She approached the body, pale and rubbery. Not like bodies on television dramas, that was something forensic shows got wrong. They were obviously actors lying there still breathing, blood oxygenating in their veins, hopes and disappointments still messing with their minds. The woman in front of her had no more disappointments, no more hope.

‘Gina O’Donnell,’ Archie said.

Dorothy reached out and her fingers hovered over the abrasive marks on Gina’s neck. Suicide at thirty-nine, hanged herself from the light fitting in her bedroom with a belt. Dorothy could see the buckle indentation still on her skin.

Archie followed her gaze. ‘Should be easy enough to cover up.’

Dorothy nodded. Archie wasn’t as skilled as Jim with the bodies, but he was good enough and he was conscientious. ‘It’s the sister organising, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Has she brought in clothes yet?’

Archie checked the pump, the peach-coloured liquid disappearing. ‘Yesterday. After…’43

He meant after they burnt Jim.

Dorothy watched as he checked the needle in the artery, the tube running to the pump. Someone else might have let him go when they discovered the nature of his illness, but Dorothy supported him and it had paid off. After his mother’s death he’d developed Cotard’s Syndrome, a psychological condition where the patient has periods believing they’re actually dead. It can occur with post-traumatic stress and Archie’s bereavement was clearly a trigger. He began hanging around cemeteries and crematoriums, attending the funerals of strangers, because he felt he was amongst his own. One of the weird things about it is that sufferers don’t contemplate suicide, because they believe they’re already dead. In severe cases people starve themselves to death.

Archie’s was never that serious but he suffered in silence for the first year he worked here. Dorothy noticed his increasing listlessness and subtly enquired. He was still doing his tasks but only the bare minimum, never otherwise interacting. Dorothy persuaded him to seek medical help, and after months round the houses, a switched-on psychiatrist came up with the diagnosis. There were a couple of years of trying out different anti-psychotics and mood suppressants, trial and error, until they found a balance that levelled him out. But it was always there in the background, the idea of his own death never fully left his mind.

Dorothy tried to imagine it, believing your soul had left your body and you were a walking corpse. Worse than real death, trapped in a decaying body, stuck between this world and the next.

‘I want to ask you something,’ she said.

‘Of course.’

She looked at Gina on the table, those marks on the neck.

‘What do you remember about Simon Lawrence?’

Archie stopped adjusting chemicals on the tray. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘He came to mind recently, that’s all.’44

Now Archie looked up. ‘Not much. He was here for the first few months after I started. Driving mostly, some carpentry.’