Can’t have been easy, I thought. Only young and married to a man twice her age who was never here and who’d left her there to deal with that great old place up on the hill with nowt but her babby for company. She was probably lonely. And you could tell from the clothes she weren’t familiar with our part of the world. I wouldn’t even know how to describe what she was wearing when we spoke that first time. It had me in mind of a monk’s habit from the horror films; like a sack with a hood, except it stopped above the knee, and she was wearing white long socks and boots shiny as a tadpole. Her hair was a city style. Fringe at the front but shoulder-length at the back and sides, and she’d done her eyes so they looked like a cat’s. She was glamorous. That’s the word. The sort that men reckon are flaunting themselves, though they don’t mind enjoying the show. The sort that women don’t feel safe around. When John said she were pretty it was no different to him telling me he’d seen some nice flowers or a rare bird, but I’ll admit there were times when I could have slapped her with the frying pan for the ease with which she looked so bloody good, and the way she could just, well, turn it on and off. She could make men go weak at the knees when she tried, though it always seemed to kill a little part of her when she did so.

It were wrong of me to look at her like that. I know that now. But you can’t help it, can you? Instinct, I mean. No different to when I jumped out of my skin after seeing her laying there in the old grave. Looked to me like she were a corpse herself, laying there on top of the spot where those old bones were sunk in deep. What’s the word I’m looking for? Sacra-something? Sacrilegious, that’s it. Seemed sacrilegious, her lying there, though I don’t worry overmuch about going to church. Wouldn’t swear in a church, mind. Wouldn’t laugh at a joke about Jesus. Just because you stop believing in Father Christmas doesn’t mean you go and board up the chimney.