Still, she wasn’t coming up the hill by chance. She walked straight up towards me and halted about five paces away.

‘What do you want?’ she hissed. ‘You’re stupid coming here. Lucky for you that those inside are asleep.’

‘I can’t do what you asked,’ I said, holding out the basket towards her.

She folded her arms and frowned. ‘Why not?’ she demanded. ‘You promised, didn’t you?’

‘You didn’t tell me what would happen,’ I said. ‘She’s eaten two cakes already and they’re making her stronger. She’s already bent the bars over the pit. One more cake and she’ll be free and I think you know it. Wasn’t that the idea all along?’ I accused, starting to feel angry. ‘You tricked me so the promise doesn’t count any more.’

She took a step towards me, but now her own anger had been replaced by something else. Suddenly she looked scared.

‘It wasn’t my idea. They made me do it,’ she said, gesturing down towards the farmhouse. ‘If you don’t do as you promised it’ll go hard with both of us. Go on, give her the third cake. What harm can it do? Mother Malkin’s paid the price. It’s time to let her go. Go on, give her the cake and she’ll be gone tonight and never trouble you again.’

‘I think Mr Gregory must’ve had a very good reason for putting her in that pit,’ I said slowly. ‘I’m just his new apprentice, so how can I know what’s best? When he gets back I’m going to tell him everything that’s happened.’

Alice gave a little smile – the sort of smile someone gives when they know something that you don’t. ‘He ain’t coming back,’ she said. ‘Lizzie thought of it all. Got good friends near Pendle, Lizzie has. Do anything for her, they would. They tricked Old Gregory. When he’s on the road he’ll get what’s coming to him. By now he’s probably already dead and six feet under. You just wait and see if I’m right. Soon you won’t be safe even up there in his house. One night they’ll come for you. Unless, of course, you help now. In that case, they might just leave you alone.’

As soon as she’d said that, I turned my back and climbed the hill, leaving her standing there. I think she called out to me several times, but I wasn’t listening. What she’d said about the Spook was spinning around inside my head.

It was only later that I realized I was still carrying the basket, so I threw it and the last of the cakes into a river; then, back at the Spook’s cottage, it didn’t take me very long to work out what had happened and decide what to do next.

The whole thing had been planned from the start. They’d lured the Spook away, knowing that, as a new apprentice, I’d still be wet behind the ears and easy to trick.

I didn’t believe that the Spook would be so easy to kill or he wouldn’t have survived for so many years, but I couldn’t rely on him arriving back in time to help me. Somehow I had to stop Mother Malkin getting out of the pit.

I needed help badly and I thought of going down to the village, but I knew there was a more special kind of help near at hand. So I went into the kitchen and sat at the table.

At any moment I expected to have my ears boxed, so I talked quickly. I explained everything that had happened, leaving nothing out. Then I said that it was my fault and could I please be given some help.

I don’t know what I expected. I didn’t feel foolish talking to the empty air because I was so upset and frightened, but as the silence lengthened, I gradually realized that I’d been wasting my time. Why should the boggart help me? For all I knew it was a prisoner, bound to the house and garden by the Spook. It might just be a slave, desperate to be free; it might even be happy because I was in trouble.

Just when I was about to give up and leave the kitchen, I remembered something my dad often said before we went off to the local market: ‘Everyone has his price. It’s just a case of making an offer that pleases him but doesn’t hurt you too much.’

So I made the boggart an offer…

‘If you help me now, I won’t forget it,’ I said. ‘When I become the next Spook, I’ll give you every Sunday off. On that day I’ll make my own meals so that you can have a rest and please yourself what you do.’

Suddenly I felt something brush against my legs under the table. There was a noise too, a faint purring, and a big ginger cat strolled into view and moved slowly towards the door.

It must have been under the table all the time – that’s what common sense told me. I knew different though, so I followed the cat out into the hallway and then up the stairs, where it halted outside the locked door of the library. Then it rubbed its back against it, the way cats do against table legs. The door slowly swung open to reveal more books than anyone could ever have read in one lifetime, arranged neatly on rows of parallel racks of shelves. I stepped inside, wondering where to begin. And when I turned round again, the big ginger cat had vanished.

Each book had its title neatly displayed on the cover. A lot were written in Latin and quite a few in Greek. There was no dust or cobwebs. The library was just as clean and well cared for as the kitchen.

I walked along the first row until something caught my eye. Near the window there were three very long shelves full of leather-bound notebooks, just like the one the Spook had given me, but the top shelf had larger books with dates on the covers. Each one seemed to record a period of five years, so I picked up the one at the end of the shelf and opened it carefully.

I recognized the Spook’s handwriting. Flicking through the pages, I realized that it was a sort of diary. It recorded each job he’d done, the time taken in travelling and the amount he’d been paid. Most importantly, it explained just how each boggart, ghost and witch had been dealt with.

I put the book back on the shelf and glanced along the other spines. The diaries extended almost up to the present day but went back hundreds of years. Either the Spook was a lot older than he looked or the earlier books had been written by other spooks who’d lived ages ago. I suddenly wondered whether, even if Alice was right and the Spook didn’t come back, there was a possibility that I might be able to learn all I needed to know just by studying those diaries. Better still, somewhere in those thousands upon thousands of pages there might be information that would help me now.

How could I find it? Well, it might take time, but the witch had been in the pit for almost thirteen years. There had to be an account of how the Spook had put her there. Then, suddenly, on a lower shelf, I saw something even better.

There were even bigger books, each dedicated to a particular topic. One was labelled, Dragons and Wormes. As they were displayed in alphabetical order, it didn’t take me long to find just what I was looking for.

Witches.

I opened it with trembling hands to find it was divided into four predictable sections…

The Malevolent, The Benign, The Falsely Accused and The Unaware.

I quickly turned to the first section. Everything was in the Spook’s neat handwriting and, once again, carefully organized into alphabetical order. Within seconds I found a page titled: Mother Malkin.

It was worse than I’d expected. Mother Malkin was just about as evil as you could imagine. She’d lived in lots of places, and in each area she’d stayed something terrible had happened, the worst thing of all occurring on a moss to the west of the County.

She’d lived on a farm there, offering a place to stay to young women who were expecting babies but had no husbands to support them. That was where she’d got the title ‘Mother’. This had gone on for years, but some of the young women had never been seen again.

She’d had a son of her own living with her there, a young man of incredible strength called Tusk. He had big teeth and frightened people so much that nobody ever went near the place. But at last the locals had roused themselves and Mother Malkin had been forced to flee to Pendle. After she’d gone they’d found the first of the graves. There was a whole field of bones and rotting flesh, mainly the remains of the children she’d murdered to supply her need for blood. Some of the bodies were those of women; in each case the body had been crushed, the ribs broken or cracked.