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you would have expected a voice like that to have but they couldn’t just wait there and see if he got stuck at seven. They scrabbled from the bed, moving in quite a few directions at once. The room became a flurry of movement without progress, as if they were caught in a film being run backwards and forwards at the wrong speed.
    Sally ran naked to the bedroom door and then ran back. John bent down and put on a sock.
    â€˜Two!’
    Sally plumped one pillow, dented the other. Some desperate plan seemed to be forming in her mind.
    â€˜Three!’
    As John bent down to pick up his clothes, Sally shovedthem under the bed with her foot on her way to pick up the Laura Ashley nightdress that was draped across a wickerwork chair.
    â€˜Four!’
    â€˜Hey!’ John hissed. Sally’s head, emerging from the neck of the nightdress was shaking vigorously as she stared, wild-eyed, at John. ‘No time!’ she screamed silently.
    â€˜Five!’
    Sally smoothed down her nightdress, made a couple of meaningless passes at the duvet. She turned to see John whirling in the middle of the floor, as if he had chosen this moment to practise miming a dervish.
    â€˜Six!’
    Sally pointed at the Wendy House, pushed John towards it. He looked at her. She opened the cardboard door and jabbed her finger ferociously at the interior several times. He couldn’t believe it.
    â€˜Seven!’
    He believed it. He crouched inside while Sally closed the door on him. He heard her sprint across the bedroom and then, at the door, begin to walk along the hall.
    â€˜Alec?’
    Her voice sounded so sleepy. The other voice had started to say ‘eight’ and trailed off. To John, huddled in his Wendy House, the blue tinge of the light had taken on a sinister quality, moonscape, jowls of the dead.
    â€˜Alec? Is that you, Alec?’
    John could hear the yawn in her voice from where he was. Listening to that expertly feigned sleepiness induced in him an agony of ambivalence. (The door was being opened. Godzilla comes.) He couldn’t believe that his Sally of the gentle eyes and honest smile could be such an actress. There were questions he had to think over, though not now. The other part of the feeling was the fervent hope that she really was as good an actress as she sounded. A lot depended on her performance.
    â€˜It took you long enough.’
    â€˜I was sleeping, Alec. Here, let me help you.’
    Alec’s feet were thudding all over the hall and there were noises that might have been several bodies hitting off the walls. He sounded like a drunken regiment. An alarming proximity of heavy breathing made John think they had reached the bedroom door. It might have been John’s imagination but he had a suspicion of the presence of foetid breath, as of a carnivore exhaling close at hand.
    â€˜You’ve had somebody in here!’
    John was suddenly aware of the fragility of Wendy Houses. A tunnel would have been handy.
    â€˜That’s right. Four men.’
    John didn’t see the joke. Pacify, pacify, he was thinking.
    â€˜You’ve had somebody in here!’
    â€˜I was sleeping!’
    â€˜Maybe. Ah’m goin’ to check.’
    There was an amazing amount of noise, which was apparently Alec going through to the living-room. Whatever previous convictions had qualified Alec for admission to ‘The Barley Bree’, burglary wasn’t one of them. He made a small riot of coming back towards the bedroom. Sally was still insisting on helping him. John wondered how you did that. It must have been like guiding a stampede.
    â€˜That’s you now,’ she was saying. ‘There we are. Satisfied now?’
    â€˜Okay, love. Ah know ye’re tellin’ the truth. When Ah saw that the telly was off.’
    John was relieved that Alec’s deductive powers weren’t in proportion to his imagined bulk. John was holding himself well back from the cut-out windows of the