‘That’s right.’

‘Of course, I wasn’t scared.’

‘No.’

‘But those things can be dangerous . . .’

‘Oh, that’s right.’

They turned as a rattling sound started up behind them. Mrs Tachyon appeared, pushing her shopping trolley; the wheels bounced and skidded on the gravel.

She ignored both of them. They stepped aside hurriedly as the trolley, one wheel squeaking, vanished into the gloom.

Then they walked home, through the morning mists.

Chapter 11

As Tommy Atkins had once said, things aren’t necessarily over just because they’ve stopped.

There was Bigmac, for a start. Yo-less had gone home with him, and Bigmac’s brother had been waiting up and had started on at him and Bigmac had looked at him strangely for a few seconds and then hit him so hard that he knocked him out. Yo-less said, with awe in his voice, that it’d been so hard that the word ‘TAH’ was printed in Biro on the brother’s chin. And then he’d growled at Clint and the dog had hid under the sofa. So Yo-less had to get his mother out of bed to bring her car round to carry Bigmac’s suitcase, three tropical fish tanks and two hundred copies of Guns and Ammo back to her spare room.

And there was the generous donation to the Blackbury Volunteers by United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings. As Mr Atterbury said, it’s amazing what you can do with a kind word, provided you’ve also got a big stick.

The cemetery was already looking more lived-in. There were endless arguments between the Volunteers who wanted it to be habitat and the ones who wanted it to be ecology and a middle group who just wanted it to be clean and tidy, but at least it was wanted, which seemed to Johnny to be the most important thing.

It took Johnny a week to find what he wanted, and when he found it he took it along to the cemetery after school, when no one was about. There was frost on the ground.

‘Mr Grimm?’

He found him by the canal, sitting staring at the water.

‘Mr Grimm?’

‘Go away. You’re dangerous.’

‘I thought you’d be a bit . . . lonely. So I bought you this.’

He opened the bag.

‘Mr Atterbury helped,’ he said. ‘He phoned around some of his friends who’ve got electrical shops. It’s been repaired. It’ll work until the batteries die, and then I thought maybe it’d work on ghost batteries.’

‘What is it?’

‘A very small television,’ said Johnny. ‘I thought I could put it right in a bush or somewhere and no one’ll know it’s there except you.’

‘What are you doing this for?’ said Mr Grimm, suspiciously.

‘Because I looked you up in the newspaper. May the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-seven. There wasn’t very much. Just the bit about them finding . . . you in the canal, and the coroner’s inquest.’

‘Oh? Poking around, eh? And what do you think you know about anything?’