Toby Ibbotson - Mountwood School for Ghosts

‘Arrest that woman. She is violent and dangerous!’

The policeman had to do something now, so he stuffed the remains of his lunch sandwich in a waste bin and advanced towards the crowd.

‘Don’t worry, Mrs Wilder. We will cover you with our bodies,’ cried Jim, who had enjoyed a game of rugby at university and sometimes missed it badly.

‘Oh please, I’d rather not,’ said Mrs Wilder.

She was feeling rather frail and didn’t want to be covered in bodies. She had been completely enraged by Bluffit’s foulness to Mr Jaros, but now she just felt old and tired. ‘What can they do to me?’ she said. And she walked through the crowd to meet the policeman.

When the Great Hagges finally arrived back at Mountwood, a faint glow in the east was dousing the stars one by one and the moon was setting. They strode into the hall, and Fredegonda immediately rang the bell for assembly.

The Hagges took up their places, with their arms crossed, looking very grim. Slowly the hall filled up with wobbly spectres.

‘I won’t waste time here,’ announced Fredegonda. ‘We want the details, and we want them now.’

Her voice rang like cold iron. She was calm — a stern self-discipline was one of her strong points — but if the assembled ghosts had known how powerfully her thumb was throbbing and how close she was to losing her temper, then they would have been even wobblier.

Then Kylie, very quietly, said, ‘It was my fault.’

The Phantom Welder found his voice. ‘No, it wasn’t. It was me and my big mouth again.’

Ron Peabody moved forward and stood to attention. His eyeballs jittered about quite alarmingly, but his voice was firm. ‘Not at all, ma’am,’ he barked. ‘I claim full responsibility. I have been derelict in my duties as a husband… er…’ His voice trailed off. He had put his foot in it again.

‘As a husband?’ Fredegonda’s voice was bleak as the Arctic tundra. ‘Mrs Peabody? This is unexpected.’

Iphigenia glided forward. ‘I was led by my artistic nature into a creative moment that I now realize I may have cause to regret. Mea culpa. No blame attaches to any other.’

Eventually the whole story came out. It usually does in the end, especially in the hands of such experienced questioners as the Great Hagges.

At last, after a short conference with her colleagues, Fredegonda declared, ‘Mrs Peabody’s offence is serious enough to justify expulsion from Mountwood. However, she was clearly provoked, and others must bear their part of the blame. We will announce our decision tomorrow night.’ And the Great Hagges turned and marched off to bed.

Later, as they lay in their four-poster bed finishing off the last of their hot drink, Goneril chuckled. ‘I do believe we’re almost there.’

‘Oh yes,’ agreed Drusilla. ‘We might have done it, my dears; we might just have done it.’

‘The bonding — did you observe the bonding, Fred… Fredegonda?’

Goneril was feeling so pleased that she almost said ‘Freddie’, but she had called Fredegonda ‘Freddie’ once before, and had decided then and there that she would never, ever do so again.

‘Of course I observed it,’ said Fredegonda. ‘Team loyalty, carrying the can, unmistakable. And Mrs Peabody… well, we knew she had it in her, but to see one’s work pay off so handsomely, what a jolly fine thing.’

‘And the others not far behind, in my view.’

‘No indeed, my dear.’

When a class finally comes together as a unit, when the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts, that is one of the finest moments in a teacher’s life.

Wearing something very close to beatific smiles, the Great Hagges fell asleep. Their rumbling snores pounded rhythmically through the old stones of Mountwood Castle.

The day after the march Daniel and Charlotte sat on General Markham’s pedestal and looked out over the city. The school holidays had started, and just so that every child in the city would be extra pleased, the weather had turned glorious. The sun shone from a cloudless sky, the stone plinth they sat on was warm, and for once the air was swept so clean that they could make out tiny flashes of white from the backs of the gulls as they circled and screamed down at the quayside.

‘It just makes things worse,’ said Daniel.

Charlotte understood what he meant. Somehow it would have been easier if it had been one of those dank, dark, dripping November days that smelled of rotting leaves and dog poo, with empty hamburger cartons and old newspapers flapping around your feet. But instead, this lovely day.

On a day like this Markham Park looked almost beautiful, with its bright beds of pansies and snapdragons. A line of fluffy ducklings teetered across the path behind their mother, who proudly waddled towards the pond saying waap waap , to concentrate their minds.

Already men in hard hats had turned up in a van and were walking about studying plans and pointing things out to each other. Any day now the heavy machinery would move in, and by the autumn Daniel and Charlotte would be living on opposite sides of a city of a million people.

And Mrs Wilder was still in the police station.

They were going with Mrs Hughes to visit her in the afternoon. Daniel’s father said he didn’t think she’d be there for long. The whole thing was ridiculous; she should just have been told off. But they might have to charge her with something because of all the fuss.

‘All the fuss’ was Jack Bluffit’s work.

Bluffit had recognized the old lady who had thrown the stone at him. She was the one who had tried to make him look a fool at the inquiry, and now he saw his chance to get his revenge. He rang the newspapers, especially the ones that didn’t mind printing rubbish as long as they sold a lot of copies, and the next day one of them ran a big headline saying ‘Pensioner Assaults Head of Planning’, and the rival newspaper went for ‘Hooligans Besiege City Hall’.

Bluffit had made sure that he was quoted in both as saying, ‘Democracy in this country is being undermined by violent urban terrorism.’

The whole point of the demonstration was forgotten.

Daniel and Charlotte walked back through the park.

‘This might be the last time,’ Charlotte said quietly.

Daniel was angry with her for saying it. That was the trouble with Charlotte; she always said what she was thinking, she always told the truth, and she always looked the world straight in the face. Sometimes it was better to tell yourself stories, wasn’t it? Even if deep down you knew that’s what they were — just stories.

‘We can go on fighting. You said we should; now you’re the one who’s giving up.’

‘That’s not fair. All roads end somewhere.’

‘If we were real fighters we would just be starting. We would lie down in front of the bulldozers, and if that didn’t work we would make bombs and blow them up.’

‘I can’t do that, Daniel. That’s how innocent people die. That’s how mothers lose their children and husbands lose their wives.’

No more was said until they turned in at Mrs Hughes’s gate. She was sitting waiting for them in her front garden.

The gardens of Markham Street were small patches of ground, cramped as only urban gardens can be, but Karin Hughes’s garden was a tiny little paradise. Roses and azaleas against the wall of the house, greedy for warmth from the brickwork, and in front of them the shy cyclamens and anemones, the phlox and pansies and mallow and cranesbill. And of course the herbs. There was even a small tree. Not just any tree. It was a silver birch, the first thing she had planted when she came to Markham Street, when waves of homesickness for the country of her birth still engulfed her from time to time. Now she sat in its dappled shade, as she had sat many times since the letter came, saying goodbye to its delicate foliage and gracious, slender lines.