Jimmy sighed, and held out a hand. ‘You go ahead, Auntie Glenys,’ he said. ‘Give me my ticket and Mo’s, and you can be fixing up a lodging whilst I prise her away from the puppy.’

Glenys shook her head. ‘If I turn up without any children I may be welcomed by a landlady who only takes adults and would be unpleasantly surprised when you two arrived,’ she explained. ‘I’ll wait for you.’

‘Right,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’ll go and check the guard’s van. Meet you at the ticket office in five minutes.’

But five minutes later Jimmy could only shake his head, an anxious frown marring his usually cheerful face. ‘She didn’t travel in the guard’s van. The guard didn’t worry – he just assumed you hadn’t agreed to it,’ he explained. ‘He did say that Mo could have re-joined the train at any number of places, only she would have had to have got a lift to do so, and you know very well she wouldn’t have done that. Where can she be?’

Seeing their worried faces, a porter came over to ask if they needed any help. Quickly, Glenys told him what had happened and the porter sighed. ‘Kids! They’re more trouble than they’re worth, I’m tellin’ you. How old was this ’un? Ten? Twelve?’

‘She’s six,’ Jimmy said, his voice wobbling. ‘Only six.’ He turned to Glenys. ‘What’ll we do, Auntie Glenys? Can she have been kidnapped? Oh why on earth didn’t she get into the guard’s van, or even just get aboard the train and walk up the corridor until she found us? What possible reason could she have for hiding away like a thief in the night?’

Glenys chewed her lip, but the porter spoke up.

‘She might have been in the toilet block, or the waitin’ room, and not realised the train were leavin’ till it were too late.’

Glenys shook her head. ‘She’s only six, but she’s a sensible child,’ she said. ‘She’d have gone to the station master’s house, or asked the way to the nearest bus stop. She wouldn’t have just disappeared. Is there a public telephone near here? Can you give me the number of the last two or three stations? She has no money on her, you see.’

The porter grinned. ‘We can do better’n that,’ he said proudly. ‘The station master here, Mr Alf Grimes, can send a message to every station on the line.’ He turned to Jimmy. ‘Is she your sister? Well. don’t you worry, young feller, we’ll have her back wi’ you before you know it.’

An hour later Glenys had used some of her precious savings on a local bus which trundled them back through beautiful countryside to the place which they now thought of as the puppy station. To Glenys, and to Jimmy too, it looked just like all the other stations they had passed, with one difference. ‘There’s glass scattered all over the platform there,’ the keen-eyed Jimmy remarked. ‘Someone’s tried to clear it up, but there are fragments in between the paving slabs. I wonder . . .’