He lifted the holdall and they began walking along the rows of gravestones. There were some large chestnut trees further up the hill giving them cover from the main road where night buses still ran.

They didn’t split up like Dorothy and Jenny had last night. Dorothy needed someone by her side, now that she knew what was coming.

The graves were laid out chronologically and they found Ailsa Montgomery after just a few minutes. She was a beloved sister, mother and grandmother, three generations out there still missing her after a decade, getting on with the white noise of life but now and then feeling a blip of grief, a bump of loss that threw them off balance. Dorothy wondered if she would ever get to the stage with Jim where she mostly didn’t think about him. She didn’t know if she would live long enough to take his death for granted and maybe that was just as well.

‘Don’t go through with this,’ Archie said.

Dorothy thought about his condition, the death fixation, the medication, the therapy. None of this could do him any good.

‘Let’s go home,’ he said.

She thought about Archie hiding that piece of paper in the coffin. ‘You could just tell me.’290

He looked around at the other graves then back to Ailsa. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

Dorothy swallowed and nodded. ‘Then we dig.’

She took shovels out of the holdall and handed one over. She propped her torch against the gravestone and paused with the blade of the spade on the ground. The grass was better tended here than last night, no moss or dandelions, evenly cut. It would be more obvious that this grave had been disturbed.

Archie looked at her and waited. She nodded to him and he reluctantly placed his shovel blade against the grass. She pushed down on her own shovel, which sank into the soil. Archie watched her for a long moment, then joined in.

It was easier this time, psychologically. It’s true that people can get used to anything if it becomes normalised. Maybe Dorothy would be digging up corpses for the rest of her life.

Once the turf was placed aside she pushed up her sleeves and set about scooping shovelfuls of dirt into a pile by the grave. Her mind ran blank after a while, the repetitive lifting and dumping, over and over, worms glistening as they wriggled in the torchlight, stones like alien eggs half buried in the earth pile.

After two hours they were close to the depth they needed to be. Another forty minutes and she expected the clunk any moment, so when it came it felt preordained, as if she was always meant to be here doing this monstrous thing.