A few minutes later, Vernon drove out on to Fargate, hunched over the steering wheel awkwardly, the way he did everything. Hudson had sworn to himself he’d get rid of Vernon if he messed up one more thing, no matter what old man Slack said. The lad was a liability, and this firm couldn’t afford liabilities any more.

Hudson snorted to himself as they drove through the centre of Edendale. Lad? Vernon was twenty-five, for heaven’s sake. He ought to be learning the business side of things, ready to take over when the time came. Some chance of that, though. Vernon was nowhere near the man his father had been. It had to be said that Richard had done a poor job of shaping his son. Not that there’d be a business much longer for anyone to run.

When they reached the house in Southwoods, Hudson asked the relatives to wait downstairs. There was nothing worse than having distressed grievers watching the deceased being manhandled into a body bag. If full rigor hadn’t set in, the corpse tended to flop around a bit. Sometimes, you’d almost think they were coming back to life.

This corpse was an old man, shrunken and smelly, with a bubble of grey froth on his lips. He wasn’t quite cold yet, but his skin felt like putty, flat and unresisting. Hudson thought that if he poked a finger hard enough into the man’s stomach, it would sink right in until it touched his spine.

Vernon was standing by the bed like an idiot, his arms hanging at his sides, his mind on anything but the job.

‘What’s up with you?’ said Hudson.

‘Melvyn, when you do a removal like this one, don’t you ever notice the little things in a person’s bedroom?’

‘Like what?’

‘Just the little things. Look, there’s a glass of water he’s only half drunk. There’s a razor here that somebody used to shave him with this morning. It’s still got some of his hairs on it, even though he’s dead.’

‘Of course he’s bloody dead,’ said Hudson, struggling to keep his voice down. ‘What do you think we’re doing here?’

‘Don’t you look at those things, Melvyn?’

‘No. It’s just a job. We’re professionals.’

‘But don’t you sometimes think … Well, while all this stuff is lying around, it’s as if he’s not really dead at all. He’s still here in the room.’

‘For God’s sake, leave off the thinking, Vernon, and get a grip on this stiff.’

Hudson took the knees of the corpse, while Vernon grasped the shoulders. An arm lifted and a hand flapped, as though waving goodbye.

‘Watch it, or he’ll end up on the floor,’ said Hudson. ‘The family down there are doing their best to pretend they don’t know what’s happening. An almighty thump on the ceiling will ruin the illusion.’

They got the body on to the stretcher and began to negotiate the stairs. These old cottages were always a problem. The doorways were too narrow, the stairs too steep, the corner at the bottom almost impossible. Hudson often thought that people must have been a lot smaller when they built these houses – unless they lowered corpses out of the window on the end of a rope in those days.