Anne giggled and agreed. She was enjoying Sid, although she was very worried and anxious. But Sid was so comical. He didn’t mean to be. He was just enjoying himself hugely, and he said so every other minute.

In fact, he was really a very nice guest to have. It wasn’t everybody who could welcome everything with so much gusto and say how wonderful it was half a dozen times on end.

He went out to the kitchen after supper and offered to wash up for Joan. “I always do it for Mum,” he said. “I won’t break a thing.” So he did the washing up and Anne did the drying. Julian thought it was a good thing to give her as much to do as possible, to stop her worrying.

Sid looked a bit taken-aback when he was asked to play games later on. “Well — I dunno,” he said. “I’m not much good at games. I did try to learn draughts, but all that jumping over one another got me muddled. If I want to jump over things I’ll play leap-frog and do the thing properly.”

“Well — we did think of playing Snap,” said Julian, and Sid brightened up at once.

“Snap! That’s right up my street!” he said. And so it was. His habit of shouting snap and collecting all the cards at the same moment as his shout, led to his winning quite a lot of games. He was delighted.

“This is a smasher of an evening,” he kept saying. “Don’t know when I’ve enjoyed myself so much. Wonder how that brother of yours is getting on — hope he brings my bike back all right.”

“Oh, he will,” said Julian, dealing out the cards for the sixth game of Snap. They were all in the lighted sitting-room now, sitting round a table in the window — Julian, Joan, Anne and Sid. Anyone watching would see them clearly — and would certainly not guess that Sid, the fourth one, was the paper-boy and not Dick.

At eleven o’clock Julian left to put the parcel that Anne had carefully wrapped up under the stone at the bottom of the garden. She had found a big notebook she thought would do, one that didn’t seem at all important, and had wrapped it in paper and tied it with string. Julian had slipped a note inside.

Here is the notebook. Please release our cousin at once. You will get into serious trouble if you hold her any longer.

He slipped down the garden and shone his torch on the crazy paving there. When he came to the last stone he found that it had been loosened. He lifted it up easily and put the parcel into a hollow that seemed to have been prepared ready for it. He took a cautious look round, wondering if Dick was hidden anywhere about, but could see no one.

He was back in the lighted sitting-room in under two minutes, yelling ‘snap’ with the others. He played stupidly, partly because he wanted the delighted Sid to win and partly because he was wondering about Dick. Was he all right?