The first few black cabs we stopped refused to take us so far out of London. In the end a scuffed unlicensed Audi pulled over, the driver peering up at us out of the dark interior. He agreed to take us for sixty. He sensed too late that we weren’t really interested in money, only in getting where we were going, and as soon as we had fixed the price he bit his lip, as if trying to decide whether he should have asked for more. I took the initiative and climbed into the back before he could say anything. He was a friendly guy from Ghana who wanted to talk. We didn’t. I asked him politely to put the radio on, and he tuned in to Radio One, a mixture of trip hop and chilled house designed to ease people into their come-downs. He had a palm-leaf cross hanging from the rearview mirror. I turned my gaze outside. I loved looking at the city so late at night, when all the working people and families were in bed. With our private soundtrack playing it seemed as if every pedestrian, every red pair of brake-lights reflected in a black puddle, every silhouette in a window still lit must have its own private narrative to be moving so late at night. I watched the city run past the window with a weird mixture of ownership and alienation, like returning to somewhere you ruled as a child. Once we’d moved out of the centre, we spent time stranded at deserted intersections, waiting for nothing but the lights. We followed brown and white signs for Chessington World of Adventures. The white rims and writing flared up in the beams of the headlights, then turned black again just as we passed. The streets were empty, and lined with bare trees. The cemetery was on a long blank of highway where the city petered out into the suburbs of Kingston. There have been civilizations where the dead are laid to rest in the centre of the metropolis, but we tuck ours away at the edges, out of mind but not so far off that you can’t pay a visit when you feel guilty. No one lived there.

We pulled off the road at the gatehouse. Our driver was visibly unsettled by the location and the dark moonless night. Ordered ranks of tombstones appeared as black squares through the thick iron spears of the cemetery fence.

‘Why you want to come here anyway?’ he said. ‘The whole place is locked up.’

‘Let us worry about that,’ I said to him, leaning forward over the shoulder of his seat to look him in the eye. ‘Now, here’s sixty for your trouble. I’ll give you another twenty now, and if you wait for us there’s another sixty for the home trip. Does that sound fair?’

‘Yeah, yeah, my friend, that’s good,’ he said, momentarily distracted from his fear by the money.

As I handed him the cash I realized I had spent almost four hundred pounds since leaving the office. He stashed the money under the driver’s side sun visor. It was turning out to be an expensive evening.