Isabel Instance and Aelfric Fouracre go through the usual procedure with the ghost of Maureen Simmons. Isabel tells her earnestly, over and over, that she is dead. This kind of quiet repetition, she and Ael have found, seems the best bet for successful communication, and accepting the fact of death is the first and most important step towards the light. Then Isabel talks about the light itself, again gently repeating her words. Finally Ael gives his speech about what the light signifies: ascension to a nobler sphere. Isabel lets him talk, and tries not to look too disapproving. He doesn’t know that; no-one does. But such is his fond assumption. She lets him rhapsodise for a while, then leans forward.

“Whatever happens, Maureen, once you’ve passed,” Isabel says, with a slight shudder – it’s a horrible word but the only one she and Ael can both agree on – “you won’t have to worry about anything any more.”

That is the only thing Isabel knows for sure about the light. Whatever its significance, she can’t conceive that there is any chance to worry on the other side of it. If there was, the fretting masses would have found some way to come back and complain they’d gone to the wrong place, their needs were not taken account of, you couldn’t get spelt bread, there must be a mistake. The living might complain about stress, but in Isabel’s experience the dead beat them hands down.

There’s only one more piece of business. Isabel clears her throat, and makes sure Ael is still watching Gary. “Now, worry is what you have to avoid above all,” she says to Maureen. “The light won’t come if you’re anxious about something, dear. Message to pass on, and all that. If there’s anything troubling you, try and let…”

Before she can finish, Gary speaks. “I did it,” he says quietly. “I know what you’re saying. You don’t need to make Mum tell you. I killed her. To set her free.” He gazes at them with intensity. “You’re aren’t the first angels to come here. They visited before. They told me I had a destiny, a great calling. They told me about sacrifice. For a long time I didn’t understand. Then I saw. I had to give her up.”

Isabel listens, her lips pressed together. “So, these angels…” she prompts.

His thin mouth stretches into a smile. “They speak to me all the time. They told me to let go my thoughts. To trust my feelings. The one thing I always knew was that Mum was special. She was called, and I sent her on her way.”

Ael turns to her and mouths, schizo. Isabel glares at him to shut up, but he has a point, if no delicacy of terminology.

“So what did you do, Gary?” she asks.

His eyes meet hers, craftily. “I helped her sleep,” he says. “And when she was resting, I carried her to where she lies in peace.”

Ael was right, then. He usually is. “What did you use? Pills?” Isabel asks, feeling the usual pointless, bitter anger at human folly. And if she feels it, what Maureen must be feeling…

Gary smiles, almost shyly, like a child. “Gin,” he says, succinctly. Ael snorts. Next to Gary his mother’s spirit gazes at him with fury. What a fate, Isabel thinks: waking up dead in a freezer, lying on a bag of frozen mixed veg, in a state of bewilderment. She doesn’t have much chance of attaining the light of grace, not while she is this angry – and she seems like the kind of person who might have been able to hold a grudge pretty hard while she was alive, let alone dead. Still, they have uncovered the circumstances all right: there isn’t much else they can do.

“Now Gary, listen to me,” Isabel says earnestly. “We’re all going to go outside now, and you’re going to tell the police, all right?”

He laughs, a short, sharp noise. “Don’t be an idiot,” he says. “Eh? The angels told me not to tell. They told me to wait for them to come. I thought I was waiting for you.” He looks at her narrowly, then at Ael. “You are… I mean…”

“Look,” Isabel begins, but Ael interrupts.

“Gary, you have done as we asked you,” he says, using his sepulchral voice again. Gary ducks his head gratefully. “You have done well,” Ael goes on. “But things have changed. We intend great things for you, Gary. Go to the police, tell them everything. Laugh in their faces. We shall come again, Gary, only if you obey me in this.”

Gary nods eagerly. “Yes, Lord. Thank you. I am sorry I did not heed the woman. But she…”

“Have no mind to her, Gary,” Ael says with bass majesty. “Come with us now.”

He leads Gary towards the door. Maureen drifts close after him. Isabel tries to get in her way; they can’t leave her like this. But all Maureen’s energy is concentrated on her son. Before they step into the hall Ael pauses.

“There is one more thing,” he says. “Er… my son.” Isabel rolls her eyes. He is such a ham. “Your relations with your mother. Is there any secret you have not told us?”

Isabel shakes her head ruefully. Nothing is enough for him: there always has to be some gratuitous twist. Gary looks confused. “My heart is open,” he says hesitantly. “What do you…”

“Did you ever conceive carnal desire towards her? Did she ever make you prey to her lust?”

Gary recoils, as does the spirit of Maureen. “No! Of course not! How can you… how can you think…”

“Trouble yourself not,” Ael says hastily. “I spoke only to see if any, er, foul demons had come to you in her shape. Come on. Out we go.”

For a moment it seems like he’s blown it, but Gary reluctantly follows him into the hall. This time she is quick, and stands in front of Maureen.

“Listen,” Isabel says intently. “Leave him, all right? Don’t think of him. Don’t dwell. The light will never come if you do, and you’ll be here forever, long after he’s dead and all this is gone, all right? None of life matters now. Please remember that.”

Maureen ripples with what might be understanding, or might simply be rage. Isabel turns, and follows the others. They probably haven’t done much good. At least they’ve tried, she tells herself, which is her chief consolation. Ael leads Gary out towards the police, who cluster round, taking Gary in charge and reacting towards Ael with a deferential wonder that is probably his chief consolation. Assuming he needs any.

On the street Isabel shoulders past a ghost or two, who stand around looking aimless. A crowd, however small, tends to draw in the dead. One of the ghosts is talking, a thick garbled voice rising and falling like the sound of distant traffic. Once Isabel reaches the police perimeter, she turns and scowls at Ael, who disengages himself from his admirers hastily, and comes up to her beaming. Another entry in his catalogue of macabre eccentricity. Over his shoulder Isabel sees Maureen’s ghost standing uncertainly on the threshold of her house. Isabel has a vision of her standing there still, long after the house is demolished, in another age of the world, lingering on a long-vanished threshold. Not for the first time, Isabel Instance raises a silent prayer to the God in Whom she doesn’t believe. Please, she thinks to herself, not me. Don’t let it ever happen to me.

It takes a while to settle Gary. He keeps looking at Aelfric Fouracre and crossing himself, muttering, “Praise be.” Eventually Isabel Instance has him sitting down in one of the plastic chairs, with Maureen’s ghost still by his side. Ael perches his buttocks fastidiously on the little sofa, and Isabel joins him. The arm of the sofa is covered with stains whose origins she tries not to consider. Ael takes out his notebook, and starts doodling. Once he’s looked around, he leaves most of the talking to Isabel, noting down anything especially eccentric.

“Right,” Isabel says. “Now we’re all set. Gary, your mother is here. She can hear us, but she can’t communicate. Maureen, do you hear me? What you’re saying doesn’t make sense. Do you understand?”

Maureen’s ghost eddies slowly. In general, it is hopeless trying to talk to ghosts. But the more recently they’ve died, the better the chances – providing the spirit concentrates. From the way Maureen is glaring at Gary, that seems unlikely. He is following Isabel’s gaze raptly. “Oh Lord, grant her the power of speech,” he says, in a strangled voice. “Mother? Mum?”

Isabel quiets him with a hand. “Now, Maureen,” she says. “I’m going to tell you what’s happening. You just listen, love, all right?”

She feels rather than sees the ghost turn to face her. “All right. You have to understand, Maureen, that this isn’t supposed to happen. When you die, there’s supposed to be a light. Just as you’ve probably heard. The light… well… it takes you away, anyway.”

She looks quickly at Ael, who pauses in his doodling a moment before continuing. They’ll never come to agreement on this point, Isabel guesses. “But sometimes, when you die, there’s nothing. No light, just… just a sort of waking up, isn’t it? If you’ve… well, I mean, it depends how you died.” Isabel pauses, and looks briefly at Gary, who has gone quite still. But out of the corner of her eye she sees Ael shift forwards on the sofa, ready to grab him if he makes a move. “Anyway, that’s what’s happened to you.” She takes a deep breath. “And that’s what we’re here to do something about.”

Isabel exchanges a glance with Ael. So far, so good. But this is the hard part. In the old days, as Ael is fond of calling any period from about 860-1920, death was apparently very different. Ghosts were the exception to the rule. Those who died naturally followed the light at once, and even the victims of accidents or murder generally moved on fairly quickly. But recently spirits had started to linger more and more often. The fifties were the start of it, according to Ael, and in the sixties, the situation became dramatically worse. Even old people who’d died peacefully started to hang about the place. Isabel has been to care homes thronging with the undead, so thickly clustered she’s scarcely been able to breathe.

The problem is that ghosts seemed to have a day or two at most to find the light. More than that, and they might linger forever. Some of the tattered remnants of the dead Isabel sees on the street might have been the shades of Romans, or older. The best theory she’s come up with is that the dead have no sense of time: so when they become accustomed to their lot, they remain in it. That doesn’t mean they are content. Every ghost she has encountered has seemed powerfully disconsolate. She asked Ael once why more of them didn’t become apparently real, like him – visible to all, able to touch and feel. He shrugged and told her loftily that it took quite exceptional strength of will. She managed to keep a straight face, more or less, though he tended to be good at spotting the less part of it.

In any event, if ghosts missed the light it seemed to stay missed. How much ghosts regretted this was evident from what happened when the dead did see the light – which is that a flock of ghosts would turn up on the instant, reminding Isabel of drowning passengers rushing to lifeboats, hoping for what – salvation? Redemption? Illumination? Whatever the light might bring, the dead seemed desperately to want it.

And increasingly, they weren’t able to get it. Isabel has seen this even over the time she’s worked with Ael. If he were to measure his job satisfaction by how many ghosts they actually helped, he’d be an unhappy man. It’s just as well, Isabel reflects, that his yardstick is instead human folly. Where death is concerned, it isn’t exactly a scarce commodity.

So last night I was at the Club at the Ivy. I should say that with debonair insouciance to give the impression that my life consists of nothing but rounds of trendy clubs populated by elegant people who smile in recognition and relief at my entrance; but there is too much of the country boy in me for that, sadly, so I will say it with starry-eyed delight instead.

I was there for an event run by the splendid Byte the Book, who bring together publishers and agents and writers and literary types in general, and I was speaking along with James Wills, managing director at Watson, Little; and Gordon Wise from Curtis Brown. Here is a picture of, well, none of us, but it gives the general idea.

We spoke about the role of agents, and about writing, and books. We shared a microphone without once wrestling each other for it. No-one stood up, red-faced, to hurl insults at anyone else. (My aesthetic in terms of panels may, I realise, be unduly influenced by Jeremy Kyle.)

It was all very lovely and thoughtful and there was lots of talk about the future of books, but no-one railed about impending doom and how the Kindle is going to liquefy everyone’s brains so that Amazon can use the newly created skull space to implant neuron word nuggets in there instead. Which was nice.

And other thing that was really nice was this: everyone was there because they love the idea of being involved in the telling of stories, which is probably a pretty precarious business, and one in which mighty tides of hope and vanity and folly and despair surge around while people cling to flotsam and long for ever bigger waves to surf; but as businesses go, it seems to include a lot of eccentric, passionate, kind people who care about what they do. Which, for a Monday night in Soho, and for a career to dabble in, is about as much as you can ask, really…

The inside of Gary Simmon’s house smells like an old store cupboard. The radiators are on full, and the warm air is thick and sour. The whole place has been neatly filleted: furniture turned upside down and pushed back against the walls, drawers removed and their contents stacked on the floor. “Police?” Isabel Instance asks Aelfric Fouracre.

“Might have been,” he says. “Or that might have been Gary Simmon’s handiwork. I have a feeling he might not prove entirely stable.”

They make their way down the hall. At the back is a closed door. From behind it comes the familiar sound of spiritual complaint: a doleful, hollow wailing. The sound is garbled, but sustains a monotonous intensity.

“I think it’s fair to say Maureen’s spirit is still in attendance,” Ael says, turning to her. Isabel makes a face. “Whatever,” she says flouncily.

He looks sharply at her. “Is that the thing, nowadays? I’ve heard people say that.” He tries it in a variety of styles. “Whatever? Whatever. Whatever.”

She winces. Ael’s always keen to keep up with slang, but it’s rarely a success. The stuff he picks up from her is already passé, for one thing; she is, as she reminds him quite often, a 42-year-old librarian. And his accent is always too correct – he can’t endure imprecision of speech. As a result, he sounds like someone’s Dad. He fits quite well with her dim memories of her own father, whom she always pictures as benevolent but remote. She wonders how offended Ael would be if she were to tell him this. Quite severely, probably.

“Are you going to get us inside, then?” she says.

He nods and advances to the door. His neatness of dress and movement disguises an ursine build. Locked doors rarely detain him long. He leans nonchalantly against the wood. The house is not luxuriously fitted out, and the jamb splinters obligingly. Ael moves quickly into the room. Isabel hears a strangled cry, and steps forward. Ael is standing over a much smaller man, presumably Gary; the ghost of an old woman hovers close by. There’s a brief struggle, which ends with Ael holding the man almost off the ground with one arm. In his other hand he holds a kitchen spatula. He waves it at Isabel.

“I’ve disarmed him,” he says. “I don’t believe it’s loaded,” he adds, looking immensely pleased. Isabel smiles dutifully. Ael very rarely makes jokes, and sulks if they are not acknowledged.

Isabel looks around the room as Ael gets Gary Simmons settled. It’s a narrow kitchen and living room, with two chairs by a formica table, and a hard little sofa facing a TV. Ael puts Gary into one of the chairs, in which he hunches, looking miserably at Isabel. He is not a prepossessing sight: thin, with receding hair, a shiny face, and a hunted expression. Spit bubbles have collected in the corners of his mouth. The ghost – Maureen – circled the room like a sparrow in the shock of Isabel and Ael’s entry. Now she is bent over her son. The light of her form flickers, but she continues to wail in protest. The closeness to speech makes the noise eerie: the angry, undirected babbling of the demented, sounding as if it comes from far away, or underwater, or both. Isabel watches her calmly, though her heart is racing. The recent dead always have this effect on her.

As the noise drones on, Gary speaks in a hoarse voice. “Who are… what are you doing?” he says.

“We’re here to help,” Isabel says, with more calmness than she feels.

“Are you angels?” Gary asks, looking at them pleadingly. Isabel and Ael exchange a glance. “Well,” Isabel begins, but she is interrupted by Ael.

“Yes, Gary,” he says in a deep voice. “We have come to you.”

Isabel gives him a look, but Ael doesn’t notice. Teasing the delusional is typical of him. Part of being dead means he has little sympathy or understanding for the problems of the living: just a scientist’s curiosity. It works, though. Gary’s mouth falls open, and with a cry, he slithers from the chair to his knees.

“Oh God, I always knew. Thank you, Lord. Forgive my doubt,” he says, clasping his hands, and looking at Ael with reverence. Ael’s chest swells a little.

“But as my companion has said, we have come to help you,” Ael goes on. “Before we begin, I think we’d better look at the… ah… freezer itself?”

Gary climbs hurriedly to his feet. “Of course, of course,” he says. “My mother… I just knew it was my destiny to release her. I prayed… and I saw what I had to do. And now here you are, praise be!”

Still muttering to himself, he leads the way to a dark doorway. It gives onto a back hall. An oblong freezer stretches the length of the wall. The lid is frosted over. Grunting a little Gary opens it. Smoky air billows out. The inside is stacked with pizza-boxes and Tupperware, making an uneven bier. Lying crookedly on top is Maureen’s body. The head of the corpse is angled towards them, chin down. There’s something defiant about the posture, as if challenging them to find anything unusual about the situation. Maureen’s ghost has followed them, and stands looking at her body. She radiates extreme displeasure, as apparent as the smoke coiling from the freezer. Isabel doesn’t blame her.

“So beautiful,” Gary says dreamily. His mother’s ghost flexes angrily, but Ael is looking at the body with similar content: the deep pleasure of novelty registering in his heart. Gary slowly lowers the lid.

“I am right, aren’t I?” he says hopefully, looking at Isabel and Ael in turn. “I mean, she is an angel? She’s joined the celestial throng?”

Ael shakes his head. “Not exactly. In point of fact she hasn’t gone anywhere. Her spirit is standing just to your left.”

Gary jumps, and looks blindly in the general direction of Maureen. “Mother?” he cries tearfully. Maureen’s spirit stares at him spitefully. Gary turns to Ael. “Can she hear me? Does she have a message?”

“Not that you’d want to hear,” Ael says dryly.

Gary looks confused. “What… what do you mean?”

“The dead are often angry,” Isabel cuts in. “You can understand that. The shock, and so on?”

Gary nods slowly, and Isabel glowers at Ael. He raises his hands in mute defence. “Come on,” she continues. “Let’s get inside and sit down. Gary, we need to have a talk with your mother. And I think you should listen.”

Finding the street isn’t hard: it’s sealed off halfway down. By the barrier is a cluster of police officers with round cheeks and flat eyes. There is also a television van, and a handful of onlookers. There isn’t much for them to onlook. The little crowd has a restless, peevish air, as if they know this too, and are insulted by the ease with which they are being entertained. Isabel Instance turns the van round and finds a space some distance away.

“How are we going to do this, then?” she asks, unfastening her seatbelt. “The usual?”

Aelfric Fouracre nods. He reaches into his pocket and produces name badges for them both. He procured them from a secret contact – so he says. Isabel doubts this: she has no evidence that he knows anyone at all apart from her. This is another area in which she suspects his air of mystery conceals a banal reality. She has a vision of Ael making the badges himself: bent studiously over a desk, using a craft knife and Pritstick, his tongue sticking from the corner of his mouth. Perhaps his version of the world is better after all.

The badges identify Isabel and Ael as senior government liaison officers. They usually work. The police, local council authorities, security guards all assume that liaison means something official and generally let them into buildings, crime scenes, more or less anywhere. Isabel was surprised how easy it was at first, but as Ael told her, it isn’t difficult to take advantage of institutions. “Army, police, council, the procedure is similar. Institutions work on rules, and they have far too many for anyone to remember. If you seem to know the rules, they’ll be desperate to please you.”

As they march towards the police they get into formation. Ael goes first, walking briskly, with a faint frown to indicate a razor-sharp bureaucratic brain working at top-speed. Isabel trots by his left shoulder, murmuring into his ear – the high-powered PA. The black clothes suit the part, the red hair less so, but it is mostly a question of conviction. The first line of policemen, awed by the sense of purpose, don’t even think of stopping them. But an older constable straightens as they passed. He starts to say, “Hey!”, but a cool flicker of importance on Ael’s face makes the word die in his mouth. He lamely converts it into, “Excuse me, sir…”

“Sorry, officer. Remiss of me. We’re community liaison. This is my assistant, Miss Instance.” Ael speaks quickly, with a hint of weary condescension. The policeman stares at them.

“Right. Only, we’re waiting for negotiators, see.”

Ael nods. “That’s right, yes. Liaison. That’s us.”

“There wasn’t anything on the radio…”

Isabel cuts in. Ael enjoys playing her boss too much for her liking. “New procedure,” she says, in a clipped voice, looking down her nose. “In case of monitoring by the suspect. You should have had warning we were coming biked over. But it doesn’t matter. You can see our accreditation.”

The policeman takes a step back, to Isabel’s satisfaction. The true measure of a man of importance is how intimidating his staff can afford to be. “Right,” he says. “Well, good luck. He’s locked in the kitchen at the back. Have you…”

“Been briefed. Yes. See that we aren’t disturbed.” Isabel dismisses him with a nod of the head. Ael has already marched to the front door of the house, where he is talking to another policeman. As she reaches the door the policeman and two others file out, and she lets them pass. For a moment she pauses on the doorstep, and tells herself, as usual, not to think about the lunacy of what they are doing.

This is not the first time they’ve walked into situations involving the prospect of violence. Ael is recklessly indifferent, obviously, and seems to assume she will be equally blasé, despite the fact that she has rather more to lose. Isabel sometimes has a horrible suspicion that he is rather looking forward to her being dead, so that he can train up her ghost. No chance, she tells herself, no chance. She’s moving on when she dies. She’s taking the pathway of light: the momentary radiance experienced by most of the dead that leads, so Ael believes, to another world, and one which he expects to be less gratifyingly silly than this one, hence him lingering. Isabel supposes it leads to oblivion. She doesn’t mind that idea. It certainly beats the wry detached death tourism in which Ael has been engaged for a millennium or so. She feels a shudder at that thought. Immortality holds more terrors for her than mortality. The idea of remaining forever, cut off from the best things in life and becoming ever more peculiarly oneself seems rather horrible. Whereas ceasing to exist as the person she is now, which is the very worst that the path of light can offer, strikes her as nothing to get too worked up about. Most of the people for whom she’d choose to remain have gone a long time ago, in one way or another. And she has no fear of ending, per se. She takes a final deep breath and looks around her, then goes inside and shuts the door.

Aelfric Fouracre is the only really alive dead person Isabel Instance has met – he is marvellously unique, as he regularly likes to remind her. She’s seen ghosts before, ever since she was a child, but never one openly visible to the general public, able to touch, to smoke in a way he wrongly imagines is French and debonair, and generally to all intents and purposes be indistinguishable from someone who is alive – apart from lacking a certain radiance, a certain bright colourful edge, which must be what people call auras, Isabel supposes, and which she’d probably be able to see properly if she concentrated. She refuses to do so, however. It’s bad enough being able to see the dead without getting involved in that kind of nonsense.

They met at the University Library. She was behind the desk watching the dead people milling around the living (there were always more dead people than living people in the University Library). She didn’t notice him waiting to order a book until he coughed and asked pleasantly whether, if she absolutely had to gawp so flagrantly at the host of the undead, she could do so after processing his request. He smiled smugly at her dumbstruck expression, handed her a card that read simply, ‘Aelfric Fouracre: investigator’, told her to call him Ael, but to be sure she pronounced it correctly, by which he meant Ay-el, not Ale, which would be a foolish name, added that it was Saxon and less of an affectation than that might seem given that it had been the Saxon period when he had received it, and told her he was going to buy her a cup of tea and educate her about the world of the dead. He marched off, weaving his way between a Victorian ghost biting its lip uncertainly as if looking for its hat and a pallid dead businessman drifting out of the reading room. After a long moment Isabel followed dutifully, with a kind of irritated wonder. Which she’s been doing ever since, she reflects wryly. On and off.

“This is the general situation,” Ael says, leaning back in his seat as they stutter through the traffic. “This afternoon at 12.42 Gary Simmons telephones the ambulance service, disorientated and upset, and announces the death of his elderly mother. The paramedics arrive at Ashfield Road at 13.01, but he won’t open the door. While they deliberate as to their best course, Gary instructs them to fetch a priest from the upstairs window. All in good time, they reply. However, it seems he wants a priest rather more promptly than that, and he claims to have a gun with which to press his case. At which point, obviously, the police get involved.”

“And are now, presumably, surrounding the house,” Isabel says, changing gear.

“Doubtless,” Ael says airily. Isabel looks at him, and he looks back, insouciant. She decides not to discuss the difficulties this will cause them. “Plod will be scratching his head and waiting for something to happen, I should think,” Ael says. “More importantly from our point of view is why this all happened. From what I can gather, the official view is that he became distressed at the sight of the corpse, and slung her into the freezer on the spur of the moment. Since when he has been sub compos mentis. But I think he’d been planning it. I think she was alive when he put her in.”

Isabel sighs. “You would. And in your wisdom have you come up with a reason why?”

“Why kill her? There’s all sorts…

“No, why freeze her.”

Ael leans forward eagerly. “Well, my theory is that he fancied it the perfect crime. He gives her a dose of sleeping pills, nothing fatal, just enough to knock her out. Then he pops her in the freezer till sure she’s dead, takes her out, defrosts her, sits her back in bed, who’d be any the wiser?”

Isbael frowns. “But he hasn’t… I mean, she’s still in the freezer, right?”

Ael waves away this irrelevance. “Lost his nerve halfway through, I expect. Happens often enough.”

“Hmm,” Isabel says, wondering where to begin. “Er… it just seems a bit unlikely. Surely the pathologist would be able to tell what had happened, for one thing.”

“Well, I’m not sure I could distinguish, for example, between a fresh chicken nugget and one that had been defrosted.”

Up ahead, a green light goes to amber. Isabel tries to accelerate to beat the red. The van wheezes, and she gives up the idea, slowing to a halt. While they wait for the light she looks at Ael pensively. She’s surprised, given his hopelessly dated outlook on the world, that he knows what a chicken nugget is. She went to a supermarket with him once, and watched him steer his trolley gingerly like a traveller in an exotic land. Every now and then he plucked items like insta-noodles off the shelf and chuckled with indulgent incredulity before replacing them. She tried to beam waves of apology at the other shoppers, but everyone was so used to what they called ‘autism’ – by which they meant any unembarrassed eccentricity – that she and Ael were ignored.

The light turns green. “I think it’s a bit more complicated than that with bodies,” Isabel says as they move off. “I mean, eyes, and organs, and things. It would probably show up.”

He grunts. “It would make for an interesting autopsy,” he says. “Anyway. No point speculating yet. Let’s see what Maureen’s spirit makes of it all.”

“If she’s there.”

“She’ll be there. Would you leave your body in with the fish-fingers?”

As they approach Mill Road Ael stirs himself for the first time. “We can’t stop, I’m afraid.”

Isabel looks at him. She’s been driving them to her flat, three rooms in the roof of a terrace house out near Brookfields. This is their routine. Ael finds the case, using, so he claims, his network – a group of mysterious would-be spies communicating via cryptic classified ads in local papers. Isabel is doubtful about the real extent of the network, and sometimes even about the basic fact of its existence: she suspects he just watches the local news and takes it from there. Anyway. Once he has something he rings and demands that she collect him on her way home from the library. They go to her flat and she opens a bottle of wine while he watches TV. He is addicted to TV: most dead people she’s met are. She has one glass for Dutch courage, and leaves the rest waiting for when they get back. If it sounds like a difficult job, she makes sure there’s at least one other bottle lined up, which is never usually a problem. Her flat seems to be full of wine bottles poking out from unlikely locations. The weight and uniformity of her recycling box is a source of great satisfaction to her. Only when she feels as ready as she ever gets do they hit the road.

“Why not?” Isabel asks, feeling stubborn, though she knows it is pointless. She has been wilful her entire life, but his obstinacy is on a whole new level.

“This one’s urgent,” he says, adjusting some invisible crease in his clothing. An old-fashion suit with a sweater under the jacket, even in this heat. Isabel has told him before that this habitual dress makes him look ridiculously middle-aged, but maybe, after you died, looking middle-aged was not something you minded about too much.

“So hang on. We’ve been driving home all this time. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You were already going the right way. And I was busy. Thinking.”

Isabel sighs. “I can’t believe I’m not even going to get a drink first. Go on, then. Tell me.”

Ael half-turns to face her. When he’s full of delighted anticipation, like now, he reminds her of a teacher at the start of a lesson he knows will be entertaining. He looks quite like a teacher, too, the kind to inspire crushes. His refined face and curly dark hair would work wonders on impressionable students. He should give it a go, one day, Isabel thinks: teaching, or maybe giving lectures with an artful stammer to rows of earnest adoring girls with big hair and glasses. He’d enjoy that kind of attention.

“Our concern is one Maureen Simmons, pensioner,” he says carefully. “As was. She lived in Ashfield Road in Chesterton sharing a terraced house with her only son Gary, 34, lab technician, single.”

Isabel clenches her hands around the steering wheel. Here it comes, then. Another one; another murder. Nearly all their clients are murder victims. Mostly because visiting the scene of violent death is the only real way to locate new ghosts – which are the only kind they have a hope of helping – but partly, Isabel suspects, because Ael simply enjoys the human depravity involved.

“What’s he done to her, then?” she asks resignedly.

He looks smug. “Have a guess. Anything you like. You’ll never get it.”

She shakes her head. His passion for the exotically macabre is inexhaustible. What is bizarre enough to have piqued his interest this time? “So he’s… he’s always had a pensioner fetish,” she says eventually. “Gets off on Saga catalogues. Then time goes by, he sees his mother turning into the object of his desire. Paralysed by his mounting attraction, he… um… he strangles her with a girdle?”

Ael nods judiciously. “That’s rather good,” he allows. “But not even close, I’m afraid. He’s put her in the freezer.”

Isabel looks at him narrowly. He is beaming at her, really thrilled. His boundless enthusiasm is, she supposes, one of his good points.

“In the freezer?”

“He’s locked himself in the house with her and says he’ll only come out if they send a priest. He wants the freezer consecrated, you see? Wants to be with her forever.”

Sweet Lord. No wonder Ael is in such a good mood. “Imaginative, isn’t it?” he says happily. “Collect the ice-cream and pay one’s respects at the same time. An admirable convenience given the busy lifestyles of the age.”

Isabel says nothing. Another stitch in the tapestry of death’s infinite variety. Unnatural causes come in all shapes and sizes, if you know where to look. And she and Ael have had practice. A lot of practice.

Aelfric Fouracre is late as usual. She has waited for Aelfric far too often for any one lifetime – not that this is a concept he can ever really understand, given how little time means to him. Lifetime even less. She yawns, stretches. Alongside the van a sweaty man in a cap emerges from the newsagent, picking suspiciously at a plastic-wrapped samosa. On the other side of the road a bent-backed old lady dodders phlegmatically into the Fitzwilliam, as if intending to declare herself an exhibit. Isabel wonders what Ael is up to this time. He won’t tell her, of course. He’ll do what he always does: leap into the van with an aura of mystery and hiss, “Drive!” It would be more impressive if he were more athletic, or the van less geriatric. He has never explained the need for haste, and she doesn’t ask. He’s probably only trying to seem dashing; it doesn’t seem fair to force him to admit as much.

She yawns again, settles lower in her seat. There’s no sign of a traffic warden either, so things aren’t all bad. She reaches out and adjusts the rearview mirror so that she can see herself, and examines the picture critically. Her Gothic years are behind her, but they’ve retreated slowly, like the tide, and left flotsam. She still dyes her hair red, and she still hasn’t grown out of applying black make-up like warpaint. Her fingernails are black, too, as are nearly all her clothes. Quite a lot of flotsam, then, all things considered. Too late to change now, probably. She’ll just become one of those wrinkled old ladies with heavy eyeliner who make young men in shops feel nervous. Ah well. She’s always been good at making men feel nervous. No reason to stop now.

Her pleasant fantasy of irascible elderly eccentricity is interrupted by Ael throwing open the passenger door. He clambers in pretty nimbly for a dead man. “Drive!” he says hoarsely.

“Yes, dear,” Isabel says dutifully. She noses the van out into the stream of cyclists, and attempts without success to pick up speed. It is a good job that Ael has never yet been chased from one of these mysterious assignations. Even if she were to stand on the accelerator with her whole weight, any hot-footed villain worth his salt would have ample time to jog alongside and pepper the cab with bullets. Displeasing to think that Ael would be unharmed, and she alone would pay the price of whatever trouble he’d got himself into. She won’t die in front of Ael, she promises herself, attempting and failing to overtake a dopey-looking boy on a bike. Ael’s face is pleasant enough, but it won’t be the first face her ghost sees. On that she is quite decided.

For much of the time during which I have been not blogging, I have been having a sit, and for some of this time I have also been having a think. As a result of these thinkings I have made a decision, which is this: I am no longer going to fill this blog with random musings loosely connected to words. Not because I don’t like randomly musing on words. I am, after all, a man who has told a room full of incredulous adolescents that it is fun to read dictionaries and then attempted to demonstrate this in front of them to their bewilderment and scorn, during the process of which I did at least discover the words ‘ragabash’ and ‘homoeomery’.

No, I am going to forgo the pleasure of random musings for a higher purpose: story. I have decided that I like stories more than I like musings. So, starting sometime – let’s say tomorrow – I am going to use this blog to publish a short story, in even shorter instalments. It will be the first of a series of stories, which will be known as The Misadventures of Isabel Instance, Librarian and Friend to the Dead.

From now on this means I will no longer be addressing you directly in this chatty way, which I fondly imagine to be a discourse conducted in green leather armchairs before a fire while something amber winks in a glass. So this is my last chance to tell you about Isabel Instance before yielding to her. Um… what to say? She is 42, not an age she likes much, all sixes and sevens. She’s a librarian (obviously). She lives in Cambridge. She wears black, even on her fingernails. Her hair is dyed, she moves with the curious daintiness of a stagehand, and she knows the dead. Her closest associate is Aelfric Fouracre, who has been dead for a very long time, and her best friend is Persephone White, who knows nothing about the dead, which doesn’t stop her carrying on a kindly trade as a harmless but fraudulent medium.

Isabel drinks whisky and helps dead people, or at least tries to help dead people, which isn’t easy, as they tend to be angry and obstinate and much more inclined to potter and have an angry think about things. Given that they have no sense of time this state of affairs can last for a while – several millennia at least. But Isabel and Aelfric do at least make the effort, and as every poor cook and incompetent present-buyer knows, you can’t say fairer than that.

Anyway. The story starts tomorrow. New instalments will come out every week or so. Their purpose is to divert, nothing more or less, though arguably this is a high enough calling to be getting on with. As Frank tells us, we aren’t just artists, we’re something more: we’re entertainers.

So if you find them diverting, do please keep reading, and if you find them really diverting, do please share them. Sharing is an imposition, I know, but hey. It spreads the love and the word and the transmission of love and words isn’t the worst thing in the world, especially when unsoiled by the grubby mitts of mammon.

And, well, yeah. That’s all. I feel oddly emotional at the prospect of this imminent extinction into fiction. If I was the kind of person who went in for rambling self-indulgent musings about words, I’d say in an excruciating attempt at glib sign-off that vanishing into someone else’s story is, in the end, a fate that awaits us all. Lucky I’m not that guy any more…

Now I know you may be thinking that, as ambitions go, this is on the bold side: but hear me out. The great problem of modern society is not inequality, nor debt, nor crime, nor lack of social cohesion; it isn’t TV, nor even Jimmy Savile; it is neither the yoof, nor the tottering ranks of the elderly. It is happiness. Specifically: the pursuit of it, as laid out in the US Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right of mankind.

Image: flickr.com/amslerPIX

The phrase ‘pursuit of happiness’ has sunk deep roots in the modern consciousness, to the extent that to challenge it sounds either miserabilist or pointlessly controversial; and yet it is the most bogus of statements and the most absurd of concepts, for one very good reason. Happiness by its very nature cannot be pursued.

Many things do lie within our grasp. We can strive for goodness, decency, a sense of value. We can seek satisfaction, even perhaps contentment. But to chase happiness is to chase a will-o’-the-wisp, an illusion that keeps us always running, never reaching – always, by definition, unhappy, because happiness recedes before us.

Here’s why. All the things I listed above as achievable are associated with actions: with the actual doing of something by some person. This applies most strongly to satisfaction. Give me a task, and I can try to complete it satisfactorily. Should I do so, I can feel satisfied in my work. I saw an objective, I completed it, I feel no distance between what I wanted and what I have got.

As a result – and probably only later, looking back – I may say that I felt happy: an indefinable sense of well-being that emanated from the ether. But I did not do the thing in search of happiness itself, and if I had done the action would have been poisoned by the ambition assigned to it.

Let me give you a concrete example. I need to put up a shelf. To do so I saw a piece of wood. Halfway through my sawing, if someone were to ask me, “Does that make you happy?” I would stop and honestly answer: no. Sawing wood doesn’t make happy. Spiritual awareness might perhaps make me happy; spending time with people I care about it might do it. Those are the things I want to do with my life. Why am I wasting time sawing this stupid piece of wood?

However, if I were asked, “Are you finding that satisfying?” I would say yes: I know how to do it, I am doing what needs to be done. This is satisfactory.

And here is the kicker: the stuff that ‘makes me happy’ is either nebulous or a treat – the cake and icing of life, not the bread and water. It does not link to actions. The things I do on a day-to-day basis cannot lead me to it; cannot ‘make me happy’.

The accumulation of satisfying experiences, on the other hand: that can. By doing tasks of more or less interest to me as well as I am able, I get to the end of a day tired, but satisfied. Afterwards I relax, I give up striving – and now, almost unnoticed, the conditions for happiness have been met, and it steals in around me.

Had I spent the day seeking happiness, I would have given up on all the tedious tasks that could have satisfied me, and mooned around after a pipe-dream. In the evening I would have been gnawed with guilt at the thought of all the things I failed to do that day, and the ways in which my life did not correspond to an unachievable ideal.

This doesn’t just apply to sawing wood, and it doesn’t just apply to individuals: it runs through society, and how we aspire to live in it. We are conditioned to seek happiness, but we don’t know what actions lead to this state. Many people therefore equate happiness with fame or money. This is splendidly ironic: these are two things that by their definition the majority can never enjoy.

So just as happiness itself cannot be sought, but only happens upon us when we seek a different goal, so the common aspirations of people in a free society cannot be achieved. Everyone is forced by the way we have defined our ambitions to find their lives wanting. Our desires are placed forever out of our reach. And so, obliged to seek happiness (this is good on that sense of obligation), we consume product after product, we go through relationship after relationship in search of a ‘soulmate’, we yearn for illusion after illusion – and all the time the only thing that grows is our wintry discontent.

Generally, when people lament the state of the world, I tend to disagree. What we have now is what people in the past would have wanted: our lives progress and improve. But this is one area in which we have lost our way, I think. People in the past had multiple aspirations, and made compromises in pursuit of satisfaction. Most people today have a single unobtainable aspiration, and refuse to compromise at all, in the pursuit of happiness: a pernicious dream that taunts and mocks them for everything they lack.

And in the end it all comes down to that one word: happiness. Jefferson’s alleged source for the Declaration of Independence was John Locke. Now Locke took time to define happiness: he said ‘the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness’. Careful, constant, true and solid: these words qualify the state he describes, and make it something far from the vacuous modern catch-all. Jefferson didn’t have that time, so he used only one out of what are five vital words – and so, I would argue, spun out a myriad unforeseen consequences.

Often people dismiss the choice of the exact word as a mere quibble – ‘a question of semantics’. I disagree: words have power. And if the most powerful country in the world existed to safeguard life, liberty and the pursuit of satisfaction – or fulfilment – or even true and solid happiness – I think the world it dominates would be a different place. A happier one.