Flesh and Blood (11 page)

“What did he want?”

“To ask if we were going to send a photographer to cover the Halloween Ball that night.”

I frowned. “Don’t you always? Why didn’t he just phone?”

“Exactly,” said Jo’s dad. “He was telling us a funny story about how he’d flown in from Eastern
Europe, somewhere, at the crack of dawn, and how some jobsworth at the airport had nearly shredded his passport. I was wondering why, after a tiring journey, he’d bothered to come into town when he could have called, but like everyone else in the office I was standing there, listening to him, chuckling along, sipping my cappuccino, like a prize idiot.”

“Why like an idiot?”

“Because of what you’d shown me. If he’d turned up a couple of weeks ago, I’d have thought nothing of it. Nothing at all. Just a local bigwig popping in to make sure he gets a grip-and-grin in the next issue, for a bit of PR. But since this particular bigwig turns up on this particular day, alarm bells ring. Because of your research.”

“In what way?” I said, feeling increasingly nervous.

“Why’s he standing around amusing us with stories
, I think to myself.
He’s got a party to organize, he must have things to do. We’re not his mates from the Chamber of Commerce or the County Council. What’s with all the coffee and buddy-buddy stuff?
And then a nasty little thought hits me. He’s waiting.”

“For what?”

“He’s waiting for us to drink the coffee. Or, perhaps, he’s waiting for
me
to drink the coffee. I get a heads-up that one of the Greenhills might be a serious nutcase, and lo and behold, the chief suspect turns up bearing gifts. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

I didn’t mention what had happened to me after the party. I guessed that Jo had already told him.

“You don’t think he heard about our meeting from me, do you?” I said.

“No, no, no, of course not. The man’s a social octopus, he’ll have tentacles everywhere. Anyway, as soon as I thought that, I didn’t touch another drop. I hadn’t had much of it. He leaves a few minutes later, all smiles and thank yous, my colleagues say what a great bloke he is, and we all go back to work.”

“What happened to the coffee? What was in it?”

“I put it down, I set it aside. I thought, first thing on Monday, I’ll send it to be analyzed. Like I said, nothing of the sort would ever have occurred to me before, but after seeing your file, anything’s possible. Less than two hours later, I’m in an ambulance.”

“Jesus, what if you’d drunk the lot?” I cried.

“Quite,” he said. “You saved my life, young man. Which leads me on to Thing To Tell You
number two. When you get a chance, give Jo that file of yours, so she can pass it on to me. Don’t come back into the office, yeah?”

“Yes, OK. What was in the coffee?”

“We’ll never know. By the time I remembered it, after I woke up at the hospital, it was too late. I rang the office. The cleaner had been in. It was tipped away.”

“That would have been evidence.”

“Absolutely. And to bring it in himself like that, he’s either so damned arrogant he assumes he’d never be caught, or he’s desperate to stop any leaks of information. So we’re still at square one on the evidence front, but once I’ve got your file, I’ll do some digging of my own. Got to go, there’s a cup of herbal tea with my name on it.”

His words rattled around my head for hours. Now, more than ever, I was determined to find evidence, to prove that something was going on.

Breaking into Bierce Priory was the worst mistake of my life.

But how could I have known? How could I have foreseen what would happen?

I was blinded by my raging desire to get at the
truth. I can see that now. But I couldn’t have known what the truth would cost me… Could I?

It was the next day that our fate was sealed. Although it was Thursday, it was the last day of that particular school week. The Friday was a teacher-training day, and there’d be no lessons. At break, I talked with Jo while we waited for Liam to turn up.

Then I said to both of them: “I was thinking about this half the night. I’m going to hold off handing over that file until I’ve got something better to include in it.”

“Like what?” said Liam.

I let out a long, slow breath. “I’ve got to take the only option.”

Liam pulled a face. “Er, hello, criminal record.”

“Someone could get in there tomorrow,” said Jo. “They’d have hours to look around.”

“How come?” said Liam.

“I told Sam before you got here,” said Jo. “Emma’s going to New York in the morning. The whole family’s going for a long weekend, shopping. All of them, including the grandad. They won’t be back
until late Sunday night. She told a couple of people in her class this morning, and now half the year’s heard about it. They only decided over breakfast today. Last-minute ticket deal, apparently. This could be our perfect opportunity.”

Liam’s gaze darted between Jo and me. “I’m hearing ‘we’ and ‘us’ here.”

“Because I’m totally with Sam on this,” said Jo.

“What? Why?”

“Sam is right. The Greenhills are extremely well protected: officially, socially, legally, every way. There’s no way to get to the truth from the outside; you’ve got to get it from the inside, or not at all.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, and that justifies breaking the law, does it?” said Liam.

“They’ll be gone all weekend,” said Jo. “We get in, look around, find the evidence we need. And if there isn’t any to be found, or getting to it proves impossible, then we just get out again. Nothing is left disturbed, nobody need ever know.”

“I can hear that ‘we’ again,” said Liam.

“I’m going in there with Sam,” said Jo.

I was as surprised to hear this as Liam was.

Jo’s lips pressed tightly together for a moment.
“Just something my dad said, OK? The Greenhills are bloody evil, trust me.”

“He told you about the coffee?” I said quietly.

She nodded. “Only me. Not Mum. She’d go ape.”

“What coffee?” said Liam.

We told him about the attempt on Jo’s dad’s life. “You see why these people have got to be brought down?” I said. “The thing is, to get into the house, I’m going… OK,
we’re
going to need help. You’re the technical one.”

Liam saw what I was getting at immediately. “Oh, no, come on. I’ll lend you some gear, but I’m not going to commit a burglary. I’m applying for university before the end of term – I’m not doing that from some young offenders’ institution! And anyway, if the Greenhills are poisoning people now, what the bloody hell will they do if they catch us?”

“They’ll be thousands of miles away,” said Jo. “We won’t get caught.”

“And if we discover some real evidence, we’re not going to get put in prison,” I said. “We’ll be heroes.”

Liam held the sides of his face, in an agony of indecision. “Can’t I just lend you a laptop, and
wires, and a set of instructions?”

“It’s not going to be that easy, is it?” I said. “Picking those electronic locks is going to need a level of technical skill that I don’t have. And Jo doesn’t have either.”

“What if they’ve got cameras?” said Liam. “What if they’ve got motion sensors? I’m not bloody MI5! I can hack a computer system, and bypass a few security measures, but no way can I get you through something really sophisticated.”

“All we’ve got to do is get in,” I said. “We may only need a matter of minutes. If an alarm goes off, and the cops turn up, not even the Greenhills will be able to stop our evidence getting out. My guess is there’s no alarm, just heavy locks.”

“Based on what?” said Liam.

“They’ll want that place secure, but silent. They won’t have it linked up to the police, in case officers turn up who aren’t part of their network. And they certainly won’t have any kind of loud siren, nothing that draws attention. And if they’ve got a few cameras on the walls, so what? We’ll have our evidence. It’ll be too late for them.”

Jo tugged at Liam’s sleeve and flickered her eyelids
at him, putting on a jokey voice. “Help us, Obi-Liam, you’re our only hope.”

I could see he was burning to help her, to impress her. He looked from me to Jo and back again. “If I can’t crack the first door inside two minutes, it’s not happening, right?”

“Right.”

“I mean it. I’m not spending half an hour writing lines of code. And if we hear barking, we leg it.”

“Right, yes, understood,” I said.

Sure enough, the Greenhills left the Priory at shortly after 7 a.m. the following morning. I’d set my alarm early, and watched through a narrow gap in my curtains, slowly spooning cereal from a bowl.

I watched Caroline double-lock the front door and check it. They loaded a couple of small cases into the boot of their car. Emma was almost skipping with excitement. Ken clambered into the back beside her. Byron and Caroline sat in the front, Byron driving. The growl of the car’s engine was loud in the pre-dawn stillness. The headlights flicked on, throwing sharp circles of white against
the windowed wall of the annexe. The Renault slowly reversed, U-turned on the road, and was away.

I phoned Liam and Jo. We arranged to meet up two hours later, once the Greenhills were safely on their way. I’d already told Mum and Dad that the three of us were working on a geography project and that we’d be out and about in the park for hours. Mum had gone to work by eight, and Dad was still gently snoring at twenty past nine. I watched for Liam and Jo from the living room, and went out to meet them as they approached.

“If we’re going in through the back,” said Jo, “we’ll need a way to scale that fence.”

“I had an idea about that last night,” I said. “We can climb up on one of the bins.” I turned to Liam. “Have you got everything?”

He tapped at the backpack slung over his shoulder. “I went into town after school yesterday, and got one of those home video transmitters. With a portable power pack it should scramble camera signals within a small radius. Just in case.”

“Genius,” I grinned.

A few minutes later, we were at the side of our
house, morning light turning the sky a washed-out semi-blue. I dragged one of our black wheelie bins out from the enclosed section behind our garden gate, where it was kept. I bumped it over the grass, to the tall metal railings that bordered the Priory’s grounds. I kept shivering, although whether it was from nerves or the biting cold, I couldn’t tell.

We found a spot where there was no direct line of sight to us from anywhere on the hill leading down to the river, and positioned the bin up against the fence. I almost tipped it over as I climbed up on top of it. Crouching unsteadily for a moment, I regained my balance and placed the toe of one of my chunky walking boots between two of the spikes that topped the metal railings. Then in one movement I heaved myself up on to one leg, swung forward and jumped.

I hit the grass with a painful thud. A zing of pins and needles shot through my leg. Shaking it off, I caught Liam’s backpack when he threw it over. Jo was next. I caught her by the waist as she jumped, breaking her fall. We both had to break Liam’s fall by grabbing his arms, as he was the tallest and heaviest of us. Liam gathered up his bag and we walked towards the Priory.

None of us said a word. The only sound was the swish of our boots on the frost-whitened grass.

I looked up at the building. As blank as an empty grave. A sense of cold loneliness surrounded the place, a strange and helpless feeling of abandonment. I quickly located the window from which that peculiar apparition had been staring at me, weeks before. The window was as dark and vacant as the rest of the house.

We approached a small, porch-like section that jutted out on to a broad, neatly kept terrace. In between two more lines of metal railings, low and narrow this time, a short set of stone steps led down to a heavy door that was set deep into the wall, half below ground level and half above.

“You’d think they’d have shutters at the windows, or something,” whispered Jo.

“Too obvious, maybe,” I said. “It might encourage people to think there was something in here worth nicking.”

“No cameras,” mumbled Liam. “I doubt they’d have hidden them, or it wouldn’t be a deterrent. Typical. Now I’ve got the stuff to deal with them. Can you see any cameras?” We couldn’t.