‘That’s just fine,’ Fang snapped. ‘You don’t like being a wet blanket, I don’t like dying horribly painful deaths. We can avoid both if you’ll just get the fucking ropes.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘But?’

The elf came up close to Fang’s ear. ‘If I untie you and you escape,’ she whispered, nodding her head in Tom Thumb’s direction, ‘he’ll get in trouble. I mean, he’s supposed to stop you escaping, and that dwarf’s got a foul temper.’

‘I see,’ said Fang. ‘I’m supposed to go plummeting to my doom just so your boyfriend there doesn’t get yelled at. I’m so grateful to you for explaining it so clearly.’

The elf pulled a face. ‘Don’t be like that,’ she said. ‘Really, you’re putting me in a really difficult position here, you know?’

‘I’m putting you…’

The elf sighed. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘we only just met and, to be really up-front about this, when you’re my size you don’t get so many offers that you can afford to go pissing guys off before you’ve even been to see a film together. Don’t you think it’s cute the way his hair curls round his ears? I think that’s just so adorable…’

‘Elf…’

‘Look,’ the elf replied wretchedly, ‘I said I’m sorry. But that dwarf person trusted him, and he’s trusting me, and if you haven’t got trust, what kind of relationship are you going to have anyway? And stop looking at me like that,’ she added angrily. ‘The last thing I need at what may well be an important stage in my personal development is a whole load of heavy guilt.’

‘Elf,’ said Fang, with terrifying solemnity, ‘when I first met you, as far as you were concerned, love means never having to say Aaaargh! Where in hell’s name has all this deep and meaningful crap come from?’

The elf didn’t reply; instead, she slumped on to the floor and started to cry.

‘Elf?’

‘Snff.’

‘Elf? Elf, you get your bum over here and untie these ropes, or you’ll be very sorry.’

‘Snff snff.’

A stray bundle of memory slipped in through the cat-flap of Fang’s mind. ‘Unless you untie these ropes now,’ he threatened, ‘I’ll say I don’t believe in fairies.’

The elf frowned. ‘Neither do I,’ she replied. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Oh. I thought that if someone said that, somewhere a fairy turns its toes up and snuffs it.’

‘Quite possibly. But I’m a elf, not a fairy. And anybody who goes around saying he doesn’t believe in elves gets petrol through his letterbox. Understood?’

Fang was about to take the argument further when the front door flew open and a round pink shape whizzed in and cowered behind a sofa.

‘Don’t let them know I’m here,’ he said. ‘I think I got rid of them this time, but I’m not taking any risks.’

Fang stared for a moment, speechless. Then he started to laugh.

‘He’s a pig,’ he said, in reply to the elf’s request for further and better particulars. ‘In fact, I reckon he’s one of the three little pigs who used to live on my patch. Now what on earth…’ He leaned forward and had a closer look. ‘Hello, it’s Julian, isn’t it?’

‘Who the devil are you? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Just don’t let my brothers know I’m here, all right?’

‘Sure,’ Fang replied. ‘After you, are they? That’s odd. You people always struck me as being just one happy family.’

‘I don’t know what’s got into them,’ Julian said sadly. ‘Behaving like utter swine, both of them.’

Fang shrugged, as far as he was able with a quarter of a mile of rope tied round him. ‘I won’t say a thing, promise. And in return you could do a small favour for me.’

‘Such as?’

‘Undoing these ropes’d be favourite. Come on, before I die of old age.’

The pig did as he was told. For some reason, Thumb (who could easily have fitted inside Julian’s ear) made no effort to stop him. The elf, who’d been anticipating having to race to Thumb’s rescue and defend him with, if necessary, all reasonable force (she’d been looking forward to that) sat open-mouthed.

‘You’re not just going to cower there while the prisoner escapes, are you?’ she said at last.

Thumb shrugged. ‘Why not? No skin off my nose.’

‘But…’

The elf’s first reaction was to mention such concepts as duty, loyalty, my comrades right or wrong; but there was something in Thumb’s manner that suggested that he wasn’t likely to respond well to that sort of argument. ‘That dwarf’ll flatten you if you don’t,’ she therefore said.

‘So? And the pig’ll flatten me if I do. Besides, Dumpy’ll have to catch me first. He may be big but I’m small, if you get my meaning. There may be nowhere on Earth a dwarf won’t dare to go, but there’s ever so many places he won’t fit.’

‘But…’ The elf hesitated. Somehow, she’d assumed that, just because he looked fairly like the dream man she’d imagined for herself over the years, the interior specifications would match the externals. The idea that he might turn out to be a coward (defined in her world view as someone who doesn’t joyfully embrace a potentially lethal fight with a much larger, stronger opponent without a better reason than not letting down a colleague he couldn’t actually stand) came as a bitter disappointment. ‘Oh, go on, then,’ she snarled. ‘Get out of my sight before I tread on you.’

‘Hey!’ Thumb stared at her in pained surprise. ‘What’s all that about, then? I thought we were, well, you know…’

‘Did you? Then you were wrong.’ She reached down and grabbed his ear, so that he had to stand on tiptoe to avoid becoming a permanent Van Gogh look-alike. ‘I really thought you were something special, you know? Someone I could rely on. Someone I could look up to.’ She stifled a sob and twisted his ear another thirty degrees. ‘Just goes to show how wrong I was, doesn’t it?’ she said, and let him go. He fell to the ground with a bump. ‘Come on,’ she said to Fang, who was free of his ropes at last, ‘let’s be getting out of here. You wouldn’t happen to have such a thing as a white feather about you anywhere, would you? It so happens I need one.’

Before they could get to the front door, however, there was a tinkle of broken glass and a rock sailed in through the window. Fang reached for the door handle and wrenched it open, then jumped back with a yelp of terror as an arrow shot through his hair and embedded itself in the wall behind his head.

‘Bit late for that now, surely,’ the elf said, then she too ducked as six or seven more followed it. ‘Like buses, really,’ she muttered. ‘You wait and wait, and then they all come along at once.’

‘YOU IN THE HOUSE!’ The bullhorn voice made the surviving windows rattle. ‘SURRENDER THE PIG AND NOBODY GETS HURT EXCEPT THE PIG, OF COURSE,’ it added, ‘OR THERE WOULDN’T BE MUCH POINT YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS.’

‘Oh Christ, it’s Desmond,’ Julian wailed. ‘Remember, you said you wouldn’t tell.’

‘That’s okay,’ Fang replied. ‘We’ll just explain that this is nothing to do with us and quietly go on our way. I’m sure they’ll understand.’

He opened the door a crack and actually got as far as ‘Excuse me,’ before another volley of arrows spitted the door. Before retreating he carefully plucked one out of the door, unpicked a white feather from the fletchings and handed it solemnly to the elf, who was cringing under the table with a waste-paper basket over her head. ‘You wanted one of these,’ he said.

‘All right,’ she snarled back, ‘point taken. Where are those other three clowns when we need them?’

‘IN CASE YOU’RE WONDERING WHAT’S BECOME OF YOUR THREE FRIENDS,’ the voice went on, ‘PERHAPS I SHOULD MENTION I HAVE THEM HERE. IF YOU EVER WANT TO SEE THEM ALIVE AGAIN, YOU’D BETTER DO AS YOU’RE TOLD. GOT THAT?’

‘Incentives just aren’t his strong point, are they?’ Fang sighed. ‘Well, we might as well make ourselves comfortable, because it looks as if we’re going to be here for quite some time.’

‘You reckon we should stay put?’ the elf said doubtfully.