‘To Mrs Redfern, I gather?’ said Alton. ‘Everybody knows that those two are sweet on each other.’

‘Bleh,’ said Merryweather.

‘My thoughts exactly.’ Benny patted him on the head. ‘I mean, she’s so old…’

‘Don’t you think that you’re being a bit jealous, loved one?’ said Alexander.

‘Jealous? No, no, I don’t think it’s jealousy to hope that the man who’s been transporting you about the place won’t settle down in one small country and… oh yarbles.’

‘Yarbles?’

‘It’s terribly rude, but they won’t understand that either.’

‘Interesting,’ Alton began, ‘that we’re old enough to be shot at, but not to hear wicked words.’

Benny ignored him. ‘The only reason he sent us off to do this was so that he could spend some time alone with Mrs Redfern. And in the middle of a crisis! I ask you!’

‘Well, we’ve got a few minutes to kill before we get back to the pub,’ Alexander said soothingly. ‘I don’t suppose we could go and have a look at what’s happened to the school?’

‘Oh, could we, miss?’ the boys started to call. ‘Could we?’

‘Stop! Stop!’ Benny waved her arms for quiet. ‘I don’t believe this! There are people out there who are trying to shoot us, but you want to go sightseeing.’

‘We could just take a look from a distance. If anybody’s there, we’ll sneak off again. Benny, it’s made of glass, where are they going to hide?’

‘All right,’ Benny agreed. ‘But we just pop our heads up, say ooh, and pop them down again. OK?’

‘Thank you, miss.’ Merryweather gave her a little hug. Benny shrugged him off.

‘And no hugging.’

They crept up to the remains of the boundary hedge between the school and the forest.

‘Ready?’ Benny asked. One, two, three!’

They all stuck their heads up over the hedge. ‘Ooh,’ said Merryweather.

The glass school shone in the moonlight, casting a fabulously complex shadow of intersecting silver. ‘There’s somebody inside,’ said Alton.

And indeed there was. Two dark shapes moved through the building, randomly like ghosts. ‘Is it them?’ Alexander asked.

‘No,’ Alton replied. ‘One of them’s wearing a Hulton uniform.’

‘It might still be them. I’ll go and take a closer look,’ Benny told them. ‘And no, Merryweather, you can’t come too.’ She hopped through a gap in the hedge.

The two figures resolved themselves as Bernice got closer to the spectral building.

It was Rocastle, with that awful boy Hutchinson behind him, wandering from room to room, a large book in his hands. Benny stepped through an open window, wondering as she did so about the incongruity of the dull panes of glass in the gleaming walls, and approached them. The aliens would never do anything so trivial and English as whatever these two were doing.