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softer before the sensations faded and a faint bitter taste reached his mouth. Colette the interviewer gazed at him in shock and admiration. “Why did you do that?” she breathed.
    “My cousin Bert was meant to as well, only he was sick instead. We used to set each other challenges and that was one of mine. He killed as many things as I did by the time we finished. When he got a bit older he helped them chase the hares into the field for the hounds at Altcar.”
    “Did you ever help?”
    “My parents wouldn’t let me go.” A residue of discontent took Dudley by surprise as he recalled how he’d never seen the hare-coursing—had never witnessed two hounds catch the same hare and, as Bert had delighted in telling him, pull it apart like a squealing bag full of meat and blood. “I killed lots of frogs, though,” he said. “Dozens and dozens.”
    “How did you manage to catch them?”
    “They were stuck together like people.” He remembered the disgust that had turned his mouth sour as he’d realised. He’d peered in repelled fascination at the couples jerking as if they were too feeble to hop, and then he’d trampled some before running for a stick. By the time he’d selected the biggest and heaviest he could wield, he’d been afraid that the frogs might have escaped into the pond, but the grass around it had swarmed with them. Their legs had continued to jerk once he’d smashed their slimy bodies, yet it had taken him years to comprehend that the males might have been unable to stop pumping their slime into the crevices that had trapped them. How could anything so slimy exert such a grip? Even when he’d heard his mother calling him he had pursued his mission around the pond until he could see nothing moving except him, and then he’d tossed the stick into the water and run back to his parents and the picnic. “They didn’tseem to notice they were being killed. They might as well have been toys you wind up. I don’t believe things feel,” he said and wished he were speaking to a real journalist. His mobile couldn’t interrupt him; he felt as if that was why he hadn’t switched it on. If the interviewer and the photographer had bothered to show up, they would have to wait—and then he wondered if they might ask his mother to show them where he wrote. They might see the stories on his desk. They might read them.
    He hissed through his teeth as he ran home. Flies like black lumps of mindlessness bumbled into his face while a sour burned taste gathered in his mouth. No car was parked outside the house. He drew several ragged breaths that felt almost too hot to inhale as he stumped across the road. By the time he reached the front door, all he could think of was a glass of water. He flung the door open as a preamble to reminding his mother that he’d been right about the people from the magazine, only to see a bulky man and a young woman half the size watching him along the hall. “Dudley Smith?” the young woman said. “I hope you don’t mind, but your mother has been letting us into your secrets.”
    Kathy was making an issue of trying to turn to him. The young woman stood up as if to demonstrate how much more petite and in control she was. “Which—” Dudley began to demand and caught sight of a heap of printouts on the table. His words distorted themselves into another shape, and he thought his face did. “Where’d you get those?”
    “Your mother brought them,” the man declared. “She said Patricia could look at them.”
    “I’m sorry we were late,” Patricia said. “We went too far on the train.”
    All that his panicky anger would let Dudley say was “I want a drink.”
    “Better fetch a glass, then,” the photographer took it on himself to tell him.
    “I can get it, Tom,” Kathy said and did.
    “Maybe you can, but you shouldn’t. Just my opinion, of course.”
    Dudley ignored him and watched Kathy pour the lemonade. He leaned against the refrigerator while he swallowed a