There were questions he wanted to put to his old chief, but now was not the moment. Instead, he looked about him with curiosity. It was the first time he’d been in a Jewish cemetery and he was struck by how different it was from a Christian churchyard, how bare of decoration and adornment. Stretched out before his eyes were row upon row of flat, closely packed graves with hardly a headstone among them. Nor was any relief to be found in the gravelled pathways lacking any bordering tree or flower to soften their stony lines. Here the bleak reality of death was undisguised. ‘Not much of a turn-out, is there, sir?’ He nodded towards the small group of mourners, most of them elderly women, who had gathered around the freshly dug grave at the end of one of the rows some distance from where they were standing. The sudden icy squall had driven them to seek warmth together and they stood huddled under their umbrellas with bowed heads like sheep caught in a blizzard. ‘I doubt Rosa had many close friends,’ Madden murmured.
