‘How did you know about this place?’ Karim asks, looking around at the adult graffiti and burnt-up ground covered in empty beer cans. ‘Are you in a gang you haven’t told me about? Because, if so, I’d like to join. I was made for the gangster life.’

Kat and I both laugh. When you skateboard in places you’re not supposed to, you sometimes get 125 chased by security guards, and it was on one of those occasions that we found this spot under the bridge. It’s totally grim, but unless you knew it was there, or you found it by accident when you were running away from a big bald guy threatening to call your mum, you’d never spot it.

‘It’s come in handy once or twice,’ I say. ‘And what the hell were you doing inside that truck?’

‘Ooh, tell him, Karim,’ Kat says. ‘It’s so clever.’

‘I was checking the sat nav,’ Karim says, not even trying not to look smug. ‘So we would know for sure where the trees came from.’

‘That is actually genius,’ I say. ‘And?’

‘I’ll give you one guess,’ Karim says.

‘Is it wrong that part of me feels relieved?’ I say. ‘Assuming that you are actually talking about Crater Lake and not Norway or something.’

‘Very wrong,’ Karim says. ‘You strange, twisted person.’

‘But we know what we’re dealing with now. We can work out how to fix it.’

‘Yeah, I’d still rather the trees had come from Norway,’ Karim says.

I’m aware that time is ticking and we’re not out of danger yet.

126 ‘Come on, we need to keep going. If we stay as close as we can to the verge, we’ll be hidden by the overhang, so we should be hard to see. It’s not the quickest way back, but I think it’s our best option.’

So we press our backs to the sort-of cliff face of land that separates the river from the main part of Straybridge. In the summer it’s covered in shrubs and wild flowers, but at this time of year, it’s mostly bald earth, embedded with rocks that dig into our backs as we side-step along. If we slip, we’ll go straight into the river, which I know from experience is even colder than the worst cold you could imagine. It’s slow going, and we’re concentrating too hard on stopping our feet slipping out from under us to talk. There are no signs of human life. I’ve never known Straybridge this quiet.