Free Funeral Music by Morag Joss

would become no more than an extra bit of spice in their travellers’ tales. Boy, is England ever violent! Did we ever tell you what happened on our trip in ’97? Sara was envious, for she felt changed, once again caught off-guard by events, by death. Without meaning or wanting to, she had once again strayed into that different territory, where simple pleasures and unambitious hopes for a good day seemed not just slightly indecent, but ludicrous.
    ‘The poor sod,’ George was saying, ‘probably just got up this morning as usual. Thinking he’s going to have another perfectly ordinary day, and it turns out to be his last, his last ever. The last day of his life. Probably just toppled over the railing, hit his head and that’s that. It’s a thought, innit? Unbelievable.’
    As he spoke Sara saw again the Assembly Rooms, the audience of women, the platform and the tall man of the night before, floundering through his disastrous speech.
    ‘George, he
didn’t
get up this morning as usual,’ she said quietly. Involuntarily, she saw again the gangly, soaked body and the dead face. ‘George, he was still in black tie. He must have been there all night.’
    DETECTIVE SERGEANT Bridger did not get up when the WDC opened the door and showed Sara next door into the Drawing Room. He gestured her to a chair and, unaware of the irony, asked if she minded if he smoked. Or rather, he waved his packet of Silk Cut at her and said, because he was dealing with a member of the general public and was obliged to ask, ‘Don’t mind, do you?’
    ‘Actually, I do.’
    She did not care what he thought. He was quite unforgivably unattractive. He was wearing, presumably in pursuit of the hard cop effect, a pair of Gap chinos, a dark blue militaristic bomber jacket, definitely of mixed fibres, and a slightly loosened thin tie of brown suede. Sara was sure that the strain showing on his face owed less to a tense all-night stakeout than to the fact that he’d had to forgo his doughnut down at the station that morning. Bridger knew her type too. Educated cow, one of them lippy, neurotic manhaters.
    ‘Oh, dear,’ he said with mock concern, consulting his list. ‘Right then. Well, Miss – oh, I beg your pardon, I see it’s
Muzz
– Selkirk is that, let’s hope we won’t be too long then. I’m afraid I’m gasping. Terrible habit, I do realise.’
    He put away his fags and produced a Snickers bar from his pocket. Unwrapping it and taking a bite, he then made his second mistake.
    With his mouth half full he said, ‘So, with a name like that, would I be right in thinking you hail from north of the border, then? Cold up there, isn’t it? Never been, myself. Prefer the sun.’
    Sara stared back steadily with a look which she hoped conveyed her exasperated boredom with the subject of Scottish weather. Bridger decided to abandon any attempt to be friendly, and instead went into his highly trained professional, got-a-job-to-get-on-with-here mode, running yellowish fingers through his pale hair as if he expected to find something interesting in it. Sara tried to work out why she felt so antagonistic towards this man, who was a policeman, after all. He did look young and she couldn’t exactly blame him for that, but he had one of those ratty faces and the kind of slight and probably hairless white body that she found revolting. Whippets had the same effect on her. Looking round, she felt a surge of annoyance at what he had already managed to do to this once tranquil and elegant room. Various flower arrangements had been lifted from their proper places and stacked with obvious impatience on a long Regency bench along the wall. The deep windowsills and three semicircular side tables were already filling up with police detritus: folders and papers, a laptop, a mobile telephone and a box of computer discs. A desk, surely borrowed from one of the other offices, had been shoved under the windows. The room was already more chaotic and grubbier than it