Paolo sits down without being asked. Looks up at the two elderly women staring at him expectantly. He feels like he’s in a Chekhov play and can’t remember his lines.

‘Read my chapter first,’ says Cordelia, pouring tea into a china cup for herself and a mug for her friend. ‘It only makes sense if you read me first.’

‘That’s true, actually,’ confirms Flick. ‘She’s not putting herself forward.’

Paolo starts to pull out his recorder, his notebooks. Looks at the teapot and gets nothing. Takes the sheaf of documents and starts to read. ‘So, I suppose … it’s all to do with what happened at Gilsland?’ he asks, weakly.

‘Aye.’ Felicity nods. ‘Most bloody things are.’

PART ONE

CORDELIA

We’ll start in the graveyard. I could start in a dozen other places, but if we’re going to get to the nuts and bolts of it all then it might as well be Highgate. Got the right smell to it, that place. Smells as death should, and no more so than when autumn’s giving over to winter. Proper end-of-the road smell. Earth, wood, decay – that sickly whiff of fermentation, like there’s fruit dying on the vine.

It was December 17, 1982. And Highgate’s in London, just in case you’re a bit hard-of-thinking. All Gothic and overgrown and spiders spinning their webs between the headstones; the threads catching the light in the way they do, throwing disco glitter into the dark.

I could tell you that I remember it all like it was just yesterday, but if I’m honest with you, I sometimes forget my yesterdays before the paint’s had time to dry. Run a hand over the memory and it’s all just a jumble of colour and mess and if you’re not careful you’re nodding like a simpleton and telling people that yes, you’d love to go on a bus to the seaside with a load of old dears. That’s age for you. I can see the stuff through the wrong end of the telescope but anything up close is a bit of a blur. The years go by so quickly it feels like you’ve only just finished ‘Auld Lang Syne’ when it’s time to start singing ‘Jingle Bells’ again. I’ll be eighty next birthday. An absurd amount of time to be alive and I feel every day of it. There are bits of me that hurt and bits that don’t work like they should and bits that look like something that lives at the bottom of the sea. It takes me twice as long to recover as it does to get tired.