Ebenezer Grayling sat busy in his counting house. It was a cold, bleak day at the Department for Transport. Big Ben had only just struck three but it was getting dark already and the lights were going on in the grand buildings of Whitehall.
Grayling stared down at the papers in front of him. He had to make these figures add up before he could go home to his constituency for the holidays. The document was headed ‘HS2 — Overspend; Compensation’, and it made for depressing reading.
Because his boss, Mrs May, had backed a previous Labour plan to build a mightily expensive high speed railway through the English countryside, Ebenezer Grayling was having to grapple with a project that now ran billions over budget. And what was worse, hundreds of families whose homes had been made worthless by the blight of the railway were beating down his door for compensation.
Some of these householders his department had agreed to compensate, if only to shut them up, and that was true of the case he was staring dismally at now, the case of one Tiny Kite, daughter of Mr and Mrs Kite of Cratchit Crescent in the town of Kenilworth in Warwickshire.
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