‘Sorry to be a frigid bitch. It’s been a heavy, heavy day.’

The church was mournful around her. It was like a huge, blackened sheep skeleton, with its ribs opened out. Incongruously, it actually came with the house. Robin had been ecstatic. For him, it had been the deciding factor.

Betty let go of Robin’s hand. She was now facing where the altar must have been — the English side. And it was here, on this frigid January evening, that she had the flash.

A shivering sense of someone at prayer — a man in a long black garment, stained. His face unshaven, glowing with sweat and an unambiguous vivid fear. He’d discovered or identified or been told something he couldn’t live with. In an instant, Betty felt she was suffocating in a miasma of body odour and anguish.

No! She hauled in a cold breath, pulling off her woollen hat, shaking out her sheaf of blonde hair. Go away. Don’t want you.

Cold. Damp. Nothing else. Shook herself like a wet dog. Gone.

This was how it happened. Always without warning, rarely even a change in the temperature.

‘And it’s not officially a church any more,’ Robin was reminding her — he hadn’t, of course, sensed a thing. ‘So this is not about causing offence. Long as we don’t knock it down, we can do what we like here. This is so cool. We get to reclaim an old, pagan sacred place!’

And Betty thought in cold dismay, What kind of sacred is this? But what she actually said, surprised at her own calmness, was, ‘I just think we have to take it slowly. I know the place is decommissioned, but there’re bound to be local people whose families worshipped here for centuries. And whose grandparents got married here and… and buried, of course.’

There were still about a dozen gravestones and tombs visible around the church and, although all the remains were supposed to have been taken away and reinterred after the diocese dumped the building itself, Betty knew that when they started to garden here they’d inevitably unearth bones.