‘Shit! The dinner!’ Jamie jumped up and ran towards the oven. Black tendrils of smoke emerged from the kitchen, setting off the smoke alarm which emitted a shrill, maddening beeping noise. He took the alarm down from its position on the wall, turned it off and then opened the oven door. A cloud rose up and made him cough. He pulled out the dinner. The chips looked like charcoal pencils; the lasagne was ruined.

Kirsty came over and looked at it. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m not hungry any more, anyway.’

Jamie opened the other front window to let out the smoke. Then he dug out the dustpan and brush and swept up the bodies of the dead spiders, throwing them out of the window. He deliberately let them fall onto the Newtons’ doorstep. Hopefully Lucy was scared of spiders too.

After that, Kirsty made him check the bed, the bath, under the sofa and wherever else there was a nook or cranny that might possibly hold a spider. To his great relief, he didn’t find any.

Kirsty didn’t sleep that night. She lay awake, staring at the ceiling, imagining that giant spiders were in the bed, or were pattering across the bedroom carpet, coming towards her; coming to get her.

Chapter Sixteen

Sixteen

‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘What?’ Jamie was taken aback by the question.

Mike leaned forward across the desk, his face framed by two computer monitors. ‘I said, What are you going to do about it?’

Jamie fell silent. He held a ballpoint pen between finger and thumb, tapped it on the edge of his keyboard, stared blindly at the screensaver on his monitor. All around him people tapped away at their keyboards, had important telephone conversations, wandered to and from the coffee machine. The server in the corner hummed noisily; the fax machine bleeped. But Jamie was oblivious to it all.

What was he going to do about it?