‘I’m not ready for him to go,’ Jenny said.

Dorothy leaned back and her chair creaked. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

Jenny shook her head and sipped her whisky.

‘What was that all about, anyway?’ she said, angling her glass towards the door.

‘What?’ Dorothy said.

‘The human barbecue downstairs.’

Dorothy shrugged. ‘It’s what he wanted. He was sick of the formal stuff, the ceremony of it.’8

Hannah frowned. ‘But he always said people needed the rules and structure to give them closure.’

‘Maybe he thought we didn’t need that,’ Dorothy said.

Jenny wanted to kick her chair back and scream out of the window, lift her tumbler and smash it against the funeral board, splatter whisky over those other deaths. She sat still.

‘But it was illegal,’ she said. She knew enough about the funeral business to know that burning a body in your back garden was not OK.

‘No one will know,’ Dorothy said. ‘Or care.’

‘You think?’ Jenny said. She hated how she sounded, like the bratty teenager she once was, sitting at this same table, moaning that Dorothy and Jim wouldn’t let her go to some all-night rave at Ingliston with two thirty-year-old men she barely knew. Here she was, a forty-five-year-old divorcee with a grown-up daughter, and she still felt like a brat. Maybe it was Dad’s funeral bringing it all to the surface, or maybe it was simply being back in this house of death.

‘I know this is hard on you,’ Dorothy said. ‘Both of you.’

Jenny felt ashamed. This was Dorothy’s husband of fifty years she was saying goodbye to, they had all lost a massive part of their lives. It wasn’t a competition.

‘And for you, Mum,’ she said, reaching her hand across the table.

Dorothy chewed the inside of her cheek and took Jenny’s hand. Her skin was still soft at the age of seventy. She seemed much younger than that, and always had a look on her face, even now, suggesting she was at peace with the world.

Hannah put her hand on top of Jenny’s and Dorothy’s, which made it feel like they were a gang about to execute a heist. They each pulled away just as the doorbell rang downstairs.

Dorothy sighed and pushed back her chair, but Hannah put a hand out to stop her.

‘Indy can handle it,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

Dorothy hesitated then nodded.

Hannah was so in love it made Jenny’s heart swell. Jenny had 9only felt the overwhelming power of love like that once before, with Craig. And, well.

She heard muffled conversation downstairs, then steady footsteps and a tap on the open kitchen door.