She wanted, she said, to do some shopping, and they saw nothing odd in this. Identify your friend’s body; then a little retail therapy. But maybe – in a job entailing regular trips to a morgue – you developed a certain insight into the reactions of the bereaved, and learned there was no template to rely on. Shopping was as useful, or useless, as any other response to death. As for Sarah, she wanted to be on her own, preferably in a crowd. It didn’t matter what they thought she wanted. The air was cold, but still; the skies grey as an anvil. Sarah’s mental weather, though, was storms and shattered crockery; in her mind, it rained hammers. She’d just come from a morgue, where she’d identified a body as Zoë Boehm. Her reasons for doing so didn’t alter this: that a woman lay dead on a slab, her body sluiced like a disconnected drainpipe. And Zoë’s possessions had weighed her down in the water. If Sarah tried to break down how she felt, the list would run to pages: grief for Zoë, fear of her own death, the nagging sense of tasks left unfinished, along with all the usual physical niggles: that sudden tremor in the calf; an unexpected churn in the stomach.
