I froze for a moment, not quite believing I’d done it. But I quickly came to my senses. One of the guards was shouting something. I bundled Amelia onto the bike. Her night vision would be sharp instantly. ‘Go, go,’ I urged, turning the key for her. I needn’t have worried; she shot off confidently down the road. In her wake, on soft feet, I slipped through the darkness and round the side of the building. I must have passed within a few metres of the nearest guard, stumbling out into the road after Amelia. He didn’t go far before giving up. In the meantime, I very nearly ran straight into a fence – it clipped my shoulder – but I’d memorised the angle well and I stopped in the darker darkness in the shelter of the warehouse, my eyes already pulling shades of grey from the night now the light was gone.

In fact, I soon discovered I could see too well. Edging round the building I realised another floodlight covered the ground to the rear of it. Worse still, there was another guard. Just the one on this side, but he was also wearing a holster and pacing back and forth. I couldn’t see the floodlight on this side, not without walking onto the guard’s patch, so there was no way I could disable it. And by the time I’d crept back to the front of the warehouse the men standing sentry there had turned on a second light, this one mounted on the building itself, high above the roller-door, and whereas beforehand they’d looked like they couldn’t be bothered, they were now very alert indeed, patrolling the full forecourt in synchronised dog-legs.

I was pinned down, I realised, unable to move either way without being lit up, and at the mercy of any guard who decided to have a good look along this thin strip of darkness squeezed between the side wall and the fence. How had I thought this manoeuvre would pay off in the first place? I wanted to punch myself for taking such a stupid risk. Instead I crouched down low, pressed tight to the corrugated warehouse wall, and wracked my brains for what to do next.

It was then that I heard her. Mum’s raised voice, muffled, distant and yet right there.

‘But there’s no more time!’ she was shouting. ‘No. More. Time!’

It was definitely her. I pressed my ear to the wall, straining to hear more, but nothing more came, and of course I couldn’t yell in reply. Instead, under my breath, I pleaded with her to call out again. The longer she didn’t, the more I began to doubt myself. I’d wait, I decided, wait and listen for more, to prove I wasn’t mad. Where else could I go after all?