“For God’s sake – just borrow a pair of my jeans. Everything we wear will have to be washed anyway, if not burnt.”

“I’m burning mine,” said Jake. “I can’t have these clothes in my wardrobe ever again.”

Carl said nothing but his breathing was indicative of impatience. He left them in the kitchen and walked towards the shed, kicking through the overgrown lawn. Jake strained his eyes to follow the blacker outline of his brother. He heard the clink of the padlock on the door of the shed.

“Go and get changed,” he said to Veronica.

It took them all night, literally all night. The shed was floored with old boards, stippled with woodworm. Carl prised them up from the foundations, working by torchlight, he and Jake holding their breath at every creak and snap of the wood. Eventually, they cleared a space through to the hard-packed earth below. Spiders scurried away from the beam of the torch and Jake saw the twisting pink glint of an earthworm. He felt his stomach clench again. They were going to lower her into this earth, into the worms, clog her hair with dirt… He took a firmer grip on the torch, trying to steady the beam.

The earth was packed hard, dried solid after weeks of hot weather. Their shovels scraped miserable little slices of dirt at each thrust, until Carl brought a watering can and poured water over the ground. That made it a little easier but after an hour, their hands were blistered and their backs aching from the unaccustomed exertion. Veronica took a turn, breaking her long polished nails on the handle of the spade, her curtain of blonde hair falling in front of her sweating face. The interior of the shed filled with stink of nervous exertion.

Eventually they’d cleared a trench that they thought would be big enough. Veronica leant against the wall of the shed, panting with exhaustion. Jake looked at her, dully conscious of her need for support and comfort but not quite able to give it. Carl stood gingerly up and put his hands into the small of his back, grunting. His hands were raw with broken blisters.

“Right,” he said and Jake was shocked at how quiet his voice was, how unsteady. He felt the anxiety twist sharper and deeper. He needed Carl to be the strong one, to stay focused, to know what to do. What would they do without him?

“Carl – “ he said, unsure of what he wanted to say.

“Right,” said Carl again, ignoring him. “I think that’s about deep enough.”

Veronica’s breathing was mostly under control. She brushed a strand of hair away from her face with her grimy hand.

“What now?”

Carl sighed. “Now is the tricky part. You two go inside and hold the door open for me.”

Veronica’s voice was tiny. “Are you going to – “

“Get it? Yes. I’ll carry it out here. You need to hold the door.”

They waited in the kitchen. Jake held the back of a chair to stop his hands from shaking. He was horribly afraid of seeing the body, of seeing what terrible damage two days of decay had done. In the end, it wasn’t as bad as he’d anticipated. Carl carried her through the kitchen, the body securely trussed in a white sheet. There were stains on the sheet that Jake didn’t look at too closely. Carl carried her small body easily, held against him like a strong bridegroom carries his bride. The white sheet made a lighter patch against the blackness of the garden. Jake and Veronica watched from the kitchen window, watched Carl and his fluttering white burden move into darkness until the door of the shed swung behind them and cut them off from view.

Veronica sat down heavily at the kitchen table. She was weeping again, monotonously, the tears running in a slow, steady trickle over her stubble-grazed chin to fall in tiny drips on the table. Jake filled a glass with water and drank it down slowly, suddenly ferociously thirsty. He could feel the blood thudding in his head. His back ached fiercely. He yearned for sleep, for the oblivion that sleep brings.

“It’s almost over,” he said to himself. Veronica heard him.

“Thank God,” she said, her voice clogged with tears.

The kitchen door opening made them both jump. Carl was back, minus his white-wrapped burden. He looked more exhausted than Jake had ever seen him.

“Jake, I need your help.”

Jake swallowed. “With what?”

“Don’t panic. It’s nothing like that. I need you to help me put the boards back. I’ve put the earth back already.”

Jake hesitated. The pause in his response was born of simple fear; terror of going near the body, and exhaustion and a whole heap of other emotions.

“Please,” said Carl and the crack in his voice made Jake realise how near to the end his brother was. He softened.

“I’m coming,” he said.

The smell in the shed was worse now; sweat, wet earth and something else, something horrible, sweetish-sour and fetid. Jake put his hand over his face.

“I know,” said Carl tiredly. “Believe me, it’s better now that it’s covered up. Come on, let’s get the boards back.”

They bent wearily to their task. Dawn was just around the corner, a pale greyish glimmer beginning to stain the darkness. They hammered the nails back as softly as they could and stood up, moving like old men. Jake felt old. He put a dirty hand up to his sweat-stiffened hair, wondering if he’d gone grey overnight, as people were said to do.

They walked out into the gradually lightening garden. A few birds were beginning to sound their tentative, early-morning notes and Jake listened for a moment, almost swaying with tiredness. He was seeing things only hazily, blinking through a fog of exhaustion. Beside him, Carl clicked the padlock shut and tested the door of the shed. Then he stood by his brother for a moment, looking at the pearly dawn light and hearing the cool, liquid notes of the birdsong. The two of them stood silently, leaning against one another, too tired to move. Then at a ‘come on’ from Carl, they began to walk back to the house, stumbling groggily through the dew-soaked grass, walking slowly back across the garden to where Veronica waited for them in the silent house.

In the kitchen, Carl put a hand out to them both as they stood there, earth-smeared, shattered, swaying like zombies.

“Leave your clothes here on the floor,” he said. “I’ll take care of them. Have a hot shower and get to bed. And after this night, we never, ever mention any of this again. Right?”

“Right,” Veronica whispered.

Jake looked into his brother’s brown eyes, ringed in shadow, laced with tiny threads of blood. Eyes just like his. He saw the command and recognised it, but he saw something else that he’d never seen before – a wordless appeal. He felt a bone-deep chill take hold of him and yet there was relief there too, in the yielding to the inevitable. They were in this together, from this moment forward.

Jake took a deep breath. “Right,” he said and then turned away from them both, to begin the long, weary slog up the stairs to bed.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Their vow of silence held. In the weeks that followed, they spoke of many things but Candice Stanton was not one of them. Jake went to work, came home, went to bed, got up the next morning and went to work. The dull routine of his days helped a little; it gave him something to focus on. It didn’t help much. The routine couldn’t help with the constant undercurrent of fear that ran through his days like a poisonous thread. It drove him from his bed in the mornings, to stand shivering under the shower. It was with him last thing at night, crowding his mind until the sleeping pills he was taking nightly began to wipe his thoughts away. He began to dread the landing, and the walk down the stairs, thinking of Candice’s head hitting the tiled floor, remembering the sound it made. After a while, he could only make the journey downstairs with his eyes shut, holding onto the banister and feeling for each step with his feet. He avoided walking on the cracked tile.