She made a mental note to ask Jacob when the cleaner would next be in. She still had to check each of these cameras for other times of day, and there would soon be more footage from the new SD cards. She didn’t know how she was going to keep on top of it, as well as everything else.

There was a soft tap on the door to the office, and Archie was standing there.

‘Are you all right?’ he said.

Dorothy rubbed at her face and nodded.162

‘What are you doing?’ Archie said, nodding at the laptop screen. There was a frozen image of Jacob, book open on his lap, eyes closed.

‘Just spying on an old man,’ she said.

‘OK.’ Archie straightened up in the doorway. ‘I’m heading out on a pick-up and I could use the help. Do you want to come?’

Dorothy closed the laptop screen and threw the printouts onto the desk.

‘Yes, I do.’

There was nothing left of Erin Underwood. Dorothy wanted to bundle her emaciated body in her arms and hug her, but she feared the bones might break under the pressure. Leukaemia, surgery, chemo and radiotherapy had left the teenager a human husk, hairless and with skin like rice paper, shrunken into herself like a voodoo doll.

They were in the mortuary at the ERI. Really Erin should’ve been in a hospice or at home for the last stretch, but sometimes there wasn’t time, sometimes people just gave up in front of your eyes. There were big banks of body fridges here, a phalanx of gurneys laid out like dead soldiers on a battlefield, post-mortem tables and toolkits, plus all the paperwork that went with the NHS.

Archie was sorting that paperwork and swapping small talk with the young mortuary worker in his overalls, tall and skinny with a goofball smile and wild, curly hair. Dorothy imagined this kid in the pub tonight, talking about what he did at work. It was hard for anyone in this industry to socialise outside of it. It often didn’t go down well when people found out what you did for a living. They either presumed you were morbid or they had their own creepy questions about how it all worked. Or they recoiled 163from conversation completely, refusing to think about mortality. She tried to imagine this affable lad dropping it into conversation as he chatted up someone at the bar.