‘This might sound crazy,’ he said. ‘But after all this calms down, maybe we could meet up for coffee or a drink sometime.’

He glanced up then away. She watched him acting nervous and thought about Craig standing over her, the kitchen knife in her guts. She thought about him with his hands around Mel’s throat, Dorothy’s throat. She thought about standing in someone’s open grave with her mum, dirt under her nails and a weight in her heart. She thought about the funeral happening right now, the pain of losing a daughter, and she thought about life and how it was stupidly short and you had to try and live it even if it killed you in the process.

‘I’d like that,’ she said.

He shuffled on the spot, smiled, held her gaze. ‘OK, great.’

He looked around like an actor waiting for his prompt.

‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be in touch.’319

‘Sure.’

He was suddenly energetic, out of the door and down the hall, then gone.

Jenny rested her weight on the plinth, just the latest dead soul to sit on this piece of wood in this room, and she tried to think of a possible future.

320

62

HANNAH

Hannah looked out of the window at Bruntsfield Links. Clouds scudded across the sky throwing patches of light and shade on the grass, shifting like a shoal of fish. She thought about collective consciousness, how fish and birds move in groups in a way that suggests they have knowledge of each other’s minds. Insects too. Maybe humans are the same, maybe we move in patterns that acknowledge each other’s intentions, have awareness of others’ thoughts. Recent experiments across disciplines pointed to a more connected universe, quantum biology, psychology, biochemistry. No man, or woman, is an island, and all that.

She felt Schrödinger rub against her leg. She knelt and stroked him, tickled his chin, and he gave off a subsonic rumble of a purr that she felt against her hand. Signals and communication everywhere.

She straightened up and went to the whiteboards. Mel’s name was at the top of the funeral board now, removed from the investigation board. She thought about the names connected to Mel – Xander, Bradley, Peter. They had been connected, of course, just not the way Hannah imagined. She thought about the name that wasn’t on the board. Her dad lying in hospital, his body repairing itself, drawing energy from a drip and his food, mending his torn skin and flesh, blood swilling round his body, his neurons firing. She pictured him kneeling on the grass a week ago, blood pouring out of him, looking like a lost boy praying for forgiveness, or maybe just for life to end. Then she thought about Peter Longhorn, his body buried or cremated by some other funeral director.

‘Hey, you.’321