WHEN AIDAN CAME YAWNING DOWN TO THE KITCHEN that morning, with Rolf eagerly following, he found Andrew’s note on the table. It never occurred to him that Andrew’s journey to London had anything to do with him. He wondered whether to leave the note for Mrs. Stock. He knew it was the kind of thing that would make Mrs. Stock say, “World of his own!” and start making cauliflower cheese, but he thought she ought to know where Andrew had gone. So he decided to leave it but make sure he was not in the house when she found it. Meanwhile, he was rather glad that Andrew was not here to see how much cereal he and Rolf were eating between them.
Then, as Mrs. Stock had still not arrived, Aidan took his glasses off and examined the old, old colored glass in the kitchen door. This was something he had been itching to do, but not in front of Mrs. Stock or even Andrew. It struck him as very ancient and secret.
At first, all he could tell was that the glass was quite powerfully magic. He had a feeling that you could use it for something, either pane by pane or in various combinations—red with blue, blue with green, and so on—or you could use all the colors together, rather powerfully. But he still had not the least idea what you might use it for.
Rolf, seeing Aidan so interested, put his paws on the lower half of the door and reared up to look at the glass too. Aidan could see Rolf’s reflection, dimly, in the yellow pane in the middle at the bottom. The glass was so old and foggy that things reflected in it only faintly, as if you were not really seeing them at all.
“Have you any idea what this window does?” Aidan asked Rolf.
Rolf’s paws slipped. He landed on the floor with a grunt and had to scrabble his way up the wooden half of the door to look at the panes again. This time he landed in front of the blue glass on the left. He whined gently.
Aidan thought at first that this was simply doggish clumsiness. Then he realized that he could still see Rolf’s reflection, faint but clear, with its ears pricked, in the yellow glass. The beautiful hyacinth blue that Rolf was now staring into contained a different face.
“Clever!” Aidan said. Rolf’s tail whirled so hard that he unbalanced himself and slid down to the floor again. Rolf was making serious scratches down the door, Aidan saw rather guiltily, as he bent down to look in the blue glass. The face in it, smoky and far away, seemed to be Shaun’s. Unless it was Groil’s. It could have been either of them.
Odd, Aidan thought, and crouched along to look into the red pane, lower right. The shape in this one, like someone silhouetted against a fierce sunset, had a battered hat on. Aidan knew the shape of that hat so well by now that he sprang up and opened the door, as Andrew always did, before Mr. Stock could barge it open.
And, sure enough, Mr. Stock loomed in the doorway, carrying a box.
Rolf gave a deep bark of pleasure and galloped outside past Mr. Stock, where he raised his leg against the water butt and then trotted busily about, sniffing and occasionally raising his leg again to squirt on clumps of weeds.
Mr. Stock came in and dumped his box beside Aidan’s cereal bowl. It contained a heap of foot-long broad beans with lumps all the way along them, like snakes that had swallowed several nests of mice. Groil’s going to be happy tonight! Aidan thought. He did not care for broad beans, and he very much hoped Andrew didn’t like them either.
“Where’s the professor?” Mr. Stock asked. “His car’s not here.”
“Gone to London,” Aidan said. “He left a note.”
“It’s to be hoped he knows what he’s doing, then,” Mr. Stock said, and departed.
Aidan closed the door carefully behind him and then stood on tiptoe to peer into the top three panes. The orange glass, top left, had waves in it that made it hard to see that there just could be a face in it too. But a face was there, like someone dissolving in fruit juice. Aidan could pick out the hairstyle, the slightly bulging eyes, and the thin, sucked-in cheeks. It really did look like Mrs. Stock. He opened the door again, in case Mrs. Stock was outside now, but the only person who came in was Rolf, all sprightly from his run round the garden.
“So it doesn’t work to summon people,” Aidan said. “How does it work, then?” He turned his attention to the green pane, top right.
There was no mistake here. It was Stashe. She smiled merrily at Aidan out of a fog of spring green, almost as if she were about to speak, make a joke, tell Aidan he had to help her with the papers today or else. There was a line of green bubbles across her, like spring sunshine.
“And she doesn’t come today,” Aidan remembered. “So it’s not summoning.”
He went on to the purple pane, in the middle. He expected, if he saw anyone, to see Andrew there. The purple pane had struck him all along as the important one. Instead he looked into a space full of lilac twilight, not a peaceful space. There was a storm, or a high wind, in there, tossing trees against rushing clouds and occasional small zigzags of lightning. Among the glittering and shifting purples and grays, Aidan thought he could pick out a face. But he could not see it clearly enough to say whose it was.
While he was trying to see it more clearly, Aidan was almost knocked backward by Mrs. Stock coming in, followed by Shaun. He put his glasses back on quickly, and the windowpanes were empty again, nothing but glowing colors and accidental streaks, lumps, and bubbles.
In the time it took Aidan to hook his glasses behind his ears, Mrs. Stock had read Andrew’s note, snorted out, “Men!,” sent Shaun off to work, and looked disgustedly at the broad beans. “What does that man expect me to do with these?” she said. “They’ll be like wood wrapped in leather. Can’t he ever bear to pick veg when they’re tender?” She picked up the empty cereal packet and shook it. Then it was Aidan’s turn. “Look at this! You and that great greedy dog have eaten the lot between you! Go and get some more, this instant. And get some dog food while you’re at it. The shop sells that too.”
Before Aidan had collected his wits enough to turn from magical thoughts to everyday ones, he and Rolf were outside with a large pink shopping bag.
“Well, it’ll make a walk for you,” Aidan told Rolf. The two of them set off up the village.
The shop, labeled simply THE SHOP, PROPRIETOR R. STOCK, was beyond the church and next door to TRIXIE HAIR STYLIST. Rosie Stock, who kept the shop, looked at Aidan with gossipy interest. She plainly knew just who he was. “Is that dog yours?” she said. “Make him sit outside. He’s not hygienic. I thought he was a stray, really. I’ve seen him around for years. I’ve only got chocolate cereal left today, or would you like the set of little packets? And does the dog eat the dry food or the meat in tins?”
Aidan chose both kinds of both. As Rosie packed them all into the pink bag for him, it dawned on him that he had no money to pay for them with. Rosie Stock seemed the firm kind of lady who would never let a person promise to pay later. Aidan doubted if she would agree to let Andrew pay later. There was only one thing to do, in that case. A bit nervously, he fetched out the old, battered wallet, took his glasses off, and opened it.
For a moment, it seemed to Aidan that someone in the distance said, “Ah!” But this was mixed up with the fizz of magic from the wallet and Aidan’s own delight when he looked inside it and found a twenty-pound note. There was so much change left when he had paid for the cereals and the dog foods that Aidan bought Rolf a gluey-looking pretend bone and a chocolate coconut bar for himself. He still jingled with coins when he came out of the shop.
Using the wallet had made him miserable. It brought back the time Gran had given it to him—with the sarcastic look she always had when she talked of Aidan’s father—and the way Gran had not looked at all well that day. Gran must have known she was going to die, but Aidan hadn’t even properly noticed she was unwell. And Gran must have had some kind of strong protection around him that Aidan had never noticed either, because the moment she died, the Stalkers had crowded into the yard.
Aidan didn’t want to think of these things. To take his mind off them, he walked on up the village with Rolf, until he came to the football ground, hoping that someone was playing football there.
They were. All his new friends were there. They were having to play on a shorter pitch than before because the near end of the field now had two large dusty vans in it, labeled in curly letters Rowan’s Traveling Fair. “They always come for the Fête,” Gloria Appleby explained. “There’ll be more of them coming next week. Glad to see you again. We lost yesterday.”
Everyone was glad to see Aidan. Some of them said, “Where were you yesterday?” and others said, just like Rosie Stock in the shop, “Is that dog yours? I thought he was a stray.”
Rolf shortly became a problem. Aidan sat Rolf down near the goal, beside the pink bag, and told Rolf to look after it. But the moment the game got going, Rolf dashed off to join in. Aidan laughed at first. The sight of Rolf, ears flying, tail whirling, trying to tackle Gloria or, barking excitedly, dribbling the ball with his nose and front feet, was truly silly. And it got sillier when Rolf dribbled the ball to the end of the field and got stuck in the hedge.
No one else was pleased. “He’s spoiling the game!” they objected.
Aidan hauled Rolf and the football out of the hedge and made him sit by the pink bag again. “Sit there,” he said, “or I’ll turn you out to be a stray again!”
This sobered Rolf for a while. He sat obediently beside the pink bag. But soon, whenever the ball came near, Aidan could see Rolf half rise to his feet with his ears pricked, yearning to join in. Aidan expected him to turn into his boy form in his excitement, but that never happened. Perhaps Rolf knew that this would cause even more trouble. Just to be on the safe side, Aidan tapped him on the nose and warned him to be good. Rolf sat and whined.
When Aidan next looked, Rolf was not there. There was only the pink bag.
“Where did he go?” Aidan asked the others. “Did anyone see?”
Before anyone could reply, the answer came in huge yelps and snarls from behind the Traveling Fair vans. Aidan dashed over there to find Rolf in the most vigorous fight with the Fair’s guard dog. Both dogs seemed to be enjoying it wonderfully, but the woman who rushed out of one of the vans was not pleased at all. Aidan helped her haul the dogs apart, after which she handed him a piece of rope.
“Tie it up,” she said, and stalked back into her van.
So Aidan dragged Rolf over to the gate and tied him to a gatepost. Rolf was laughing, dog-fashion, with his tongue hanging out, and quite unrepentant. “Yes, I know you were winning,” Aidan said to him, “but that’s because you’re not really a dog. You were being unfair. You’re cleverer than it is. Now behave!” He gave Rolf the gluey fake bone to keep him quiet.
Rolf ate the bone in two minutes, but he gave no more trouble. There was peaceful football, until Jimmy Stock looked at his watch and said he had to be getting home for lunch. Everyone else looked at watches then and said the same. Aidan untied Rolf and gave Gloria the rope to give back to the woman, and they all left, some up the road to the new houses and some the same way that Aidan was going. Rolf trotted demurely in the middle of the cheerful group like a dog that had never misbehaved in its life.
As he and Rolf turned into the lane leading to Melstone House, Aidan had a horrible thought. Suppose, because Andrew was away, that Mrs. Stock did not think she had to get lunch, not even cauliflower cheese? Aidan was so hungry by then that he could have eaten those broad beans raw. Well—almost. He went round the house to the back door, to give Mrs. Stock her pink bag back and then, perhaps, to look pleading the way Rolf did.
Rolf dashed ahead, round the corner. Aidan heard him give a roaring sort of bark there, full of surprise. Aidan ran after him, lugging the bag. Groil was there, looming shyly round the corner beyond the water butt. Rolf was bouncing around Groil, giving yelps of greeting and standing up to paw at Groil’s knees. Groil made Rolf look tiny. “Oh, hallo!” Aidan said. “I thought you only came out at night.”
“Not these days,” Groil said, fending Rolf off with his enormous right hand. “I got zips now. And friends.” His bush of hair was full of dust and cobwebs. He scratched a storm of it out with his left hand as he said, “I came to say we finished the glass in the roof, me and Shaun. Want to come and look? It’s got faces in it now. Power’s up. You could speak to the High Lord now if you want.”
“What do you mea—” Aidan began.
A look of huge dismay came over Groil’s big face. He put a large finger across his lips and fell to his knees, looking imploringly at Aidan to keep quiet. Then—it was a little like watching Rolf change—Groil shrank into something smaller and darker and harder. In less than a second, you might have thought Groil was a boulder at the corner of the house.
Aidan was looking at the boulder, thinking, So that’s why I could never find him in the daytime! when a loud, rather shrill voice cried out behind him, “Aha! Found you! Got you!”
Aidan whirled round. Rolf spun away from sniffing at the boulder. His hackles came up like a bush round his shoulders and like a hedge down his back. He bared his fangs and snarled.
The fat little man, standing beside Aidan with one hand out to grab his arm, backed away a step. “Keep that brute under control!” he said. He was wearing a black coat and striped trousers as if he were going to a wedding.
Aidan stared. “I can’t,” he said. “He doesn’t like you. Who are you? Are you going to a wedding?”
“Wedding!” exclaimed the little man. “What a stupid idea!” His round face flushed. Aidan thought, Here is somebody else who looks like someone I know! Round and red and clean-shaven though the little man’s face was, it was still remarkably like Tarquin O’Connor’s.
“Then what are you doing here?” Aidan asked, not very politely. Gran would have been shocked and said something about manners maketh the man. But Aidan knew the man had been about to grab him, and it was clear that both Groil and Rolf considered him to be an enemy.
The little man drew himself up to his full, fat height. “I am loyal butler to the King,” he said proudly, and added, even more proudly, “I am the Puck, no less. I am come here to deliver a letter to the magician Hope from my master, when here I see you.” He waved an expensive-looking envelope in one hand. He reached out for Aidan with the other hand. “You used the wallet. There is no doubt who you be. I shall take you prisoner forthwith.”
Aidan backed away. Just like Andrew, he thought, I don’t believe this!
But Rolf evidently did believe it. He was advancing on the little man step by slow step, growling deeply. Aidan would not have credited that Rolf could look so sinister. “I—I don’t—don’t believe you,” he said. “Go away, or I’ll set my dog on you!”
Rolf didn’t wait to be set on. He went from crawling to a leap, snarling hideously.
The little man—was he really the Puck? Aidan wondered—dodged nimbly aside and got his back against the water butt. Rolf went thundering by, scrabbled to a stop, and turned to attack the little man again. The Puck held up both plump hands and sang out, “Change! All change!” and Rolf was suddenly a soft-skinned small boy, kneeling on the grass and looking most unhappy.
“Ow!” he said. “That hurt.”
“I meant it to,” said the Puck. “You traitor! You are by rights one of us who do not use iron. Why are you defending a human?”
“Because you wish him harm, of course!” Rolf said angrily.
“Not I,” said the Puck. “I am going to take him softly and kindly to the King my master, and the King my master will put him softly and kindly to death.” He gave Aidan a sly little grin. “Kindly,” he said. He held both hands up again and sang, in a soft, buzzing chant:
“Come to me in hornet guise
Come and carry off my prize.”
A dark cloud of big flying things came streaming over the roof of the house and descended on Aidan. He took his glasses off and tried to back away from them, but they were all round him, circling him, up and down and round, buzzing louder and deeper and stronger than bees. Meanwhile, the Puck was chanting again:
“Seven times round
Seven times round,
Bind the child that I have found,
Seven times round,
The child is bound.”
Aidan tried to keep his eyes on just one of the creatures, to count how many times it circled him, but he soon realized he could be hypnotized that way. It was like trying to follow one snowflake in a blizzard. Without his glasses, he was not sure if they were exactly hornets, but he could see they had big, bent, striped bodies and stings sticking out at the ends of them. Their wings made a snarling blur. Aidan remembered reading somewhere that you could die if enough hornets stung you. He was terrified. He looked across at poor, near-naked Rolf, crouching on the grass, but the creatures did not seem to be interested in Rolf. That was one good thing at least.
“Help!” he shouted. Mrs. Stock must be in the kitchen. Surely she would hear.
“Seven times round,” chanted the Puck, “Seven times round,” and he added in a more normal voice, “Then walk where my hornets take you and you will not be hurt. Walk toward the front of this house.”
“No!” Aidan screamed. “Help!” Was Mrs. Stock deaf?
Help came from another direction instead. Uneven feet ran, one foot light, one heavy. “What the green festering devil is going on?” demanded a voice. It could have been the Puck’s voice, except that it had an Irish accent. Tarquin came round the corner of the house and exclaimed at the sight of Aidan half crouching in a funnel of whirling dark creatures. He swore. “Call those things off!” he said, pointing his crutch at the Puck. “Call them off now!”
The Puck looked extremely dismayed to see Tarquin, but he shook his head. “Not I. This is in my master’s service,” he said, and went on with his chant. “Seven times round, Seven times round—”
Tarquin suggested several very filthy things the Puck could do with his master and rushed at the little, chanting man with his crutch pointed like a lance. “Stop it!” he yelled.
“I take no orders from a man with one leg!” the Puck screamed out as Tarquin’s crutch hit him in his bulging gray waistcoat.
Tarquin’s missing leg promptly gave way. Tarquin landed in a crouch on his real knee. But he heaved with the crutch as he went down, and the Puck went up and over backward into the water butt. SPLASH!
Rolf cheered and seized the chance to become a dog again. And, Aidan saw out of the corner of his eye as he ran out from among the dwindling, vanishing hornet creatures, Groil also seized his chance. Aidan glimpsed him uncurling and whisking himself out of sight round the corner of the house.
Aidan knelt down beside Tarquin. “Thanks,” he said. “What can I do for your leg?”
“The Lord alone knows, except it isn’t there anymore,” Tarquin said wretchedly.
Here the kitchen door opened, and Mrs. Stock came out with her what’s-going-on face on. Shaun followed her, busily gnawing on half a French loaf filled with steak and lettuce. Aidan’s stomach rumbled at the sight. Then they all had to shield their faces as the Puck came soaring back out of the water butt in a brown surge of rainwater.
“I’ll be even with you yet!” he screamed at Tarquin, spitting out water and pond life.
“Evens is all you’ll ever be with me,” Tarquin said to him. “I’m your human counterpart, so I am. Add in Shaun here, and you’re outnumbered. Go away. Stay away.”
“What in the world—?” said Mrs. Stock, watching the Puck come hovering down to the ground in his dripping morning dress. “Shaun, get that creature out of here before my nerves get the better of me, for Heaven’s sake!”
“I’m going, I’m going!” the Puck said, glowering at her. “You needn’t invoke That Place. And,” he added to Aidan, “I shall find you again, soon enough. Whenever you use that wallet.” He bent and popped the soaking envelope he was holding into the pink bag. Then he was gone. There was nothing of him left but a small shower of water falling among the thistles and the grass.
“We must ask the Professor for some way to keep these creatures off you,” Tarquin said to Aidan.
“Professor’s not here,” said Mrs. Stock. “Gone to London. World of his own. Were you wanting him for anything particular?”
“Nothing, only hoping for a bit of physio, as you might say,” Tarquin said. He was still kneeling on his good leg, propped on his crutch. He pointed miserably to the missing one, where his trouser leg draped across the grass.
“Help him up, Shaun,” Mrs. Stock commanded. She picked up the pink bag—which had got rather wet in the encounter—and looked inside it. “Wet letter for the Professor,” she said. “Damp cereal. At least you got proper food for that ungrateful dog.” Rolf gave her a reproachful look and shook himself. Water sprayed across Mrs. Stock’s apron. “None of that, or I shan’t open you a single tin,” Mrs. Stock said. “Aidan, your filled French will be ready in ten minutes. Be here.” She marched back indoors with the bag. Rolf followed her, with his nose practically inside the bag.
Shaun, with his French bread waving in one hand, heaved Tarquin up with his other hand, and Aidan helped steady him. Tarquin’s shoe fell off his missing foot as he came upright. “See?” Tarquin said despairingly. “Gone again.”
There was a perfectly good sock on the missing foot. Aidan looked at it, glad of the distraction. He was still vibrating all over from the hornet creatures, and from knowing that someone here in Melstone wanted him dead now. He was like the strings of Andrew’s piano, he thought, if you struck one of the deep keys hard and then went away.
“Your sock’s still on,” he said to Tarquin. He bent and felt the air above the sock. His fingers met a sharp shin and a bony knee and strong muscles at the back of them. “Your leg’s still there. The Puck just made you think it wasn’t.” He put the shoe back on over the sock to prove it to Tarquin.
“Is that so?” The color began to come back to Tarquin’s bearded, elfin face. Very cautiously, he stood on both feet. He flexed the missing leg, then stamped. “You’re right!” he said. “It hasn’t gone!”
Shaun nodded, satisfied that Tarquin was now all right, and turned to Aidan. “Groil wants you to look in the shed. He got the window clean.”
Groil came sidling back round the corner of the house, big again, with his head nearly level with the bedroom window beside him. He grinned down at Aidan. “That was a good parsnip last night,” he said. “Sweet. Big. Come and look in the shed.”
Here was another distraction. Aidan grinned back. “There’s about a thousand broad beans for tonight,” he said.
“Oh, good,” said Groil.
Tarquin tipped his head back to look up at Groil. His mouth came open. “Who—?” he said to Shaun.
Shaun had just taken a massive mouthful of bread and steak. “Glmph,” he said, with lettuce hanging down his chin.
“This is Groil,” Aidan said. “He’s one of those who don’t use iron. My gran told me there’s a lot of them all over the place, if you look. Coming?”
Tarquin nodded wonderingly and limped after Shaun as Shaun followed Groil and Aidan round the house to the yard. There Groil stopped beside the lawn mower and bowed Aidan toward the shed door with one huge hand outstretched. It was so courtly that it made Aidan laugh as he slipped inside the shed.
The place was quite different already. It glowed with strangely colored light from the glistening, clean glass in the roof. Aidan could see where Shaun had been at work on two of the walls, cleaning and polishing the carved wood. The oddly shaped birds and little animals stood out all over the back wall, shiny and almost golden. The polish revealed that there were carved people in there too, mixed with trails of leaves and flowers.
Aidan breathed in the honey smell of the beeswax. “It’s lovely!” he called out. He took his glasses off and looked up at the colored glass in the roof. You could hardly see where the panes had been cracked now, or if you could see a crack, it looked like part of the patterns in the glass. Those patterns certainly seemed to be faces, but the window was too high for Aidan to see them properly with his naked eyes. All he could see was that they seemed to be moving. Or was it that his head was moving because he was craning upward?
Something strange happened then.
The shed went away from Aidan and, with it, the footsteps of the others and Tarquin’s voice—Tarquin was chattering as usual. But Aidan could still hear birds singing somewhere in the garden or in the orchard. He could hear trees rustling too, and smell damp leaves mixing with the scent of honey from the walls. Out of this, a voice spoke to him. It did not seem to use words, but it reminded him of Gran’s voice all the same, even though it seemed to be the voice of a man.
What is it you need, young sprig of kindling?
Aidan answered the voice in his mind, not by speaking. I want to be safe. People keep coming after me.
The voice seemed to consider. Then it said, Steps have been taken, by you and by others, but to be sure of safety you need to get rid of that wallet in your pocket.
Why? Aidan asked, startled.
Because they can trace you by it, sprigling. Money from nowhere is always trouble.
This sounded so like one of Gran’s sayings that Aidan believed it instantly. He said in his mind, I’ll get rid of it, then. Thanks.
But isn’t there anything more you need? Have you no ambitions?
Well, Aidan thought, he would quite like to be a football star, like Jimmy Stock was obviously going to be. But what his real ambition was he knew suddenly…. I want to be wise, like Gran and Andrew, and have my own field-of-care and write books about all the amazing things I find out and—and fix things magically that can’t be fixed any other way and—and do lots of other things that need magic and—and—
The voice interrupted him. Aidan could hear the smile in it. Good. That is a very proper aim. The perfect one for you. You shall have my help in this.
The birdsong and the leaf smell receded away into the background, and Aidan found himself back in the shed again, with all three of the others. Shaun, with his mouth full, was waving his French loaf at a piece of the wall, and Groil was bending down to inspect it. Aidan blinked and wondered however Groil had squeezed inside here. On the other side of him, Tarquin had both hands curled up around his eyes, as if his hands were binoculars, and was looking up through them at the window in the roof.
“I can’t see all the faces clearly,” Tarquin was saying, “but there’s Wally and Rosie, and I think there’s Ronnie Stock too, so I do. On a rough guess I’d say half the village was up there.”
A hatted silhouette darkened the door. “Shaun,” said Mr. Stock, “what do you mean, leaving my mower out in the yard? Get it in at once. It’s going to rain.”
“Yes, Mr. Stock. Sorry, Mr. Stock.” Shaun fled out into the yard, still munching.
Aidan looked round for Groil. Groil had crouched down in one corner and made himself hard and heavy. He was obviously not wanting Mr. Stock to see him. He looked for all the world, Aidan thought, like one of those old bags of cement that Shaun had buried in the asparagus bed. Aidan went over to Groil, wrestling the wallet out of his pocket as he went.
“Can you guard this for me for a while?” he asked him.
Groil put out a surprisingly small dense hand and took the wallet. “Where would I keep it?” he asked anxiously.
“Your pocket. Zip it into one of your pockets,” Aidan said.
Groil grinned, like a crack in a sack. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. I got zips.”
Aidan remembered then how hungry he was. Mrs. Stock had said ten minutes and be there. He pushed past Mr. Stock and ran.
“What went down?” Mr. Stock said to Tarquin as soon as Aidan had gone. “I felt something. Do you need any help?”
“Not now. I dealt with it myself,” Tarquin said. “But I warn you, Stockie, Aidan’s going to need us all on maximum alert from now on, so he is.”
As Shaun began to trundle the mower toward them, Mr. Stock scratched worriedly under the back of his hat. “All right. But it’s the Professor I seem to be homed in on, really.”
“Revamp yourself to home in on both of them, then,” Tarquin said. “I think it’s urgent.”
Shaun and the mower arrived then. Beyond Shaun, rain began to pelt down. Tarquin made a face and raced away to his car, carrying his crutch like a rifle and quite forgetting he had only one leg.