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As she entered, she saw them, dressed up for dinner, heading into the dining room.

Unsure how Pierce Littleslade had managed to dress so quickly, she wondered if she had made a mistake. Then she noticed the bag of turnips he was carrying in one hand.

This was it, she thought. Time to find out the truth.

Aware that she was covered in mud, but frustrated and angry and not in any mood to take any nonsense from anyone, she marched into the dining room, currently nearly empty, and went straight up to the Littleslades’ table, where they had sat at the table reserved for Howling Gail.

‘Oh, hello, dear,’ said Mrs. Littleslade.

Mr. Littleslade scowled at her, as though perhaps aware of what she had been doing.

‘How are you, dear?’

‘I’ve been better,’ Kelly said. ‘I think it’s about time you confessed to what you’re doing around here. I saw you stealing those turnips from Mrs. Flowers’s garden.’

Pierce Littleslade looked aghast.

‘What on earth are you talking about, girl?’ he said.

‘Those turnips,’ Kelly said, pointing at the bag at his feet. ‘You stole them from an old lady’s garden, and you’ve been carving them and leaving them lying around trying to scare people. I know exactly—’

‘What a terrible thing to say,’ Mr. Littleslade said.

As Mrs. Littleslade started to cry, he reached into the bag and pulled out a turnip. It looked as though it had just come off a shop counter.

‘I just bought these in the greengrocer’s,’ he said, as though to confirm what Kelly reluctantly had surmised. ‘These aren’t stolen. I bought these for my wife.’

‘Is it your anniversary?’ Kelly couldn’t resist saying.

Mrs. Littleslade started to cry even harder.

Mr. Littleslade almost smiled, but twisted it into a smirk at the last moment.

‘No,’ he said, ‘but it is the anniversary of my dear wife’s father’s death in a tragic helicopter crash.’

‘Oh. I am sorry to hear that,’ Kelly said, not sure whether it was true.

‘You know she’s traumatised. Look at her,’ Mr. Littleslade said. ‘She’s so traumatised that she’s had to see a psychotherapist.’

‘Oh, so she went to a psychotherapist, did she?’ Kelly said, already realising she was losing her power and was probably going to end up conceding defeat in the face of this irate man and his crying wife.

‘Yes,’ Mr. Littleslade said. ‘And he diagnosed her with severe trauma and prescribed a natural healing method.’

‘What’s that?’ Kelly said.

‘Feeding turnips to horses,’ Mr. Littleslade said.

Kelly stared at him.

He looked at her with such conviction, unblinking, that she was unable to doubt it for a second.

‘But … you were caught on camera putting a turnip on the top of a flagpole outside the Carnival of Horrors.’

There was a flicker of uncertainty in Pierce Littleslade’s eyes. Then it was gone, and he was back to the same old stone-faced expression.

This is how he won so many poker games, Kelly thought. He’s a master of the poker face.

‘I was trying to get it down,’ he said, staring at her again with the same unblinking conviction. ‘Someone’s been putting them all over the place, trying to bring bad luck onto this village. I saw it up there, and I was attempting to get up to take it down. However, it was too high, and in the end I had to leave it there.’