‘You know they won’t take me seriously,’ Dorothy said.

‘Thomas will.’

‘Even he can’t swing this. Exhuming a grave on a hunch? A bereaved family from a decade ago needlessly upset over something that’s likely nothing?’

Archie looked up. ‘That’s just it, it’s nothing, you’ve got no evidence.’

‘That’s why I need to get into that grave.’

Archie swallowed. ‘I won’t be a part of this.’

Dorothy felt the wood of the doorframe under her finger. ‘You owe me.’

‘That’s not fair,’ Archie said. ‘I think you’re having a breakdown.’

‘I’ve never been clearer in my mind.’

‘You need to speak to someone.’

‘I’m speaking to you.’

Archie put the foundation brush down, wiped his hands. ‘You’re talking about desecrating someone’s grave. It’s illegal. You’ll get caught.’

Dorothy straightened her back. ‘Not if you help me.’

‘I’m sorry, Dorothy, I won’t do this.’

Dorothy held onto the doorframe, squeezed the wood, hoping for a splinter to pierce her skin. ‘Then I’ll do it myself.’

220

42

HANNAH

She drifted through the day of lectures and labs like she was dark matter, undetectable by humanity, just an ominous lack of substance, a hole in the calculations of the universe. She’d studied dark matter in her first-year particle physics class, how the observable universe was only five percent of the story, the other ninety-five was mysterious, unseen. But we know it’s there because of the effects it has on what we can see, without it, galaxies would fly apart. Dark matter is the glue of the universe. She felt dark energy permeating the James Clerk Maxwell Building too, a sense that everyone knew what Peter Longhorn had done, and that Hannah was responsible. But all she’d done was look for the truth, try to solve the mystery of her friend, and if that started a chain reaction that led to other consequences, that wasn’t her fault.

She saw Bradley Barker in the canteen, and he rose and left when he caught sight of her. She looked around for Xander but he was missing from class. Some of the other members of the Quantum Club were there, but they all looked away when she tried to make eye contact. She was repellent, driving everyone away with her actions.

She bunked off her last tutorial and walked up the road towards Greenhill Gardens. She needed to see Indy, be told she’d done the right thing.

It was half an hour’s walk through Blackford and The Grange into Greenhill, passing some of the biggest houses in the city, Edinburgh old money for generations, lots of Skelf funeral customers over the years. She wondered what possessed Grandpa to start up the private investigator’s. Was it to do with the missing 221employee? It was impossible to think of him as a murderer, but everything had changed in the last week.