The Impossible Boy (4 page)

‘In short,’ the man continued, ‘there were enough supplies in here to keep a few dozen people alive for, well, potentially, years. It was the storeroom for the
government’s secret nuclear bunker, you see. In the event of a nuclear attack on London – back in the days when such a thing was deemed likely – Britain’s top brass were all
meant to hide down here and wait it out. Lucky them, eh?’ He chuckled macabrely at the thought. ‘That was all in the bad old days, of course, and the world is a considerably safer place
nowadays, thanks largely to the efforts of people like you and me. Or more specifically,’ the man smiled, ‘
me
.’

Edgar smiled politely. ‘I have no doubt.’

‘You see,’ said the man, ‘I have quite recently enjoyed something of a promotion. A few brief months ago I was a mere drone at the Ministry of Defence. Just another bumbling
clod working on the usual top secret technology stuff. But after some pretty darn clever manoeuvrings on my part – largely due to my handling of some recent odd business at a school in Blue
Hills – I’m now a far more important number here at the Secret Service. Or rather,’ and here he grinned a slow catlike grin, ‘somewhat
above
the Secret Service. I
have tasted power and – by Jove, sir –
I like it
. By the way, did you know that I am the eighth most powerful person in the entire world?’

Edgar nodded. ‘I had heard.’

The man looked disappointed. ‘Oh. Anyway, my job is basically to stop the Prime Minister of Great Britain worrying about the state of the world, about the prospect of wars, of revolutions,
of threats of all kinds. Anything that would make him want to scurry for safety underground and fill up this storeroom again. So you see, as long as this room remains empty, I am doing my job. And
the PM doesn’t care in the
slightest
how I go about it.’

Edgar nodded. ‘Of course.’ He had worked for the Secret Service for nearly twenty years and knew there was scarcely a single foul deed they would not commit in the pursuit of
Britain’s interests.

The man rose to his feet and walked around to the front of the desk. The desk being the size it was, this took a good ten seconds. He held out his hands graciously to Edgar.

‘Thank you so much for coming here today with the message. I do appreciate your taking the trouble. I’m so sorry I was snippy with you earlier.’ He shook Edgar warmly by the
hand, clasping his other hand tightly over Edgar’s.

‘Not at all,’ said Edgar. ‘We’re both just doing our jobs.’ He felt a sudden sharp pricking in the back of his hand. He snatched it out of the man’s grip.
There was a red dot on the back of his hand. Blood.

‘Forgive me,’ said the man. Edgar saw he was holding a small, stubby syringe in the hand he had clasped over his. ‘A sedative. And rather a powerful one too.’

‘Whuh . . .?’ Edgar’s vision suddenly began to blur.

‘You see,’ said the man, ‘the thing is, you saw the message. And the fewer people who see it, the better for Britain. Thankfully though, the sedative now entering your system
will erase all memory of your visit here today.’

‘Whuh . . .?’ said Edgar again. His mouth wasn’t working terribly well. Or his limbs. He sank slowly to his knees.

‘In fact, I’m afraid that, as we can take no chances with the security of the message, to be on the safe side I had to give you a dose of the sedative so strong that it will erase
your memory of the entire last – oooh – twenty-five, thirty years, I should think.’

‘Thirty years?’ mumbled Edgar. His lips were numb. The floor suddenly looked like a very comfortable place. He lay on it, cradling his head in his hands.

‘I believe you mentioned you were married?’ said the man.

Edgar nodded dumbly. He tried to mouth the word ‘Charlotte’.

‘Splendid! Complete amnesia is the perfect way to put the sparkle back into your relationship! All those years of arguments and nagging swept away in an instant. You’ll be able to
get to know each other all over again. I’m really most jealous!’

Edgar did not reply because he was no longer conscious.

The man returned to his thronelike chair and pressed a button on the armrest. A second small hatch opened on the vast surface of the desk and a tiny telephone no bigger than a playing card slid
upwards. The keypad of the phone bore only a single digit – 1. He gently pressed the number with a finger and held the tiny phone to his ear. There was a muted ringing tone.

‘Hello?’ said a voice.

‘Good afternoon!’ said the man cheerfully. He eyed Edgar’s unconscious form. ‘I wonder if you might send a cleaner over to the office? It appears to be somewhat . . . er
. . .
untidy
.’

‘Certainly, sir. Be about five minutes.’

‘Thank you!’ said Sir Orville McIntyre. ‘You really are most terribly kind.’

Gabby pressed herself flat against the wall, feeling the rough brickwork scrape against the back of her head. She checked her watch. School was due to finish in just under
three minutes.

This time she wouldn’t lose him.

The previous afternoon, she and Barney had met up in a quiet corner of the playground during break time to discuss the strange magical abilities of Chas Hinton.

‘You’ve got to admit, mate,’ said Gabby, removing her small, round glasses and cleaning them with the edge of her jumper, ‘that trick with the doves was pretty darn cool.
I can’t begin to imagine how he does it. And the way he works the audience! He’s so charming, isn’t he? I can see why everyone likes him.’

‘In other words, he’s a show-off who knows a few magic tricks,’ said Barney, rolling his eyes. ‘Biiiiiiiig deal! Hardly impossible, though, is it?’

Gabby smiled and slotted her glasses back on to her nose. ‘What about him walking on water, then? If that’s a trick, I wouldn’t mind learning it. It would make going on holiday
to France a lot cheaper if you could hike there!’

Barney wrinkled his nose. ‘We’ve only got Laura’s word for that, haven’t we? She might have made a mistake. Or she could be lying.’

‘Why on Earth would she want to lie about Chas walking on water?’

Barney shrugged. ‘People do the weirdest things to get attention, don’t they? Back in Kent an old lady on our street used to tell everyone that elves were stealing her tea bags. She
was on the local TV news saying she’d stayed up one night to take a photo of them doing it but she’d put her thumb over the camera lens by mistake and none of the pictures came out. She
was talking rubbish, obviously, but it got her on the telly, didn’t it? Maybe it’s the same with Laura.’

‘She hardly seems the type to invent stuff,’ said Gabby, ‘and she’s a pretty popular girl herself – it’s not like she’s short of attention.’

‘We need to find out more about Chas,’ said Barney. ‘I don’t know where he’s from, what his folks do. Anything about his life outside school. Discovering that might
give us some clue.’

‘I’ll ask around,’ said Gabby. ‘Someone might know something.’

‘And I’m going to follow him home tonight. See where he lives. We’re in the same general science class for last lesson today.’

‘You could always just, you know, ask him where he’s from,’ said Gabby with a teasing smile. ‘Engage him in conversation. It’s a pretty good way to find out stuff
about people, believe it or not.’

Barney shook his head. ‘I don’t want him to know we’re investigating him. He might try to mislead us. I know everyone thinks he’s ace but there’s something about
him I don’t like. I don’t trust him.’

Gabby widened her eyes in mock-terror. ‘Oh no! Take care following him then, mate! Do you want me to come along and act as your bodyguard in case things turn ugly?’

‘Ha flipping ha,’ said Barney in a flat voice. ‘Don’t worry about me, Gabs. I reckon I’m pretty good at following people without being noticed. You’ll
see.’

When the bell rang at three-thirty that afternoon at the end of the general science lesson, Barney calmly put his things back in his schoolbag, keeping one eye firmly on Chas
Hinton, who was sitting a couple of desks in front of him. Chas slid from his seat, pulled on his coat and headed for the door. Barney followed silently.

Chas rounded a corner, moving against the flow of bodies streaming towards the main entrance, and slipped into the school hall. Barney could see him clearly through the window in one of the
hall’s wide double-doors. He was walking towards the centre of the empty hall.
Interesting
. . .

‘See you at football practice on Thursday night, Barney?’

It was a boy called Rob Yellowwood, a tall kid with red hair and a freckly nose.

‘What?’ said Barney. ‘Oh yeah, sure. Sorry, mate. Can’t talk now. Need to be somewhere. See you Thursday.’ He waved absently at Rob and quickly sidled up to the
double-doors leading into the hall. He peered inside.

It was completely empty.

Frowning, Barney pulled open the door and stepped inside, his footsteps echoing on the wooden floor. His eyes darted around the empty hall, his heart sinking lower with every step. He checked
behind the headmaster’s lectern, behind the piano; he checked every inch of floor, every corner of the room. There were no other exits. Nowhere to hide.

It had happened. He had, in that briefest of moments, lost Chas. It was impossible. But he had managed it. And now Gabby was going to know just how rubbish at investigating he was . . .

‘Don’t worry about it, mate,’ Gabby laughed later that evening when he phoned to tell her about his investigative blunder. ‘I’m sure even Sherlock Holmes had an off
day.’

Next day, though, was different. Gabby was prepared. She had a
plan
. And as Barney was away from school on his LifeSkillz placement, she was also on her own and would
have no one else to blame if she messed up.

LifeSkillz was a scheme dreamed up by Mr Steele, the deputy head at Blue Hills High, to get pupils involved in their local community and give them a glimpse of life outside the classroom. Mr
Steele himself had come up with the name ‘LifeSkillz’ – he was very keen on the ‘z’; kids liked words with ‘z’s in them, apparently – and for two
afternoons a week the kids (or as Mr Steele put it, ‘the kidz’) in Barney’s year were assigned to people, places and institutions in Blue Hills that needed a little assistance.
Some kids got to help out at
The Blue Hills Weekly Chronicle
, some at the local radio station. Barney, however, had been assigned to help out an elderly couple who lived near the school,
something, if he was honest, he wasn’t too happy about.

Faking an optician’s appointment, Gabby had left her final lesson of the day twenty minutes early. She used this time to slip into the girls’ toilets and change into a different coat
and a curly blonde wig she had bought the previous year for a fancy dress party (she had gone as Marilyn Monroe but everyone had assumed she was Lady Gaga, much to her annoyance). She removed her
glasses and put in her emergency contact lenses. The tiny slivers of plastic felt weird and uncomfortable in her eyes but she knew any disguise she donned would be useless if she was still wearing
her usual glasses. An old baseball cap pulled down low over her face completed the outfit.

That morning, Laura had told her which classroom Chas would be in for his final lesson of the day – class LO5 (the LO stood for Lower Block, a long single-storey building that was the
oldest in the school). Laura had also told her that kids in her and Chas’s form were not doing their LifeSkillz activities until next term so he should definitely be in school today. Gabby
had a sudden vision of Chas on LifeSkillz working on the checkout in a supermarket and making customers’ groceries vanish as they trundled along the conveyor belt. She stifled a giggle.

The school bell rang. Gabby tensed. From within the building erupted the happy shouts and laughter that signalled the end of the school day, followed by the weary voices of teachers calling for
calm. Chairs scraped against the floor. Fire doors squeaked and slammed. Muffled footsteps echoed down corridors. And then, like cola from a well-shaken can, a stream of kids burst through the door
of the Lower Block and exploded into the playground, yelling, running, pulling on their coats, all with a single happy thought –
home
.

Chas was one of the first kids out. He waved at another boy and sauntered towards the school gate. Gabby followed, moving through the crowd at a leisurely pace, keeping her distance.

Watching Chas move through the school gates, Gabby pushed forwards and, pulling down the peak of her cap further still, she followed.

Town was clogged with traffic. Cars and buses were bunched up against one another like impatient cattle, engines grumbling and exhausts coughing out streams of smelly white clouds. Gabby slid
into the doorway of a shop and peeped around at Chas. He was standing outside a specialist hi-fi shop a few doors down, gazing in at various pieces of unidentifiable matte black audio equipment.
What is it about boys and hi-fi stuff?
she wondered. Could anyone really tell the difference between a CD player that cost thirty pounds and one that cost three thousand pounds?