‘Just a parcel,’ he says, stepping into the room. ‘It came for you while you were … er, at the police station. Or rather, I saw it sitting on the doorstep when I opened the door to Mr Allen. I’ll leave it here.’

‘Thanks, Jack,’ I say, watching as he places the square parcel on the chest of drawers.

‘No problem,’ he says in his usual clipped fashion. ‘Right, I’m off to bed. Night, night.’

‘Night, Jack.’

I wait until he has closed the door, then get out of bed. The parcel is wrapped in plain brown paper and has no postmark. My name is written in blue biro. Big, angry capital letters. I peel it open and see a flash of pink. Inside the box is a pile of papers wrapped in a thick pink satin ribbon.

I take one out and unfold it. It’s a letter, written in messy, childish handwriting.

My handwriting.

I read the first couple of lines.

Dear Angus, I hope you are well. I think you are the luckiest boy in the world to live somewhere as magical as Holly Maze House.

I continue to read. It’s a letter to Angus.

A boy with piercing blue eyes and a sad smile.

Angus was the protagonist of the Holly Maze books. Like me, he had lost his mother and he felt so different because of this that he found it difficult to make friends. He lost himself in a world of fantasy, just as I did. He was a male version of me really, a twin. And the more I read the Holly Maze books the more I felt that Angus wasn’t an invention, that he was real. I started writing him letters, telling him about my life and how sad I was feeling with my mum gone. I had forgotten all about them until now.

As I sit here, a chill courses through me, though it’s a warm summer’s night. Who has sent me these?

I can hear Dad filling the kettle to make a cup of tea. The ITN news headlines echo through the house. Dad always turns the news on when he comes in from work. You still haven’t got back from the shops. You told me you would pop to Bee’s Books in town to buy Geoffrey Rivers’s book before you went to do the weekly shop at Sainsbury’s. I try to block out the sound of the news and concentrate on my latest book: The Demons of Winter Valley. I borrowed it from the school library before the holidays and I’m almost finished. I curl up on my polka-dot beanbag in the corner of my bedroom and let myself be whisked away to a land of snow and ice and enchanted forests, much more exciting than interest rates and politics.