When they came to the opening at the end of the lane, they could have wandered into a century before their own time. The graves were spaced out in the irregularly shaped plot, perhaps twenty of them that were immediately visible. Every side was surrounded by trees. The sky was dark above them, and there was no way of knowing who was watching from beyond the foliage.

The place was empty. No bird dared peck for worms in the wet earth. No rabbit, rodent or squirrel dashed for the cover of long grass.

‘Nothing here,’ Baarda said. ‘We should—’

The shovel hit him a blow that sounded like a steak mallet bouncing off a butcher’s block.

‘Oh, holy fucking shit …’ Connie shrieked.

The man who stepped forward from behind the place where Baarda had just been standing was no ghoul. He was as real and menacing as any psychopath Connie had ever met. Baarda’s body lay face down in the grass, water beating onto the back of his head. Blood flowed in rivulets from his hair and down his neck. Connie wondered if he was still alive and – if he was – how long he had left to live.

‘Hello there,’ the man said. ‘I’m Fergus.’

Connie dragged her eyes upwards from Baarda’s body and forced her attention onto the man holding the shovel. The descriptions of him as skeletal were understandable but inaccurate. He was wire, bone, sinew, tendon – all stretched to their limits, absolutely taut – and clear through the skin, as if he were an anatomical diagram of a human. His face was dominated by cavernous eye sockets and painfully pointed cheekbones, his dermis little more than cling film holding tissue tight within. So many blood vessels had broken in the whites of his eyes that the colour of them was demonic. There were more gaps than remaining teeth, and as he breathed and spoke, there was a fierce whistling from his mouth, as if he were a stove-top kettle about to blow. Which in psychiatric terms was exactly what he was, she thought.

‘I’m Connie. It’s nice to finally meet you.’

‘How did you find me?’

He grinned and she saw blackened gums. The descriptions of Cotard’s syndrome hadn’t done the condition justice. It wasn’t only the sufferer who believed he was dead. The man before her was doing as good an impression of being a walking corpse as she could have dredged from her imagination.

‘Never mind. What matters is that you reached me. I thought you might.’

‘I was at your house before,’ Connie said. ‘There was a fire. Did you know about that?’

‘It’s not my house any more. I don’t live here.’ He planted the cutting edge of the shovel into the ground and stood with one boot on its shoulder.

‘Here … as in Edinburgh?’