The Petitioners (7 page)

‘What if the torches don’t work?’ I said to Declan, cornering him as he ate the reconstituted stew.

‘This isn’t bad,’ he commented. ‘The torches will work. Trust me.’

By the time we emerged it was completely dark, and there was still no sign of Fiona or Dan. I looked at Declan, wondering if he would show any trace of concern. Instead it was Tanya who came over and said, ‘Shouldn’t they be back by now?’

‘You’re not meant to know about that,’ Declan grumbled. ‘Oh, well, I suppose I’d better go – through the rain and cold, putting myself at risk too – and have a look for them.’

‘They could easily have fallen,’ said Tanya reproachfully. ‘It’s slippery under foot.’

‘Listen here, Ms Fairfax,’ said Declan, putting an arm round her shoulders and leading her away, ‘if there’s one thing we’re used to by now, it’s wet ground. Trust me. They both know to take care.’

‘I wish you’d told me they’d gone. Told me officially, I mean. I could have sent a couple of men with them.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ said Declan.

She shoved his arm away. ‘Let me be the judge of that. I’m sending scouts up there now.’

He heaved a long-suffering sigh. ‘I suppose so.’

‘There’s no suppose about it,’ she snapped. ‘You can go with them to show them the way. I’ll get that organised now. You’ve got five minutes.’

It wasn’t any longer than that until the small party set out. I wondered whether to offer to go too. Certainly if Dan was in trouble, I should be there to help get him out of it. But I didn’t have as much hill experience as Declan had, which I knew would make it too risky to take me along, so I made the excuse of staying at our base camp in case Dan and Fiona found another way down and wondered what was going on.

I thought the worst that could happen was that one of them had fallen and the other had stayed with them, waiting to be rescued.

The truth about what had happened didn’t cross my mind at all.

JENNIFER

The story became more like ‘Wind in the Willows’ as Jeff took something from the wall and set it alight. It turned out to be an old-fashioned lantern. I had seen one in my illustrated copy of the book but not in real life.

‘Are we going to a tiny little underground house?’ I whispered, feeling silly and childish.

‘No need to whisper now,’ said Jeff. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the door had closed behind us as silently as it had opened. ‘It isn’t an underground house but it is a bit bijou, I suppose.’

I hadn’t noticed his accent before – well, he hadn’t said very much – but now I wondered about it. The way he pronounced ‘bijou’ made no pretence at authenticity.

‘Are you English?’

He chuckled. The sound bounced off the tunnel walls. I hoped the vibration wouldn’t cause a landslide.

‘Born and bred within the sound of Bow Bells,’ he said. I couldn’t decide whether he was joking or not.

‘I was born in England,’ I told him. ‘But I’m still Scottish.’

‘Wasn’t there some sort of law about that earlier?’ he said.

‘Yes. But my Dad says we don’t have to worry about it now.’

‘And your Mum? What does she say?’

He kept his tone casual but I sensed the answer was important to him for some reason.

‘I’m not sure. But she’s always the one that worries, no matter what.’

‘Yes?’

‘All the time.’

We walked on in silence for a while. So he was still living up to his image as a man of few words.

‘Why have you kidnapped me?’ I said after a while.

‘Kidnapped? That’s a laugh – I thought I was rescuing you.’

‘Mum’s going to think it’s a kidnap,’ I told him with confidence. ‘She’ll be worrying herself sick.’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘They’ve fed her enough drugs to keep her out of it for a good while.’

‘Drugs?’ I thought back to when I had last seen Mum. She had been very sleepy, that was true. But drugged? How did Jeff know? ‘Can we go back for her? Please?’

He laughed again, but not in a warm chuckly kind of way. It was the harsh laugh of somebody who had seen reality and not liked it very much. ‘No way. Not now.’

‘Later?’

‘Maybe.’

He stopped suddenly and I only just managed not to run into him. I had noticed the tunnel was getting smaller as we went along. Now the roof was low enough for him to put his hands up to it – and with a push, he made a hole through which light and warmth poured down on us.

‘After you,’ he said, and took hold of me round the waist and hoisted me up towards the hole. I was too surprised to register a protest, and it was only when another pair of arms reached down and grabbed for me from above that I started to struggle.

‘Easy, now,’ said Jeff. ‘It’s only Will up there. You’ll be all right.’

He was surprisingly calm for somebody whom I was kicking in the face.

‘Sorry,’ I said as Will pulled me up through the hole into a warm kitchen with the sort of kitchen smells I remembered from Jeff’s domain in the hospital.

‘Where are we? Is this where you live?’ I asked as he swung himself up beside me. Will replaced the trapdoor which covered the hole in the floor, and put a rug over it.

‘Just passing through,’ said Jeff.

I intercepted a glance between him and Will. It was hard to decipher. On Jeff’s side I interpreted it as a warning not to tell me too much, while Will’s expression held puzzlement and a smidgeon of panic.

I knew the feeling.

‘When can we go back?’ I said.

‘What’s your hurry?’ said Will. He sounded like a native of those parts. He had the quiet manner of speech of somebody who had lived in the Highlands for most of his life.

‘Mum’s still there,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get her away. I don’t know what’s going on but if I’m in danger, then surely she must be as well.’

‘Not quite the same kind of danger,’ said Jeff. He added, to Will, ‘Have you got the dinner on?’

‘I didn’t know you’d be back so soon,’ said Will defensively. ‘I’ll start the spuds now and we can eat about two.’

‘Spuds?’ I asked.

The two men burst out laughing.

‘Spuds – potatoes. Pommes de terre. Kartoffeln,’ said Jeff.

‘Oh, yes! I know!’ I must have sounded like an over-excited six-year-old. I thought back to Ravernie, where my father and I had excavated potatoes from the ground and cooked and eaten them together. I blinked back a tear.

We all sat down round the table, with its old, scratched surface. I felt as if I was at home for the first time since my father and I had left Cramond, all those months before. It was silly, of course. I didn’t really know what Will and Jeff were up to. For all I knew they were white slave traders or something. I smiled suddenly. I suppose it was the old-fashioned surroundings that had sent my brain back to something I had once read in my great-grandmother’s journal. Even when she was a girl, it had only been an urban legend.

‘How much do you want to know about what we’re doing here?’ said Jeff.

‘Don’t tell her anything!’ Will urged. He stared at me, not in a hostile way but with that scared-rabbit expression I had seen earlier. It could have something to do with the way his sandy eyebrows were permanently raised, or with his very slightly protruding teeth… I dragged my attention back to the point.

‘I don’t even know enough to wonder what I don’t know,’ I said, hoping to make some kind of sense. ‘Are you a secret agent?’

Both men broke into genuine laughter, spluttering with it, catching each other’s eyes and starting up again when they were about to stop.

‘Secret agent?’ said Jeff at last, still shaking with the aftershock. ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

‘I don’t know – a spy?’

He shook his head.

‘Well, do you work for a foreign power?’ I asked, not knowing how else to express it.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Jeff.

Will shook his head. ‘You shouldn’t tell her. What if she falls into the wrong hands?’

‘The wrong hands?’ I was even more bewildered, if that was possible.

‘Just about any hands are the wrong hands,’ said Will.

‘I know that already,’ I said with feeling.

‘Except ours,’ he added hastily.

Jeff made a sound halfway between a sniff and a snort.

‘Any hands can be the wrong hands,’ he said. ‘Depends on lots of things.’ He leaned forward, closer to me, and spoke in a low voice as if he thought there might be eavesdroppers inside the room. ‘I’m an envoy from the English government.’

For some reason it made me giggle. ‘Envoy?’

‘I told you not to tell her,’ said Will.

‘Yes, an envoy,’ said Jeff. ‘I’ve been sent with my team to establish the extent of support for certain ideas in what’s left of Scotland. Believe it or not, I work for the English Diplomatic Service.’

‘What sort of ideas?’

‘Hmm. Dangerous ideas. Ideas that could be seen as treason in certain quarters.’

His words didn’t strike quite the appropriate amount of fear into me. After all, my brother had once been in jail for conspiring against the Scottish government, and he had lived to tell the tale. Not that he had actually told it, having been preoccupied with survival ever since his release. Knowing him, he would prefer to take part in more action rather than reviewing the past in any case. My father and I had been on the run from government agents and had escaped, and my mother – well, she was different.

‘Treason? You mean, rebellion against the government?’

‘My information is that there is no government,’ he said.

This didn’t exactly come as a shock, but it was startling to hear it spelled out in these uncompromising terms.

‘Anarchy,’ he said. ‘Marauding bands of looters taking what they want, crimes of violence on every street corner, whole areas where private paramilitaries have taken over… That isn’t what we want on our doorstep.’

‘I’m sure it isn’t,’ I said meekly. I supposed the group my father and Dan and the others were involved in might count as a marauding band of looters, although I didn’t like to think of it in those terms.

Having conjured up the rest of the family, so to speak, I was so busy worrying about them that I didn’t think through the possible implications of his final sentence for a moment or two. There was a short pause.

‘Are you going to invade Scotland?’ I said as I at last worked it out.

The two of them laughed again. Well, at least I was providing them with some free entertainment.

‘Don’t worry about that for now,’ said Jeff, not quite laying my fears to rest. ‘We do need to speak to your mother, though. We think she may have information that could be useful to us.’

‘I’m sure she has,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know how you’re going to get it out of her while she’s trapped in there. Have you got a plan?’

‘A plan?’ said Jeff, almost as if he hadn’t even heard the word before. ‘It isn’t quite as specific as that.’

‘You are going to rescue her, aren’t you?’

‘If we can,’ he said.

‘What about you?’ I asked Will. ‘Are you on the same side as him?’

‘It isn’t really a matter of taking sides,’ said Will evasively.

‘You can assume he is,’ said Jeff, cutting across Will’s reply. ‘But he’s right, there aren’t any sides.’

‘There are always sides,’ I said. ‘Quite often more than two.’

They didn’t laugh at this.

‘Weren’t you going to put the spuds on?’ said Jeff to Will. ‘And perhaps some sausages?’

‘I suppose you make your own sausages too,’ I said.

‘No, we barter potatoes for them,’ said Will. ‘The gamekeeper down the road makes them from venison. Only in season, of course.’

I hadn’t realised such an old-fashioned kind of community existed, here in the hills. It hadn’t even been like this at Ravernie.

It was a mistake to think of Ravernie. It reminded me of my father.

GAVIN

The search party took longer than I had expected. I couldn’t do any more work in the stables. It was too dark, and we had a self-imposed ban on having unnecessary lights on after supper, to preserve what energy resources were left. Of course I couldn’t sleep, which would have been my next choice of how to pass the time. Instead I wandered more or less aimlessly about the encampment – now that it was more formal, with its rows of army style tents and the larger kitchen tent with its extending canopy, I felt justified in giving it this title – mulling over in my mind such weighty issues as whether to mend my socks again or to ask somebody to forage for some new ones on the next trip down into town.

I thought about Emma and Jennifer too, and hoped they weren’t getting too bored during their enforced rest. A bored Emma was a dangerous Emma. I wasn’t sure if Jen ever got bored. She tended to find something to use her brain for in the most unpromising situations. She didn’t always translate her ideas into action, though. I suppose she was more like me in that way.