The Apothecary (13 page)
When I told Benjamin at lunch about our new ally, he was furious. “You did
what
?” he said.
“I didn’t tell him anything specific,” I said, flustered by his anger. “But I think he can help us.” We were alone at the empty table where I had watched him stare down the lunch lady.
“We aren’t supposed to tell anyone!”
“Your father never said that. He said you had to keep the Pharmacopoeia safe from people who want it. And we need help to do that. We’re in over our heads.”
Benjamin scowled at the food on his tray and said nothing. Then a familiar, loud, long bell rang.
“Bomb drill!” called the lunch lady. “Everyone under the tables!”
“Again?”
I said, looking around. People started to push back their benches.
“It’s so stupid,” Benjamin said, his shoulders set in opposition to the noise.
“It is,” I said. “But I don’t think this is the time to make a scene and get kept after school. Or have them try to call your father.”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“I’m getting under the table.”
“We’d be incinerated in an atomic bomb blast,” Benjamin said. “Instantly. We’d be ash by now.”
“I know,” I said. “Ash. Here I go.” I slid underneath.
Benjamin stayed in his seat, and I saw the lunch lady’s ankles in white cotton tights approach. “Benjamin?” she said. “Do I have to send you to the headmaster?”
I heard him sigh, and then he pushed back his bench and climbed under.
“Thank you, Mr Burrows,” she said, and her white-encased ankles moved on.
Benjamin crouched inches away from me under the table. “Happy?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “That was smart.”
When the drill ended, we climbed out again. Sarah Pennington was giggling about something with her friends. The other students climbed out from under their tables, laughing and talking.
Then I noticed a uniformed police officer and a man in a brown suit standing by the door, speaking to the lunch lady. She turned and pointed to us, and they crossed to our table.
“Benjamin Burrows and Jane Scott?” the man in the suit asked, standing behind me. He was tall, with his hat in his hand, and he had the wispy fair hair of a child or an old man. “I’m Detective Montclair, of the Metropolitan Police. This is Officer O’Nan. You’ll have to come with us, please.”
“Why?” Benjamin asked.
“Please,” the detective said.
“Are we under arrest?”
The detective glanced at Officer O’Nan, who was short and stocky, with bristly hair like a hedgehog. In that moment, Benjamin lunged towards the door.
“Run, Janie!” he said.
I scrambled up, taken by surprise, but the men were right behind me, and the detective grabbed my shoulders.
“Let go!” I cried.
Everyone in the lunchroom was staring at us now.
Benjamin reached the door at a run, but the lunch lady in her white uniform was standing in front of it with her arms crossed. The uniformed policeman tackled Benjamin, taking him sprawling.
Benjamin’s satchel, with the Pharmacopoeia in it, slid across the floor and stopped at Sergei Shiskin’s feet. I saw a look pass between Benjamin and Sergei, and Sergei quietly picked the bag up. He shouldered it as if it were his own, and I was impressed with how cool and collected he was.
Benjamin kicked and fought so that all the attention stayed on him, and the policemen didn’t seem to notice how he’d passed the satchel off. I tried to twist free, too, but the detective was strong, and they finally wrestled us both out the door, under the disapproving eye of the lunch lady. She looked as if she’d expected as much—as if resisting the bomb drill was bound to lead to police custody sooner or later.
A dark sedan was parked outside the building. “We haven’t
done
anything,” Benjamin protested as they dragged us to it.
“Then why are you struggling?” O’Nan asked.
“Because we haven’t done anything!”
They pushed us into the car. I looked out the window at the students who had spilled out of the school. Sarah Pennington watched with her friends, and Sergei stood quietly with the satchel. Officer O’Nan took the driver’s seat.
“Are you arresting us?” I asked as the car pulled away from the school.
“Not yet,” Detective Montclair said, turning from the passenger seat to smile at us. His wispy hair was askew from the struggle, and he had crooked teeth. “We just have some questions.”
“About what?”
“A man was stabbed to death last night at the Chelsea Physic Garden.”
“What?”
Benjamin said. “We don’t know anything about that!”
I was in a panic. Someone must have seen us coming out of the garden. We needed to establish an alibi, but we couldn’t with the policemen listening.
We drove in silence through the London streets, away from St Beden’s and into neighbourhoods that seemed dirtier and more run-down, the bomb damage from the war more obvious and unrepaired. My mind was racing through possible explanations we could give for being at the garden. Our botany project for the science competition, maybe—except that the science competition didn’t really exist.
“Why are we going to the East End?” Benjamin asked.
“Because that’s where Turnbull Juvenile Court is,” Detective Montclair said.
“I thought we were just being questioned.”
“You are,” he said. “Nothing to worry about. Just ordinary procedure.”
“I want to call my parents,” I said, even though they were at a castle in the country.
“Naturally,” the detective said.
“You can’t question us without them present,” I improvised.
He smiled his crooked smile. “Oh, yes, we can, my dear,” he said. “This isn’t the ‘land of the free’, you know. You just sit tight.”
W
e stopped at a three-storey brick building with a peaked roof, like an orphanage in a Dickens novel. Turnbull Hall had been built in the nineteenth century as a place where the poor could live and eat and get an education from reform-minded university graduates, and it might once have been a fine, clean, noble place. By 1952, though, it was grubby and cold, with sooty windows and surly guards, and held a juvenile court and a reformatory school.
Officer O’Nan immediately took Benjamin into one room, and Detective Montclair steered me down a hallway, past a classroom full of bored and pasty-looking children. There was a smell of poverty and abandonment and neglect, and of generations of kids who didn’t get enough baths or enough love.
We arrived in an empty, run-down classroom, and Detective Montclair told me to take a seat. He sat opposite me, squeezing into a child-sized desk. His fine hair was still disordered from our struggle.
“Now, do you go by Jane or Janie?” he asked.
“Jane,” I said flatly. I didn’t want him acting like my friend.
“You’re American.”
I nodded.
“Parents working here, yes?”
The detective’s manner was very calm, his voice soothing, and I was reminded of a king cobra I’d once seen in a film, which hypnotised its prey, swaying back and forth, before striking like a bullet. I nodded.
“How do you find London?”
“Are you arresting me?”
“No.”
“Then I’d like to go now.”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened in the garden?”
I bit my lip. Obviously, they had separated me from Benjamin so they could compare our stories. But we hadn’t had time to get them straight, and anything I said might be different from what Benjamin said.
“If I’m being arrested, I’d like a lawyer,” I said. My parents had told me that you
always
needed to ask for a lawyer if you were accused of something,
especially
if you were innocent.
“But you haven’t been arrested.”
“Then I’d like to leave.”
“Then I might have to arrest you.”
“Okay, go ahead. And I’d like a lawyer.”
He paused, tilting his head. “Do your parents like their jobs, Janie?” he asked.
“Yes. And it’s Jane.”
“Well,
Jane
,” he said, “I can have you deported for refusing to cooperate with a police investigation, and then your parents would have to take you home. But I get the feeling that they don’t
want
to go back to Los Angeles.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I’ve read their file.”
“They have a
file
?”
“Of course they have a file,” he said. “We don’t just let any old Communists in.”
“They aren’t Communists!”
“And now you have a file, too. So let’s fill it with good things, shall we? Things, say, about what a cooperative foreign national you are, and how
helpful
in matters of grave importance.”
“I’m fourteen,” I said. “I can’t have a file.”
Detective Montclair looked around the ancient classroom and smiled his crooked smile, as if approving benignly of the shabby desks and dusty blackboards. “When this building was built,” he said, “a child could enter the workforce at six. You might have been at work for eight years by the age of fourteen. Difficult work, too. Physical labour. So I think you’re old enough to answer a few questions about a murder, to help the country that has so generously allowed your Communist parents in, and seen fit to employ them.”
“Stop calling them Communists. They aren’t.”
“Where were you last night?”
“At home.”
“All evening? If we call your parents and ask them if you came home late, what will they say?”
I bit my lip harder, to keep the tears of frustration back. If only Benjamin and I had figured out our story ahead of time. If only I could have warned my parents to keep their mouths shut. I had a feeling Scotland Yard could track them easily to their castle in the country.
“I see from your face,” Detective Montclair said, “that your parents might have a different story.”
I said nothing.
“You know, if Benjamin acted alone,” the detective said soothingly, “you can tell me that.”
I glared at him. I wanted to tell him that a German man with a scar on his face had probably killed the gardener, and that they should be looking for him right now, but I was afraid to contradict what Benjamin might say. And the gardener had told us not to trust the police.
“Why don’t you think about it for a bit,” the detective said.
He left the room, and I was alone. I guessed he was going to talk to Benjamin. I would go to jail for obstruction of justice at the very least, and maybe even for murder. I wondered again what we had touched, in the gardener’s cottage, and left prints on. The lantern, at least. I felt trapped and frightened, which I supposed was exactly what they wanted, but knowing that they wanted it didn’t help.
After half an hour, the stocky Officer O’Nan came to move me to a room with a door at each end and two cage-like cells along one side, right next to each other, separated by a thick concrete wall. It seemed improvised, added long after the original building. Benjamin was in the first cell, holding the bars helplessly. There was another boy with him, who looked small and ragged, but then the policeman led me past and put me in the next cell and I couldn’t see them anymore. The cell was cold and damp, with a low wooden bench.
O’Nan left, and I went to the bars.
“Benjamin?” I whispered, remembering the Shiskins’ bugged kitchen and telling myself not to say anything incriminating, or loud.
“What’d you tell them?” he whispered back, around the concrete wall.
“Nothing! They tried to get me to turn on you and say you did it. I
hate
them.”
“They did the same to me.”
I put a hand out through the bars to see how far away the other cell was, and met Benjamin’s hand reaching towards mine. An electric shock of surprise went through me. Our fingers interlaced and squeezed.
“It’s going to be all right, Janie, I promise,” he said.
Then the other boy’s voice chimed in, from Benjamin’s cell. It was high and clear, with an accent you didn’t hear at St Beden’s. “So, d’you two have a plan for gettin’ us out of here, or do I have to spring us myself?” he demanded.
We unlocked our hands.
“That’s Pip,” Benjamin said. “He’s a pickpocket. And a housebreaker.”
“Leastways I never
murdered
no one,” the boy’s voice said.
My heart started to pound, and I thought of jailhouse movies I’d seen, with snitches planted in the cells. “Benjamin,” I whispered. “They put him in there hoping you’d talk to him!”
“I thought of that already,” Benjamin said, in a full, loud voice. “Good thing I’ve got nothing to tell.”
“Oh, they’ll pin it on you anyways,” Pip said cheerfully. “They’re right good at that.”
I heard a scuttling noise and turned to see a long grey rat moving along the wall of my cell, beneath the low wooden bench. It seemed to be heading for my feet, and I screamed, in spite of myself.
“Janie?” Benjamin called.
“There’s a rat in here!”
It froze and crouched along the wall.
“Sounded like you was being murdered,” the other boy said.
I felt indignant, because I was
not
some shrinking violet. In the past twenty-four hours, I’d seen a man die, let a boy stay in my room, and been threatened with deportation. I thought I’d handled it all pretty well. But a fat, dirty rat running at your feet was horrible. It watched me with beady, curious eyes, waiting for my next move.