“I can’t believe it!” he exclaimed as the waitress served us two ice cream sundaes. The service in the restaurant was so slow that they were more like Mondays by the time they arrived. “Five hundred dollars! That’s more money than I’ve earned in a month.”

“It’s more money than you’ve earned in a year,” I reminded him.

“And all because some crazy American thinks his pen pal was murdered.”

“How do you know he wasn’t?”

“Intuition.” Tim tapped the side of his nose. “I can’t explain it to you, kid. I’ve just got a feeling.”

“You’ve also got ice cream on your nose,” I said.

After lunch we took the bus over to Fulham. I don’t know why Tim decided to start in Brompton Cemetery. Maybe he wanted to visit it for old times’ sake. It had been more than a year since we’d last been there, but the place hadn’t changed. And why should it have? I doubted any of the residents had complained. None of them would have had the energy to redecorate. The gravestones were as weird as ever, some of them like Victorian telephone boxes, others like miniature castles with doors fastened by rusting chains and padlocks. You’d have needed a skeleton key to open them. The place was divided into separate areas: some old, some more modern. There must have been thousands of people there, but of course none of them offered to show us the way to Smile’s grave. We had to find it on our own.

It took us about an hour. It was on the edge of the cemetery, overshadowed by the football stadium next door. We might never have found it except that the grave had been recently dug. That was one clue. And there were fresh flowers. That was another. Smile had been given a lot of flowers. In fact, if he hadn’t been dead he could have opened a florist’s. I read the gravestone:

LENNY SMILE

APRIL 31st 1955—NOVEMBER 11th 2001
A WONDERFUL MAN, CALLED TO REST.

We stood in silence for a moment. It seemed too bad that someone who had done so much for children all over the world hadn’t even made it to fifty. I glanced at the biggest bunch of flowers on the grave. There was a card attached. It was signed in green ink, With love, from Rodney Hoover and Fiona Lee.