run as fast as I can, but it’s no good. As soon as I turn my phone on, I know my life is in meltdown. I have fifteen voicemails from Wilbur and nobody else is picking up their phone.

“Hello. This is Richard Manners. I’m probably with Liz Hurley right now, but leave a message and I’ll ring you back when she’s gone home. BEEP.”

“Dad,” I gasp into his answering machine, still running. “We’ve been caught. Don’t let Annabel buy—” and I screech to an abrupt halt on the pavement. I have no idea what paper this article is in. “Don’t let her buy anything. Just stop her leaving the house. She can’t find out this way.”

Then I recommence running. I need to get to Nat.Before the newspaper does.

 

Apparently I’m the only person in the entire world with any sense of urgency. By the time Nat’s mum finally opens the front door, I’m screaming Fire through the letterbox and scratching at the paintwork.

“Harriet?” she says and even in my panic I stop, confused for a few seconds.

Nat’s mum is blue. Not a bit blue: totally blue. Like Annabel, she only really ever wears a dressing gown; unlike Annabel, she doesn’t just have one and it doesn’t have baked beans down the front. This one is a pale blue silk kimono. She also has a white towel wrapped round her hair and her face is painted in a pale blue face mask. When Nat’s mum doesn’t look like a giant Smurf, she looks a lot like Nat. Except twenty years older and modified by huge amounts of plastic surgery.

“What’s going on? Are we all dying?”

“Yes. I mean no. Not immediately. Is Nat here, please?”

“No idea. Four Botox injections and I can’t move a muscle. Look at this!” She makes a pained expression with her eyes.

“I need to see her.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Not really.” I start removing my shoes so I don’t track mud into her white carpet. “Has anything been delivered to your house today?”

Nat’s mum strains around the eyes again. “Not as far as I know.”

I pause in the middle of a shoelace. The wave of relief is so powerful that for a second I think I’m going to fall over. Maybe Alexa got the wrong address. “Really?”

“I don’t think so.”

I take a deep breath and feel the panic starting to seep back out. I’m still going to tell Nat, but now I can do it gently, sensitively, apologetically, delicatel—

“Unless you mean the envelope that came through the door half an hour ago.”

My breath stops.

“I took it up to her a few minutes ago. I’m not sure I’d call it a delivery exactly, but it seemed important. Handwritten and everything.”

Oh, no, no, no.

And before Nat’s mum can say anything else, I rip my shoes off and race upstairs.