‘I did right, didn’t I, our Jimmy?’ Mo asked anxiously. ‘You always say come to you if I’m in trouble, and oh, Jimmy, I’m in trouble now!’

‘I don’t see why, kiddo,’ Jimmy said after a thoughtful pause. ‘You had every right to take our presents, and I’m sure you can’t have killed Cyril. What makes you think you did? You’ve played the same trick before just to slow him down, and it worked.’

Mo gave a doleful sniff. ‘Ye-es, but this time I stayed too long looking for the sparkly necklace – I really wanted to see it again, ’cos it were real pretty, but I never did find it – and I’d barely got back into the kitchen when Cyril started hollerin’. He come shufflin’ to the top of the stairs, never noticin’ I’d tied his bootlaces together, and saw me in the kitchen and his eyes sort of slithered sideways to the sack of sprouts and the clothes horse and he guessed I’d been spying on him. He roared like a bull, Jimmy, and screamed that he’d kill us both when he got his hands on us and then he took a big step forward, so of course he came down the stairs head first. I were hopin’ he’d bruise himself like he’s bruised us so many times, but then Mrs Grimshaw and Aunt Huxtable came running to see what had caused the commotion, an’ Cyril were still lying at the foot of our stairs. Aunt Huxtable began to scream that he were dead and whiles everyone were clusterin’ round – I saw Johnny Latimer give him a real good kick – I sneaked in and tried to undo the laces. Only the old girl must have seen, ’cos she began to screech that it were bound to be the work of the Trewin kids, you an’ me, Jimmy. I tried to say that you were at the wash house and I were too little to hurt anybody but Aunt Huxtable just kept screechin’ we’d killed her son and tellin’ someone to fetch the scuffers. “They’ll hang you from the yard arm,” she said, and tried to grab me, so I lit out and come to you.’ She looked at him anxiously. ‘That were the right thing to do, weren’t it, Jimmy?’

‘Yes of course,’ Jimmy said positively. Now that he thought about it he realised that his little sister had taken a step which he, as the older, should have taken long since; she had run from the Court and the Huxtables. Jimmy supposed that he had stayed with the old woman because when his father came for them he would naturally expect them to be at the Court. And then there was the problem of where Jimmy would run. Sam Trewin had married Grace against his parents’ wishes and had cut himself off completely from his family; Jimmy did not even know where they lived. He gnawed his lip thoughtfully. His mother was Welsh, and had grown up on a farm, but that was all he knew. He could only assume that, like his father’s family, the Griffiths had not approved of their offspring’s marriage and wanted to cut the connection.