It was cold and dim inside, as gloomy as a tomb. Daylight struggled through the stained-glass window behind the altar – wine-red and bottle-green. We shuffled into our pew near the front. I hadn’t been to church for ages – not since before Mutti was taken away – and the familiar smells swirled around me like the rising tide: old hymn books, cold stone, dust and candle wax. The air was heavy with stillness and quiet prayer.

The church filled up quickly – the whole village was there, I think. Someone started playing the church organ, and I was relieved; the quiet, respectful muttering was starting to make me nervous. My best dress was not warm enough for the chill of the church, and I found that I was somehow shivering and sweating at the same time. My fingertips had gone all pale and waxy, as if I didn’t have enough warm blood in my veins to reach them. I didn’t want to look at poor Sam Bright’s coffin. It was so close to me that I could almost have reached out and touched the newly hewn wood. I kept thinking that it could so easily have been my sister in there.

I made myself fold my hands in my lap and I looked up into the vault above us. I thought, as I had many times before, that it looked exactly like the upside-down hull of a ship. Perhaps Noah’s ark had capsized and we were all the poor creatures drowning in the flood.

Then the vicar walked up the central aisle and stood in front of the altar. The organ stopped and we all stood up. There was a moment of silence. The vicar spread his hands and opened his mouth to welcome us, but he didn’t say anything – he just stared at the back of the church, his mouth a perfect O. The entire congregation turned around to see what had taken the vicar by surprise.

A man had come through the church door. He walked up the aisle towards us, starched and upright in a patched old suit and boots that shone like black mirrors. It was Spooky Joe. What was he doing here?

He must have attempted to tame his wild white hair; it looked exactly like the combed clouds in the sky outside. He nodded stiffly to a couple of people as he walked in, his jaw set tight and serious. The muttering began again, but it was a different sort of muttering now.

He sat down on the other side of the aisle, just behind the Brights, and stared straight ahead. Then he nodded slightly to the vicar – just a downward shift of his mouth and a dipping of his hooded eyelids – and the service began.