‘There was a man,’ she said. ‘In that crypt. The stone building under the purple tree. The laurel went right through it. There was a man. A body.’

I shook my head. Can’t really say what for. It just felt that one of us should be saying something different. If one of us disagreed it would be more likely it wasn’t true.

‘That’s the Kinmont Mausoleum. Been there for centuries. Of course there’s bodies.’

‘That was a man!’ she said, and even as the rain and the wind battered the house it was the screech in her voice that went through me. ‘He was … fresh!’

‘He couldn’t be. Who would put him there?’ It was a daft question but it summed up my head in that moment. The idea was madness.

‘We have to go back,’ she said, and I saw her move towards the door.

‘In this?’ I goes. ‘Are you mad?’

Her face twisted into something I didn’t like. Her smile was like a gargoyle’s, all leering and boggle-eyed. ‘Mad? They think so. Some do. Maybe all. But I know what I saw. We can’t just leave him there.’ She stopped herself and I saw something else on her face, as if a fish had come to the surface to feed and then disappeared again without leaving much more than a ripple on the surface. ‘That’s his place. Stefan’s. My boy. He liked it there. We played …’

I don’t think it was in her to cry. She never did seem the type. That’s maybe the closest I saw her to squeezing out a tear. She held onto them like they were gold.

‘Come on, we’ll get dry, wait out the storm and then go and tell someone. Whatever we saw will be easier to get a gander at when the rain stops.’

She seemed like she wanted to protest but then her teeth started chattering and she gave in to a shiver and suddenly the idea of tea and a fireside didn’t seem so awful. She took her coat off in the hall but carried it with her to the sitting room, dripping water all the way. When she pulled her boots off she wasn’t wearing socks. Her feet were pale, swollen things. They made me think of the eggs we made at Easter; hard-boiled in ferns and leaves and onion skins with mottled patterns all over their shells.