughter's. 'The Weedon children's. So, not fabulous.'
'Oh,' said Gavin. 'Christ, yeah. Sorry. I didn't realize.'
He had spotted the familiar surname in a Yarvil and District Gazette headline, and, vaguely interested at last, bought a copy. It had occurred to him that he might have walked close by the place where the teenagers and the boy had been, but he had no actual memory of seeing Robbie Weedon.
Gavin had had an odd couple of weeks. He was missing Barry badly. He did not understand himself: when he should have been mired in misery that Mary had turned him down, all he wanted was a beer with the man whose wife he had hoped to take as his own ...
(Muttering aloud as he had walked away from her house, he had said to himself, 'That's what you get for trying to steal your best friend's life,' and failed to notice the slip of the tongue.)
'Listen,' he said, 'I was wondering whether you fancied a drink later?'
Kay almost laughed.
'Turn you down, did she?'
She handed Gaia the phone to hang up. They hurried out of the house and half jogged to the end of the street and up through the Square. For ten strides, as they passed the Black Canon, Gaia held her mother's hand.
They arrived as the hearses appeared at the top of the road, and hurried into the graveyard while the pall-bearers were shuffling out onto the pavement.
('Get away from the window,' Colin Wall commanded his son.
But Fats, who had to live henceforth with the knowledge of his own cowardice, moved forward, trying to prove that he could, at least, take this ...
The coffins glided past in the big black-windowed cars: the first was bright pink, and the sight robbed him of breath, and the second was tiny and shiny white ...
Colin placed himself in front of Fats too late to protect him, but he drew the curtains anyway. In the gloomy, familiar sitting room, where Fats had confessed to his parents that he had exposed his father's illness to the world; where he had confessed to as much as he could think of, in the hope that they would conclude him to be mad and ill; where he had tried to heap upon himself so much blame that they would beat him or stab him or do to him all those things that he knew he deserved, Colin put a hand gently on his son's back and steered him away, towards the sunlit kitchen.)
Outside St Michael and All Saints, the pall-bearers were readying themselves to take the coffins up the church path. Dane Tully was among them, with his earring and a self-inked tattoo of a spider's web on his neck, in a heavy black overcoat.
The Jawandas waited with the Bawdens in the shade of the yew tree. Andrew Price hovered near them, and Tessa Wall stood at some distance, pale and stony-faced. The other mourners formed a separate phalanx around the church doors. Some had a pinched and defiant air; others looked resigned and defeated; a few wore cheap black clothes, but most were in jeans or tracksuits, and one girl was sporting a cut-off T-shirt and a belly-ring that caught the sun when she moved. The coffins moved up the path, gleaming in the bright