‘Oh, dear! I do hope it isn’t serious. That would be most inconvenient.’

‘I dare say he’d find it inconvenient as well,’ Alex said sardonically.

She whirled on him like an avenging fury.

‘It’s easy for you to sit there and mock, but you don’t have a crowd of children who are expecting Santa to arrive with his sack and give out presents, and you’ve got to tell them that he isn’t coming.’

Alex was saved from having to answer this by the arrival of Corinne.

‘Mrs Bradon, I’m so sorry,’ she said at once. ‘Jimmy’s got a broken collar-bone and a cracked rib. I’m afraid he can’t be Santa.’

‘But can’t he be Santa with a broken collar-bone?’ Mrs Bradon asked wildly. ‘The children won’t mind.’

‘It’s being set now. He’s in a lot of pain,’ Corinne explained.

‘Well, they can give him something for that.’

‘They are giving him something, and it’s going to send him to sleep.’

‘Oh, really! That’s very tiresome!’

Alex’s lips twitched. He couldn’t help it. Mrs Bradon’s single-mindedness would have been admirable in a boardroom, but here it was out of place.

‘There must be a way around the problem,’ he said.

‘Like what?’ Corinne confronted him, eyes flashing. ‘This is your fault. You ran Jimmy down, driving like a maniac.’

‘I was doing ten miles an hour, if that. He slipped on the ice. He always was a slowcoach.’

‘Well, he can’t be Santa, whatever the reason, and it was your car.’

The sheer injustice of this took his breath away.

‘What does it matter whose car it was if I didn’t hit him?’

‘Jimmy says you did.’

‘And I say I didn’t.’

‘Will you two stop making a fuss about things that don’t matter?’ Mrs Bradon said crossly. ‘We have a crisis on our hands.’

‘Surely not,’ Alex said, exasperated. ‘How hard can it be to play Santa? A bit of swagger, a ho-ho-ho or two-anyone can do it.’

‘Fine!’ said Corinne. ‘You do it!’