At seven thirty, Frannie says, ‘Paul will be awake.’

‘Lydia will sort him,’ Joe says. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘Go, if you want,’ Cathy says to Frannie. ‘Lydia will be wondering – well. It isn’t fair.’ She tucks a strand of hair back into her bun, where it pulls tight against her hairline.

‘How are we going to get in without Lydia seeing us like this?’ Frannie says hoarsely. She gestures to them, to their dirtied and bloodstained limbs. Cathy shrugs, trying to stay in the now.

‘I think that looks undisturbed,’ Joe says, standing and looking at the grave in the woods. Cathy stares at it. It is impossible to tell. Like a hidden object, her eyes are drawn immediately to it.

Her younger sister stares too. Frannie, whom she’s always known so well, who had a baby after a one-night stand and never bothered to look up the man again. Cathy’s always known exactly who she is. Outwardly confident, sociable Frannie. But now … Cathy suddenly feels, there in the woods, like they don’t know each other at all. A stranger stands next to her.

‘I don’t know,’ Cathy says quickly to Joe. ‘Do you think it looks okay?’

‘It’s fine. I think. We need to put the spades away.’

‘Were they clean?’

Joe exhales. ‘I can’t remember.’

Frannie is silent, standing next to them. She’s looking at her phone. Worried about Paul, Cathy guesses.

‘They were clean,’ Frannie says, glancing up.

‘No – I don’t think they were …’ Joe says. ‘Why would they be? They’re for gardening.’

‘Just run the hose over them,’ Cathy says. ‘Okay?’

‘Okay.’

They walk away. Cathy tries not to think of William lying there, seven feet under, alone. The sun has come up. The sky is a perfect, delicate blue. If you threw up a ball, it would shatter.

After a few minutes, Joe stops still on a lattice of tree roots. ‘What if he wasn’t dead?’ he says.

‘What?’ Frannie says, a harsh, loud exclamation in the early morning. ‘Joe, honestly.’

‘He was dead,’ Cathy says reassuringly. Joe blushes.

Funny how anxiety manifests itself. Joe once became convinced he’d left a surgical instrument inside a great Dane. Cathy had been present at the operation – there was no way it could have happened – but, nevertheless, Joe had wanted to open her back up. In the end, they’d compromised on an X-ray, which had shown nothing, of course.

She sees Joe’s chest rise and fall slowly. ‘Okay,’ he says slowly.

‘Let me see that piece of paper,’ Cathy says. Joe passes it to her. It’s illegible. Some sort of form, all in Italian. She looks at Frannie, ready to explain why they took it and the wallet, but she is lost in her own world, wandering haphazardly, staring up at the sky, lost in thought, lost in guilt, probably. Hopefully. Hopefully not just daydreaming.

‘We need to think,’ Joe says, as they walk. ‘We need to think.’

As the three of them step into the sunlight, Frannie reaches for Cathy’s hand. They wind their fingers together. The shovels clink against each other in the silence.