He always wanted to incorporate their surname into the veterinary practice, when his mother handed it over to him, Cathy and Frannie, but everybody said it didn’t work, said it sounded like a garden centre. And so instead they named it the anodyne Vets 24 – something so modern it makes his mother wince. Evan, the most senior vet who isn’t in the family partnership, is currently running it while they’re away, here, though Joe is sure they will hear all about that when they return. Evan thinks he is a real hero. Their retired mother, Maria, is helping out a couple of days a week too. Hopefully she will prop him up.

Cathy nods quickly. ‘Yeah.’ Their eyes meet again. ‘Only us. Forever.’

It takes another hour to finish digging. The last foot is the hardest. The soil is cool and packed, the night sky above Joe quiet and dark. Worms veer out of the sides of the hole, almost as if they are leering at him as he digs.

Frannie’s head pokes over the edge of the grave at five thirty. She’s finished burning the blood on the road and the grass verges, and cleaned the car. She couldn’t get the dent out of the fender, she says, but Joe has a plan for that. She helps them get out of the grave, three chain-linked siblings, their hands in each other’s.

When Cathy emerges, the sky is beginning to lighten, black to grey, dawn in monochrome. It’s still warm, the night heavily scented and close.

‘Right,’ Cathy says sadly. She picks up the wallet. ‘You didn’t check his name?’ she asks.

‘Didn’t want to,’ Joe says.

He watches her run her fingers over the embossed name on a credit card. ‘Mr W. R. McGovern,’ she says softly. She finds his driving licence. ‘William. He’s thirty-one.’

‘Was,’ Frannie says, casting a glance at Joe.

‘Was,’ Joe echoes.

Frannie leans back over William R. McGovern, aged thirty-one, as if blessing him. When she sits back, her forehead is anointed with blood. The grave dug, Cathy leans over and closes his eyes with the very tips of her fingers.

8.

Now

Jason’s Office, mid February, 5.55 p.m.

Jason and I are standing outside his office in the cold. He is shifting from foot to foot, wanting to head off, I guess, to wherever it is that he goes. He rushed me out with him at ten to six, but seemed to want to keep talking, asking me questions in the lift on the way down and as we crossed the shabby foyer, trying to make the most of the time given.

‘Before I go,’ he says for the second time, lighting a cigarette wordlessly, without explanation or excuse, ‘still no contact with the others?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Nothing.’

‘Right,’ he says, flicking the end of the cigarette, evidently thinking as he breathes out two columns of blue smoke from his nose. ‘Interesting.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Well. Not what I expected,’ he says with a brief shrug. ‘Families – you know. They usually find it hard to sever the ties.’ His eyes catch mine, the tip of the cigarette a small sun in the descending winter murkiness. ‘No matter the circumstances,’ he adds.