I bent forwards and lifted the flap on a cardboard box – it was full of yellowy printed paper. Newspapers from the old days.

SHAME UPON THEM read a thick black sentence across the top paper. The rest of the writing was smaller. A family was driven out of Midleaf by angry neighbours last week when they defied the eldest edict and refused to send their son to camp.

Driven out?

I pulled back some of the papers and read another one further down the pile. TOGETHER WE CAN SAVE OUR COUNTRY. Andrew Solsbury, leader of the opposition, speaks a message of hope. Will it win him next week’s snap election? I looked at another even further down. DARK TIMES ARE UPON US. A series of coordinated worldwide terrorist attacks have—

“Cruise girl?”

I dropped the papers and sat up.

“Tea.” Elsie shuffled through the door with a sloshing mug.

I stepped back through the junk and took the mug. I sniffed it. Camomile. Yuk. “Thank you, Mrs Weather.”

Elsie made her way across the room with her stick. She stopped to wheeze after each step.

“Can I help?” I said. “Shall I clear a path for you?”

“Don’t touch it. It’s Hannard’s.”

Maybe, to Mr Wetheral, this stuff wasn’t junk at all. Maybe it was treasure.

I sipped at my tea. If I sipped at it enough times, I’d get to the bottom eventually.

Elsie reached the glass doors at the back.

“What do you want to know then, Cruise girl? Forecast for Guy Fawkes? Christmas? Hundred per cent right. Every time. Nature doesn’t lie. Doesn’t have the capacity.”

“Just Friday, please, Mrs Weather. My mum wants to know whether it’ll rain on Friday. Jed’ll be fourteen, see? It’s his party.”

She grunted, struggled with the key for a moment, and opened the door.

The garden looked even messier than the house. Overgrown vegetables, clambering ivy, sprawling shrubs, shadowy trees. Plants and leaves creeping, pouring, climbing over everything.

Elsie prodded with her stick, found firm ground and stepped out.

“Wait there,” she said.

She wobbled across the weed-woven patio, somehow managing to stay upright. Then she waded into the undergrowth in search of insects to pinch and seed heads to break open.

I didn’t have long.

I crept back out into the hall. Mr Wetheral couldn’t see me from this angle. I looked over the piles of coats and shoes and books – no sign of any medicine bottles. Checked in between the stacks of paper, quiet as you like. Still no medicine.

Where else could it be? Think, Maggie. Where would Dad keep ours? I looked around.

The kitchen.

It was as chaotic as the rest of the house. Worse, maybe. Water barrels and a potato bin just sitting there in the middle of the floor. Wonky piles of crockery and an overflowing compost box on the worktop, the Siamese cat curling in and out of them.