I was allowed to cut a gap in the chicken-wire fence behind the pool house and peel it back wide enough for me to drag through each of the dead men. Some afternoons, between workouts, Tenoch would sit on a poolside-lounger and watch me struggling, sweating and swearing.

‘You could help a bit, you know. They’re pretty heavy,’ I called out to him as one of the guy’s hands came away from its skeleton.

‘You shouldn’t rely on anyone, Rhiannon. If you worked on your upper body strength you wouldn’t need to.’

‘Why do you work out so much if you don’t use your muscles for anything other than showing off?’ I said, squinting in the baking heat.

‘I’m saving my strength for other things,’ he said, which I didn’t get but I couldn’t be arsed to have him clarify either.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I huffed, heaving the third man out of the Wendy House, across the terrace, round to the fence and yanking his feet through the gap, pushing him down into the shallow ditch at the bottom. I didn’t have the strength to heave each of the bodies into the wheelbarrow, let alone wheel them all down into the field, so instead I had to rely on the old drag, roll and heave technique, muttering all the while.

‘I’m supposed to be on my holidays. I’ve fucking paid to be here, why have I got to do this as well? Hmm? I mean, is that fair?’ I was directing my questions to the vacant expression of the fourth man as I dragged his sorry ass through the fence and rolled him down into the ditch.

I clambered down into the ditch and grabbed his wrists, pulling him up into the field. ‘I mean, shouldn’t he be waiting on me? I’ve paid an arm and a leg to be here. When I kill a guy, the least I do is bury him myself. Why doesn’t he do his own dirty work? What am I? Some kind of skivvy? Prick…’

I got back up to the pool house to find Tenoch waiting in the doorway. I yanked down my face mask.

‘Is that what you think this is? A holiday?’

‘No,’ I said, sweat trickling down my forehead into my already-stinging eyes. ‘To be honest, I don’t know what this is.’

‘You are helping me, like I am helping you.’

‘I’ve paid you to help me. And I don’t know if you’ve ever dug a grave before but it is bloody hard work in this heat. I’ve been at this for days.’

‘So?’

‘So you didn’t tell me there was rattlesnakes in those fields either.’

‘I don’t expect they caused you much problem, a couple of little snakes. You’re a serial killer after all.’

‘I didn’t kill them. I don’t kill willy-nilly.’