She exchanged a look with Archie and redoubled her efforts, spurred on by the knowledge she was close. Archie kept digging with reluctant movements. She was scooping and clearing, soil lifting into the air behind her as their breath billowed from their mouths like lost souls.

Finally the coffin was mostly clear of dirt, just a smear left. This was a cheaper coffin, light pine, but it had held together well. Dorothy began unlocking the bolts at the corners and Archie eventually did likewise, then when they were all done Archie helped Dorothy out of the hole then climbed out himself. She 291wedged the shovel blade between the lid and coffin and they creaked apart like something from a horror movie.

She turned to Archie. ‘This is it.’

Archie lowered his head.

Dorothy breathed in the smell of damp dirt and sweat, blinked heavily as she lifted the lid and balanced it against the wall of the hole.

Crumbs of dirt fell into the open coffin as Dorothy lifted her torch from the headstone and pointed it.

Two bodies.

Her heart hammered against her ribs and spots flashed across her vision. She breathed, tried to be mindful, closed her eyes and opened them again.

There were some remains of clothes, strips of cloth, an emaciated leather belt, then at the top end of the coffin were two skulls, one higher than the other. Below that were two tattered ribcages like shipwrecks emerging at low tide. From the size of the remains it looked like a man and a woman. One was Ailsa.

Dorothy turned to Archie who was staring into the coffin.

She looked back and saw a slater disappear into the earth beneath a shoe. Two ladies’ shoes down there, and the other two feet just bare bones behind. She looked at the woman’s hands, bones folded across sunken ribs. The man had been wedged in along one side of the coffin, Ailsa pushed up against the other side. She was small, there was room for two of them. People might’ve noticed at the funeral if they knew how much a body weighs, or a coffin, or any of it. Certainly Jim would’ve known. And Archie.

She turned to him. ‘Simon Lawrence.’

He shook his head.

‘You knew all along,’ she said.

He just kept shaking his head, his eyes glowing wet as he wrapped his arms around himself.

Dorothy touched her face, felt the grains of dirt, wiped them away with a smear. ‘Tell me.’292

‘I can’t.’

‘Damn you, Archie, if you don’t tell me what happened, I’ll throw you in this grave and fill it in.’