‘Come on, Marcia, let’s go. I need to get back to the world of the living,’ I said, and pulled her away. ‘I’ll buy you a hot chocolate up in the village.’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ said Marcia. ‘Lead the way.’

*

After Marcia had gone home, I called Heather. I needed her reassuring angle on life after the atmosphere at the cemetery.

‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ she said after I’d told her about finding Grace. ‘Don’t let it bother you.’ She laughed. ‘It’s not like she can come and haunt you.’

‘No because, in a way, she already has.’

‘Haunted by your own spirit.’

‘Stop it. Oh, but one thing that was worth the visit was that I found out Elizabeth Siddal is buried there.’

‘The one in Millais’s painting of Ophelia? Where she’s lying amongst the reeds?’

I nodded. ‘Apparently she was ill after posing for that painting; it was after lying in a bath in cold water for hours.’

‘Let’s see what it says on the Net,’ she said. ‘Let me get my laptop. Give me a minute … Here it is. Lizzie Siddal, 1829–1862. Buried in Highgate in the West cemetery in the Rossetti family grave. She died of an overdose of laudanum – no one knew whether it was intentional or an accident.’

‘Apparently, on the day of her funeral, her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, placed a book of his poems next to her face in her coffin. Seven years later, the coffin was reopened and the book taken out and published, a fact that some art historians believed haunted him for the rest of his life, and is the reason that he wasn’t buried in the family grave. There is also a story that – when the coffin was opened – she was in pristine condition and her beautiful red hair had continued to grow.’

‘I heard that story, but apparently it’s been exaggerated, because everyone’s hair continues to grow a little after death. There is another story that the man who ordered the exhumation made up the story about the hair to tantalize Rossetti.’

‘Good story all the same,’ I said. ‘Want to come? It’s on Friday at ten. We could skive off and not open the shop until lunchtime.’

‘Wow, you have changed your tune. Months ago, you would never have suggested skiving off. You bet I’ll come. Christina, Dante’s sister, is also buried there. I loved her poems when I was going through my “tragic heroine” phase in my twenties.’

‘Ah, those happy days,’ I said as I clicked off my phone.

I arrived back home just as Jon was getting out of his car with Chief.

‘Hey Bea,’ he called as he put Chief on a lead, ‘where have you been?’

‘Cemetery in Highgate.’

‘Oh. I am sorry. A funeral? Someone close?’