My mum is dead. That is absolutely certain. I saw her body in the coffin. Like a waxwork it was. It wasn’t her. It was like an empty shell. She’d gone and she was never coming back. I saw the lid closed down. I saw the coffin get lowered into the grave. And I saw it the next day when the gravediggers had put all the earth back in and it was a piece of ground again, only this time with a coffin-sized mound of earth lying on top. No headstone…

I have a photographic memory. I only have to see something once, and I never forget it.

It’s my party piece. It’s what I always do for school talent shows. I get people from the audience to call out names, dates, strings of numbers, bits of poetry. I write them all on the whiteboard, look at it once, then I get them blindfold me and recite them all…

The day North died I was in the school library. I always thought that if –when - someone close to me died, ceased to exist, I would know, feel it somehow, some way. A shiver, a cold tingling something like that. But seriously, I had no idea.

I was  talking to Emine. We were arguing, not a blood and guts heart and soul argument either, just what we thought the Year Eight in front…

It was Dad’s idea, of course. He’s into all that survival stuff. His idea of a family holiday is crossing the Sahara by camel. We had to drink our own pee. Last year it was Siberia. I lost three toes to frostbite. So when the auditions for a new TV show called Extreme Jungle Family Challenge came up he was first in line. The idea was simple; drop an “ordinary” family into the Amazon rainforest with a couple of video cameras and…

Rathbone House had stood on Coldharbour Lane for eighty years, unloved, desolate, alone. Nobody visited. They knew the stories, you see. They knew its reputation. I made its acquaintance in the long, hot summer of 1976. It changed my life forever.

My name is Heather Heap. Some days I love my name. Some days I hate it. I suppose it’s my dad’s fault. It’s his family name. Mum took his name when they married, but she doesn’t use it for her business which is a hair and beauty salon.

The times I hate it are when people nickname me as Rubbish Heap, Scrap Heap, Scrappy, Dung, Dusty and worse. The times I love it are mostly when I…

The sudden throb of the engines and a gentle rocking told them that the ship was underway. He struggled to free his hands but the tape cut even deeper into his wrists. 

“We have to get out and stop the ship somehow,” he said. “Axos mustn’t  get to the island before ‘Task Alpha’.”Suddenly her hands were cutting the tape that held him.  “How on earth did you get free?” he…