The Door That Led to Where by Sally Gardner

premonition that he was about to join the daffodils.
    When they parted AJ was none the wiser as to why Samuel Dalton had been so terrified to see a man he seemed to think was Lucas Jobey. Or how he came to have his photograph taken in the twenty-first century.
    In a way AJ no longer cared about the snuffbox documentation. If he was fired, so be it. He would live here, in 1830, near to Esme Dalton. He had spent the best afternoon he had ever spent with a girl. He was thrilled by how she thought.
    â€˜If the world is still turning in two hundred years, I hope it will be a kinder place,’ she had said to him.
    Oh, Miss Esme Dalton, you could rock my world, he’d thought to himself.
    By the time he’d reached the house in Mount Pleasant, AJ had decided that if Mr Baldwin was back in chambers on Monday he would tell him he needed more time to find the papers.
    The one thing he knew he didn’t want to do was to give his key to anyone.

Chapter Sixteen
    The funeral of Leon’s mum took place the following Wednesday. No horse-driven hearse for her – just a basic coffin, one wreath and three mourners: AJ, Slim and Elsie. No one had seen Leon since his mother had died. It wasn’t for the lack of looking.
    AJ had spent all of Sunday searching for him and all he had found were rumours and gossip about Leon being in deep shit.
    AJ hadn’t found Leon and he hadn’t found the snuffbox papers, but on Monday he had learned, to his relief, that although Mr Baldwin’s condition was stable he was expected to be in the London Clinic for a little while longer.
    AJ had hoped that Leon would be at the crematorium, but he wasn’t. It was off a busy main road and the minicab driver had had to stop and ask for directions at a petrol station. The chapel itself sat adrift among a rocky sea of monuments sanitized with plastic flowers. The crem was nothing more than a clinical conveyor belt where mortal remains were turned into something more manageable.
    Slim had said he would meet AJ and Elsie there.
    â€˜Why he wouldn’t come in the minicab with us is beyond me,’ said Elsie. ‘It’s a right trek out to this dump.’
    AJ had a feeling he knew the answer. It was all over Sicknote’s Facebook page: pictures of her with Moses, all loved up. “My man, the one and only,” she had written. Elsie was paying the cab driver when Slim emerged from behind a memorial stone, looking like death.
    â€˜Have you eaten?’ said Elsie. She took a sandwich from her handbag and offered it to Slim.
    â€˜No. Yeah. I’m all right,’ he said.
    â€˜Eat,’ said Elsie.
    Slim stuffed it in his mouth as the hearse bearing Leon’s mum’s coffin slowly pulled up.
    It was a woebegone sight. Wednesdays, thought AJ, are made for woebegone sights.
    â€˜I’m glad I’ve saved with the Co-op,’ said Elsie. ‘When I go, I’m going in style. It’ll all be catered for, down to the last egg sandwich.’
    The priest wanted to be done with this cremation. He looked awkward. In his hand was a laminated order of service. AJ reckoned he had picked out the one most appropriate for a drug addict.
    â€˜She was a wonderful mum,’ the priest said in a voice of hopelessness, ‘and will be much missed in her community.’
    So much so that she was already forgotten, thought AJ. Her flat had been cleaned out, slapped with paint and was waiting for a new family to move in.
    The priest seemed relieved when at last he could press the button, and the curtain opened as Bob Dylan croaked Leon’s mum’s one request. Broken head, thought AJ. Nothing but a broken life.
    It was then that AJ saw the sparrow. It must have flown into the chapel by mistake and it settled on the coffin. He wished Leon was there to see it; he would have known it was a sign, a good sign. Just before the conveyor belt started with a judder and the coffin chugged into oblivion, the sparrow