As we walked away from the goats, things felt better. We’d been helpful. Back around the front, bright sunlight turned the empty windows of Ash House into silver plates. It was only old raindrops clinging on, but it looked magical. The creepy empty loneliness had faded off. The rushing, butting emergency was over. We even got a laugh when a tame moth landed on my hand.

‘Hey, look at its face,’ I said. ‘Looks like it’s got a handlebar moustache. The moths round here are extreme. He’s got to be doing something to change them – you never normally see moths in the daytime.’ The words jumbled together. Giggles nearly spilt out of me from total, brutal relief.

‘Yeah, you do,’ Sam said. ‘They’re not all nocturnal.’

Then there was a noise. Sam held up a warning hand, but I’d heard it. We stopped dead at the side of the house. The sound was feet. Shuffly, unsteady ones, but definitely footsteps on the jaggedy front path. Dislodging stones. Someone slow, but unstoppable, old-man-shaped, and very, very bossy. It was the boiled-egg-headed old man from the village hall.

His voice hit me like a slap. ‘Well now. It’s my duty, as head of the parish council, to check on problem areas in this village periodically – but what excuse do you two have to be here, eh? You’re on private property, and the owner is quite clearly absent …’

‘We were passing.’ Breath seemed to catch in my throat. ‘We heard some goats in trouble. We went to help, stopped them getting out on the road.’

He looked straight at me. His eyes were full of fake amazement that I really thought he’d believe anything that came out of my mouth. Cold eyes. Lizard eyes. He looked like he had a cold: bulgy, watery eyes and pinkish, sore-looking nostrils. The nostrils flared. ‘Hey! You were at the jumble sale. Bit of a snooper all round, aren’t you.’

Sam shrank towards the wall of the house ‘You didn’t tell me the old man was Mr Lombard,’ he muttered.

I looked at my shoes and shrugged. How could I have known?

Lombard snorted in disgust and turned his back on me. He looked at Sam and folded his arms.

‘Goats in trouble?’ he said. ‘Did their trouble come before or after you’d chased them round their pen, Sam Irwin?’ His thin lips pressed together in a straight, mean line. He smelt of wet paint.

‘No, we sorted them, Mr Lombard,’ Sam said. His voice was high and squeaky and horrified. ‘They were stampeding.’