Burning Secrets (15 page)

Chapter 34

D
ANIEL WAS AWARE
of a diffuse orange glow in the sky over in the direction of The Brow, long before the house itself came into view. Although he was tired and cold again after the warmth of Ramsay's bed, and hadn't eaten since lunchtime over twelve hours ago, he was still buzzing with excitement from that kiss. He could hardly believe he'd dared to grab her like that, half expecting her to tense up and push him off, but she'd kissed him back. He'd thought his head would explode, and it had taken every atom of self-control to get back out of that window . . .

Striding on through the night, he felt strong enough to overturn a car, uproot a tree with his bare hands, or take on a pack of wild dogs. But there were no wild dogs to be faced, just a solitary fox, whose eyes blazed yellow in the torchlight, before it slunk through the hedge and away over the fields.

He was surprised to see every light on in The Brow, as though a party was in full swing, and still more unsettled when he opened the front door and there was no Chet bounding up to greet him.

“Hello?” he called, with a sinking heart, moving through the empty rooms. “Louie?”

He stood helplessly in the kitchen. It was some minutes before he noticed the message Louie had left for him amongst the clutter. It wasn't particularly enlightening, telling him nothing more than he already knew from Ramsay and giving no hint of where Louie had headed. She'd been gone more than five hours! The fact that Chet was with her was only mildly reassuring. Where the hell could they be?

Just as he was contemplating the almost unbearable idea of heading out once again into the cold night to look for them, the phone burst into life, its sudden shrilling in the silent kitchen making him leap. He snatched it up, fumbling it to his ear in his haste. “Hello?” he said with a trace of desperation in his voice.

“Oh,” said Louie. “You're there.”

“Louie! Where the hell are you? I was getting really worried.”

“Looking for you! You're the one who's missing – not me,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, sorry,” said Daniel, trying to master his frustration, “I just got back and there's no one here so I got a bit . . . you know. Have you got Chet?”

“Yes, he's with me. I've been ringing home every twenty minutes. What have you been doing?”

“It's complicated. I'll tell you later. Where are you ringing from, anyway?”

“I'm at Mrs Ivory's house.”

“
What?
”

“I bumped into her when I was out looking for you. We drove around a bit trying to find you, then she brought me back here so I could keep phoning, while she went out in the car searching again.”

“Oh
God.”

“It's OK, she's totally cool about it. She's just coming in the door now. I'll tell her you're OK.”

“Have you spoken to Mum?”

“Not yet.”

Daniel blew out a long sigh of relief.

Through the muffling of the receiver he could hear Louie saying, “Daniel's back; he's on the phone,” and then something he couldn't catch, and the next voice was Mrs Ivory's.

“Daniel – you're safely home,” she said calmly. “That's wonderful. Louie was getting just
a little
concerned.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I got a bit held up, and then I called in on . . . a friend . . . and I forgot the time . . . and—”

“As long as you're all right,” she said, cutting off this stream of inadequate excuses.

“Yeah. I'm fine. Sorry you've gone to a load of trouble.”

“It was no trouble. Now, since we've established everyone's all right, and it's rather late, Louie may as well sleep here in my spare room, and then I'll drop her back first thing in the morning.”

Daniel would have preferred it if Louie and Chet had come home, but having caused so much disruption, he felt he could hardly start making demands. And he was so grateful that Louie was OK, and that everything had been sorted out without involving their mum, that he would have agreed to anything.

As soon as he had hung up, relief gave way to extreme hunger. He took an over-ripe banana from the fruit bowl of wizened apples and ate it in three bites. The kitchen was in a state: it would need a major clean-up before Mum got back, but not now. Daniel realised he was missing her. Even though it might not seem that she did much when she was here, everything fell into disarray when she wasn't. Maybe she did stuff without him noticing.

He wandered around switching lights off and then wearily climbed the stairs. Even removing his trainers required a monumental effort, and he toppled into bed without bothering to undress, and fell asleep where he landed.

Chapter 35

D
ANIEL WAS WOKEN
just after eight the next morning by the sound of Louie, singing along to the radio in a bright clear voice. He found her in the kitchen, attempting to clear a space on the table amongst the clutter. There was a warm, toasty smell coming from the oven. Chet, who had been circling around the table, sniffing for spilt food, came bounding over, jumping up and almost pushing Daniel over in his enthusiasm.

“Get off me, you crazy hound,” Daniel laughed.

Louie turned at the commotion. “Hello,” she said cheerfully.

“I never heard you come in,” he said.

“I didn't want to wake you up,” said Louie. “You looked so peaceful.” She opened the oven and a gust of hot bread-scented air filled the room. Bringing out two crusty rolls with bare fingers, and dropping them hastily on to a plate, she said, “Mrs Ivory stopped at the baker's on the way back in case we didn't have anything in the house.”

“That was nice of her. Sorry you had to stay over. I tried ringing as soon as I could, but . . . ”

“That's OK. I had quite an interesting time.” She split the rolls with her fingers and spread them thickly with butter before offering the plate to Daniel. He hesitated for only a second before choosing the largest, promising himself that he'd be unselfish some other time when he wasn't so starving.

“Oh yeah?” he asked, through a mouthful of bread.

“No. You first. Where were you last night?”

Daniel gave her a detailed account of the hours he had spent in the locked storeroom, and an edited account of his night visit to Ramsay. Louie kept interrupting with questions and expressions of disbelief. “Why didn't you just smash the window?”

“Because it was reinforced glass and there wasn't a handy brick lying around.”

“Those voices you heard – that must have been me and Mrs Ivory. You should have yelled out.”

“I didn't need to by then. I knew I could get out by myself.”

“Ramsay wanted to call the police. She really likes you.”

“I know she does.” He hadn't mentioned the kiss, but the memory was never far from his mind. He only had to close his eyes to relive every detail.

“Why were you snooping round the storeroom in the first place?”

“Because I wanted to know what was so important that it had to be locked away in a place where nothing is ever locked away.”

“You could just ask Mrs Ivory. They were her keys.”

“
What?
”

“You said it was a fish key ring like yours. It belongs to her. I saw it in her car ignition last night.”

Daniel was shocked into silence. He had assumed the caretaker or a cleaner had locked him in. “How many keys were on it?” he said at last.

Louie put her head on one side, as she always did when trying to remember something. “Two, I think. One in the ignition and one dangling. Why does it matter?”

“Because if that's her only key apart from her car key it must be important. There must be some reason for keeping that room locked – even though there's nothing valuable in there. Other rooms with computers and musical instruments and expensive equipment are left wide open.”

“Why are you so bothered?”

Daniel opened his mouth and then shut it again. He couldn't think of a way to explain which wouldn't involve explaining everything. “I can't tell you . . . yet,” he said. To his surprise, Louie made no attempt to follow this up. Usually she would have pounced on a remark like that and demanded to be told, then nagged and moaned and cross-examined him until he gave in. But she just shrugged placidly. “So, anyway,” he went on, not quite believing he'd got away with it, “tell me about Mrs Ivory's house. What's it like?”

“Nice,” said Louie. “Pretty. It's got bare wooden floors and white walls, with red sofas and a cream rug and . . . ”

Daniel swallowed the last of his bread, lost in thought. He was sure Mrs Ivory had to be involved – it was her keys that had locked him in, and he was now sure it had been her who had disposed of the drawstring bags with the Narveng logo on them. She had been there on the footpath from the beach the day he had found the bag in the bin. And she had seen him with it just before he used the school pool. “But is it flash?” Daniel interrupted. “Is she rich?” He wanted to know whether her house suggested the sort of lifestyle that a teaching salary couldn't buy. After all, whoever was providing Narveng with access to hundreds of human guinea pigs would surely have to be generously paid. Daniel couldn't imagine any other possible motive for taking such a huge risk.

“Not really. It's no bigger than this. It's
cleaner,
but it's not flash. She hasn't even got a TV.”

So if not money, what was in it for her? He realised Louie was still talking away, and that he hadn't been paying attention.

“I said I thought I might start school after Christmas,” Louie repeated.

“What? Why?”

“I thought it might be fun. It's getting kind of boring at home. And Mrs Ivory said I'd be in Fay's class.”

Daniel stared at her, horrified at this turnaround. Knowing what he now knew, Stape High was the one place in the world he'd never let her go. His protestations were cut short by the ringing of the telephone. He snatched it up.

“Hi, Mum,” he said, recognising the sharp sucking-in of breath before she had even said a word.

“Oh, someone's there at last,” she exclaimed. “I rang four times yesterday until midnight.”

“Ah,” said Daniel. “We were out.”

“I sort of gathered that.”

“I was at Ramsay's,” he improvised, “and Louie was at a . . . er . . . sleepover. How did you get on, anyway? Was anything stolen?”

“Only a couple of paintings – nothing valuable. Oh, and my identity.”

“What? Where are you?”

“I'm stuck at Port Julian. This place gets madder by the minute. They won't let me through because ‘according to their records' I'm already here. Apparently someone calling herself Ingrid Milman landed at Darrow airport on Sunday.”

Chapter 36

D
ANIEL AND
L
OUIE
stared at each other across the kitchen table. “Why would anyone pretend to be Mum?” he wondered out loud.

“Even Mum doesn't want to be Mum,” said Louie. This struck Daniel as the truest thing Louie had ever said, and he burst out laughing, until she couldn't help joining in.

But the fact was their mum was stuck at Port Julian until someone in authority could confirm her identity. “People here have no sense of urgency,” she had complained, before ringing off. “I could be here all day.”

“The problem is, nobody knows what Mum looks like,” Daniel grumbled. “She's such a hermit.”

“Mrs Ivory knows. She'd help, I know she would. And the people at customs would respect anything she said.”

“School's started by now,” said Daniel. “She can't go waltzing off to Port Julian halfway through the morning.”

“She can do anything she wants – she's in charge!”

“You ring her then.”

Daniel left her to it and went into the garden with Chet, who was pawing at the back door and whining to be let out.

The chilly morning air felt heavy with damp and the trees were draped with mist. The dog whisked around the garden, his nose to the grass following scent trails, and returned to Daniel with the remains of an old tennis ball in his mouth. The green felt had been gnawed into loose flaps and now resembled a small cabbage. Daniel obligingly lobbed it high in the air and watched Chet caper back and forth excitedly until it landed with the flabbiest of bounces and he could seize it again.

As the repetitive rhythms of the game cleared Daniel's head smothered half-thoughts began to surface. Louie was so different lately – so easy-going. He'd been so obsessed with Ramsay that he'd hardly noticed at first, but soon after the fireworks she'd seemed to calm down. In fact for the last week or so she'd been really docile.

Docile.
That wasn't his word. Someone else had used it, recently, but not about Louie. He threw the ball almost vertically and watched it shudder, flap and come to land in a patch of Leaf that was growing in the long grass. As he went to put his foot over the ball – a manoeuvre which drove Chet into a frenzy – he noticed that someone had dug a clump out of the middle – a socket of fresh soil was clearly visible.

Instinctively he glanced back at the blank face of the house. Louie's curtains were open and between them on the windowsill stood a small terracotta plant pot, from which tufts of green foliage sprouted. Abandoning Chet's game, he strode towards the house, his heart thudding.

Louie was standing at the open fridge with her back to him. In one hand she held a bin bag into which she was dropping various items of out-of-date food. “It's all sorted,” she said, without turning round. “Mrs Ivory was in a meeting, but she took the call. I knew she would. She said as soon as it's over – in about twenty minutes – she'll drive down to Port Julian and—”

“Louie,” Daniel interrupted her.

She spun round, surprised at the urgency of his tone. “What?” she said, revealing teeth stained a livid green.

“Why are you eating Leaf ?” he demanded. “You hate it.”

“I used to. But it's actually really nice.”

“Oh my God,” said Daniel wildly. “Spit it out. Spit it out.” He grabbed her by the shoulders and she cringed away. “Do you want to end up like all the rest of them?”

He tried to poke his finger between her teeth and scoop out the leaf pulp before she swallowed it.

“Stop it,” Louie begged him, frightened, half gagging. “What are you doing, Daniel?”

“You mustn't eat it – it's a drug. Everyone at school is on it, that's why they're so weird and . . . and . . . happy. Spit it out.”

“But I like being happy,” said Louie. “I've been eating it for at least a week and it hasn't done me any harm.”

“But it might do. You don't know if it's safe. You're just being used. They're using you all.” Daniel was striding about the kitchen, swearing and banging his fist on the table.

“Who is?”

“Mrs Ivory and Narveng,” he ranted. “Daniel. You need to calm down,” said Louie gently. He stopped abruptly and looked at her. Louie telling
him
to calm down. It was such a reversal of the natural order that for a second he was speechless. The sound of a car engine made them both glance out of the window. An elderly police car, the pale blue of a washed-out sky, was bumping up the lane towards The Brow.

“What do
they
want?” said Louie.

“Me,” Daniel groaned, watching as the car pulled up at the gate, and a single uniformed policeman got out. “Ramsay said they'd be after me about the fire.”

“But the fire was nothing to do with you. Why should you worry?” Louie said.

He gave her such a look that she blushed.

“Just say you don't know where I am,” Daniel instructed her, and before she could even reply, he'd slipped out the back door and run across the grass, between the apple trees and away through the gap in the brambles.

He looked at his watch. Mrs Ivory would be leaving the school in twenty minutes and the round trip to Port Julian would take at least another forty. That would give him just enough time. He followed the footpath in the direction of Joff Bay and then cut back along the edge of a freshly ploughed field, keeping close to the high hedge. At the stile, from which there was a clear view of the lane as it curved past Winnie's house, he crouched down and waited until he saw the police car pass back the way it had come. Then he jumped over the stile and ran, tripping and stumbling over the furrowed earth, past fields of stubble, and up on to the moor. He kept to the trails that he knew from walks with Chet, well away from the solitary tarmac road which bisected the plateau, taking the most direct route to Stape. At a steady run, he made it to the school in forty minutes and arrived sweating and breathless, his lungs on fire, just as the bell was ringing for end of break. Pupils were streaming back into the building. He hung back in the shadow of the caretaker's cottage until everyone was inside, and then skirted around to the staff car park. Mrs Ivory's black Ford Focus was missing, her designated parking space empty. Good.

Catching sight of himself in the shiny surface of a parked car, he mopped his sweaty face with his sleeve, and raked his fingers through his hair so that he didn't look quite so wild, before entering the school through the back door to the admin block. He walked briskly, with a confidence that he didn't really feel, as though he was on an important errand.

He stopped outside Mrs Ivory's office and knocked at the door, his heart drumming, prepared to take off at the sound of her voice. But there was no noise, apart from the distant trill of the telephone in reception. He let himself into the room and closed the door behind him. She had evidently left for Port Julian in a hurry – a coffee mug was on the desk, half full and still slightly warm. And, as he'd hoped, she had left her computer on, midway through some work, without logging off.

On this occasion he was going to take every precaution. He slipped the catch up on the window so that it appeared to be closed, but could be pushed open from either side, and then looked around for somewhere to hide. The only possible place was a slim metal wardrobe with sliding doors. It contained a navy overcoat, an academic gown, a reflective tabard, a pair of shoes and several reams of printer paper. Once these had been pushed to one end, there was just enough room for Daniel to squeeze inside.

Satisfied, he sat at the desk and began to work. Mrs Ivory had abandoned the computer halfway through checking emails. With clumsy shaking hands, Daniel typed the word Narveng into the search field. Nothing. He tried Compound K, but again drew a blank. Disappointed, he tried the recycle bin. Here were deleted files going back
eight years
. He shook his head over this: Mrs Ivory obviously thought just pressing delete actually deleted something.

This time he was lucky. Performing a search for Narveng brought up an email, six years old, from someone called [email protected]. He could feel his pulse racing with excitement as he waited for it to open. Like all computers on Wragge it was unbearably, prehistorically slow; you could practically hear cogs grinding. It was the first thread of evidence that actually linked Narveng to the school and, more specifically, to Mrs Ivory.

Nothing exactly incriminating, thought Daniel, but it was a link. The reply was even briefer:

This sounded more like someone with something to conceal.

Daniel glanced at his watch. Even if the border officials at Port Julian liked to do things at a leisurely pace, Mrs Ivory was unlikely to tolerate any time-wasting. There was surely only a matter of minutes until she returned.

He returned to the original message from ‘Dave' and clicked on Reply.
This will stir things up
, he thought, cracking his knuckles then beginning to type.

He clicked Send. The pressure of his finger on the mouse was like pushing a button to set off an explosion hundreds of miles away. Somewhere, he hoped, at a desk in the offices of Narveng UK, there would be a man called Dave having a panic attack.

Beside him the phone suddenly rang, its tinny jangle slaughtering the silence, and making him jump up in alarm. Before he could decide whether to make a swift exit or hide it stopped. When he looked back at the computer screen there was a message, which he read with a smile of something like triumph spreading across his face.

Oh my God
, Daniel thought.
It's true. It's actually true.
And this was the evidence. For a second or two he considered printing it off right now on Mrs Ivory's own printer, but then he had a better idea. He forwarded the email from Dave to his own Hotmail address, and was trawling his memory for Helen Swift's details when he heard footsteps approaching. With fumbling fingers, he deleted the exchange with Dave and cleared the screen, and then scrambled into the metal wardrobe, setting the coat hangers shivering on the rail and making the whole structure quake. He clutched the hangers and pulled the sliding door across so that only a knife-edged gap remained. He could see a tiny stripe of carpet, wall and window. Immediately a feeling of claustrophobia engulfed him.

The office door opened and closed softly and a moment later Daniel heard the pneumatic hiss and creak of someone sitting down on the swivel chair, followed by the scrape and rustle of drawers being opened and searched.

Only now it occurred to Daniel, crouching awkwardly in the restricted space, and scarcely able to breathe, that he hadn't really thought things through. Mrs Ivory might well be comfortably installed for the rest of the day. How long could he remain hidden, when the slightest twitch would give him away? It was one thing to be found in Mrs Ivory's office, but quite another to be caught hiding in a wardrobe. Various appalling scenarios of discovery and humiliation began to play out in his mind. He wondered whether it would be better to burst out and confront her.

The chair hissed and creaked again as its occupant stood up, oblivious to the storm of emotions raging in the metal wardrobe in the corner, and walked across to the filing cabinet under the window. For the briefest second as she crossed the room she was clearly visible through the paper-thin gap in the sliding door.

Helen Swift.