He rubs at the back of his head. He’s bone tired, the night of no sleep and physical activity beginning to catch up with him. He keeps thinking of the body, the blood slowly pooling in the crevices and creases of his palms, just outside, just over there. You buried him. This single fact keeps repeating on Joe, as though, if his brain tells him often enough and in different, more shocking ways, it might sink in, and he might accept it. Your sister killed that man. You hacked through a tree root with your spade and huffed like it was merely an inconvenience, in order to bury him. Cathy closed his eyes for him.

‘Right. We don’t know anything about him,’ Joe says. ‘Except that he was half British.’

‘Exactly,’ Frannie says.

‘And was staying near here?’

‘I guess so.’

‘So it’s quite likely – if he’s staying around here, or lives around here – that the police will question us.’

‘It is,’ Cathy says.

‘And if they find the body,’ Joe says. ‘Then they will find our DNA.’

‘Yes,’ says Frannie.

‘So we need to destroy all the evidence we can,’ Joe says. ‘And make it seem like something else has happened. A different – narrative.’

He takes the pen and starts to write down the evidence on the back of an Italian pizzeria menu that he will burn later.

The hire car.

Their whereabouts.

The crime scene.

He clicks the top of the pen, on and off again, on and off again.

‘This is madness,’ Frannie says. ‘This is actually mad.’

‘We need to be meticulous.’ Joe finds his jaw is tensed. He wishes she’d keep up with him. He’s trying to undo her mess, after all.

‘You sound like Mum,’ Frannie says softly. Their mother would say that sort of thing, Joe concedes. She’s never quite been able to relinquish control of the practice, regularly going over and over the books, interrupting operations.

‘Don’t X-ray clients’ pockets,’ Cathy says, their mother’s number-one catchphrase.

Joe gives a wan smile. ‘Treat each animal as you find them,’ he finishes. ‘Regardless of their owners’ income.’

Cathy smiles across the table at him. ‘I was just thinking that. You really do,’ she says. ‘Joseph, Catherine, Francesca – whoever you are!’ she says, an exact imitation of their father’s chaotic inability to discern which of his children he’s speaking to.

‘God,’ Frannie says, throwing her head back. ‘We’re mad to be laughing.’

‘They’re old jokes,’ Joe says with a half-smile. ‘Our mad parents.’

Their parents used to be similar, both fans of hard work and dedication. Owen, their father, grew up in a council estate in Birmingham. When he was twenty-five, he had been sweeping the floors of the factory where he had worked for a decade when it went into administration. According to Owen, he knew who worked hard, and who didn’t, and where the systems did and didn’t function well, and so he made the administrators an offer. They accepted it, he got a bank loan and went from cleaner to CEO. He now owns fourteen factories. But, where their mother has remained hard working, since Rosie, their father has retreated into himself, fallen into sullenness.