said, patient and smiling. ‘I’ve explained it to you three times, Martin.’

His son sighed and stared at the Ordnance Survey map spread out on the camper table.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I’m sure there was a tower exactly where I’ve marked it.’

‘You’ve got it wrong, nitwit. I keep telling you, there’s a pond there, that’s all.’ The smile had gone now.

‘I suppose.’

‘What do you mean, you suppose!’

‘But the map could be wrong. Or you could be wrong yourself.’

Mr. Phelps drew in his breath. ‘Martin, there are times when I wonder if you have any brains at all. I’ve told you—I’ve seen it. The map is accurate and I am not wrong!’

‘Don?’ Mrs. Phelps was lying facedown on a picnic blanket spread on the grass just outside the camper door. ‘Remember, dear, we’re on holiday.’ Though pretending to sleep as she sunbathed in her bikini, she had been eavesdropping on the conversation, half expecting it to end in a row.

Mr. Phelps shuffled from his seat behind the table and went to the door, his walking boots clumping on the floor and his angry weight making the camper tremble.

‘Well,’ he chuntered, ‘he really is stupid as well as stubborn sometimes, Mary. I’ve explained till I’m blue in the face but he just doesn’t seem capable of taking it in.’

‘Maybe he has a blind spot for maps.’

‘A blind spot for maps! Mary, you can’t have a blind spot for maps. You can, perhaps, for French or maths. But not for maps. They’re designed so any fool can understand.’

He stared across the heat-hazed field to the woods beyond and wondered why he hadn’t gone off on his walk alone instead of listening to his son blathering about a tower that wasn’t there and the map being wrong.

Mrs. Phelps flopped onto her back, put her sunglasses on and patted the rug at her side.

‘Come and sit here for a few minutes,’ she said.

Her husband obeyed, squatting cross-legged, his arms hugging his knees.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he said, more in regret than anger now, ‘if he just listened a bit more carefully. But he argues. Doesn’t try to learn first.’

‘It’s his age,’ Mrs. Phelps said. ‘I bet you were just the same when you were fifteen.’

‘Never!’

His wife laughed, gently. ‘Course you were, everyone is.’

‘Not me. I was keen to know about things. Everything. Information, that’s what it’s about. You don’t get to know things by arguing the toss with someone who knows more than you do. You listen. Question. Pick their brains.’

Mrs. Phelps stroked her husband’s knee. ‘Well, you aren’t in school now. Just relax. Enjoy yourself. That’s what holidays are for.’

Mr. Phelps edged his legs out of range of his wife’s hand.

The summer afternoon sang.

‘Maybe,’ Mrs. Phelps said after a while, but quietly so that Martin wouldn’t hear, ‘maybe we should have let him go off with his friends after all.’

‘Camping with a bunch of yobs? Not on!’

‘You’re too hard on him.’

‘He’ll appreciate it later.’

‘At his age you need some freedom, Don. A life of your own.’

‘Ho!’ Mr. Phelps snorted. ‘Freedom to act like an idiot, you mean. Freedom to roam the streets and vandalize bus shelters. Freedom to terrorize old people and mess yourself up with drugs. Some freedom that is!’

‘What makes you think Martin would behave like that?’

‘Oh, come on, Mary. You’ve seen the rubbish who hang around our place. I passed a gang of them the other night. Half of them smoking their heads off while they watched the other half make a meal of the local females. About which enough said!’

Mrs. Phelps sighed. ‘That’s a kind of learning too, I suppose.’

Her husband flicked a hand at a bombarding fly. ‘Well, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a lesson Martin can do without, thanks.’

For a few moments neither spoke.

Mr. Phelps whisked at more attacking flies, but with less ferocity now.

‘Why not go for your walk?’ Mrs. Phelps said when she was sure the storm had blown over.

Her husband stood up in one smooth movement without using his hands. ‘Perhaps I will.’ He tucked his shirt in and hitched his trousers. ‘There’s a long barrow just north of us. No record of it being excavated. I’ll poke about there for a while. Might be interesting.’

He collected his stick from the back of the car, said, ‘See you in a couple of hours,’ and stalked away.

From his seat in the camper Martin watched his father stride across the field, climb the gate in the hedge and disappear up the lane. Then he returned his gaze to the map lying on the table at his elbows. A week ago he had been looking at it with excited anticipation. Now he regarded it with distaste. Nothing ever turned out as well as you hoped.

He slipped out from behind the table, took an apple from the basket in the food cupboard, bit into its juicy crispness, went to the door and sat on the step, his feet square on the ground.

The noise of his munching was loud in the country silence.

‘Enjoying it?’ his mother said.

Martin nodded, knowing she was watching from behind her shades.

‘He’ll feel better after his walk,’ Mrs. Phelps said.

Martin nodded again.

He gnawed his apple to the core, then lobbed it high over his mother’s body to fall in the long grass beyond. From where it landed a small dark bird he didn’t recognize flew up, startled. If his father had still been here, he would have insisted that he look it up in his recognition book.

‘Could I help?’ Mrs. Phelps asked.

‘Doubt it,’ Martin said, squinting as he tried to follow the bird’s flight into the sun.

Mrs. Phelps sat up and turned to face him. ‘Won’t you tell me what the trouble is?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘You were having quite a set-to for something that doesn’t matter.’

Martin shrugged. ‘It’s just that I say the map is wrong, and Dad says I don’t know how to read it properly.’

Mrs. Phelps took her sunglasses off. ‘What do you say is wrong?’

Martin sighed. ‘You know how he set me a route to walk this morning to prove I could use the map on my own?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I managed all right really. Just missed a couple of details. Only little things. But on the last leg down Tinkley Lane—’

‘The one that runs along the far side of this field?’

‘Yes. There’s a quarry along there, about a mile away, and a benchmark, and a couple of disused farm buildings, and I got them all OK.’

‘But?’

‘In a field with a pond in it about three quarters of a mile away—four sixths, actually, to be exact—I saw a tower.’

‘And?’

‘It isn’t marked on the map so I put it in.’

‘But Dad says it isn’t there?’

Martin nodded.

Mrs. Phelps put her sunglasses on again. ‘But, sweetheart, I don’t see the problem. Either the tower is there or it isn’t.’

‘That’s what we were rowing about.’

Mrs. Phelps laughed. ‘Men! Why row? Why not just go and find out together?’

‘I wanted to. But Dad wouldn’t.’ Martin stood up. ‘He said he knew it wasn’t there. He said he’d been along that way twice already since we got here and he’d never seen a tower. But I know it’s there, Mum, I saw it this morning for certain.’

‘All right, all right!’ Agitation in her son’s voice warned that care was needed. ‘Come here. Sit down. Let’s have that shirt off. Get some sunlight on you. You’re as bad as your dad. You both think you’ll evaporate if you get sun on your skin.’

Reluctantly, Martin tugged his shirt off and sat so that his mother could rub sun oil onto his back.

‘This tower,’ she said as she anointed him, ‘what did it look like?’

‘A bit weird really. Built of stone and quite high. Fifteen metres. Twenty maybe. And it was round. With little slit windows, and pointed tops like in a church. But there wasn’t a spire or anything, the roof was flat, with battlements round the edge like a castle. There was a biggish doorway at the bottom, with an arch like the windows. But there was no door. And the wall was partly covered in ivy, and weeds and even clumps of flowers were growing out of the cracks between some of the stones.’

‘How exciting. Lie down and I’ll do your front.’

‘No, I’ll do myself.’

Martin took the tube and began oiling his chest.

‘Did you go inside?’

‘I started pacing towards it because I wanted to try and fix its position on the map exactly. But after thirty paces, well before I even reached the pond . . . I don’t know . . . the air went chilly. Just all of a sudden. Like I’d come up against a wall of cold.’

He stopped rubbing the oil and looked at his mother’s masked eyes.

‘Made me feel a bit scared. Don’t know why. There weren’t any cattle in the field, nothing to be scared of, you know. But I stopped pacing and just stood. And then I noticed how quiet the place was. I mean quiet in an odd sort of way.’

Martin paused, his eyes now not focused, though he was looking straight at his mother.

‘And what was so odd?’ Mrs. Phelps said as calmly as she could.

Martin’s eyes focused again.

‘No birds,’ he said. ‘None flying anywhere near and not a sound of any birdsong either. Not even insects. Nothing. Just dead silence.’

Mother and son stared at each other.

‘Perhaps a kestrel lives in the tower? Or some other bird of prey?’

Martin shook his head.

‘You can’t be sure.’

‘Can.’

‘How?’

‘Went in.’

‘Even though you were scared?’

‘I’m trying to tell you!’

‘All right, OK, I’m listening.’

‘It was pretty hot this morning, right?’

His mother nodded.

‘A heat haze, just like now?’

‘Was there?’

‘I didn’t notice either till I was in the field. I’d noticed about the birds and was looking at the tower. It seemed normal, just an old stone building, you know. The field all around is long grass, like this one, with a tall hedge, and a wood opposite from the lane side. And it was while I was looking at the wood that it hit me.’

He stopped, uncertain of himself.

‘Go on, sweetheart,’ Mrs. Phelps said.

‘Well, everything, the wood and the hedge and the grass in the field, even the pond—everything was shimmering in the haze. But the tower . . . It wasn’t. It was quite still. The shape of it was clear-cut.’

Mrs. Phelps gave an involuntary shudder. She didn’t really believe Martin’s story. Not that he would lie. He never lied. But he did get carried away by his imagination sometimes. Even so—a tower standing cold and silent in the middle of a summer field. She shuddered again. Curious how a few words, just by association, can chill you on a lovely day in hot sunshine.

She came back to herself. Martin was still telling his story and she had missed something. She said, ‘Sorry, darling, I was distracted. What did you say?’

‘The tower,’ Martin said. ‘It was cool inside, wonderfully cool, and restful.’

‘Wasn’t it locked up?’

‘No, I told you. There was a doorway but no door.

I went straight in. And inside the place was smelly, really stank, like empty places often do, don’t they, as if people have used them for lavatories. But it was quite clean, no rubbish or anything. A round-shaped room with a bare earth floor. And one of the little pointed windows with no glass in it. And a stone stairway that started just inside the door and curled up round the wall to a floor above. No banister, just the stone stairs in the wall.’

‘No sign of life ?’

‘Nothing. Deserted. And very cool. Really nice after the heat. Well, anyway, I thought it must have a terrific view from the top, so I climbed the stairs. Thirty-two. Counted them. Eighteen to the second floor, and fourteen to the top. The first floor was just old wooden boards. A few bird droppings but nothing else.’

‘And safe. Not rotten or anything?’

‘No. I wouldn’t have gone on if it hadn’t been safe, would I? I’m not that stupid, whatever Dad thinks.’

‘It’s just his manner. So was there a good view?’

‘Not really. After the field there’s trees in the way in most directions. But it was nice. There’s a parapet so you can’t fall off. And it was just as cool up there as inside. I’d have stayed longer, but I knew if I didn’t get home in reasonable time, Dad would start getting at me for taking so long to do a simple route. So I came down, paced the distance back to the lane, marked the position on the map, and came back.’

Mrs. Phelps took a deep breath. ‘What a story!’

Martin glared at her. ‘It is not a story. It’s what happened.’

His mother leaned to him and hugged his face to hers. ‘Yes, my love, I know,’ she said. ‘I mean, what a strange thing to find a tower like that and it not be on the map.’

Martin pulled free. ‘Don’t you start!’

Mrs. Phelps leaned back on her hands. ‘Did you tell your father all this ?’

Martin grimaced in disdain.

‘No,’ his mother said. ‘Best not to, I suppose.’

‘He wouldn’t believe me about the tower being there. So you know what he’d say about the rest. Rubbish, he’d say, pure imagination.’

Mrs. Phelps thought for a while then stood up and adjusted her bikini. ‘Look, why don’t I slip into something respectable and you can show me your tower? That’ll settle matters.’

Martin shook his head.

‘Why not? If I’ve seen it he can’t go on saying it isn’t there.’

‘But that’ll only make it worse. He’ll get angry and say we ganged up against him, that I got you to take my side, that I can’t stand on my own feet.’

Impasse.

After thinking for a moment Mrs. Phelps said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You go on your own, and double-check the position of the tower. After all, you just might have made a mistake. Then come back and tell me. After supper this evening, I’ll suggest we take a walk, and I’ll make sure we go along Tinkley Lane past the tower. That way, we’ll all see it together and your father won’t be able to say you’re wrong. How about that?’

Martin considered.

‘OK,’ he said, cheering up. ‘But I know it’s where I said it was.’

‘’Cause it is, my love. But make sure. And while you’re gone I’ll fix supper so that everything’s ready when your father gets back.’

Martin pulled on his shirt, collected his map from the camper, folded it so he could hold it easily and see the area round the tower, gave his mother a tentative hug, and set off across the field.

Mrs. Phelps watched her son out of sight before going inside, pulling on a pair of jeans and an old shirt of her husband’s, and slipping her feet into her sandals.

Martin sauntered down the lane, stifled by the heat cocooned between the high, dense hedgerows. Wasps and flies whirred past his head. A yellowhammer pink-pinked behind him. Straight above, crawling across the dazzling blue, a speck of airplane spun its white spider thread.

His shirt clung uncomfortably to his oiled body. He glanced up the lane and down, and, seeing no one, tugged the shirt off and used it as a fly-whisk as he walked along. Usually he kept covered, too embarrassed by his scrawny build to show himself in public. Boys at school called him Needle.

Even without his shirt he was sweating by the time he reached the gateless opening in the hedge that led to the tower. And sure enough, there it was, looking just as it had in the morning. This time he noticed at once how coldly it stood and clearly outlined while all around grass and flowers and trees and rocks and even the pond at the foot of the tower shimmered in the haze. And while he looked, just as that morning, he felt a nerve-tingling strangeness. He tried to work out what the strangeness was and decided it was like knowing something was going to happen to you but not quite knowing what.

There must, Martin thought, be some ordinary explanation. His father would probably know what it was, and would tell him, if only he would stop insisting that the tower wasn’t there, and come and see for himself while the heat haze was still rising. By this evening, when his mother tricked his father into seeing the tower, the haze would have vanished.

As he checked its position on his map, Martin remembered the coolness and how much he had wanted to stay in the tower. Now there was nothing to hurry back to the camper for. He could stay and enjoy himself. He might even make a den, a secret place where he could come and be by himself during the rest of the week. He could properly explore the building. There was bound to be something interesting if he looked carefully enough. There was also the pond. There might be fish to be caught. And if he wanted to sunbathe, the tower roof was a good place. No one could see him lying behind the parapet, but he would be able to spy anyone approaching across the field. He might even go home after the holiday with a useful tan.

He was about to enter the field when he heard a shout. A cry, in fact, rather than a yell. A girl’s voice, high-pitched and desperate. Coming from the direction of the tower.

Shading his eyes with a hand, he searched the tower but could see no one.

The cry came again.

And suddenly he knew what caused the strangeness he felt.

It was as if he had been waiting for this cry, that it had reached him as a sensation long before he heard it as a sound in his ears.

As he stared with unblinking eyes, he saw a girl’s head, then her body appear above the parapet till she was revealed to her waist. She was about fifteen or sixteen and wearing a sleeveless white summer-loose dress. But from this distance it was difficult to see her features clearly, which anyway were partly hidden by long dark hair that fell around her face and shoulders.

She grasped the wall of the parapet with one hand. The other she raised above her head and waved urgently at Martin.

At first he thought she was only excited, perhaps pretending to be frightened by the height. But then she cried out again in that high-pitched urgent voice.

She seemed to be shouting, ‘Come back, come back!’ and waving him towards her.

But that could not be. He had never seen her before.

Puzzled, Martin did not move, except to raise his own hand and wave back in a polite reflex action.

Still the girl waved and cried, ‘Come back, come back!’

She’s mistaken me for someone else, Martin thought. But even as he thought this, smoke began to drift up from the tower behind the girl, first only a thin blue smudge in the air, which quickly became a thicker feathering, and then, after a belching puff, a dense, curling ribbon that streamed straight up into the sky, grey-white against the deep blue.

As the smoke thickened, the girl’s cries became more panic-stricken, her hand-waving more frantic.

Which at last brought Martin to life again.

Dropping his shirt and map, he sprinted towards the tower.

Mrs. Phelps gave her son a few minutes’ start before setting off after him. But she got no farther than the gate when she met her husband striding down the lane towards her. She knew at once that he was excited from the jaunty way he was windmilling his stick.

‘You’ll never guess,’ he said as he approached.

‘What?’ Mrs. Phelps grinned, expecting some story about her husband finding an almost extinct flower or spotting a rare bird.

‘Just been talking to an old farmer. Asked him if he knew of a stone tower anywhere in the district.’ He paused, enjoying the drama.

‘And?’

‘At first he said no. Nothing of that sort round here, sir!’ Mr. Phelps, who prided himself on his talent for mimicry, imitated the farmer’s accent. ‘Then he remembered. Ah, wait a minute, sir, he says, yes there were one. But that were years back, sir, when I were a boy, like.’

Mrs. Phelps caught at her breath.

Her husband went on, unaware. ‘I quizzed him—without letting on about Martin, of course. Apparently, there used to be an old teasel tower where the pond is just down the lane from here. You know the sort. You always say they look as if they’re straight out of a fairy tale. Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel and all that rubbish. And I came across a teasel growing wild this morning when I was checking on Martin’s nonexistent tower. Rather like a tall thistle, with a large very prickly head. Well, it was the heads they dried in those towers and then used them for raising the nap on cloth. Fascinating process.’

‘Yes, darling, but—?’

‘They cut the dried heads in two and attached them to a cylinder which revolved against the cloth so that the prickles snagged against the fabric just sufficiently to scuff the surface.’ Mr. Phelps chuckled. ‘Teasing it, you might say.’

‘Don—’

‘And do you know, Mary, they still haven’t been able to invent a machine that can do the job better. Isn’t that extraordinary!’

‘Don, the tower—what did the old man tell you?’

‘I’m just coming to that. According to the old chap, one day during a long hot summer like this, the tower burned to the ground.’

‘Burned—?’Mrs. Phelps flinched.

‘Hang on, that isn’t all. A young girl is supposed to have died in the blaze. The old chap told a marvellous tale about how she was meeting her boyfriend there in secret and somehow the fire started, no one ever found out how, and the girl got trapped.’

‘Don, listen—’

‘The boyfriend ran off, scared he’d be caught with the girl, I expect. You know how strict they were in those days about that sort of thing, and quite right too. The wretched boy deserted her, poor lass, and she died in the flames. Young love betrayed by cowardice.’

‘He’s gone there,’ Mrs. Phelps said bleakly.

‘A nice yarn but all nonsense, of course. However, it does look as if there might have been a tower somewhere near where Martin thought he saw one. Isn’t that odd!’

Mrs. Phelps turned away and set off at a jog down the lane.

‘Hang on, Mary,’ Mr. Phelps called after her. ‘Haven’t finished yet.’

‘Got to find him,’ his wife called back.

‘But wait!’ Mr. Phelps waved his stick. ‘I want Martin to take us to where he thought he saw the tower.’

Without turning, Mrs. Phelps shouted back, her voice carrying her panic, ‘He’s gone there already!’

Hearing at last what his wife was saying, Mr. Phelps sprinted after her, ungainly in his walking boots.

‘Gone there?’ he called as he ran.

‘To check. We must catch him.’

‘Steady! Wait!’

By the time Mr. Phelps reached his wife he was almost speechless from lack of breath. He seized her arm and pulled her to a stop.

‘Mary, you’re being hysterical. What is all this?’

‘Can’t you see?’ Mrs. Phelps panted. ‘Martin wasn’t wrong.

‘Having us on!’

‘No! There! To him, it was there!’

‘Rubbish!’ Mr. Phelps leaned forward, both hands on his stick, recovering his breath. ‘He’d found out. Only pretending he’d seen it. Some kind of joke.’

’No, no, no!’ Mrs. Phelps was near to tears with desperation.

Her husband glared at her. ‘Pull yourself together, Mary, for heaven’s sake!’

As if she had been slapped, his wife’s tears suddenly gave way to anger. She glared fiercely back at her husband.

‘Don’t you speak to me like that, Don! Don’t you dare condescend to me! You think you know everything. To you the world is just one big museum of plain straightforward facts. Well, let me tell you, you don’t know everything. There’s more to this world than your boring facts! And for once I don’t care what you think. I believe Martin saw that tower. He’s gone back there. And I’m going after him. I’m afraid what might happen if he sees it again. Call that a mother’s intuition. Call it what you like. But I feel it. That’s all I know. Now, are you coming or aren’t you?’

Mr. Phelps stood open-mouthed and rigid with astonishment at his wife’s outburst.

By the time Martin reached the tower, smoke was billowing from every window and crevice.

Instinctively bending almost double, he ran inside.

The force of the air being sucked in through the doorway pressed against his bare back like a firm hand pushing him on.

At once he found himself engulfed in blinding, choking fumes, could hear the roar of flames from across the room, could feel their blistering heat on his skin.

But still from above came the girl’s panic-stricken cries.

Without thought or care, he threw himself to the left and onto the stairs. He pounded up them, stumbling, coughing. Hardly able to see for smoke, he kept his left hand pressed against the wall for fear of veering to the edge of the stairs and falling into the furnace on the floor below, from where flames were already leaping high enough to lick the exposed floorboards of the room above. He held his right arm against his face, trying to protect it from the scorching blaze.

On the second floor flames were already eating at the boards. The dry wood was crackling; small explosions were sending showers of sparks cascading across the room. And, mingled with the suffocating fumes, the stench of burning flesh was so strong that Martin retched as he staggered on hands and feet now up the second flight of stairs. By the time he reached the trapdoor to the roof he was choking for breath, his smoke-filled eyes were streaming with tears and all down his right side he felt as if his skin were being peeled from him like paint being stripped by a blowtorch.

The tower had become one giant, roaring chimney.

Martin hauled himself up into the air, gulping for breath. Once on the roof he clung for a moment to the parapet, unable to move till he recovered his strength. But he knew there was no time to spare.

Through tear-blurred eyes and the fog of smoke swirling about him, he looked round for the girl and saw her only an arm’s length away still waving and crying desperately in the direction of the road.

‘Here!’ he tried to shout. ‘I’m here!’

But the words clogged in his parched throat.

So he reached out to take her by the shoulders and turn her to him.

‘Surely we’re nearly there!’ Mrs. Phelps panted.

Clumping along beside her, Mr. Phelps, breathless too and sweating, said, ‘That beech tree. Just there.’

Seconds later Mrs. Phelps spotted her son’s shirt and map lying in the road.

‘Don!’ she cried, rushing to pick them up. ‘They’re Martin’s!’

She turned and saw the gap in the hedge, and dashed towards it. But her husband, arriving at the same instant, pushed her aside and ran ahead into the field, causing Mrs. Phelps to fall to her knees.

‘Oh, God!’ she pleaded, and, finding her feet again, stumbled after him.

‘Martin!’ Mr. Phelps was calling when both he and his wife were brought to a sudden stop.

Across the field, high above the pond, they saw their son floating upright in the air, his arms outstretched as if reaching for something.

‘Dear Lord!’ Mr. Phelps muttered.

But neither he nor his wife could move. Spellbound, they could do no more than watch as their son took hold of that invisible something for which he was reaching and clutched it eagerly to him in a passionate embrace. For a long moment he remained like that, his body utterly still, until, suddenly, he opened his arms wide, peered down and, in a strangely slow, dreamlike movement, as if from a high diving board, launched himself earthwards.

The instant Martin’s body hit the water, Mrs. Phelps came violently alive.

‘Martin!’ she screamed, and hurtled across the field.

Her scream seemed to bring her husband back to his senses. He sprinted after her, yelling, ‘Mary . . . Mary . . . Careful!’

But Mrs. Phelps paid him no heed. By the time she reached the pond her son’s body had surfaced and was floating facedown in the middle. She plunged in headlong, her arms flailing, but found herself at once entangled in clinging weeds that grew around the edge.

Galloping up behind her, Mr. Phelps made no attempt to swim, but ploughed in till he was wading waist-high towards his son, his frantic strides churning the water to froth and his boots so disturbing the stagnant mud on the pond’s bottom that it belched up great bubbles of putrid gas in his trail.

As soon as they had lifted Martin onto the bank Mr. Phelps said, ‘Leave him to me!’ And with a sureness and skill that surprised his wife, began reviving their son with the kiss of life.

It was only when Martin was breathing properly again that Mrs. Phelps noticed the ugly blisters covering the right side of his body. She was sitting with Martin’s head cradled in her lap and had been going to cover him with his shirt. Instead she looked at her husband who was kneeling at her side and saw that he too had seen the burns.

‘We must get him to hospital,’ she said, working hard to keep the shock from sounding in her voice.

Mr. Phelps nodded.

Martin opened his eyes. ‘Mum,’ he said.

‘Hush, sweetheart. It’s all right. You’re safe now.’

Martin blinked in the bright sunlight, and coughed up water.

His mother eased his position, holding him so that he could breathe easily.

‘Is the girl all right?’ Martin asked when the spasm was over.

His parents glanced at each other.

‘She’ll be fine,’ his mother said, smiling down at him.

Martin tried to raise himself. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

His mother gently restrained him. ‘She’s been taken care of. Don’t worry.’

‘You see, Martin—’ his father began.

‘Not yet,’ Mrs. Phelps said as lightly as she could. ‘Later.’

Her husband turned away. ‘I’d better get the car and take you to hospital, old son,’ he said.

Martin said, ‘I told you it was there, Dad, didn’t I?’

Mr. Phelps peered across the empty field hidden from his son by his wife’s cradling body.

‘You did,’ he said.

‘And I got the position exactly on the map.’

‘You certainly did. Well done!’

Mr. Phelps looked down at his son and stared into his eyes for the first time in months. And the boy’s gaze, looking frankly back at him, as though somehow he now knew all there was to know about his father, caused Mr. Phelps to shudder.

Mrs. Phelps observed her husband’s discomfort and felt his pain. But there was nothing she could do to help him. The time for that had passed. And their holiday too was over.

‘We ought to get him away from here as soon as we can,’ she said gently.

Mr. Phelps took a deep breath and braced himself. ‘I’ll only be a jiffy,’ he said, and set off towards the lane at a steady jog.

Mrs. Phelps watched him go and suddenly felt utterly exhausted. The sun was scorching her back, but she knew she mustn’t move. The warmth reminded her that Martin had said how cool it had been near the tower. It certainly wasn’t now. And all around grasshoppers rasped. She listened. There was also plenty of bird noise and the loud skirl of passing flies and bees. None of the strange silence he’d mentioned.

Martin broke in on her thoughts. ‘Am I badly hurt?’

‘Not badly,’ his mother said, brushing scorched hair from his forehead.

‘Was I out for long?’

‘Long enough.’

‘Has the tower burned down completely?’

‘Afraid so.’

‘That’s a pity. It was a nice place. But the girl’s OK?’

‘I’m sure she is,’ Mrs. Phelps said with utter conviction. ‘Thanks to you.’

‘And I will see her again, won’t I?’

‘Would you like to?’

‘Wouldn’t mind.’ Martin grinned sheepishly at his mother. ‘She was quite pretty really.’

‘Yes,’ Mrs. Phelps said, struggling against tears. ‘I expect she was.’