We opened drawers. We looked in cupboards. We looked under the sofa. Quite what we were looking for I had no idea. On the other hand, if were acting logically we wouldn’t have been in the house in the first place.
With every passing minute a cold hand was starting to close around my heart, and when the clock struck five I gripped Charlie’s arm so hard I left nail-marks.
Upstairs was just as characterless as down. There was a travel guide to Scotland. But that was the only piece of evidence that a real, living, breathing human being lived here.
“Right,” I said. “Let’s get out.”
“We haven’t done the loft,” said Charlie.
“Are you out of your tiny mind?” I whispered.
He was. On the other hand, I didn’t want to leave the house on my own. If I was going to bump into Mrs Pearce I wanted to do it with company.
Charlie climbed onto the banisters, lifted the square white hatch and moved it to one side.
“Please, Charlie,” I said. “Don’t do this.”
But Charlie wasn’t taking advice. He grabbed the side of the hatch and hoisted himself up into the darkness. He vanished briefly, then his head reappeared. “Now you. Climb onto the banisters.”
I climbed onto the banisters and he reached down and pulled me up. When I was inside the loft Charlie took a torch from his back pocket with his working hand and I followed the oval of light as it swept over the joists.
There was a box of Christmas decorations. There were some old floor tiles. There was an empty suitcase. There was a spider the size of a gerbil.
“There’s nothing here,” I said. “Please, Charlie. I want to go home now.”
But he was making his way over to the hot-water tank and the pile of elderly cardboard boxes sitting around it. One by one he started to open them and investigate the contents. I crouched next to him and started to help so we could get this over and done with as quickly as possible.
It was me who found it. A metal biscuit tin pushed into the recess beneath the tank. I pulled it out, blew the dust off, held it in the beam of Charlie’s torch and popped the lid open. Inside were seven brass wristbands, an Ordnance Survey map of somewhere in Scotland and a piece of paper. Except that it wasn’t paper. At least, not any kind of paper I’d ever seen. It was like tin foil, but smoother and softer. Yet when I unfolded it I could feel that it was as strong as leather. On it was printed:
Trezzit/Pearce/4300785
Fardal, rifco ba neddrit tonz bis pan-pan a donk bassoo dit venter. Pralio pralio doff nekterim gut vund Coruisk (NG 487196) bagnut leelo ren barnal ropper donk gastro ung dit.
“We have hit the jackpot, baby,” said Charlie.
And that was the exact moment when we heard Mrs Pearce come in through the front door downstairs.
“Don’t move,” said Charlie.
He stepped round me and slid the square panel back over the hatch, shutting us both into the attic, and for a couple of seconds I thought I might be sick, which would not have been helpful.
“Charlie?” I whispered. “What the hell are you doing?”
He tiptoed back round me and picked up the piece of stuff that wasn’t quite paper.
“Charlie?”
“Shhh!”
He slipped the orange Spudvetch! notebook out of one pocket and a pen out of the other. Putting the torch in his mouth and holding the notebook open with the bandaged paw of his right hand, he began to copy the incomprehensible message.
I sat with my face in my hands and breathed deeply and counted slowly to calm myself down. It didn’t work. Through the ceiling I could hear Mrs Pearce moving about, opening doors, rattling the cutlery drawer, filling the kettle. It occurred to me that we might very well be stuck in the loft until she left for school in the morning. And then it occurred to me that I would need to go to the toilet sometime between now and tomorrow morning. And then it occurred to me that I was going to be arrested for weeing through the bedroom ceiling of my history teacher.
“Done,” said Charlie, sliding the notebook back into his pocket and putting the message back into the biscuit tin. He pushed it under the water tank and repositioned the rest of the boxes. “Now, let’s make our getaway.”
“How, precisely, are we going to do that?” I asked.
He got to his feet, cracked his knuckles and said, “Rev your engine, Jimbo.”
He put his hands against the roof, jiggled it and wiggled it, and after a minute or so a slate came free. He pushed his arm further through the hole and frisbee’d the slate out into the night. There was a second’s silence, then the slate hit a greenhouse with an almighty shattering of glass.
“Now,” said Charlie. “Listen.”
We waited for the sound of the back door being opened, then Charlie said, “Go, go, go.”
I lifted the hatch, slid it to one side and lowered myself onto the banisters. Charlie did the same and slotted the hatch back into place. We’d just begun to go downstairs when Mrs Pearce walked into the hallway below us. We froze. She hadn’t seen us yet, but it was surely only a matter of seconds before she turned round.
She was standing very still, staring at the front door, watching something or listening for something. I felt a single drop of sweat make its way down my spine.
And then she did something we’d seen Mr Kidd do in the playground, just after his eyes went blue. Carefully, she placed her right hand over her left wrist and lifted her head for a few seconds. We couldn’t see her face, we couldn’t see her eyes, but something about the gesture gave me the willies.
Then it was over. Her arms dropped to her sides, she picked up her keys from beside the telephone, took her coat from the rack, opened the front door and stepped outside, shutting it behind her.
We sprinted down the stairs, along the corridor and through the kitchen. We unbolted the back door, ran across the garden and vaulted the fence before you could say, “Barnal ropperdonk.”
We didn’t stop until we’d left the park and run for five or six streets. We finally came to a halt at a bus stop on the main road. I was petrified. I was out of breath. I looked at my hands and I could see them actually shaking.
“God,” said Charlie, “that was fantastic.”
“Next time, Charlie,” I said, “you’re doing it on your own.”
I got home expecting a grilling. About where I’d been. And why I’d been there so long. And why I hadn’t told anyone beforehand. But Mum was working late, Becky was out with Craterface and Dad was so engrossed in his cooking that he wouldn’t have noticed me bringing a cow into the flat. I dumped my bag and sat down. He took a spoonful of something from the pan on the cooker and carried it carefully over to me. “Try this.”
So I tried it. And it was really very good indeed.
“Tomato and orange soup,” said Dad, “with basil and cream and a dash of cognac.”
“Wow,” I said. “Mum definitely won’t divorce you now.”
6
Captain Chicken
Charlie’s bandages came off a couple of days later. To celebrate the occasion his mum decided that I should be allowed back into the house. He’d suffered enough, apparently. And learned his lesson. Clearly she knew absolutely nothing about her son.
On the other hand, it did give us the opportunity to show the secret message to Charlie’s dad. Obviously we didn’t want him leafing through the Spudvetch! notebook and finding out that Charlie had been following teachers around Sainsbury’s. So we made a second copy on a clean sheet of paper and handed it to him over supper.