'Not really,' said ibb.

'Plock,' said Pickwick, who had popped her head round the door. She ruffled her feathers excitedly and rushed up to greet Gran, who always seemed to have a few spare marshmallows about her.

'What's it like being old?' asked ibb, who was peering closely at the soft pink folds in Gran's skin.

'Death's adolescence,' replied Gran, 'but you know the worst part?'

Ibb and obb shook their heads.

'I'm going to miss my funeral by three days.'

'Gran!' I scolded. 'You'll confuse them – they tend to take things literally.'

It was too late.

'Miss your own funeral?' muttered ibb, thinking hard. 'How is that possible?'

'Think about it, ibb,' said obb. 'If she lived three days longer, she'd be able to speak at her own funeral – get it?'

'Of course,' said ibb, 'stupid of me.'

And they went into the kitchen, talking about Mrs Beeton and the best way to deal with amorous liaisons between the scullery maid and the boot boy – it must have been an old edition.

'When's supper?' asked Gran, looking disdainfully at the interior of the flying boat. 'I'm absolutely famished – but nothing tougher than suet, mind. The gnashers aren't what they were.'

I delicately helped her out of her gingham coat and sat her down at the table. Steak Diane would be like eating railway sleepers to her, so I started to make an omelette.

'Now, Gran,' I said, cracking some eggs into a bowl, 'I want you to tell me what you're doing here.'

'I need to be here to remind you of things you might forget, young Thursday.'

'Such as what?'

'Such as Landen. They eradicated my husband too, and the one thing I needed was someone to help me through it, so that's what I'm here to do for you.'

'I'm not going to forget him, Gran!'

'Yes,' she agreed in a slightly peculiar way, 'I'm here to make sure of it.'

'That's the why,' I persisted, 'but what about the how?'

'I too used to do the occasional job for Jurisfiction in the old days,' she explained, 'a long time ago, mind, but it was just one of many jobs that I did in my life – and not the strangest, either.'

'What was?' I asked, knowing in my heart that I really shouldn't be asking.

'Well, I was God Emperor of the Universe once,' she answered in the same manner in which she might have admitted to going to the pictures, 'and being a man for twenty-four hours was pretty weird.'

'Yes,' I replied, 'I expect it was.'

ibb laid the table and we sat down to eat ten minutes later. As Gran sucked on her omelette I tried to make conversation with ibb and obb. The trouble was, neither of them had the requisite powers of social communication to assimilate anything from speech other than the bald facts it contained. I tried a joke I had heard from Bowden, my partner at SpecOps, about an octopus and a set of bagpipes. But when I delivered the punchline they both stared at me.