Persuading Sam to come with me was easy – at first. Went home for my bike, then texted, Meet me at Eggshell Bench. Got intel!

(That sounded professional. I’m getting good at this.)

Eggshell Bench sits at the top of stone steps on a steep grass banking, and you can hide there because it’s always overgrown. It’s one of our best places. The back of the bench curves over like a smooth plastic eggshell – like it got dropped on the way to a children’s playground – and that’s how it got its name.

By the time I’d biked there the stupid rain had stopped, so never even needed my senseless puffer coat. I was tying the horrific thing to the saddle when Sam arrived. I thought he’d be excited, but even when I told him my whole entire intel, he wasn’t up for going to Ash House.

‘Can’t see what it’s got to do with the weird weather whatsoever.’

‘But, Sam, this is our best clue yet. This might be the source of all Folding Ford’s secrets,’ I said majestically and watched him thinking. He’s in the top set in all subjects at school, and sometimes you can hear his brain working. ‘And it’s a charnel house.’

‘A what?’

‘Yeah, sounds awful. Needs looking up.’

Sam got it done before I’d taken my next breath and said, ‘It’s a house full of bodies or bones, or death!’

‘Whoa. See?’

‘Still don’t fancy it,’ he said. He stared at his front bike wheel, scraping it with the toe of his trainer.

My belly felt like beetles were crawling in it and I went hot all over. ‘Why not?’

‘He’s well scary. We call him the Cloaked Strider, because he walks round in that big long coat like a total randomer. Roan used to have nightmares about him.’

Roan is Sam’s little brother. ‘So the giant on Beggar’s Hill with all those moths – that was the Cloaked Strider?’ I said. ‘You never told me.’

‘You didn’t mention any cloak. You were all about a giant with moths on threads – which is impossible, actually. Moths shed scales if you even pretend to touch them.’ Sam lives on a farm; he knows the most amazing stuff about any animal. ‘If you tried to tie threads on moths, they’d slither away leaving you totally scaled up.’

‘Which doesn’t stop it from being true that day. I know what I saw.’

He shook his head at me, slowly. ‘Anyway, he’s properly weird. Dodge Cooper’s brother says he comes out at night like a bat, and never sleeps. I’m not going near him.’