"No!" The old mars slapped the table. "It's got to be today! Today's when it all happens, you see. Mrs Tachyon. The trolley. Johnny and the rest of them. It's got to be today. Otherwise ... " He pushed away the dull yet healthy breakfast. "Otherwise it's this for the rest of my life."

The secretary was used to Sir John's moods, and tried to lighten things a little.

"Blackbury ... " he said. "That's where you were evacuated during the war, wasn't it? And you were the only person to escape when one of the streets got bombed?"

"Me and two goldfish called Adolf and Stalin. That's right. That's where it all started," said Sir John, getting up and going over to the window. "Go on, jump to it."

The secretary didn't go straightaway. One of his jobs was to keep an eye on Sir John. The old boy was acting a bit odd, people had said. He'd taken to reading very old newspapers and books with words like "Time" and "Physics" in the title, and sometimes he even wrote angry letters to very important scientists. When you're the richest man in the world, people watch you very closely.

"Adolf and Stalin," said Sir John. To the whole world in general. "Of course, these two are only their descendants. It turned out that Adolf was female. Or was it Stalin?"

Outside the window, the gardens stretched all the way to some rolling hills that Sir John's landscape gardener had imported specially.

"Blackbury," said Sir John staring at them. "That's where it all started. The whole thing. There was a boy called Johnny Maxwell. And Mrs Tachyon. And a cat, I think."

He turned.

"Are you still here?"

"Sorry, Sir John, said the secretary, backing out and shutting the door behind him.

"That's where it all started," said Sir John. "And that's where it's all going to end."

Johnny always enjoyed those first few moments in the morning before the day leapt out at him. His head was peacefully full of flowers, clouds, kittens

His hand still hurt.

Horrible bits of last night rushed out from hiding and bounced and gibbered in front of him.

There was a shopping trolley full of unspeakable bags in the garage. There was also a spray of milk across the wall and ceiling where Guilty had showed what he thought of people who tried to give him an unprovoked meal. Johnny had had to use the biggest Elastoplast in the medicine tin afterwards.

He got up, dressed, and went downstairs. His mother wouldn't be up yet and his grandad was definitely in the front room watching Saturday morning TV.

Johnny opened the garage door and stepped back hurriedly, in case a ball of maddened fur came spinning out.

Nothing happened.

The dreadful trolley stood in the middle of the floor. There was no sign of Guilty.

It was, Johnny thought, just like those scenes in films where you know the monster is in the room somewhere ...

He jumped sideways, just in case Guilty was about to drop out of the ceiling.

It was bad enough seeing the wretched cat. Not seeing it was worse.

He scurried out and shut the door quickly, then went back into the house.

He probably ought to tell someone official. The trolley belonged to Mrs Tachyon (actually, it probably belonged to Mr Tesco or Mr Safeway) so it might be stealing if he kept it.

As he went back inside, the phone rang. There were two ways he could tell. Firstly, the phone rang. Then his grandfather shouted "Phone!", because he never answered the phone if he thought there was a chance it could be answered by someone else.

Johnny picked it up.

"Can I speak to-" said Yoless, in his Speaking to Parents voice.

"It's me, Yoless," said Johnny.

"Hey, you know Mrs Tachyon?"

"Of course I-"

"Well, my mum was on duty at the hospital last night. She's got horrible bruises and everything. Mrs Tachyon, I mean, not my mum. Someone really had a go at her, she said. My mum, not Mrs Tachyon. She said we ought to tell the police."

"What for?"

"We might have seen something. Anyway ... er ... someone might think it was ... us ... "

"Us? But we called the ambulance!"

"I know that. Er ... and you've got her stuff ... "

"Well, we couldn't just leave it there!"

"I know that. But ... well, we did have Bigmac with us ... "

And that was it, really. It wasn't that Bigmac was actually evil. He'd happily fire imaginary nuclear missiles at people but he wouldn't hurt a fly, unless perhaps it was a real hard biker fly which's given him serious grief. However, he did have a problem with cars, especially big fast ones with the keys still in the ignition. And he was a skinhead. His boots were so big that it was quite hard for him to fall over.

According to Sergeant Comely of Blackbury police station, Bigmac was guilty of every unsolved crime in the town, whereas in real life he was probably only guilty of ten per cent, maximum. He looked like trouble. No one looking at Bigmac would think he was innocent of anything.

"And Wobbler, too," Yoless added.

And Wobbler would admit to anything if you got him frightened enough. All the great unsolved mysteries of the world - the Bermuda Triangle, the Marie Celeste, the Loch Ness Monster - could be sorted out in about half an hour if you leaned a bit on Wobbler.

"I'll go by myself, then," said Johnny. "Simpler that way.

Yoless sighed with relief. "Thanks."

The phone rang just as Johnny put it down again.

It started saying "Hello? Hello?" before he got it to his ear.

"Er ... hello?" he said.

"Is that you?" said a female voice. It wasn't exactly an unpleasant one, but it had a sharp, penetrating quality. It seemed to be saying that if you weren't you, then it was your fault. Johnny recognized it instantly. It was the voice of someone who dialed wrong numbers and then complained that the phone was answered by people she didn't want to speak to.

"Yes. Er ... yes. Hello, Kirsty.

"It's Kasandra, actually."

"Oh. Right," said Johnny. He'd have to make a note. Kirsty changed her name about as often as she changed her clothes, although at least these days she was sticking to ones beginning with K.

"Have you heard about old Mrs Tachyon?"

"I think so," said Johnny, guardedly.

"Apparently a gang of yobs beat her up last night. She looked as though a bomb'd hit her. Hello? Hello? Hello?"

"I'm still here," said Johnny. Someone had filled his stomach with ice.

"Don't you think that's shameful?"

"Er. Yes."

"One of them was black."

Johnny nodded dismally at the phone. Yoless had explained about this sort of thing. He'd said that if one of his ancestors had joined Attila the Hun's huge horde of millions of barbarians and helped them raid Ancient Rome, people would've definitely remembered that one of them was black. And this was Yoless, who collected brass bands, had a matchbox collection and was a known spod.

"Er," he said, "it was us. I mean, we didn't beat her up, but we found her. I got the ambulance and Yoless tried- Yoless was definitely thinking about first aid..."

"Didn't you tell the police?"

"No-"

"Honestly, I don't know what would happen if I wasn't around! You've got to tell them now. I'll meet you at the police station in half an hour. You know how to tell the time? The big hand is-"

"Yes," said Johnny, miserably.

"It's only two stops on the bus from your house. You know about catching buses?"

"Yes, yes, yes, of course I-"

"You need money. That's the round stuff you find in your pockets. Ciao."

Actually, after he'd been to the toilet, he felt a bit better about it all. Kirs- Kasandra took charge of things. She was the most organized person Johnny knew. In fact she was so organized that she had too much organization for one person, and it overflowed in every direction.

He was her friend. More or less, anyway. He wasn't sure he'd ever been given a choice in the matter. Kirs- Kasandra wasn't good at friends. She told him so herself. She'd said it was because of a character flaw, only because she was KiKasandra, she thought it was a character flaw in everyone else.

The more she tried to help people by explaining to them how stupid they were, the more they just wandered off for no reason at all. The only reason Johnny hadn't was that he knew how stupid he was.

But sometimes - not often - when the light was right and she wasn't organizing anything, he'd look at KiKasandra and wonder if there weren't two kinds of stupidity: the basic El Thicko kind that he had, and a highly specialized sort that you only got when you were stuffed too full of intelligence.

He'd better tell Grandad where he was going, he thought, just in case the power went off or the TV broke down and he wondered where Johnny had gone.

"I'm just off to-" he began, and then said, "I'm just off out."

"Right," said Grandad, without taking his eyes off the set. "Hah! Look, there he goes! Right in the gunge tank!"

Nothing much was going on in the garage.

After a while, Guilty crawled out from his nest among the black plastic sacks and took up his usual position in the front of the cart, where he was wont to travel on the off chance that he could claw somebody.

A fly banged on the window pane for a while and then went back to sleep.

And the bags moved.

They moved like frogs in oil, slithering very slowly around each other. They made a rubbery, squeaky noise, like a clever conjurer trying to twist an animal out of balloons.

There were other noises, too. Guilty didn't pay them much attention because you couldn't attack noises and, besides, he was pretty well used to them by now.

They weren't very clear. They might have been snatches of music. They might have been voices. They might have been a radio left on, but slightly off station and two rooms away, or the distant roar of a crowd.

Johnny met Kasandra outside the police station.

"You're lucky I've got some spare time," she said. "Come on."

Sergeant Comely was on the desk. He looked up as Johnny and Kasandra came in, then looked back at the book he was writing in, and then looked up again slowly.

"You?"

"Er, hello, Sergeant Comely," said Johnny.