She scooped it up in her hand and threw it onto the pyre, watching as its feathers burst into flames. She wiped the bird’s blood on her jeans and breathed deeply.

5

2

JENNY

Dorothy raised her glass. ‘To Jim.’

The three women clinked tumblers and sipped Highland Park. Jenny felt the burn as it went down. Any half-decent gin was her usual drink, but Dad loved whisky and this was for him. She placed her glass on the kitchen table and ran a finger over the grain of the oak, thought about the thousands of meals she’d eaten here as a kid.

Dorothy took a gulp of whisky and played with a clay dish in the middle of the table, something Hannah made at primary school with the yin and yang symbols on it. She made it for Dorothy, even back then interested in her gran’s worldview, the balance and connectedness of the world. The dish had a used-up tea-light in it, and Jenny thought of her dad in the garden, smouldering away as they sat here. She took another drink.

Archie was still down there tending the fire. When he’d begun using the poker on Jim’s body the three women had adjourned upstairs to the kitchen, Indy slipping off to look after reception. The same front desk dealt with both funeral and investigator businesses, different numbers to call but they came through to the same phone.

Jenny looked round the large open-plan kitchen. They were at the old table next to the functional kitchen stuff – cooker, fridge-freezer, cupboards – running along two walls. The adjacent wall was taken up by two large bay windows looking out over Bruntsfield Links. From here Jenny could see the crenellations of Edinburgh Castle ahead and the dome of Arthur’s Seat to the right. In between was the tree-lined park, a stream of students and 6school pupils crisscrossing from Bruntsfield to Marchmont and back the other way.

The final wall of the room had large whiteboards from waist to head height. One had ‘FD’ in thick letters across the top, the other ‘PI’. The kitchen doubled as the ops room, from which both businesses had been run for the last decade, since Jim surprised everyone by announcing he intended to expand out of the death industry into private investigations. Maybe it didn’t surprise everyone, Dorothy didn’t bat an eye, but Jenny struggled to get her head around it, and Jim evaded any questions from her.