Itchcraft (24 page)

Jack checked the time on her phone. ‘Three o’clock seems like a long time to wait now,’ she said.

At the reception desk, Sandra broke away from a phone call, cradling the handset on her shoulder. ‘Anyone got a Ford Galaxy reg number GYU 129K?’ she called.

‘Gabe, that’s us!’ exclaimed Chloe.

‘Oh,’ said Gabriel. ‘Yes, that’s me. What’s up?’

‘Parked illegally. Going to be towed.’ He swore and Sandra shook her head. To the caller she said, ‘Yes, he’s here. He’ll be five minutes.’ To Gabriel she said, ‘They said you had two minutes.’

‘Damn, damn, damn,’ he said and headed out of the reception. ‘Which way?’ he yelled, turning back.

‘Follow the signs for
car park
?’ suggested Sandra, and he was gone.

The bored family were called through to another waiting area; Jack and Chloe watched them go, feeling jittery. Chloe called Itch, but it diverted again. She called Gabriel, but he didn’t answer. ‘I was going to suggest he check the car park for that Renault Itch mentioned,’ she said. ‘As he’s out there anyway.’

‘Good idea,’ said Jack. She fell silent, then suddenly put her hand on Chloe’s arm. She spoke quietly and slowly. ‘Chlo, why did they call here about the car? Why did they call this reception? Why not the main desk?’

‘Maybe they did,’ suggested Chloe unconvincingly. ‘Maybe they work their way round the different departments till they find the car they’re after?’

‘Maybe,’ said Jack. ‘Do you remember where we parked? It’s just that I don’t remember any red lines or disabled bays.’

‘Jack, stop talking like this,’ said Chloe. ‘You’re scaring me!’

‘Well, something’s not right, that’s all.’ Jack tried Itch’s phone again, then Lucy’s. ‘Must be the lab they’re in,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave a message.’ She waited for the message to play out. Then, ‘Lucy, it’s Jack. We’re worried about that car Itch said was following us. And Gabe has gone to reception and I’m not sure . . . Oh, this sounds stupid now I’m saying it out loud . . . Oh well, just call when you can.’ As she hung up, she saw that Sandra was escorting the crossword man to his appointment. ‘That sounded really lame,’ she said. ‘Maybe we’re fine after all.’

‘Maybe . . .’ Chloe was still nervous. She looked around. ‘But we are on our own now. We need to be with people, Jack. We need company.’

As he waited for Dr Alexander to analyse the burned euro, Itch suddenly felt worried. With all that had happened – the Geiger counter in the graveyard, the journey with Gabriel, the talk of Gaia – he hadn’t given much thought to the note he’d brought back from Madrid. But whatever it was that had caused the money to spontaneously combust, it had led to Chloe’s injury and countless others. The riots and panic had now spread across Spain. The director was right: this same piece of analysis was no doubt being conducted right now in labs across the country; maybe across the world.

He glanced at Lucy and she looked up at him, smiling and shrugging at the same time. She tucked some loose strands of hair behind her ears. Itch remembered the words from his old banned textbook,
The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments
 . . .
There is hardly a boy or girl alive who is not keenly interested in finding out about things
. Itch had found that, in this respect at least, its author had got it wrong: most of his fellow pupils didn’t appear to be even slightly interested in ‘finding out about things’. That was what he liked so much about Lucy. She got it. She wanted to find out about things. And looking at her now, eyes wide and restless, Itch realized that she was as excited about the chemical analysis of the euro as he was.

Dr Alexander worked silently, and with the minimum of movement: a repositioning here, a small adjustment there (a complete contrast, Itch thought, to his demented whirling after the analysis of the 126). He stood up to stretch his back, but then bent forward again without comment. At first, Itch and Lucy were happy to stand and watch him work, but after a while they started fidgeting.

Eyes still glued to the eye-pieces, Alexander held up his hand. ‘Desist. Please.’

Itch and Lucy froze, grinning at each other. They had been told off for sure, but the thrill of an imminent discovery overrode any embarrassment they felt. They stood like bodyguards on either side of their employer, waiting for their next instruction.

Suddenly Alexander straightened again and stepped away from the microscope.

‘OK, your turn. Itch, it’s your banknote – tell me what you see. We have quite a story here, I think!’ He rubbed his hands together again, then waved Itch over to a computer screen next to the microscope. It showed a graph that looked like a stormy sea.

‘OK . . .’ Itch smiled nervously at Lucy, then peered at the screen. ‘It’s a graph,’ he said after a few seconds. ‘Peaks and troughs. Different colours, different waves . . . black mainly, but red, green and blue. There are numbers at the top of each peak.’

Dr Alexander nodded. ‘That’s the wave number along the horizontal axis and the Raman intensity along the vertical. See that cluster of peaks there? They’re small, but not present when we compare it with a spectrum of a clean euro note. So those, I would suggest, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, are from your culprit!’

Itch stood up and allowed Lucy to peer at the screen. She gave it the briefest of examinations.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I see the graph, but what does it say?’ She was now hopping from one foot to the other. The director was enjoying the moment, like a talent-show host about to announce the long-awaited winner. He paced as he spoke.

‘The smaller wave is europium oxide – which is a puzzle . . . I’ll have to check it out. But the big beast you can see in the middle, the large cluster there, is picric acid!’ If he expected any reaction from Itch and Lucy, Alexander was disappointed. They both stared back at him, waiting for more information.

‘Picric acid?’ asked Itch, puzzled.

‘Also called 2,4,6-trinitrophenol,’ said Alexander. ‘It was used as yellow dye for silk; also as an antiseptic, I think. But it became famous as a military explosive. The French, Russians and Japanese liked it particularly, but it fell out of favour eventually. It’s still used in fireworks – that screaming some of them do . . . that’s burning picric acid.’

‘The noise from the cash machine!’ said Itch. The director looked puzzled. ‘The cash points in Spain were exploding,’ he explained, ‘and there was one giving out a high-pitched whine. I thought it was weird, but there was so much else that was weirder at the time, I didn’t give it much thought.’

Alexander nodded. ‘That confirms it. These euros have been treated with picric acid. It is sensitive to heat or shock; it would lie dormant in the dark and cool, but then kick off when coming into contact with light, warmth or someone chucking it about.’

‘Do they use picric acid in the banknote printing process?’ asked Lucy. ‘Might it have been an accident?’

He removed the charred euro from the microscope. ‘Unlikely, I’d have thought. Very unlikely. It’s either a very expensive mistake – a chemical contamination somewhere – or it was deliberate.’

There was silence in the lab for a few moments. ‘But who would want to make money burn like that?’ asked Lucy. ‘What would be the point?’

Dr Alexander leaned back against the bench and stabbed a finger at her. ‘That is precisely the question that needs answering. This bit with the microscope is the easy part. Scientists everywhere will have discovered the picric acid and the in formation will be out soon, if it isn’t already. But quite
why
it’s there, that’s a whole new game. And that game can get nasty.’

‘Do you mean like the kicking you talked about?’ asked Lucy. ‘When that Greencorps woman turned up, pretending to be a reporter?’

‘It wasn’t her,’ he said. ‘It was the goons she was with. They did her dirty work.’

And the blood drained from Itch’s face. ‘Wait!’ he exclaimed. ‘Just wait! No one say anything!’ He stood still, staring into the distance, focused on nothing.

Lucy and Alexander exchanged glances, then waited.

‘Oh my God . . .’

‘Itch, what is it?’ Lucy was alarmed now. Itch’s face was white, his hands in front of his mouth.

When he spoke, his voice was strained and surprisingly quiet. ‘That woman . . . The Greencorps agent pretending to be a journalist,’ he said; ‘the one who came here. What was her name? She called it through the glass.’

Dr Alexander thought for a moment. ‘Mary Bale, I think. Well, that’s what she claimed, anyway. She said she was from the
International Herald Tribune
and I foolishly believed her. But so what, Itch? What’s the problem?’

Itch took a breath. ‘When we landed yesterday, Colonel Fairnie met us at the airport. He explained why he wasn’t going to be around any more. Basically Greencorps are going all legal and decent and want to expose price fixing in the oil industry. Stupidly, everyone believes them. He mentioned they had a new CEO after those two guys were shot – I think by Flowerdew. I thought at the time that the name was familiar in some way. Dr Alexander, I think Mary Bale now runs Greencorps.’

Alexander led the way to his laptop and searched for
Mary Bale + Greencorps
.

The screen flashed with a photo that looked like it came from a press release. He clicked on it, and they all stared at the image of a tall, stylish Asian woman in her twenties with a discreet, controlled smile.

‘Is that her?’ asked Lucy.

Dr Alexander cursed viciously and nodded. ‘This is extraordinary.’

‘But so what? Sorry, but I don’t get it. What if she is in charge?’

‘It means that Greencorps have a criminal at the top,’ said Dr Alexander. ‘Another one. And that their new image is a sham!’

‘No surprises there,’ said Itch. ‘I’d better call Jack and Chloe.’

The doors of the head-injury clinic opened and a smiling, broad-shouldered man in a white coat and crocs appeared. He looked at his clipboard.

‘Chloe Lofte? This way please!’

Chloe stood up, acknowledging the doctor. ‘Yes, that’s me,’ she said. ‘Come on, Jack, we’re up.’

But her cousin didn’t move, her hands in her lap, eyes staring straight ahead. The doctor shifted impatiently in the doorway.

Chloe tapped her cousin on the shoulder. ‘Jack?’

There was a second’s pause, then Jack leaped to her feet, dashed round Chloe and kicked hard at the doors, trapping the doctor’s outstretched arm. He yelled with surprise and pain, dropping the clipboard, his arm was pinned just below the elbow. Jack kicked again at the door, harder this time, and there was a snapping, crunching noise as the man’s radius bone snapped. He slumped to the floor on the other side of the door.

‘Jack!’ screamed Chloe. ‘What are you doing?’

But Jack grabbed her hand and ran. ‘Just stay with me!’ she yelled, and they took off down a corridor. The sign said
CONSULTING ROOMS AND X-RAY
.

‘Jack, you broke his arm!’

‘Yup!’ She started opening doors; all the rooms were empty. ‘We need people – where
is
everyone?’ She reached for her phone, but saw that there was no signal. Behind them they could hear the man’s groans and then sharp words exchanged. The injured man sounded German, the other American.

‘Chloe, it’s the burned-hair man!’ Jack pulled Chloe along as she spoke. ‘It’s the guy who attacked us at the mining school. I recognized his voice – he’s a Greencorps man! After Itch got on the train to Brighton, he followed me and I only just got away. He’s the guy who attacked Dr Alexander. I
know
it’s him!’ She opened another door to another dark, empty room.

‘Should we hide?’ said Chloe.

Jack pulled her in, and they shut the door as quietly as their racing hearts and shaking hands would allow. The only light came from the small opaque window in the door and the glow of green and red monitor lights – not really enough to see by, but they didn’t have time for their eyes to adjust to the dark. They dived underneath what looked like a desk and crouched there. Over their panting breaths they heard their pursuer trying all the doors, just as they had.

‘I could lock it!’ whispered Chloe, and before Jack could pull her back she ran towards the door.

‘Chloe, come back!’

Ignoring her cousin, Chloe felt for the bolts at the bottom. Her hands found the metal latch and forced the steel shaft down. It clicked as it was rammed home, and she winced at the noise. Suddenly they heard banging: their pursuers were searching the next room! Jack joined her cousin and reached for the top bolt, pushing it home. The light from the small window darkened as the two men passed by outside. Jack and Chloe heard more conversation, punctuated by gasps of pain.

‘The other door!’ hissed Chloe, and pointed at the flat thumb-turn latch that would lock the doors together.

‘But they’ll hear!’ mouthed Jack, and they stared at each other, frozen with indecision and fear. Jack reached out and rested her fingers on the latch, ready to twist. They waited for the Greencorps men. They pushed the left door first, hard. It rattled against the bolts. For a terrifying moment Chloe and Jack thought it would give way, but it held fast and, under cover of the noise, Jack twisted the latch. It slid shut just as the push came. Both doors shook as the men pulled and pushed at the handle, but they stayed shut. A firm boot would have splintered them, but there were other doors to try and the pair moved on.

‘We need Gabriel!’ Chloe was crouched down, looking scared. ‘We need to find Gabriel!’ Then, with a dawning look of horror, she grabbed her cousin’s arm. ‘What if . . .? Do you think he’s OK?’

Jack shrugged and tried her phone again, but there was still no signal. ‘I think maybe we shouldn’t depend on Gabriel . . .’ She was choosing her words carefully and guessed that Chloe knew it. ‘We need to deal with this ourselves. There are hundreds of people around, and just two Greencorps guys. We need to find some proper doctors and get help. We’ll be fine.’ She pulled Chloe up. ‘We go back to reception, and if there’s no one there, we run for the wards. They were back up the corridor, I think. OK?’

Chloe nodded.

Jack continued, her voice more urgent now. ‘And if we run into those men, we shout and scream.’ They stood listening by the bolted doors. A tannoy call for a doctor to attend an emergency reassured them that life in the rest of the hospital was carrying on as normal, and they nodded at each other. Jack unlocked the door, waited for a second and then opened it as silently as she could. She pointed left. ‘We go that way,’ she mouthed.