Samuel would have known the word for how I felt that night as I sat in my nest and ground my teeth, grabbing blankets in my fists and sucking on my cheek until it hurt. Was it temper? Fury at being doubted? Sadness, even. Fairfax had seemed such a likeable man. Perhaps it was the sting of disappointment. I had glimpsed something other than the darkness of my constant grief. As the body tumbled onto the damp grass I had experienced something ignite within me. It was as if an ember had suddenly erupted in a dead hearth. For that heartbeat, as the rain battered down upon me and I looked upon the limp and broken corpse, I forgot Stefan. For that solitary tick of the clock, I escaped from the mire of my own grief. It felt like being thrown free of a burning car.

I’d seen him. Of that I was sure. He’d worn a blue suit. He had dark hair and polished shoes and he wore a khaki bag on a strap. His face was white and angular, like dough pulled into points. Not old but not young. A man. A dead man, hidden in a crypt alongside ancient bones.

‘That doesn’t matter now,’ Felicity had said, as she snivelled into her sleeve. ‘Fairfax. It’s horrible. We should never have made him go out …’

I couldn’t stand it. Not the self-pity. Not the weeping and the stooped shoulders and the shaking hands. I’d stayed in that churchyard an hour, looking for a body that shouldn’t have been there. Only gave up when the rain started up again. Knocked on Felicity’s door. Her husband opened it. A little man, with square shoulders and bandy legs and a lipless knife-wound of a mouth. He knew what had happened. Felicity had told him. He’d invited me in and offered tea. Handed me a towel. Told me what had happened to Fairfax. It seemed extraordinary. Two hours before he had been standing in the doorway of the kitchen. Now he was a mangled thing on a dirty, rain-lashed road.

‘Sergeant Chivers will be up to talk to Felicity when he has time,’ said John. ‘He’ll want to know what the old sod was thinking, driving in this weather in that daft bloody car. Should nivver have bought it but he wouldn’t be told.’

He hadn’t said it accusingly but Felicity had heard it as such. She’d given in to more tears. Shuddered and wailed and said it was all her fault.

‘The body,’ I’d said. ‘He went to go and see the body we told him about. And now the body’s not there.’

‘This is the body in the crypt, then,’ said John, and his expression was hard to read. ‘Don’t think on that now. Can’t have been nice. Must have been a shock.’