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was one thing to creep into Mr Kowalski’s garden to look for a cricket
     ball when Mr Kowalski might burst out of his house at any moment and catch you, but quite another to go there knowing that
     if he did appear, you could get yourself out of trouble at the touch of a button. If Alex was carrying the computer, it wouldn’t
     matter if Mr Kowalski came out. All he would have to do was press Ctrl‐Z and he would be safely back in his bedroom deciding
     whether or not he wanted to go.
    An hour later, with his laptop balanced on one arm and the time on it set for ten minutes earlier, Alex strode confidently
     down the path at the side of Mr Kowalski’s house and into his back garden. The old man was indoors and, as all the windows
     of his house were tightly closed and the curtains drawn – they always were, no one knew why – there was no reason why he should
     know Alex was there.

    He searched the garden thoroughly – twice – but without finding his cricket ball. He checked over the vegetable patch, walked
     up and down the flower beds and scanned every inch of the lawn, but there was no sign of it. Or of his frisbee, or any of
     the tennis balls. Disappointed, he was just double‐checking one of the flower beds before leaving when –
    ‘Get away! You are
very
bad! Get away!’
    The sound of Mr Kowalski’s voice was so sudden and so startling that Alex dropped his computer. It landed on the grass at
     his feet and, as he bent down to retrieve it, he realized two things. One was that Mr Kowalski was not shouting at
him
in his heavy Polish accent, but at a small white dog, which had been sniffing around the vegetable patch and was now running
     for its life. The second was that Mr Kowalski had a gun.
    ‘You don’t stay away, I shoot you!’ Mr Kowalski shouted and, pointing the gun at the dog as it raced across the garden, fired
     twice. The
ping
of pellets bouncing off the fence at least told Alex it was only an air pistol, but any reassurance he might have felt disappeared
     as Mr Kowalski turned and saw him.
    ‘Alex?’ he demanded sharply. ‘What you doing? What you doing in my garden?’
    ‘I‐I –’ Praying that the computer had survived
the fall, Alex lifted his hand, pushed down on Ctrl‐Z and found himself back in his bedroom, quite unharmed, but with his
     heart thumping heavily in his chest.
    His first idea may not have been as successful as he’d hoped, but it didn’t really matter, Alex thought. It was his second
     idea that was the exciting one and, after telling his mother where he was going, he walked down the road to talk it over with
     Callum.
    Callum, however, was not at home. Alex rang the doorbell several times without getting an answer before Mrs Penrose came out
     of the house next door to tell him that the Bannisters had all gone off in a car about half an hour earlier. Alex asked if
     she knew when they would be back – Mrs Penrose usually knew everything like that about her neighbours – but on this occasion
     she didn’t.
    ‘I would have asked them,’ she said, ‘but I was a bit upset at the time. About Jennings.’
    ‘Jennings?’
    ‘My dog,’ Mrs Penrose explained. ‘He’s small, white… You haven’t seen him, have you?’
    Alex wondered if he should say he had seen it in Mr Kowalski’s garden being shot at, but decided against it. Mrs Penrose had
     already lost one dog
that year, and if she’d lost another he didn’t want to be the one to break the news.
    He called back twice in the next couple of hours, but Callum had not returned and he still wasn’t back at half past one when
     Alex and his mother left for the fête. Which was a shame because that was where Alex was planning to put his second idea into
     practice.
    The school fête was held on the playing field every year in the middle of May, and Alex and Callum normally went to it together.
     This year, however, the fête was almost over and Mr Eccles the head teacher had finished giving out the