‘They have to go past us, don’t they?’ said Louisa. ‘Why wouldn’t they?’

‘They have to go past us, don’t they?’ Harry mimicked her.

‘Well, they do!’ snapped Louisa angrily. ‘Some of them. They wouldn’t all want to push in here.’

‘Unless they’re hungry,’ said Harry and he licked his lips. ‘Mmmm, a nice fresh Louisa.’

Daniel didn’t laugh. He looked scared. ‘Why don’t we all just climb up there with Isaac?’ he said. ‘They’re not going to get to us up there. We could wait for them to move on.’

‘Yeah, and what if they don’t move on?’ said Sonya. ‘What then? If we go up top we’ll be stuck there. Like a cat chased up a tree by a pack of dogs.’

‘Just like the hobbits in The Hobbit,’ said Ella. ‘And we don’t have any kind of magic talking eagle to save us.’

Harry spotted Scarface’s gun.

‘You got any more of them?’ he asked. ‘That’d be well useful.’

Scarface didn’t respond in any way. Didn’t even look at Harry.

‘It’s the only one he’s got,’ said Ella.

‘He’s a miserable bastard, isn’t he?’ said Sonya.

‘I’d be miserable with a face like that,’ said Harry.

‘I’d be miserable with a face like yours,’ said Sonya.

Scarface put a finger to his lips to get them all to shut up. They stopped talking, and they could hear the grown-ups, closer still, a whispering noise like wind in the trees, or a wave coming closer and closer, just one wave that sounded like it was never going to break. A tsunami.

Ella stayed close to Scarface, looking at the faces of the other kids, just white streaks in the night.

‘I can see them,’ said Louisa quietly and they all turned towards the gate. There, across the open ground, was a moving black mass, the pale light from the moon outlining the tops of heads, picking out steam rising into the night air. They filled the space that was framed between the trees that grew on either aside of the road leading up to the gate, taking up the whole field from side to side.

One by one the children moved to the gate to get a better look. The stink of the grown-ups was growing stronger; it made Ella feel sick. She wanted to hide, to dig a hole and bury herself in the ground, let the wave wash over her. But she had to look. She had to know what was coming. She went over to the gate with Scarface and forced herself to look.

They were coming slowly, bunched together, shuffling through the long grass, trampling everything in their way. A shapeless wodge of people. Ella couldn’t see their faces yet, but one thing was very clear to her.