Taken by the Gravekeeper

Maud Halloway opens graves for a living. She has a licence, a van, and a six-year record of emptying sites the parish would rather forget. What the parish forgot is that under Saint Wulfric's, at the bottom of a sealed stair, a man has been waiting since 1843 for somebody with a key. Cassian Roe was buried there alive to keep the churchyard's dead where they were put. He cannot leave the grounds. He cannot die. He has not been believed by a living soul in a hundred and eighty years. Maud believes him in approximately ten seconds, and then asks him what he would like dug up. What they find is a ledger: every grave she has ever opened, the fee the parish paid, and a plan she was never supposed to find out about. Grave by grave, fee by fee, the two of them are going to open one more hole together — in the parish, in the wall, and in the hundred and eighty years that have kept a man in the ground.