“It was clearly one of those mornings when I was particularly American.”

“I had one class in the morning, the mysteriously named "Further Maths". It was two hours long and so deeply frightening that I think I went into a trance.”

“Did you hear?" he asked. "They found another body around nine this morning. It's the Ripper, definitely.""Good morning," I replied."Morning. Listen to this. The second victim...”

“He had let Aunt Peg live in his house and married her, so clearly he had a thing for flaky American types who liked to sneak off in the dead of night. That was, as Ginny remembered it, how America won the Revolution in the first place. The English walked around in bright red coats in straight lines and took breaks for tea, and the Americans snuck around dressed in rags and hid in trees and stole their horses. Or something. Whatever. She had to do this-it was her birthright. It was what George Washington would have wanted.”

“And if we get caught, I will claim I made you go. At gunpoint. I am American. People will assume I'm armed.”

“The day was ridiculous.In fact, the situation was so serious I thought they had to be joking - like maybe they staged a special first day to psych people out. I had one class in the morning, the mysteriously named "Further Maths." It was two hours long and so deeply frightening that I think I went into a trance.”

“Stuart's a wizard with those kinds of things," she said."What kinds of things?""Oh, he can find anything online."Debbie was obviously one of those parents who still hadn't quite grasped that using the Internet was not exactly wizardry, and that we could all find anything online. I didn't say this, because you don't want people to feel that they've missed something really obvious, even when they have.”