‘Oh, I see,’ said the ghost. ‘Of course. Thank you.’

‘Might I ask?’ said Beverley, piping up now, her voice rising both in volume and tenor as she spoke. ‘Might I just make the polite enquiry as to who makes these decisions and what criteria they employ in doing so?’

‘I suppose it’s the shop designers,’ said Declan with a shrug. ‘We carry much more popular fiction than we do literary fiction, so it makes sense to use the largest wall for them.’

‘Not who decides what goes where,’ replied Beverley, impatiently. ‘But what is classified as popular and what is classified as literary? And is the latter, by its very nature, unpopular? Or is it more that popular fiction cannot be literary? I understand that Ian McEwan sells very well. As does Margaret Atwood, who’s a personal friend. Doesn’t that mean that they’re popular?’

‘I don’t really know,’ he said, scratching the place where his beard might have been, had puberty done its job more efficiently. ‘Someone in head office, I imagine. There’s a very nice woman called Leah who works in Central Buying. It might be her.’

‘And you’re perfectly happy to go along with these random choices, are you, Declan?’ she asked, spitting out his name as if it was a piece of unripe fruit. ‘You don’t consider that these decisions create a sort of literary apartheid?’

‘I’m not sure what that means,’ he said.

‘You’ve never heard of apartheid?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘South Africa? In the eighties? When they segregated the blacks from the whites?’

‘I wasn’t born in the eighties,’ said Declan. ‘I’m only twenty-two. But if you’re looking for books about South Africa, then I’m sure I can find some in the travel section. Also, the history section, probably. I can look it up on the computer for you, if you like?’

‘I do not like, no. My point was that you have created an apartheid between the books that you or this Leah woman determine to be popular, which I assume you, or she, consider to be frothy and of little importance and, I daresay, are all written by women, while those you term literary novels, the ones of great weight and authority, are penned by men and given their own special piece of real estate in the store. Isn’t that right?’

‘Someone in head office …’ repeated Declan, sensing that this was a battle he was ill equipped to fight.

‘Yes, someone in head office,’ repeated Beverley, waving him away. ‘Always blame the mysterious someone in head office. It’s so much easier than taking any personal responsibility for these things, isn’t it? And I wonder, if I walked over to the popular fiction section, would I even find—’

‘Mrs Cleverley?’

A voice made her spin around.

‘I’m so sorry to interrupt,’ said a woman, who was clutching a copy of one of her novels as if it was the last bag of frozen sprouts in Iceland on Christmas Eve. ‘But you are Beverley Cleverley, aren’t you?’