No ordinary cemetery, this. Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park had not received the dead for more than fifty years – the vast Victorian necropolis had been given back to nature, and thick forest had grown up within it, with narrow muddy paths running through deep brambles and fallen, upheaved lumps of crumbling memorial marble. By day it was quiet, wild, gothic, eerie. By night – I did not like to speculate. It radiated darkness, as if the night itself was made here, and here was its signal clearest.

Pierce had been right. The boldness was gone from me.

‘Seems more like a place to get murdered than mugged,’ I said. ‘I can see why you put it in the book.’

‘Yeah, it’s, uh,’ Pierce said. His voice cracked and he swallowed. ‘It’s atmospheric.’ And, in his hands, it had made for atmospheric writing – violence among the tombstones. Chthonic horror. Chthonic, relating to the underworld; I knew the word from Pierce’s book, from that scene, the one all the reviews quoted, the one in the cemetery, and here I found it applied.

A high wall separated us from the jungle, and we skirted it in silence. The entrance lay on a crossroads corner; just within, a war memorial, a brightly painted community centre, and an Edwardian keeper’s cottage, then a curtain of ink. Above the skeletal trees, the plume, squeezing and rolling, still with the source-less inner light.

‘I wish that thing would go away,’ I mumbled.

‘It’s mostly just kids snorting nitrous and trying to scare each other,’ Pierce said. His attitude had entirely changed – the energy was back. ‘I reckon you’re right, it’s not going to happen.’

‘You don’t want to go through with it?’ I said. I had not expected this, not at this moment anyway. ‘The mugging? Because if there was anywhere it could happen, this seems most likely.’

‘No, no, I do, I do,’ Pierce said. ‘But not here. I’m just not sure it’s going to happen. Feels too contrived.’

I weakened in the knees. Disappointment at another failed outing, another so-so bit of uneventful colour for the piece, contended for a moment with epic relief, before being washed away by it entirely. I could return home, I could drink, I didn’t have to go into the cemetery. Without prompting, I looked towards the far glimpse of Mile End Road, and its passing night buses.

‘Contrived, OK,’ I said. This was a weird thing for Pierce to say – of course it was contrived! – but I didn’t want to argue, not when the fridge was calling me. ‘Contrived.’

‘Yeah. Inauthentic. Look at us. This is ridiculous. We need to think it through. New plan.’

A whoop rose up from the cemetery park, a multiple shriek of joy, blunted by the trees and distance, but sudden enough to make us both start.

‘Kids,’ I said.

‘Kids,’ Pierce said.