‘Your English is very good,’ he said, and she gave him the side-eye as she crunched on a piece of romaine lettuce.

‘Possibly because I was born and brought up in Oxford,’ she replied. ‘It’s the first language there.’

‘Oh. I thought Mum said something about you being Slovakian.’

‘I said she had Ukrainian blood,’ said Beverley, correcting him. ‘Her parents came to England after the war.’

‘My grandparents,’ said the ghost, correcting her.

‘And how do you see the job of a ghost?’ asked Achilles, deciding that if she was not going to have the manners to slobber all over him, then he was honour bound to take her down a peg or two. ‘It’s a strange sort of role, don’t you think? Mind you, there are some writers out there who I think would be better off if they hired one. I tried to read a novel recently that was so unintelligible that it seemed as if it had been translated from the original Serbian by someone who only spoke Croat.’

‘A ghost is a sort of interpreter of dreams,’ explained Beverley. ‘Like Freud. Or that fellow in the Bible.’

‘Daniel,’ said the ghost. ‘Although I’m not sure that Freud would approve of the analogy.’

‘Was he not religious?’

‘Men of science rarely are. The two are contradictory.’

‘It’s a little ironic, all the same, isn’t it?’ asked Achilles.

‘What is?’

‘Well, didn’t Daniel end up in the lions’ den? Or was that a different Daniel?’

The ghost thought about it. ‘No, that was the same Daniel,’ she agreed. ‘And I see what you mean.’

‘I’m not following,’ said Beverley, looking up from her food with a baffled expression on her face.

‘Daniel was accused of worshipping God over the king and was thrown into the lions’ den for his troubles,’ said Achilles. ‘But he was saved by an angel. Your previous ghost ended up on a safari being mauled to death by a lion.’

‘How do you know so much about the Bible?’ she asked, putting down her fork. ‘You’re not being radicalized, are you?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘It’s impossible to know what goes on in schools these days,’ she said, turning to the ghost. ‘They let any type of person come in to give random talks to the children and the government approves them all. In my day, we were lucky if we had a member of the Women’s Institute stop by to break up the tedium. I remember an elderly lady who gave us a talk once on “How to Satisfy Your Husband” and we all thought it was going to be some ghastly tale of lying back, closing one’s eyes and thinking of England, but instead it had something to do with the correct way to roast a chicken and dispose of the giblets afterwards.’

‘You do make a mean roast chicken,’ said Achilles.