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Grimshaw waited for someone to say it. Sooner or later someone always said it. And then theywould try to run. Sooner or later, they always tried to run.
    â€˜It’s as if …’
    He fixed his eyes on Marsha, willing her to finish the sentence. She did.
    â€˜It’s as if we’re all under some horrible curse!’

6
HEREIN LIES THE BODY OF LAMPWICK THE ROBBER, DARE NOT TO DISTURB
    â€˜What you have to ask yourselves,’ said Jon, ‘is why?’
    Fish had made them some more tea, pouring it strong and hot and adding plenty of sugar. He was still cold right to his core and knew that the others would be feeling the same. Hot, sweet tea was just what they needed to help thaw their hearts and give them back some strength. The toast was still on the plate. The second batch had been done long ago, but was cooling, unnoticed, in the toaster.
    â€˜I think now is the time to tell you about the exhumation of Lampwick the Robber,’ said Jon. ‘It was on the last night of the job, just before all this awfulness began. We only had a few graves left to do, but there was this particular one that spooked the hell out of me. Something about the feel of it, an air of wakefulness, like the deceased wasn’t properly gone. I think, subconsciously, we’d been avoiding it, but it was the only one left so at last we had no choice but to dig the coffin up.’
    Jon hesitated, as if he didn’t really want to say any more. Fish shuddered, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Marsha and Susan do the same.
    â€˜Go on,’ said Marsha, her voice full of fear.

    It was one of those lovely mornings,
Jon began,
before the sun is up, when the horizon is just showing a promise of dawn. For some reason, probably to stop people coming to gawp, exhumations are always done after dark and so I was glad to see that morning was on its way because it meant the job was almost over. Someone had to move the bodies from the old graveyard to the new one, and Steve was the kind of bloke who did his work with respect. Even so, I didn’t much care for the thought that we were disturbing the dead.
    This last grave, the one we had been avoiding, was an old one – the deceased had been buried way back in Victorian times. The headstone was covered in lichen, and bushes had grown over it, making it difficult to get at. I couldn’t read the inscription at first, just the name. Lampwick. I tried to clean it up, scrape off some of the lichen and that. When I’d done, I could see the words. ‘Leave Him In Peace’. It seemed like a funny thing to write on a headstone, more like a threat or a warning.
    I won’t bore you with the digging. Enough to say that we got down to wood at last. And then, as if it hadn’t been bad enough already, things got really creepy.
    It was early morning, like I said, and the sun was just coming up over the horizon as we reached the coffin. The birds
were singing their hearts out the way they do, to welcome in the new day. As soon as our spades scraped the coffin lid, they stopped.
    Silence.
    Not a tweet.
    Now, Steve isn’t the imaginative sort. You don’t go in for grave-digging as a career if you’ve got a lot of imagination. But even he stopped what he was doing and looked at me.
    It only lasted a moment. Then the birds got going again and everything seemed normal. Except for the coffin. Instead of a metal plate with the deceased’s name and dates on it, there were words scratched into the wood. We didn’t have time to read them. The sun was coming up and we needed to get the grave filled in properly before the world was up and about. All I saw was, ‘Herein lies the body of Lampwick the Robber, dare not to disturb.’
    I didn’t catch any more, not just because we were busy getting the coffin out of the ground, but because something distracted me. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw movement. Nothing much, just a shadowy