She probably is mad, he thought. Or eccentric, anyway. I mean, if she went to a specialist and he showed her all those cards and ink blots she’d just nick them or something.

Yes. Eccentric. But she wouldn’t do things like dropping bombs on Paradise Street. You have to be sane to think of things like that. She’s totally round the bend. But perhaps she gets a better view from there.

It was quite a cheerful thought, in the circumstances.

Mrs Tachyon had gone. The ward sister seemed quite angry about it.

‘Do you know anything about this?’ she demanded.

‘Us?’ said Kirsty. ‘We’ve just come in. Know about what?’

Mrs Tachyon had gone to the lavatory. She’d locked herself in. And in the end they’d had to get someone to take the lock off, in case she’d fallen down in there.

She wasn’t in there at all.

They were three floors up and the window was too small even for someone as skinny as Mrs Tachyon to climb through.

‘Was there any toilet paper?’ said Johnny.

The sister gave him a look of deep suspicion.

‘The whole roll’s gone,’ she said.

Johnny nodded. That sounded like Mrs Tachyon.

‘And the headphones have vanished,’ said the sister. ‘Do you know about any of this? You’ve been visiting her.’

‘That’s only been because it’s, you know, like a project,’ said Kirsty, defensively.

There was the sound of sensible shoes behind them.

They turned out to belong to Ms Partridge the social worker.

‘I’ve phoned the police,’ she said.

‘Why?’ said Johnny.

‘Well, she— oh, it’s you. Well, she … needs help. Not that they were any help. They said she always turns up.’

Johnny sighed. Mrs Tachyon, he suspected, never needed help. If she wanted help she just took it. If she needed a hospital, she went where there was one. She could be anywhere now.

‘Must have slipped out when no one was looking,’ said Ms Partridge.

‘She couldn’t,’ said the sister stoutly. ‘We can see the door from here. We’re very careful about that sort of thing.’

‘Then she must have vanished into thin air!’ said Ms Partridge.

Kirsty sidled closer to Johnny while they argued and said, out of the corner of her mouth: ‘Where did you leave the trolley?’

‘Behind our garage,’ said Johnny.

‘D’you think she’s taken it?’

‘Yes,’ said Johnny happily.

Johnny was quiet on the bus home. They’d gone to the library and he’d wangled a photocopy of the local paper for the day after the raid.

There was a picture of people looking very cheerful in the ruins of Paradise Street. Of course, things were pretty faded now, but there was Mrs Density with her goldfish bowl, and Wobbler’s grandfather with his bit of bomb and, just behind them, grinning and holding his thumb up, you could just make out Wobbler. It hadn’t been a good photo to start with and it hadn’t improved with age and he had soot all over his face but, if you knew it was Wobbler, you could see it was him all right.