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your ear,’ said Merlinmary, having a happy little daydream of blood dripping from everyone’s head.
    â€˜Well, it still needs a bit of work,’ said Winchflat. He stood up and his trousers fell round his ankles with a crash.
    â€˜As I was saying,’ he explained, ‘it still needs a bit of work. I’ve managed to make it really small but it still weighs three hundred kilos.’
    There were a few teething problems. Whenever anyone wearing a detector went within fifty metres of traffic lights they would suddenly change – not from red to green or green to red but into giant three-metre-tall pink marshmallows. Funny things happened at supermarket checkouts, too, whenever anyone wearing a Hearse-Whisperer-Early-Warning-Device passed by in the street. If the customer was a nice person, their bill would come out as twenty-five cents, no matter how much they had bought. If they were a nasty person, theircredit card would melt inside the machine so they couldn’t buy anything.
    Even when Winchflat sorted out all the problems, sometimes as an aeroplane flew over the Floods’ house all its toilets would flush for no reason. Eventually it was agreed that just Winchflat would wear the Hearse-Whisperer-Early-Warning-Device, and he would tell the others if it went into danger mode – which it had.
    â€˜Well, we can’t just stay here in these rotting coffins,’ said Merlinmary. ‘I’m getting backache.’
    â€˜And I’m getting mould between my toes,’ said Satanella.
    â€˜You’ve always got mould between your toes,’ said Morbid.
    â€˜Oh yes, so I have.’
    The children were each hiding inside a coffin in the school graveyard and, as coffins are usually made to hold only one person and some of the bodies still had quite a bit of meat on them and were leaking, the children were all feeling very uncomfortable and damp in unpleasant places.
    â€˜I think the first thing we need to do is get out of here,’ said Winchflat. ‘Then we’ll decide the best place to hide and how to get there.’
    â€˜OK,’ said Merlinmary. ‘How about we all dig downwards and meet in the catacombs. At least the corpses are less leaky there.’
    â€˜It’s always catacombs, isn’t it?’ Merlinmary complained. ‘Why can’t they ever be dogacombs?’
    â€˜Hold on, everyone,’ said Winchflat. ‘Before you start digging, I better check where the Hearse Whisperer is.’ He switched on his Hearse-Whisperer-Early-Warning-Device. ‘That’s strange, she appears to be burying a dead body on a little island off Tristan da Cunha.’

    They didn’t know that the dead body was the fake professor and that the Hearse Whisperer had just stolen it from the school.
    â€˜That is strange,’ said Satanella. ‘Why would she go there?’
    â€˜Don’t know,’ said Winchflat. ‘But the really strange thing is why she’s burying it. I mean, she usually eats dead bodies or drops them off tall buildings onto innocent passers-by.’
    â€˜Maybe it’s like squirrels when they bury nuts to eat later,’ said Satanella.
    â€˜No, I reckon she’s probably hiding it,’ said Merlinmary.
    â€˜At least it should be safe to move from these coffins at the moment,’ said Winchflat. ‘Let’s go.’
    When they gathered at the cemetery gate, they saw the wanted posters. They were stuck on every available flat surface they could see.
    â€˜I hate that picture of me,’ said Satanella. ‘It makes me look like a hairy Jack Russell and I hate Jack Russells – nasty little hyperactive balls of gristle.’
    â€˜I think now might be a good time to leave,’ said Winchflat. ‘While those idiot FSI people are asleep and the Hearse Whisperer is busy.’
    So they went down into the catacombs, finished picking the bits of flaky corpse off each other, sprayed