Mr Akira rubbed his chin. ‘Surely in this context,’ he said, ‘all of us means not just those of us who are gathered in this particular clearing in this particular wood, but all samurai everywhere. Indeed, all human beings, regardless of race, creed or caste. All living creatures even, since all living things are part of the universal matrix.’

‘Good point,’ muttered Mr Wakisashi. ‘I like that.’

‘Which means,’ Mr Akira went on blithely, ‘that, much as we’d like to help, it’s simply impossible. There’s not enough room in this forest, let alone this rather cramped little clearing.’

Snow White’s eyes were starting to bulge out of her head. ‘For the last time,’ she growled. ‘Are you going to come up here and kill this bitch for me, or aren’t you? Well?’

There was an awful silence, and the dwarves, bears, mice et cetera took a few steps backwards. Eventually, Mr Hiroshige spoke. He said:

 At once the rest of the crowd burst into furious applause; and in that split second, Snow White knew she was through.

She could see it in their faces; no more fetching and carrying, no more taking their boots off in the hall, no more running errands and being at her beck and call. Her power was broken. It was time to move on.

‘Oh, all right then,’ she said, and her voice was almost cheerful. ‘See if I care.’ She let go of the torch, skipped lightly away through the cordon and off into the darkness of the wood. She knew where she was going; there are always places you can go when you’re cute, sweet and utterly ruthless. In a few months’ time she’d be trying on the glass slipper or taking a thorn out of the Beast’s paw or thanking some poor sucker of a knight in shining armour for rescuing her from a dragon the size of a small Jack Russell. She didn’t even look back. Her kind never do.

The crowd started to drift away, chattering in quiet but excited voices about the cottages they were going to build, the evenings they were going to spend with takeaways and videos, the pink frilly curtains they weren’t going to have in the living room. For the first time since she’d come to this domain, the wicked queen sensed the absence of something; it was like the moment when the pneumatic drills that have been digging up the road outside for the whole of the past week suddenly stop.

‘Woof,’ muttered Fang.

‘That’s all right,’ the queen replied. ‘Sorry I took so long getting here.’ She cut the ropes, the cauldron hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud and Fang poured himself out of it, brushed a few slices of potato off the top of his head and curled up in a ball. ‘After all,’ the queen continued, ‘what’s the point of being a wicked queen if you can’t interfere with the true course of justice? If I were you, though, I’d take a hike. Better still: get a haircut and a collar, pack the wolf business in for good and start over as a cuddly dog. Waggle your tail a bit and sit in a shop window. There’s girls in Amsterdam who do that for a living.’

As Fang wobbled unsteadily away into the trees, the wicked queen sighed and shook her head. She had her doubts about this, even now. Starting all over again from scratch was all very well in principle, but there was going to be an awful lot of this sort of thing; old habits dying hard, deeply rooted narrative trends to get rid of, happy endings to untangle. At times it made her wish she was back in real life. No, belay that thought. However hairy it might get here sometimes, it was never that bad.

She walked home, let herself into the castle by the back door and went upstairs to her dressing room. On the way she passed the great hall, where the Brothers Grimm were busily, if hopelessly, occupied with mops and buckets. It was possible, she told herself, that one day they’d manage to clean up the mess, and if that day came then in theory they’d be free to go back. But somehow it turned out that for every bucketful of soapy water they tipped out of the window into the moat, another two or three would ooze up out of the waterlogged rushes. Served them right, she muttered to herself.

‘That’s right,’ she called out as she passed. ‘Remember, if you can get your chores done in time, you shall go to the ball.’

The Grimms looked up at her and muttered something under their breath. It had something to do with the ball, or balls in general, but the queen was too far away to make out what it was.

She reached her dressing room, closed the door and sat down in front of the mirror. She took a deep breath and said the words.

‘Running DOS,’ replied the face in the glass. ‘Please wait.’

When the moment came, she felt unaccountably nervous. True, she had no reason to do so that she could think of; she’d saved the big bad wolf from the lynch mob, the Grimms had been dealt with, she’d broken the power of Snow White and set everybody free. Not a bad start, she told herself.

‘Path fair not found,’ said the face. ‘Define fair.’

‘Just,’ the wicked queen replied. ‘Even-handed. Amenable to reason. Equitable in one’s dealings with others.’

The face remained impassive.

‘You, O queen, are the fairest of them all.’

The wicked queen nodded politely, said thank you, and closed down the mirror. So that’s all right then,’ she said aloud. ‘And now I think I’ll go and have a bath.’

Once upon a time there was a little house in a big wood.

No roses round this door. No white picket fence, no neatly trimmed flowerbeds, no cheerful chintzes at the windows. This place is a pigsty.

Which is as it should be, because three little pigs live here. As far as they’re concerned, it’s just the way they like it, even if it can be a bit of a nuisance crunching your way across a carpet of empty styrofoam pizza boxes every time you go for a pee.

It’s solidly built, of thatch, timber and brick; but there are no more wolves to huff and puff in the forest now, so it’s largely academic.

No more Snow White, no more wolves; you’d be forgiven for thinking this might constitute a happy ending. That would be premature, of course; it’s never the happy ending until the master of ceremonies calls out ‘Let’s hear it for the fat lady’ and they start bringing on the bouquets. There’ll be other pests, be sure about that: road-widening schemes, local byelaws about keeping livestock in residential areas, RSPCA inspectors, weekenders from the city who move in and start complaining about the noise or the smell. But this is Make-believe Land, where the wicked queen can be relied on to come and chase the nuisances away.

It’d be nice to be able to say that everyone gets to live happily ever after, here in Mr Dawes’s rose-tinted Gulag; but that would be taking fantasy a bit too far. The happiest the ending is likely to get is probably the small diner that Tom Thumb and the elf are running these days, out by the Hundred Acre Wood by-pass; or the noisy, dirty engineering works where the dwarves go during the day, endlessly churning out precision-machined grommets and drinking tea out of cups that never seem to get washed up. It may even be somewhere in the Akira Integrated Circuits business park, where Mr Akira (president and managing director), who gives a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and tries not to screw too many people while he’s about it, applies to the production of high-quality electronic components absolutely none of the principles he learnt back in the days when he was an earnest young student of the True Path of Enlightenment.

Handsome is as handsome does; ask any mirror.