She gave a little shiver and sniffed. She tried not to think about Sam. It made her too sad. At first, after they’d left Waitrose, she’d hoped he might still be alive somehow, that he might escape from the grown-ups who’d captured him and come back to her. He’d always promised he’d look after her. And he always had – even though he was smaller than her. That was the thing about Sam: he was older by nearly two years, but he’d always been tiny. Dad had called him ‘shrimp’, which he hated. To Ella he hadn’t been a shrimp, he’d been her hero. He’d been gone for days and days now, though, and she knew that she was never going to see him again.

He was gone forever.

She had to forget him or his memory would always make her sad. Like a ghost hanging around. When she pictured him he was trapped in the car park at Waitrose, stuck in a corner with grown-ups coming in at him from all around. What use was a memory like that? She roughly wiped away a tear with her sleeve. Bad thoughts didn’t help anything.

‘I’m up!’ Monkey-Boy called down triumphantly, waving his hands and whooping, his long fair hair hanging down in his face.

‘Well done.’

‘So do I get my biscuit now?’

‘Maybe.’

‘But you said!’

‘I’m joking you.’

‘Not funny.’

‘You’re funny.’

‘I’m the Monkey Man.’ He was singing now, as if it was a nursery rhyme. ‘No one else can climb as high as I can. Come up here.’

Ella wriggled to her feet and walked quickly over to the stairs where the statue of the granddad sitting in his chair watched over the hall. It was nice in the day, when they could run around in this part of the museum and explore and play. They didn’t have to worry about any grown-ups, or the spider man, or the slenderman, or whatever it was.

It was different at night. At night they all came out, all the crawling fears, but then Ella and the others stayed safely locked behind the iron bars of the minerals gallery. She couldn’t think of this place as home yet, not like Waitrose had been. Any more scares here at the museum and she wasn’t sure she could cope. She would run away. Maybe back to Buckingham Palace. It had been safer there, even if David, the boy in charge, had been bossy and weird. The most important thing was to be safe. To have food and water and not be attacked by grown-ups. Nothing else really mattered.