I looked around – Caroline sat casually, legs swinging, on a branch on the opposite side of the trunk and Guleed was on a branch a metre below. We were near the top of the tree and the branches below us had been bent back and up to create a sort of natural hide. Suspiciously, none of them had broken in the process and I couldn’t see any string or wire holding them in place.

I looked at Caroline, who gave me a bland look in return.

Then I flinched at a nearby explosion, then another and another and then two more moving away.

We sat in terrified silence for another half an hour, but heard nothing more.

The likelihood was that Martin Chorley had cut his losses and scarpered, but none of us felt like betting our lives on it. Besides, he could have left booby traps and/ or weird hybrid things behind.

So we waited quietly in the gathering dark for someone to come along and rescue us.

13 Angry Birds

13

Angry Birds

We waited largely in silence and stillness, except for a furious unvoiced argument about whose turn it was next to play Angry Birds on Caroline’s phone, which only really ended when the phone in question buzzed and we got a text saying – You may alight whenever you feel ready.

‘He took his time,’ I said.

‘Does this happen a lot?’ asked Caroline.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Sometimes Beverley rescues me, sometimes Lady Ty, occasionally Molly – I think there’s a rota.’

‘Shit,’ said Caroline. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’

‘Don’t be daft,’ I said. ‘There isn’t really a rota – we’re not that well-organised.’

Guleed snorted.

Caroline carried Guleed down first – just wrapped an arm around her chest and stepped off into thin air. It was hard to tell in the dark but it looked to me like they dropped smoothly and at a steady pace. As they fell, the branches that had been curled over to hide us from the ground began to unbend and return to their original positions. When I told Bev about that later she said that was more impressive than the flying.

‘Wood not being notably motile,’ she said.

When it was my turn I closed my eyes and tried to get a sense of the forma Caroline was using. When you’re learning a new a forma it can take dozens, sometimes hundreds, of demonstrations before you can even start to replicate it in your mind. But you can still learn something from a brief encounter, if you pay attention.

Not that this is easy when you’re dropping twenty metres with nothing holding you up but Caroline’s contempt for the laws of motion.