But Bernard isn’t listening. He has been spooked – by what exactly, I don’t know. He dashes into some shrubbery and then onto a gravel path that leads through an avenue of topiary. The rest follow quite sedately, but somehow Bernard never gets very far ahead of them. Every so often one of the dead people says, ‘Now you know how it feels. Now you understand what you’ve been doing to us all this time.’ This only makes him move faster.

We all glide down garden path after the next, surrounded by topiary that gives Bernard very little choice of where to go. One by one, the corpses stop following him, until it’s just Captain Singh, Gladys, and I. The topiary lane ends in a gazebo. We follow him in. The gazebo is covered in vines, and the far side has lift doors inset. He is just disappearing into the lift when we arrive, but we all manage to squeeze on, anyway. The lift takes us down into a cave with a vaulted ceiling. We are standing on a lip of stone at the edge of a dried-up canal that disappears into a tunnel to either side. There is no bridge across the canal and no steps leading down into it. Captain Singh and Gladys stop here instinctively, but Bernard jumps down into the bottom of the canal and picks his way along it. After a few steps he looks over his shoulder, his face brightening with the realisation that his pursuers can’t get down. He is finally going to get away. He goes loping into the dark tunnel.

Everything is quiet for a little while. Then a noise comes out of the tunnel, a familiar groaning, followed by a flicker of white light coming from the tunnel. We lean out and see Bernard’s figure silhouetted against a distant, bright light. Bernard stops in his tracks, turns, and starts to run back to us, with the light behind him. There’s a rush of wind, and the shrubs all shudder.

I know the smell of this air. This is the Underground.

‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ Bernard says. ‘You’ve got the wrong man.’

Captain Singh and Gladys murmur to one another in concern. Just for a moment, the scene were are in breaks open and the platform of an Underground station flashes into view like a movie projection. The bright light comes from a fast-moving train hurtling towards Bernard from behind. Just before it overtakes him the train station dissolves back to the tunnel.

Captain Singh leans on his cane, peering at the place where Bernard used to be, looking puzzled.

‘Jolly strange, that was,’ he says.

Daphne appears at my elbow as if she’d never climbed inside Bernard’s body at all. She takes my arm with her claw-like hand, and when she breathes on me it smells like bubblegum.

‘Wake up,’ she says. ‘Wake up, the Shojis are back. Wake up.’