This article: John May is a man struggling with loneliness who works the Bona Vacantia office in the Kennington Town Hall in London, where his main responsibility is locating the next of kin of people found dead in the district with no will and testament. Most cases are open-and-shut due to lack of leads, but when heirs are located, he regularly finds them hesitant to accept the deceased's personal property, and so has taken the practice of offering to organize the funeral himself, paid for by district government, writing an eulogy for each deceased, as an incentive. His boss finds this practice time-consuming and expensive, and so has decided to close his office down once he completes one final case: the death of William Stoke.
Inspecting Stoke's apartment, his sole lead are a series of photographs—one of them of a pork pie factory. He visits it and obtains from one of the workers, who remembers Stoke, the address of Stoke's first lover. The now old and temperamental woman wants nothing to do with Stoke, giving John the impression Stoke cheated on her with the lady who owned a fish and chips restaurant that Stoke frequented. John travels to where Stoke was living at the time and checks all the fish and chips in town until he locates Stoke's second lover, Mary; her daughter, Kelly; and granddaughter.
Mary tells John that they cannot be considered Stoke's kin as "he never wanted a family." She does, however, tell him he abandoned them and landed in prison. At the prison, a guard leads John to some letters Stoke never mailed, where he find's Kelly's address and visits her without Mary's knowledge. Kelly is taken aback to hear her father is dead, but cuts John off when he tries to offer to organize the funeral, sending him instead to Jumbo: a man that served in the military alongside Stoke. contains an answer for the question: What is the first name of the person who has taken the practice of offering to organize funerals., what is it ?


John