‘Freddy Robertson was right, you know,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s the unknown we’re most frightened of, the things we don’t understand. And more than anything else in the world, death is the great unknown. The only way to come to terms with it is to understand it. If you can do that, then death loses its power to be quite so frightening.’

‘I hope that’s so.’

‘He wasn’t right about everything, though. Vernon Slack had been listening to him too much.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The idea that the soul hangs around the body until the flesh is gone from the bones – that isn’t true at all. There’s a moment when the personality dies, when the person you loved is gone for ever. In the hospital, I knew exactly when that had happened. There was no doubt about it, none at all. And then nothing mattered any more. I mean, I wasn’t worried about what death would mean for Mum, all that business about decomposition and the body digesting itself. Because anything that took place after that moment wasn’t happening to her. It was just nature tidying up.’

Fry straightened up. ‘Have you seen the clouds over there?’ she said.

Cooper looked across the valley in amazement. He had never known her to notice the weather in the Peak District before, not unless it was actually raining so hard that she was in danger of drowning. But he saw what she’d noticed. There were banks of dense grey clouds over Hammerton Hill, but they were breaking up as they rose, allowing a glimpse of sky.

He turned to look at Fry. She was gazing past him at the view, as if seeing the landscape for the first time. Over her shoulder, Cooper could see the carved miner smiling as the sun touched his face. The miner didn’t care what happened to his body – and why should he? Someone had captured his spirit and preserved it for ever. His memory would never decompose, his soul was intact, his eternity was beyond the need for a physical body. Somehow, from somewhere, he’d found the secret of peace.

But Cooper had one more thing he needed to say. It was something that had been burning a hole in his heart since he’d spent those hours sitting by his mother’s bed, with too much time to think.

‘Vernon Slack said the dead place was in other people’s hearts,’ he said.

‘Yes?’ said Fry.

‘But he was wrong about that, too, wasn’t he?’

‘What do you mean, Ben?’

‘Everybody who knew Vernon lied to protect him. Everybody. They tried to shift the blame on to his father, who deserved it, God help him. And his grandfather decided he’d rather suffer himself than allow Vernon to go through the nightmare he’d face if he was arrested.’