Dear Scarlett (10 page)

But it doesn’t work that way, because a second later, Uncle Derek’s phone rings and he’s called away to a suspicious fire on the other side of town.

“Girls, I’m really sorry, I can either rush you back now, or leave you here?”

“We’ll stay,” we chorus.

“Well, if you’re sure?” Uncle Derek looks worried and relieved all at once. “How will you get back?”

“Bus,” says Ellie at the same time as I say, “Walk.”

“Well, don’t take any lifts from strangers and here’s a fiver for cake or tea or something.”

In the end, we keep Syd too. Uncle Derek drives
off with a blue flashing light on the top of his car.

We get to the entrance of the East Wing, with Syd in his pushchair, two backpacks and our tickets.

“Oh, no, no – you really can’t bring that in here. Where are your parents?” He’s a whiskery man in a hot tweed suit. He looks like he’d rather be at home watching the cricket than here dealing with people like us.

“We’re on our own,” I say.

“But my dad’s a policeman,” says Ellie.

“I don’t care if your dad’s the Queen.” He points to Syd. “You’re not bringing that in here, in that state.”

I look at Syd. He’s licking his palms. They’re the cleanest part of him.

“Look.” The man crouches, he probably thinks he’s more charming like that but he’s not, he’s just less tall. “There’s a block of lavatories over there, with some lockers. You can leave all your paraphernalia in one of those, wash that…” he points at Syd, “and perhaps I’ll let you in next time.”

“Pooh,” says Ellie as we trek towards the toilets.

I think of a much ruder collection of words.

“Do you think it’s in the East Wing?” says Ellie.

“I don’t know where it is – I wish I knew what we were even looking for.” My dreams of trunks of secrets have crashed in flames. I’d quite like us to go home before I die of heritage boredom.

“We’re looking for diamonds, silly,” says Ellie, picking a stone from the side of her shoe.

“Are we?” We may, sort of, be looking for diamonds, but I think I’m still looking for Dad.

“Poo?” says Syd hopefully and breaks out of his pushchair.

We chase him outside, over the grass, through the old people with their cups and saucers, and out on to the drive. He can move really fast when he wants to, and I’m pushing a pushchair, and Ellie’s got the backpacks.

“Syd!” I yell and I’m about to lunge for him, but a movement catches my eye.

It’s them. They’re here, the lady mayoress and the chauffeur.

I stop, and Syd stops because I’m not chasing him, and Ellie chugs up behind.

“What?” she says, bent double and panting like a dog.

I lean over next to her. “It’s them. Don’t look
now, but they’re over by the tea shop.”

“The café?” Ellie jerks up her head.

“It’s all right, they can’t do anything here,” I say. “It’s too public.”

“But how did they know we were here?” Ellie looks worried.

I think about the letter-boxes book, but that’s still safely at Ellie’s house and it was the only thing that led us here. “They must have followed us.”

“Now that,” Ellie says, “is creepy.”

She uncurls and we amble towards Syd. I’m trying not to look towards the tea shop, but I do want to see what they’re up to.

The man’s not wearing the grey suit now. He’s got a sweaty blue shirt on instead. He’s balancing a tray of tea and scones, and jam and milk, and stumbling through the tables. His teapot’s sprinkling the old ladies with trails of boiling water. It’s causing a rumpus.

Up at the far end of the tea garden, the lady mayoress is applying make-up from a sparkly purple bag. She’s got a tiny mirror, and I bet she’s watching us. Her face is kind of orange with pale green eyeshadow and crimson lipstick. Her enormous bottom flows over the sides of the little
wooden chair and I can’t help thinking of what Ellie said. She does look like a Christmas bauble, and everyone around her looks as dull and brown as a fir cone.

I try to pretend I haven’t noticed them, so I stroll by, casually tracking Syd, who of course has no idea what’s going on. Ellie follows, and Syd instantly makes a run for it the moment he knows he’s got our attention.

Luckily, he doesn’t head for the café, instead, he doubles back towards the toilet block and it takes us five precious minutes to corner him. He runs into the gents then runs out screaming, “Stinky!” and I tackle him by the tall bank of lockers.

“’Arlet,” he says, slipping his fingers up my nose when I’ve finally got him clamped in my arms.

“Syd,” I say. “Time to go.”

He reaches his little fingers up to my throat. He pulls on the key until it falls out of my T-shirt. It clinks on the concrete floor.

It looks exactly like a locker key.

“Which one?” asks Ellie.

There are hundreds of lockers, and I’m thinking that it’s only a matter of seconds before the driver comes to find us.

I finger the key as if it could home in on the right locker. Gripping Syd by the wrist I stand up, and think through the things in the box.
Come on, Dad, which one?
And then I remember the book,
Gone with the Wind.

“Number thirty-nine,” I say, walking over to stick the key into the lock.

Whoa. It fits.

It turns, smoothly, and I pull the door open, keeping my eyes closed. Is this going to be another of his disappointments?

“What is
that
?” says Ellie, loudly, next to me.

I open my eyes. Inside, wedged against the back of the locker is a rough bundle of paper trussed in elastic bands. We might have expected something like that, but attached to the bundle by a sagging red string is what looks like a battered, old-fashioned Airfix kit.

I grab both, and fighting the urge to rip them open, stuff them in my backpack.

“That’s it, then,” Ellie says. “Let’s run.”

“Poo,” says Syd. “I sc-ream.”

“NO!” Ellie and I shout, together.

Ellie shoulders the backpacks while I strap Syd into the pushchair.

“I SCREAM!” yells Syd, just as I stick my nose round the corner of the toilet block. The note is spine-shatteringly loud.

“Can’t you shut him up?” says Ellie.

Panicking, I reach into my jeans. I’ve still got a single stolen sherbet raspberry welded to the paper bag, and a fizzing snake spotted with pocket fluff. “Here.” I stuff them into Syd’s clammy hand, and
at a fast walk, head out of the toilet block towards the main gate.

“Bus?” asks Ellie hopefully.

“Walk; we can head off over the footpath. Otherwise we’ll be stuck on the side of the road for ages. They’ll get us.”

The lady mayoress is pretending to be interested in scones, but the pair of them are perfectly lined up for the gateway. There’s no way we can get past without being spotted.

Rats.

“We’ll have to go another way,” I say, dragging the pushchair backwards across the gravel.

“Try the back of the house?” says Ellie. There’s panic in her voice.

I expect there’s panic in mine.

The grumpy man in the tweed suit’s sneaking a pork pie as we creep past him. He doesn’t seem to notice us, although he stands up and wipes his glasses with a handkerchief and afterwards peers closely at the ruts the pushchair leaves in the gravel.

We turn right into a courtyard, by a log pile. The walls are high but not impossible to climb. At least, not for me.

Ellie’s wearing a stupid little blue flowery skirt.
Not ideal for this.

Not ideal for anything.

I can see it’s going to be tricky to get her over the wall, especially as it’s a scratchy, mossy, leafy, mouldy sort of a wall with a crumbly top.

“How are we going to get out?” she asks, looking at the wall as if it’s going to eat her. She’s almost in tears.

“Easy.” I stand on a log and peer over. Fields and hedges run towards Dampmouth Bay. “We can get home this way. Go on – you first,” I say. “Then I’ll hand you the pushchair.”

“But I can’t do that!” Ellie looks at the wall, completely terrified.

“I’ll give you a leg up.”

“It’s all icky, Scarlett.” She’s got her most pathetic voice out now. The one that puts smiley faces over all the “i”s.

“Ellie – come on!” I shout. “Would you rather get icky or get caught by those two?”

I hold my hand out, like a stirrup, and she lands her clean pink sandal in my palm.

“I don’t want to do this, Scarlett,” she says. “It’s only because you’re my friend.”

I look up at her watery eyes behind the ridiculous
glasses. Friend? I suppose it goes both ways now. I need her as much as she needs me. “I don’t want to do it either, let’s just get it over with. Put your hand on my head, the other on the wall.”

She does, and I give her a massive shove, scraping her leg right up the side until she topples over the top of the wall.

“Ow!” she squeals.

“What?” I’ve got Syd by the wrist, and I’m trying to work out the fox, sheep, lettuce, slug, duck thing, again. Should I send the pushchair over or Syd?

“Nettles, thousands of them – I’ve stung my bum,” Ellie whines. “And there’s cow poo over here.”

I take Syd from the pushchair, and clamp him between my knees.

Ellie’s still moaning on the other side of the wall, but I can hear footsteps on the gravel, someone’s moving around on our side of the house.

“Here comes the pushchair.” I stuff it over the wall and hear it crash in the nettles.

“Ow!” says Ellie again. “Stung my hand.”

“Sorry,” I say. “And Syd.” I stand on the log and lift him over the wall.

He puts his feet on the top and looks as if he’s going to make a run for it along the shaky brickwork.

“No, you don’t!” shouts Ellie, and he disappears. There’s a thump and Syd squeals, and I hear the strap of the pushchair click shut. “Ha!”

Now, there’s just me.

I look around for another log, and peeking through a bush that screens the corner of the courtyard, I see that the chauffeur’s deep in conversation with the grumpy tweedy man. He’s pointing in our direction.

Rats.

The logs are all too uneven to stack. I need something to spring from, to give me a leg up. But all I can find is a wheelbarrow, so I take it over to the wall and climb in.

Although I can nearly stretch my foot to the top of the wall, I just can’t quite get up there.

Rats and double rats.

I’m going to have to pretend it’s a vaulting horse.

I turn the wheelbarrow over, so that it’s leaning against the wall.

“Over here, I should think, the scamps.” It’s the tweedy man, he’s bringing them our way. “Are you
a policeman, sir? The little girl said her father was a policeman.”

I make myself breathe.

“Oh, yes, CID, you know, hush-hush,” says the chauffeur. He’s definitely this side of the house. “Protecting the good lady here.”

“Fascinating, fascinating.” The tweedy man’s voice is getting closer.

They already know we’re here somewhere, so I take a chance and step out from the bush to give myself a longer run-up.

“There!” shouts the tweedy man.

“I see her!” says the lady mayoress. “Scarlett – lovey.”

They’re all running now.

“OK, Scarlett,” I say to myself. “You can do it.”

I take one skip and then in three long strides, my legs motor towards the wheelbarrow. One foot lands firmly on the underside of the barrow and as it starts to collapse, I throw my body forward so that my hands hold the top of the wall, and the rest of my body follows in a messy half-flip
half-vault
.

The wall vanishes beneath me and I kick my feet as I go over, so that I land, already running,
beyond the nettles. Ellie’s halfway across the field, struggling with the pushchair, Syd screaming every step of the way.

“Hey!” shouts a man behind me. Chauffeur?

“Come back,” shouts another. Tweed?

But we seem to have developed wings.

It all starts to fall apart by the time we reach the second field. Ellie complains about the heat and cow poo and thistles. Syd just complains.

He mostly complains by singing. “Hu-pty Du-pty, sat on the wall,” except he only knows one line, so Humpty Dumpty never actually falls off.

At least the penguins couldn’t sing.

“Can’t you make him stop?” says Ellie again.

I grab a handful of dandelion seed heads and Syd mashes them, but it only shuts him up for a millisecond.

We stumble on.

Ellie’s given me the pushchair. I can see why she doesn’t want it; it’s rubbish at fields and rocks and mud, the wheels are tiny and jammed up with green stuff.

This is not a good way to make an escape.

I stop to clear the wheels. Syd crumbles dandelion seeds down the back of my neck.

I look back. There’s no way that woman would make it over the wall, no matter how many tweedy men helped her. But I’m not so sure about her friend the chauffeur. He could be just behind the hedge, watching us.

“Come on, Ellie – one last run.”

“Scarlett, can’t we stop for a minute?”

But she follows.

We run into town and duck through the streets all the way back to Ellie’s house; it’s nearer than mine.

“What if your dad’s not back?” I shout.

But he is. He opens the door just as we arrive. “I wondered what had happened to you! I was coming to have a look.”

He stares at us. Syd’s wailing and tearful and his pushchair’s sprouted most of a hedgerow. Ellie’s not much better. Her legs have gone red and blotchy,
except for all the little white stinging nettle rings, and she’s got leaves in her hair.

Her perfect pink sandals aren’t perfect any more.

They’re not really pink either. More cow poo.

“What?” says Uncle Derek.

“We got lost,” I say quickly.

“We thought we’d take a short cut,” says Ellie.

“Had a g-ate fall,” says Syd.

Syd’s downstairs watching the cartoon channel with Uncle Derek. They’re eating iced buns with jam inside. Uncle Derek’ll wish he hadn’t had that idea once Syd wipes his hands on the sofa.

The white sofa.

We’re in Ellie’s bedroom, but it wasn’t easy getting up here. Uncle Derek kept asking questions and picking mud off our shoes, and staring at us in a meaningful way. But Ellie held her nerve and I said nothing, and Syd hadn’t a clue what had happened, so now we’ve got the papers we took from the locker open on the floor. A scrapbook, that’s what
it is. Sheets of black paper plastered with pictures and newspaper cuttings, going right back to 1985.

There are also other things. Pretty labels, beer mats, stamps, packaging from other countries. I flick through without reading it, just soaking in the pictures.

A bill from a restaurant stops me.
Margarita pizza with extra olives, mushrooms and capers.
That’s what I always have.

Weird.

There’s a receipt for twelve pairs of black socks. I screw up my eyes, and despite Ellie’s bedroom, I can almost see Dad. He
did
always wear black socks. Black socks with brown shoes.

I hold my breath so that I can’t smell the soap powder, and try harder.

I get a glimpse of him sailing in through our front door. He’s holding a bunch of flowers, yellow ones, all wrapped in gorgeous white lacy cellophane, and I can almost smell them. He’s wearing the brown shoes, the jacket, the jeans, and he’s smiling. Maybe he’s even laughing. His hair’s acting like a halo, curly, lit by the sun outside, but I can see his eyes, bright and surprising in his dark face.

He says something I can’t quite hear, but I can
feel my own excitement. I’ve been looking forward to this; it might even be my birthday. Mum charges in from the side of the picture and they hug, and the whole memory’s flooded with sunlight.

And then it’s gone.

And I feel happy and sad, all at once. It was as if he was here, and I try to get back to the memory, get Dad back in the room, but he won’t come, so I go back to the scrapbook.

On another page, there’s a wrapper for a Cornish pasty. It’s made of brown paper, slightly greasy. Next to it are three tickets, little green tear-off tickets, for a ferry in Cornwall. Two adults and a child.

I rub my forefinger over them. They’re flat now, but they were once curly, because they come out of one of those ancient ticket machines that makes the clicky bicycle sound. I close my eyes to listen. The man turns the handle twice for each ticket and I’m back by a triangle of water, caught between black overhanging branches. I’m looking up, as if I’m in a pushchair. I can see Mum’s duffle coat, and Dad’s legs, and I’m cold and there’s an engine, shaking under my feet. It smells of oil, and sea, and pasty.

“Whoa, look at this,” shouts Ellie.

I jump. I’m back in Ellie’s stinky bedroom with piles of soft toys and pink cushions.

She’s jabbing the scrapbook, pointing at a large newspaper cutting.

“Scarlett, look!”

My eyes run over the words but I don’t take them in. “Emerald” and “gangsters” are hard to ignore, but I’m not very interested. I’m interested in the bits of Dad that Dad’s left in the scrapbook. The pieces that trigger a real moment of Dad, and that can tell me more about him as a person.

Just at the moment, I don’t want him to be a spy.

But Ellie does.

“Listen, if you won’t read:
‘The Fedora Emerald, the fifth largest ever found, flawless in every way, is tonight back in the safe-keeping of the Queen’s Royal Treasury. Believed stolen during the Second World War, when it was removed for cleaning, rumours have placed it in Berlin, Paris, Rome and Moscow, until it disappeared completely in 1980. Eventually, the emerald was believed to have found its way to Uzbekistani gangsters, in payment for arms. However sources close to the treasury say that a covert operation has recovered the jewel, and it is now to be kept in London under armed guard.’
That’s your dad.”

“How do you know? He might have had nothing to do with it,” I say, destroying the pile of teddies.

“Why else would he have it?” Ellie says. “You don’t keep press cuttings of other people’s successes, do you? I mean, my dad only cuts out things from the paper that relate to us.”

I shrug. It sounds like something from a fairy tale, not real life. I run my fingers over the ferry tickets. They’re from real life.

“And this,” says Ellie. “‘
The documents stolen from the Home Secretary’s briefcase last month have been discovered in a Whitehall office. Although government sources are trying to play down the contents of the documents, it is believed that they were of great importance to national security. When asked about the find in the Whitehall office, the government spokesman declined to comment.
’”

“OK – so he stole things back,” I say. “We already knew that – your dad told us.”

“Yes – but this is proof, proof that he did the right thing; that he wasn’t doing it for personal gain.”

“So?”