She had the second key out and into her pocket, then moved to one of the middle ones as Jenny crawled from the other direction to do the final one. They were turning the keys at the same time, squeaks as the threads unravelled, the shanks of the keys rising as they turned. Then they were out.

Jenny rose and helped Dorothy to her feet. She shunted herself out of the grave backwards, sitting on her bum at the side of the hole, then helped Dorothy do the same. Dorothy got the pickaxe from the holdall and leaned into the grave, jammed the point of the axe between the lid and the body of the coffin, and waited a moment.

She shared a look with Jenny but couldn’t work out what she was thinking. She thought of Jim’s shard of bone in her pocket, she carried it everywhere now. She thought of letting go of the pickaxe, leaning back, producing the bone and stabbing herself in the heart with it. Or at least cutting at her wrists. But that was even more crazy than digging up Barbara Worth.

She pursed her lips and swallowed, then levered the pickaxe tip between the casket’s lid and body. They separated easily with a pop, the seal broken after a decade of peace. She got her shovel and reached into the hole, stuck the blade under the coffin lid and lifted it up.

Jenny pointed her torch into the grave.

There was Barbara, or what was left of her, a sagging pile of bones, decayed flesh and disintegrated material forming a thin mulch on the floor of the coffin, her skull intact, wisps of flesh and skin still hanging off, worms and slaters hiding from the light, crawling between collar bone and shoulder blade.

‘Christ,’ Jenny said.

Dorothy stared for a long time then slipped into the coffin like 255she was sliding into a swimming pool. She landed with a squelch and thought she might be sick.

‘Mum.’

Dorothy looked up. She wondered how she must appear to Jenny, wild-eyed, covered in mud, standing amongst human remains in an open grave.

‘I have to check,’ she said. She put a hand against the wet earth on the side of the hole and crouched down, lifted Barbara’s skull with her fingertips. A large earthworm slid out and burrowed away. Dorothy felt some of the coffin base give under her foot, solid earth below.

There was nothing underneath Barbara’s skull except more of her decomposed scalp. Dorothy saw a glint of an earring in the mud. She shifted the shoulders and ribcage, lifting them and peering underneath. More of the same, fragments of cloth and skin yet to be returned to the planet. She scanned the rest of the coffin, lifted Barbara’s hips, obviously a woman’s hips. Nothing there.