Dead Men's s Boots

When you spend your life dealing with the crude mechanics of life and death, you tend to find the elegant theories less than compelling. So maybe Carla was right: maybe John’s mind had started to go, and maybe that explained both his aberrant behaviour in the last few weeks of his life and his scary transformation after death.

Or maybe there was something else going on – although it was hard to imagine what sort of something that could be if it required him to burn his body after he died as though his body contained a secret message of some kind.

Todd brought me out of my thoughts by leaning forward to tell the driver to hang a left: the unexpected sound made Carla tense, showing how strained the silence in the car had become even as it broke it. As though the ice had been broken, too, Todd turned to Carla and offered her an affable smile.

‘I haven’t made any specifications about the service, Mrs Gittings,’ he said, ‘but I believe there will be a clergyman on hand. If you want any kind of a prayer spoken over the casket, or a hymn . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished, no doubt realising as he said it how pathetic the three of us would sound striking up a chorus of ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’.

‘I just want it to be over,’ Carla said, in a low, curt tone that left no room for further conversational pleasantries.

Our route took us through a part of London that’s one of my favourites. Mile End is steeped in tragic and tragicomic history in the same way that, say, a pickled pig’s trotter is steeped in vinegar. This was where the first of Hitler’s flying bombs rained down; where the spectacularly cocked-up launch of HMS Albion killed dozens of local kids who’d taken the day off school to see it glide off the slipway; where the resurrection men plied their trade and where Bishop and Williams murdered the Italian Boy.

We drove on through Stepney to Bow Common, and just after Mile End Station we turned off the main drag, skirted the shapely backside of St Clement’s and turned in through the gates of the Mount Grace crematorium.