For a while, everything was fine. Amy drove along the road, the lights, which were brighter than she expected, illuminating the way in the darkness.

Amy found that by carefully adjusting the direction lever back and forth, she could make the TurboChaser go at a constant, not-too-fast speed. Every so often another car would come past, and the driver would frown at them, but then, because this was a big city and all sorts could be seen on the roads, they would forget about it immediately and just drive on. It felt incredible to be driving along an actual road. The sat nav kept on barking out orders in Welsh, because Rahul had programmed it to take the route with the least possible traffic, so they had to take quiet little back roads. Plus there was hardly anyone about because it was night. But still, it was all so exciting.

In fact, for a while, it looked like Rahul had thought of everything. For example: within five minutes, spatters appeared on the glass in front of Amy.

“Oh no,” she said, “it’s starting to rain!”

“Don’t worry. Click forward on the indicator stick!”

She did. And immediately, outside the glass, what looked to Amy like a bendy kitchen mop appeared, and ran across the wet glass, soaking it up.

“Is that …”

“A bendy kitchen mop? Yes.”

“A windscreen wiper! Amazing!”

And then:

“I’m cold!” came a voice from the back – Janet.

“Hmm. Wonder if that could be anything to do with the decision to wear a fairy costume. With no sleeves?” said Jack.

“I think it probably is something to do with that, actually,” said Rahul.

“I’m cold!” she said again.

“Don’t worry.” Rahul reached for a circular dial in front of him. It was a plastic one, and round it had been placed an arc of coloured tape: first blue, then red. He turned the dial so that it faced the red.

Out of the floor behind the front seats, in between Jack and Janet, emerged a pole. At the top of the pole was a black hair dryer.

“Can you switch it on?” said Rahul. “It’s battery-powered. But I haven’t worked out how to do that from the front.”

Jack blinked in amazement. But after a bit of fiddling around the handle to find the switch, he did so.

“Arrgh!” he said, getting a blast of hot air in his face. He closed his eyes.

“Sorry. You need to give it a slap.”

“What? I can’t hear you! It’s still blowing in my face!”

“Give it a slap!”

Jack did so.

“Ow! You just hit me!” said Janet.

“Sorry!” said Jack. “I can’t see.”

Janet tutted, and slapped the hair dryer herself. It started to revolve.

“Aaaahhh …” she said, when it got round to her, “that’s nice.”

Rahul beamed with pride. He pointed to the dial. “Heating system.”

Amy nodded. She pointed at the blue bit of tape.

“It can go cold as well?”

Rahul shook his head. “No. That’s just to look right.”

“I see,” she said.

The journey seemed to really be going much more easily than Amy had thought it might do. She even decided to say this out loud.

“It’s going much more easily than I thought it might do. If everything carries on like this, we’ll be in Scotland by the morning!” She looked at her watch. It was 1:30am on Saturday morning. Dad wasn’t leaving for Japan till Sunday. Loads of time!

“Yeah! Definitely!” said Jack.

Amy didn’t like the sound of that. Jack never said anything positive – unless he was being sarcastic.

“Because one thing Rahul’s parents will definitely do,” continued Jack, proving her right, “is sit in the car and just wait for us to come back. And not ring our mum, or anything …”

Amy’s stomach fell.

Rahul frowned, and shook his head. “No, I think they might do that.”