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whisper of this to anybody, I’ll have your shop turned into a junkyard, right?’
    Alfie understood only too well and vanished in record time with his ten pounds clutched in his fist.
    When he had gone, Conrad seemed in a better humour.
    â€˜Irish, we’re going to pay a call on Ray Silver tonight. That slanty-eyed swine has been in with Golding and I didn’t know it.’

Chapter Six
    Though the rain had stopped late on the Friday night, Oldfield cemetery was little better than a quagmire in the early hours of the next morning.
    At six o’clock, it was still pitch dark when a plain blue van drove up to the ornate gates set in the stone wall. A man – a council gravedigger – got out and unlocked the gates in the beam of the van’s headlights.
    The vehicle passed through and made its way along narrow tarmac roads until it reached the newest graves in one comer. Nearby was a wooden hut. Two more men got down and fetched spades, poles, and canvas from it before trudging through the squelching turf to the most recent burial plot.
    Working with their gumboots already plastered in red earth, they erected a screen from the hessian and posts, before starting to remove the fresh soil from the grave. They laboured by the light of two paraffin lamps hung on the poles. The harsh shadows and silhouettes made an eerie pattern as the two undertaker’s men watched them from the cab of the van.
    The top layers were hard going but, by the time the first flush of grey light appeared in the sky, they had got down to the drier soil and the going was easier.
    After this, there was only room for one man at a time in the hole and they took it in turns. The two undertakers ambled over to watch the last stages, and by seven o'clock they saw the spade thumping on the top of the coffin.
    A few moments later, the diggers were able to rub the mud from the brass plate and confirm that the box held the last remains of Rita Laskey.
    They came up for a quick smoke, then went back to clear the soil from the sides sufficiently to pass two ropes around the coffin. The ends were brought up to the graveside and after a few experimental pulls to make sure that enough earth had been taken out, the workers relaxed.
    At exactly seven thirty, the yellow beam of headlights swept through the gates and a black Wolseley drew up behind the van. Sergeant Burrell and a thin man in a raincoat came over to the little group.
    The gravediggers touched their caps to the man in plain clothes.
    â€˜Morning, Mr Phelps, we’ve got ’er ready.’
    Their boss, the council surveyor, had come to identify the grave to the police sergeant. He took a rolled plan from his coat and studied it by the light of a pressure lamp.
    â€˜Laskey … number nine-two-six. That’s the eighteenth in the second row beyond the north roadway.’
    He walked down the path with a torch wavering in his hand, counting the headstones and the pathetic heaps of earth.
    â€˜That’s it, sergeant – that’s nine-two-six all right.’
    Burrell grunted. He was no great one for getting up in the morning and to be dragged out at six o’clock to take the borough surveyor to a sodden cemetery was no great stimulus to his conversation.
    â€˜Get her up, then,’ he said shortly to the workman.
    They and the two undertakers tailed onto the ropes and with some grunting and squelching, the coffin came free from the grave’s muddy bottom. They hauled it up level with the surface and swung its end onto a plank which had been laid across the head of the pit. One of the men slid another plank under the other end and, with the weight taken, they removed the ropes and stood back.
    â€˜Better check the plate yourself, sarge,’ suggested one of the diggers. He leant over and rubbed the metal with a rag.
    Burrell held his torch close and peered at the brass oblong. ‘Rita Maria Laskey … At rest … eighteenth of November,