They shifted more shovelfuls, Dorothy’s shoulders bending to the work. She pictured the Earth spinning through space at thousands of miles an hour and tried to think how irrelevant all this was, but the truth was it mattered to her more than anything. And it would matter to Barbara Worth’s family, but she couldn’t help that.

Jenny’s shovel thudded into the ground beneath them and Dorothy felt the reverberations through her feet. It felt different from solid ground, it was wood.253

Jenny looked round, panting. Dorothy breathed heavily as she leaned on her shovel, then she reached out of the grave and grabbed one of the torches, played it over the blade of Jenny’s shovel as she scraped at the earth, spooning it out to expose the grubby oak casket underneath.

They redoubled their efforts even though Dorothy didn’t want this to end. As long as they kept digging, she would never have to find out. If they dug all the way to New Zealand she could stay blissfully ignorant about what they were doing, what Jim had done.

Much of the casket was exposed now and the thunk and scrape of their efforts shifted more earth every second. Soon they had the entire lid of the coffin exposed and Dorothy recognised it as the Lindisfarne model, solid oak, not veneer, upwards of a thousand pounds, the most expensive casket they sold. So Barbara’s family had money to spend. And money to sue if it came to that.

Jenny stopped digging. The six brass turnkeys along the sides of the coffin lid were exposed, a dull gleam where the torchlight hit them. Dorothy placed her shovel out of the grave and Jenny followed suit. They stood there on the coffin, Dorothy thinking.

Jenny shook her head. ‘We don’t have to.’

‘We’ve been through this.’

‘Are you sure?’

Dorothy nodded. She got to her knees, felt the dampness of the remaining dirt against her trousers, and tried to unscrew the first key in the top left corner. It was tight and she scraped earth from the thread, squeezed the screw between thumb and forefinger and pressed. Finally it started to budge anticlockwise, stiff to begin with then faster as the dirt was pushed aside and the thread caught better.

She turned and saw Jenny doing the same at the bottom end, first one screw, which came easily, then another, which she had to lean into, sticking her elbows out, to get it moving.

Dorothy went back to her own end, started on the second one, 254scraping away the dirt, feeling the rawness of her skin, the breeze around them, the rustle of leaves on the trees above, that bloody owl and its mate still calling back and forth. Why couldn’t they just get it together?