A paraffin lamp casts a dim glow round the room with peeling white paint. There are two doors supported by trestles. William’s heart jumps at the sight of such small bodies lying on them. During training, he’d looked after one child; a ten-year-old boy hit by a car. At the time, he thought he’d taken it in his stride. Now he thinks the embalmers look as if they’re working on dolls. Two men stand over a body, one pumping embalming fluid in with a hand pump, the other attaching a label to a big toe. On the floor is a bucket into which blood flows. There are mounds of black rags at the embalmers’ feet.

Another man, at the second station, looks immediately to William and opens his arms slightly in a gesture of relieved welcome.

‘Harry, this is William,’ says Jimmy, ‘your partner for the next few hours. I’ll leave him with you, Harry.’

‘Thanks, Jimmy,’ the man says, then turns to William. ‘Ready for this, lad?’

‘Ready,’ says William, not wanting another speech.

‘Right then.’ Harry picks up a pair of scissors and hands them to William. ‘I’ve cleaned him up as best I can.’

The boy’s brown hair lies flat across his forehead. His face has smears of grey across it, but large smudges of freckles are clear to see on his neat nose, reminding William suddenly of his old chorister friend, Martin. His arms are freckled too and his shorts are rumpled. Then William notices that below the knee, both legs are crushed.

‘You saw the parents on the way in?’ Harry asks. William nods. ‘They’re waiting to see if we’ve got their child.’ A tiny muscle twitches under Harry’s left eye. ‘First, cut the shirt off. Neat as you can.’

‘OK,’ says William, moving already to the body, noticing one side of the shirt is covered in slurry and the other is strangely fresh. He snips down the clean seam and manoeuvres it off the boy. One side of it feels light and insubstantial in his hands while the other is heavy and pulls downwards. ‘Where shall I put it?’

Harry shakes his head slightly. ‘You’re going to take it out there’ – he nods to the chapel door – ‘hold it up, and ask whose little boy went to school in it on Friday morning. Then bring them in here.’

5

At nearly 5 a.m. there is a purple tint in the sky; a tired light, as if it’s reluctant to break open the third day of Aberfan’s suffering. The drone of lorries taking the slag from the village is constant and William feels the air move as one of them moans past.