Dead Man's Time

up the leather-bound wine list and
opened it. Just as he began casting his eye up and down, looking for the dry white wines he knew Cleo liked, and which he liked best, too, he suddenly saw two people he recognized.
    ‘Bloody hell!’ He pulled the wine list up, covering his face, wanting to spare them the embarrassment of being spotted. Although the Machiavellian streak in him almost wanted them to
see him.
    ‘What is it?’ Cleo asked.
    He waited some moments, then lowered the list, and pointed at a couple, arm in arm, strolling away from them. ‘I thought they were coming in here!’
    She stared at the couple. The man had a large bald patch, and was wearing a brown jacket and grey trousers. The woman had brown hair cut in a chic style, and wore a pretty pink dress. ‘Who
are they?’
    ‘You’ve met them both, individually, at the mortuary over the years. DS Norman Potting and DS Bella Moy!’
    ‘They look rather a mismatched couple, from here anyway.’
    ‘They’re even more mismatched close up, believe me!’
    ‘She’s the one on your team who doesn’t have a life, right? She cares for her elderly mother?’
    He nodded.
    ‘And he’s been married – what – four times?’
    ‘Yup.’
    Their waiter appeared. Grace ordered two glasses of champagne and some olives.
    ‘That’s terrible.’
    ‘He is pretty terrible. But hey, good on Norman pulling Bella!’
    ‘Good on Norman pulling Bella?
’ she quizzed. ‘What is it with you men? Why do men treat pulling women like a sport? What about,
Poor Bella, lumbering herself, in
desperation, with a serially unfaithful old lech?
’
    He laughed. ‘You’re right.’
    ‘So why do they, Roy?’
    ‘Because, I suppose, for most people, life’s a compromise. That writer – philosopher – you like, whose work you introduced me to a few months ago. What was his great
line? Something about so many people
living lives of quiet desperation
?’
    ‘Yes. Don’t let us ever get like that, Roy.’
    He stared back into her clear, green eyes. ‘We never will,’ he said.
    ‘Is that a promise?’
    ‘It’s a promise.’
    Their champagne arrived. He raised his glass and clinked it against hers. ‘No desperation,’ he said. ‘Ever.’
    ‘None!’
    A short while later he ordered six oysters. Then, when he saw the mischievous look in Cleo’s eyes, he upped it to a dozen.

55
    At 11 a.m. on Monday, Gavin Daly sat at his desk, thumbing through his ancient Rolodex looking for a name from the past, ignoring the grinding blatter of the old ride-on mower
as his gardener went up and down the lawn, cutting immaculate stripes.
    He had heard the news, an hour earlier, that the Coroner had released his sister’s body, and her funeral could go ahead tomorrow, as he had planned.
    His thoughts were interrupted by a perfunctory knock, followed by the sound of his door opening, and he turned to see his housekeeper, Betty, enter with a tray containing a wine glass, an opened
bottle of Corton-Charlemagne white Burgundy, a Robaina cigar, perfectly cut, and a dish of green olives.
    The first of his two glasses of white wine a day, which would be followed by his evening two fingers of whiskey. Everything in moderation was his recipe. All the people he knew of or had read
about who’d made it to his kind of old age had their own particular secret. For some, it had been total abstinence from alcohol. For others, it had been a life of celibacy. Poor, miserable
sods – they might have lived a long time, but strewth, it must have seemed so much longer! What they all ignored was England’s oldest ever man, Henry Allingham, who had died only a few
years ago at 113, and had attributed his longevity, in a radio interview he’d heard on the great man’s 112th birthday, to ‘Cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women.’
    Every morning, as Betty filled that first glass for him, he raised it in a silent toast to Henry Allingham, before lighting his cigar.
    In front of him lay the front page of the
Daily News
from February 1922, in its protective plastic. He thanked Betty, drank some wine, and waited until he heard the door shut behind
him. Then he continued his search through the ancient, battered Rolodex index cards, until he found the name and telephone number he was looking for. A genealogist called Martin Diplock, whose
service, years back, he had used regularly to check the background history of high-end antiques.
    He dialled it, and as he half-expected, heard a
number