‘Hello?’ I put my head outside and listened, but all I heard was a cat’s childish noise. With one sentence I’d sent him shooting back where he’d come from. I hadn’t known it was possible to disappoint a person so quickly. Now I’d tell Elizabeth that Scarlet was gone, mix her a hot chocolate, and watch The X-Files. It didn’t seem so terrible a prospect. But then Dominic called my name.

Elizabeth crouched on the stairs. ‘Don’t go! That’s what she wants!’

‘Shut the door,’ I said.

He was kneeling in the flower bed. He’d picked some poppies already: they flopped against his wrist. I actually thought he was picking them for me. Half to himself, he said, ‘How many d’you think we need?’ When I didn’t answer, he lurched towards the house.

Elizabeth had put the chain on. She demanded to know who Dominic was, why he’d picked their flowers.

‘They’re for tea,’ I said. ‘Tea that Scarlet can’t drink. He’s a spy too. He’s come to get her.’

Elizabeth stared. ‘Are you a spy?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, with an irony that was painful to me. ‘I’m a massive spy. With a little eye.’

When she let us in, he went straight to the kitchen. He put the kettle on. He got a knife and a chopping board and started smashing the poppyheads flat with the blade, like cloves of garlic.

‘They’re not those kind of poppies,’ I said. ‘Opium poppies are illegal.’

‘Can’t be that different, can they? Same family.’

He pushed the mess into a glass teapot and poured in boiling water. It turned a purplish grey. He put some in a cup, drank it, gave a big bark of a cough, and spat into the sink.

‘That’s disgusting,’ Elizabeth said.

Dominic stuck out his bruising tongue. ‘Old Scarlet,’ he said. ‘What a bitch. She was hiding in the trees outside.’ Off Elizabeth ran, in that funny way she had, high up on the balls of her feet. ‘This is fucking shit,’ he said to me. ‘Have they got any booze?’

I felt afraid, then. Poppies could be explained as a potion, part of Elizabeth’s games, but alcohol was a power I didn’t want to summon. I watched him go to the cellar head and touch the ranks of bottles.

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘They’ll know.’

‘They won’t.’ He lifted out a bottle of whisky. ‘I’ll top it up.’ He grinned.

‘Don’t take too much,’ I said, adding a lame, ‘please.’

Every drop he poured seemed to come from my vein. The cup was half-full before he stopped. He topped the bottle up with water and replaced it as Elizabeth returned.

‘Scarlet’s not there,’ she complained. ‘We should search the house.’