‘Now I really wish Ace was here. I should think they’re firing some sort of heavy weapon from the field opposite. If we pop down the street and along the hedge, we might be able to get up to the forest without being seen.’

A trail of dark smoke was already drifting from the upstairs rooms. ‘How do you think they found you?’ asked Alexander, the door handle gripped in his hand.

‘Probably a tracer of some kind. Beyond your ken, Alex.’

‘Excuse me,’ asked Constance. ‘Do I take it that we are being fired upon?’

‘Yes.’ Benny grinned at her over her shoulder. ‘Sorry. Happens to me every other week.’

‘What an exciting life you must lead.’

‘I have considered learning to type. All right, Alex, let me go first. Constance, when I say go, run as fast as your bloomers will carry you.’

Alexander opened the door and Benny hopped through it, glancing quickly left and right, the pistol up to her cheek. The little cobbled backstreet ended in a rough track that ran along the edge of a field. Big hedge, luckily. Behind it, she could see the glint of metal.

A purple sphere rocketed from the field and burst through an upper window of the museum with a tremendous flammable thump. ‘Go!’ Benny called. ‘Quietly!’

Alexander and Constance ran with her to the hedge, and, crouching, they raced up the muddy track.

Benny had that familiar sick feeling in her stomach again, imagining bullets snickering through the hedge and slicing them up. She really hated combat, hated the people who did this for a living and got close to enjoying it.

Well, there were exceptions, of course. She’d been too cold with Alexander.

Despite, no because, he was in the same boat as her. Except he’d only lost a friend.

They ran flat out for a hundred yards, hedge to the left, backyard walls to the right, and broke out, thankfully, into a small copse at the edge of the woodlands. A chalky path wound upwards into the hills, and they followed it for a while, finally collapsing behind an uprooted tree trunk. Through the trees down-slope, a tiny length of fence was visible. In the field beyond it, strange figures were attending a silver cylinder. ‘Another two of them,’ Benny muttered. ‘I wonder who they are?’

‘You mean you don’t know?’ Alexander glanced behind them and forced a smile. ‘I say, look, we’re not alone on the barricades. It’s Mrs Redfern’s cat. Wolsey, isn’t it?’

Wolsey was staring at the three humans from behind a tree. He had something in his mouth. Constance looked at him nervously. ‘Do shoo it away,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand cats. Now, Bernice, shall we find this object of yours, now we are free? Who is it that has it? Some friend who is keeping it safely?’