‘Right. Let me quickly get dressed and I’ll be out. You keep well back from the fire now, Donny. No heroics, you hear me?’

‘Yes, Miss.’

‘What were you doing out at this time of night anyway? Why didn’t you go straight off home?’

A definite shifty look passed across the boy’s face, and he mumbled some sort of excuse about hanging around to look at the moon. Madi wasn’t buying it, but this wasn’t the time to stop and question him. For now, all that mattered was getting herself down to the hall and making sure that Tom was all right.

By the time she emerged into the street a few minutes later, the sky was lit with a bright orange glow that hovered above the line of trees like a bright and rather beautiful sunset. The smoke, carried by the wind, was drifting through the night air, catching in her throat. She could see the tips of the flames reaching for the sky before she turned the corner and saw the old wooden hall itself, or what was left of it.

Tom was doing his best with a garden hose, connected to the outside tap in the nearest garden, but the hose was not long enough and the trickle of water emerging from it was doing nothing but wet the pavement. A couple of the other men were running back and forth from their homes with buckets.

Everyone else was outside in the street, standing around in groups, watching in near silence as if they could hardly believe what they were witnessing. Some of them had come out in their dressing gowns and slippers, one or two wielding their phones and taking pictures, capturing the moment as the last walls succumbed to the flames and their cherished hall finally lost its battle for survival.

By the time the fire engines came roaring in, it was obvious that it was too late to do anything much but douse the flames.

‘Well, that’s it then.’ Tom sat in Prue’s kitchen clutching a warming cup of cocoa and shaking his head. ‘That’s the end of the show. Hall burnt to the ground. Costumes all gone …’

‘If only we’d carried them down to store them overnight in Prue’s shed as we’d planned.’

‘But we didn’t, Madi. My fault. I’m supposed to be the one in charge, and I left them there, at the mercy of the flames. All that flammable material. You hear about it, don’t you? Cheap Halloween costumes catching alight …’

‘These weren’t cheap fancy dress, Tom. They were ordinary clothes, tarted up with sequins. The costumes aren’t to blame. You’re not to blame.’

‘We don’t know that. I’m an ex-firefighter, for God’s sake. How on earth can this have happened?’

‘Let’s wait and see what the investigation turns up, shall we? And in the meantime, we can ask for more donations and make new costumes.’

‘What’s the point? We’d hardly got started anyway. And with no hall, we have nowhere to rehearse and, more importantly, nowhere to hold the actual show. No, it’s over, Madi. It’s a crying shame, but I’ve let those kids down.’