Bertie was not like this. He usually gave a reasonably full account of what happened, censoring only those lurid details that he thought would be an undue shock to parental ears, particularly those of his mother. Thus he had never told his mother about Tofu’s habit of spitting at others, nor of the small-scale numbers racket that his friend ran in the playground at school. Bertie felt outrage over that, because he knew that it was essentially criminal: Tofu more or less bullied everybody to put part of their pocket money into a pool, the winner taking the entire proceeds. All the participants had to pick a number between one and fifteen – there were fifteen members of Bertie’s class – and then Tofu would announce which number won that week. The problem, though, was that it was Tofu who picked the winning number, and he only revealed it after everybody had chosen their number.

‘You should write the winning number on a piece of paper before we choose,’ Pansy had suggested. ‘That would be much fairer.’

Tofu smiled. ‘Not possible,’ he said.

‘And you’ve won three out of the last six times,’ pointed out Hiawatha.

‘I’m really lucky,’ said Tofu.

Bertie had said nothing about this to his parents, who would not have understood it, nor possibly even believed it. But now, faced with this direct question from his father as to what happened, he vacillated as to whether to mention the letter at this stage. He had decided that he would read it first, and, if necessary, lose it if its contents were in any way likely to threaten his continued membership of the cub scouts. It could be a letter about some new activity of which his mother disapproved, and that might mean the end of his cub scout career; one could never tell with her.

He decided that the best thing to do in relation to his father’s question was to pretend not to have heard it. But Stuart persisted. ‘I said, did anything happen, Bertie? Anything interesting?’

Bertie told his father about the compass game, but resolutely omitted to say anything about the letter. He felt it in his pocket, as bulky and as obvious as any incriminating object tends to be, and when they got back to Scotland Street he rushed into his room. Taking the letter from his pocket, he held it up against the light of his reading lamp. Through the thin paper of the envelope he saw a folded piece of paper, but that was all; he could make out that there was something printed or written on the paper, but he could not decipher what it was.

Bertie put the envelope down and closed the door of his room. If he had had a lock, he would have locked it, but his requests for a lock had been turned down by his mother.

‘A lock, Bertie?’ she said. ‘Whatever would you want a lock for?’