‘To keep people out or keep people in?’ said Johnny.

A look of panic crossed Wobbler’s face. Since he had a big face, this took some time. He started to run again.

‘You’re just trying to wind me up!’ he yelled. ‘I’m not going to hang around practising being satanic! I’m going home!’

He turned the corner into East Way and sprinted towards the main gate.

Johnny slowed down.

He thought: padlocks.

It was true, actually. He’d noticed it in the past.

All the mausoleums had locks on them, to stop vandals getting in.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

If he shut his eyes he could see Alderman Thomas Bowler. Not one of the lurchin’ dead from out of Wobbler’s videos, but a huge fat man in a fur-trimmed robe and a gold chain and a hat with corners on.

He stopped running and then, slowly, walked back the way he had come.

There was a padlock on the door of the Alderman’s tomb. It had a rusty look.

It was the talking to Wobbler that did it, Johnny decided. It had given him silly ideas.

He knocked again, anyway.

‘Yes?’ said Alderman Thomas Bowler.

‘Er . . . hah . . . sorry . . .’

‘What do you want?’

‘Are you dead?’

The Alderman raised his eyes to the bronze letters over the door.

‘See what it says up there?’ he said.

‘Er . . .’

‘Nineteen hundred and six, it says. It was a very good funeral, I understand. I didn’t attend, myself.’ The Alderman gave this some thought. ‘Rather, I did, but not in any position where I could observe events. I believe the vicar gave a very moving sermon. What was it you were wanting?’

‘Er . . .’ Johnny looked around desperately. ‘What . . . er . . . what does Pro Bono Publico mean?’

‘For the Public Good,’ said the Alderman.

‘Oh. Well . . . thank you.’ Johnny backed away. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘Was that all?’

‘Er . . . yes.’

The Alderman nodded sadly. ‘I didn’t think it’d be anything important,’ he said. ‘I haven’t had a visitor since nineteen twenty-three. And then they’d got the name wrong. They weren’t even relatives. And they were American. Oh, well. Goodbye, then.’

Johnny hesitated. I could turn around now, he thought, and go home.

And if I turn around, I’ll never find out what happens next. I’ll go away and I‘ll never know why it happened now and what would have happened next. I’ll go away and grow up and get a job and get married and have children and become a grandad and retire and take up bowls and go into Sunshine Acres and watch daytime television until I die, and I’ll never know.

And he thought: perhaps I did. Perhaps that all happened and then, just when I was dying, some kind of angel turned up and said would you like a wish? And I said, yes, I’d like to know what would have happened if I hadn’t run away, and the angel said, OK, you can go back. And here I am, back again. I can’t let myself down.