I thought it was a tailor’s dummy. Honest I did. One of those big dolls you get in the windows of the shops in Carlisle. I thought somebody had dressed one up and put it in the Kinmont crypt for a game. That’s what I tell myself now, anyhow. Maybe I didn’t think that at all. Maybe I knew straight from the off what I was looking at and I’ve made the rest of it up. Maybe not. I’m blathering, I think. Wittering on, John calls it. Pushing my dinner around the plate. He says that too, and I like that description. Acting like I’m eating, but not actually eating. That’s maybe what I’m doing now. Making noise without saying anything. I’m sorry. I’ll try again …

I’d seen her a couple of times before. Cordelia, I mean. Striking lass, she were, though it pains me to say it, given how fond of herself she can be when she’s dolled up to the nines. Weren’t always as slim, mind. She were massive with the baby when she moved in to the old Winslow place. Big enough to be carrying twins. She was a delicate thing underneath, you could tell that at once, but with the baby she were carrying – well, she looked like a house-end. Even so, John had said she was a balm for the eyes and he wasn’t wrong. Looked like somebody from a magazine. Eyes like forget-me-nots and her lipstick were a colour me mam would have called ‘brazen’. Carried herself a bit fancy, if I’m honest. Sniffing the clouds, as me mam used to say. Bit fond of herself, though if I were half so pretty as her it would be a struggle to get me away from the mirror. But I don’t like to judge and you can’t know a book from its cover so I never joined in when anybody made fun or said she were a bit too bloody haughty by half.