Michael had laid an old towel over most of the body, but I could see a white elbow, sticking out like a fallen branch above the webs.

‘Don’t look,’ Michael would say whenever I glanced over.

We kept going for another fifteen minutes in silence until I stopped.

‘Keep digging,’ Michael said.

‘He’s moving.’

‘What?’

‘He’s moving! Look. Wait.’

Sure enough, the webbed surface was twitching. More significant than wind through the clearing. The impression had changed from solid snow to a rippling white ocean. I could almost feel it through the threads, like I was the spider that spun it, the central nerve.

Michael stopped digging and looked up. ‘Go back to the car.’

‘No.’

Michael walked over and peeled off the towel. I followed, and saw the body in full for the first time. There was a dark glistening stain above one hip. Someone shot him, then I hit him, Michael had said. I wasn’t sure; I’d only seen gunshots in the movies. The man’s neck had a lump in it as if he’d swallowed a golf ball. He was wearing a black balaclava, but it wasn’t quite the right shape. The fabric was bulbous in the wrong places. When I was a kid, a bully at my school used to put two cricket balls in a sock and swing it at me. That’s what the balaclava looked like. I got the feeling the fabric was the only thing holding his head together. It had three holes, two for the eyes, which were closed, and one for the mouth. There were small red bubbles pooled on his lips, pulsing. The froth of bubbles was growing, spilling onto his chin. I couldn’t see any of his features, but I could tell from his mottled, sun-damaged arms and the engorged veins across the backs of his hands that he was at least twenty years older than Michael.

I knelt, interlocked my hands, and gave a couple of rudimentary compressions. The man’s chest caved in a way I knew it shouldn’t, right down the sternum, and for a moment all I could think of was that his chest was like the bag of money, unzipped down the middle.

‘You’re hurting him,’ Michael said, putting his hand under my arm and pulling me up, before guiding me away.

‘We have to take him to the hospital.’ I made one last, pleading stand.

‘He won’t make it.’

‘He might.’

‘He won’t.’

‘We have to try.’

‘I can’t go to the hospital.’

‘Lucy will understand.’

‘No.’

‘You must have sobered up by now.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You didn’t kill him – you said he was shot. Is the money his?’

Michael grunted.

‘He clearly stole it. This makes sense. You’ll be okay.’

‘It’s two hundred and sixty grand.’