‘It was on the afternoon of the attack,’ said Wiki. ‘We were signing up names for the event.’

‘We didn’t get many,’ Jibber-jabber butted in.

‘One at a time.’

‘OK,’ said Wiki. ‘We went to the car park, that’s where the lorry was. Einstein kept three sickos on the lorry for his experiments. They were named after the X-Factor judges. James made us go on the lorry to see the sickos. We had to go to show we weren’t scared.’

‘We were scared, though,’ said Jibber-jabber. ‘We didn’t want to go on the lorry, and the sickos were quite horrible, and later on they got out and attacked the library.’

‘We’ll get to that in a bit,’ said Maxie. ‘Tell me about Paul.’

‘Paul was on the lorry,’ said Wiki. ‘He looked after the sickos. He was quite angry about something, and looked ill. He shouted at us, saying books were stupid and the real world was too harsh to be in books. He said we didn’t know about things and that he did. Like he was going to prove it to us.’

‘And the three sickos escaped?’

‘Yes,’ said Wiki. ‘When we were having our event in the library the sickos got in and attacked us. We beat them off, but James ran away and got killed.’

‘And you didn’t see any more of Paul after you were on the lorry?’

‘No.’

Maxie looked round at Justin, who was sitting on her left.

‘I presume these sickos were kept locked up?’

‘Yes, of course. They were chained to the side of the lorry and there were bars and padlocks; the whole thing was really secure. It had to be. We couldn’t risk them getting out. I mean, they couldn’t get out.’

‘Well, they did.’

Justin shrugged. There was no arguing with that.

‘Someone must have opened all those locks,’ said Wiki.

‘Yes.’ Brooke turned to Justin. ‘Paul had keys presumably. Who else?’

‘Keys to the lorry? I’m not sure. James, I think. Einstein must have, but he wouldn’t have let the sickos out, they were too valuable to him.’

‘And James is dead.’ Maxie turned back to the two little boys. ‘You say James was with you in the library when the sickos attacked?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he look to you like he knew anything about what was going on?’

‘No way,’ said Jibber-jabber. ‘He was more scared than the rest of us, acting all tough when all along he was just scared and a wimp basically …’

‘OK, thanks.’ Maxie smiled at the two small boys, sitting there with dirty faces, scruffy hair, eager to please. ‘I think you two might as well go. But if you think of anything else you’ll come and tell us, yeah?’

‘Anything else about what?’ asked Jibber-jabber.

‘We’re trying to find out how the sickos got out.’

‘Oh, right. Yeah. It wasn’t us.’