Susan chews her lip as she thinks. ‘I don’t know, Malky. But I would say … maybe? I mean, isn’t that what people do? In films and stuff? You are all dead and whatnot, in your best suit – or kilt in Kenneth McKinley’s case – and you are lying there with a photo in your hand, or a necklace, or something that has been important to you.’

Is that right? Is that what happens? Susan actually doesn’t seem very sure of it. I take a deep breath and say, ‘I don’t want to do it.’

‘Do what, Malky?’

‘I don’t even want to say it.’

‘Say what, Malky?’

I can tell what she’s doing. It’s crafty. She’s making me say it out loud. Once it’s out there, it becomes more real. I force the words out.

‘I … I’m going to have to steal … the last Dreaminator in the world from … from a dead man?’

Susan smiles – a bit sadly, as though she knows how hard that was for me. ‘Yes. But it is not you. It is “we”.’

‘What’s it got to do with you? Why are you helping me?’

She adjusts her specs and looks at me with her deep dark eyes. It’s as if I’ve asked the stupidest question ever. The answer is so obvious to her and, because I know her now, I also know that she is telling the whole truth, and it feels good.

‘Because I am your friend,’ she says.

Something changes between us in that moment. Whatever happens from now on – whatever happens with Seb – I’m not on my own.

I open up Mam’s laptop and, moments later, we’re both staring at the outside of a building shown on Street View.

Becker & Sons

Funeral Directors & Monumental Masons

It’s a newish-looking building in two parts. There’s a reception area with modern glass doors and big windows; next to it, accessible through reception, is a bigger building with a strip of narrow windows at roof level and a set of double doors at one end. I swallow hard. This is a crazy, ludicrous, criminal, dangerous and just plain weird thing to be doing. But it might also be my only chance.

‘How do we even begin to do this?’ I croak to Susan. I mean, it’s all very well to have done dodgy stuff in the past, and got into a bit of trouble, but this is a whole new level of bad. Making it even stranger is the fact that next to me is a girl who has probably never done anything bad at all in her life, yet she’s the one that came up with the idea.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘But we have to do it soon, right? We do not have much time. Tonight, I think.’