The Petitioners (15 page)

‘What are you going to do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You aren’t Scottish,’ I reminded him. ‘You can’t register as a survivor.’

He laughed. ‘I’m a survivor all right… I see what you mean. I can’t register in a Scottish census.’

‘Can you?’

He put on a silly and very annoying imitation Scots accent. ‘Ah canna see why not, hen.’

‘You’d be arrested!’

‘I’m a foreign diplomat. The worst they can do is deport me.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I’m not so sure of that.’

‘Well, I’ll play it by ear, then,’ he said. ‘If the situation looks at all threatening, we just won’t go there after all.’

‘But won’t they see us coming?’

‘Not necessarily,’ he said.

That was why we went an even longer way round the next day and spent the night in a hollow on the hill just above Balmoral, heading up to the top in the morning to keep watch on the castle and observe the comings and goings.

There was a steady procession of people going up the path and round towards the side entrance. We hadn’t seen anybody come out yet, something which I found slightly sinister. I had visions of people being massacred inside the place or thrown in the dungeons. Only as far as I knew there weren’t any dungeons. It was all more like a stately home – and not a very enormous one – than a proper castle. I suppose that’s what was bound to happen when Victoria and Albert project-managed the building work.

‘Looks harmless enough,’ said Jeff in my ear. My mother had fallen asleep in the cart somewhere below us, and we didn’t have the heart to wake her up yet. She might need all her reserves of energy to deal with whatever we found there.

‘Why don’t you wait here with Mum and I’ll go down and give it a try?’ I knew I didn’t want to set off down the hill and walk across that expanse of lawn alone, but it seemed as if that was the only contribution I could make to the expedition, if that was the right term for it.

‘I have a feeling we need to stick together,’ said Jeff.

‘A feeling?’ I said. ‘I didn’t think you master spies used feelings to decide what to do. Isn’t it all logic and gadgets?’

‘I haven’t got any gadgets… Well, not that many.’

‘This petition of yours – how does it work?’

‘What do you mean?’

I must be speaking in riddles these days. He had asked me the same question the day before.

‘How do we collect the signatures? Is it all cloud-based?’

‘Yes. It works with audio-signatures. People who agree to sign just speak their names into a – well, a gadget – I’ve got with me, and it all gets stored to be validated.’

‘How do you do that? Validate, I mean?’

‘Oh, it just checks for unique identities. To make sure we aren’t just getting the same people’s voices over and over again.’

‘So if I took your gadget down there with me,’ I said, ‘I could collect some signatures while I was waiting in the queue or whatever.’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No way, in fact. This gadget stays with me. Only I can activate it.’

‘With your voice?’

‘And fingerprint and DNA sample,’ he said.

They took their security very seriously in his branch of wherever he worked. I didn’t buy his story about the diplomatic service for a moment.

‘So I’d have to steal your voiceprint and a finger and some DNA before I could use it,’ I said thoughtfully.

I had no intention of doing any such thing, of course. I just wanted to see if he might believe me. But he just laughed as usual.

‘You could try,’ he said.

I didn’t even bother sulking. It was too much of an effort.

‘What’s going on down there?’ said my mother suddenly from behind us. She had managed to get down off the cart and struggle up the hill on her own. This journey had given me a new respect for her stamina. I didn’t think I could have done it only days after being drugged up to the eyeballs and lying in a hospital bed. I wondered if her generation was essentially stronger than mine, or whether people tended to get more determined as they got older. Maybe that was it. I still hadn’t found anything in particular to be determined about. And of course the future stretched out apparently endlessly for me. My mother was probably thinking in terms of how much she could still fit into her time.

I shook my head, hoping that would shake the morbid idea out of my mind.

‘People going in,’ I told her. ‘I haven’t seen them come out though.’

‘Maybe they’re coming out at the back,’ said Mum sensibly.

‘Is there a way out at the back?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mum.

‘I’ll pop down and have a quick look,’ said Jeff. ‘Stay here.’

‘No – don’t leave us on our own here,’ I said. ‘What if something happens to you and we don’t know what to do next?’

‘I’m sure you’ll think of something,’ he said, and went off at a brisk walking pace, zig-zagging down the hill.

It happened very quickly. One minute he was just walking, the next minute there was a sound no louder than a bee’s buzz, and he was falling, tumbling down among the tufts of grass and the rocks.

‘Oh, my God, the rocks!’ I gasped, and headed off myself at a much faster pace, jumping over obstacles as I came to them instead of stepping carefully. It was a miracle I didn’t break my neck.

I hadn’t waited for my mother’s reaction. I didn’t care whether she was following me or not. I just wanted to get to Jeff to find out…

He was lying very still on his back, on a grassy patch between a rough circle of rocks. He opened his eyes as I came to him.

‘Should have – stayed there,’ he said with some difficulty. I didn’t want to look too closely but I had to. Was that blood on the front of his dark coloured sweatshirt, or was it just a food or sweat stain I hadn’t noticed before?

One hand reached out to me. I grabbed at it.

‘Careful,’ he said, trying to gulp in more air. ‘Take – this.’

There was a black button in his hand. It looked just like the kind of button you might have on your jacket, less than two centimetres in diameter and quite smooth on top with a couple of small holes for sewing it on.

‘Hold it – to my mouth,’ he said.

He needed help, but I was incapable of working out what to do to obtain it. I could only do as he asked. I took the button and brought it to his lips. He spoke a few words and then pushed it away. ‘Now say something into it,’ he told me.

Feeling extremely silly, I held the button up to my mouth and said, ‘Fish fingers.’ It was the secret password  Dan and I had always used when we played spy games as children. Now it was all for real. I wished it was still a game.

Jeff’s mouth curved into a smile. ‘That’s your password. Collect – as many as you can.’

I looked disbelievingly at the button in my hand. Was this the device he had mentioned, the one that would let us record people’s audio-signatures and convince the English government we were serious about reunion? It looked so ordinary but it could help to determine the fate of a whole nation.

I hadn’t been looking at Jeff while I thought these important thoughts. When I looked back at him, his eyes were closed and his whole body relaxed into limpness. I shook him gently by the shoulder, but there was no response. Medical help! That was what he needed. I got to my feet, and found my mother standing beside me.

‘Come on, Jen,’ she said, ‘we’d better get on with it, then.’

‘We’d better get some help for Jeff, you mean.’ What else could she mean?

‘No, I mean we’d better start collecting the signatures. You don’t want all his efforts to be wasted, do you?’

‘But – Jeff.’

‘I think it’s too late.’

‘It can’t be!’

She pulled me away, gently but inexorably. I started to struggle. We couldn’t leave him just lying on this bleak hillside. We had to do something. But I couldn’t get out of her iron grasp. Was that a metaphor for my life? Suddenly I wished I had stayed with Dad. At least I knew he had some human compassion in him, even if he hid it well at times.

Two figures appeared below us, running across the lawn and up the hill. She pulled me out of the way.

‘They’ll find him there,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing more we can do now. No point in them catching us too.’

Before I knew what was happening, we had ducked down behind some sparse vegetation, and we were creeping down the hill, and in no time we found ourselves crossing the lawn and merging into the stream of people who were moving towards the Banqueting Hall entrance I remembered from before. Nobody had stopped us – yet. I still had the button in my hand. The fact that I would feel silly asking people to speak into it was a triviality compared with the way we had abandoned Jeff. I would never forgive my mother for this.

She squeezed my arm, which she was still holding. ‘We’ve got to get on and do this. Otherwise everything he was working for will be lost. Give me the button thing.’

‘No – he said it was voice-activated. I’m the only one who can work it.’

She frowned. ‘That’s ridiculous! We’ll never collect enough signatures if only one person can do it. How on earth will that work?’

‘You can ask them to sign, and I’ll follow you around with the device,’ I said. My brain was still numb. For two pins I would have thrown away the button and made her search for it in the damp grass, but I agreed with her that we shouldn’t waste Jeff’s work.

My mother started working the queue right away. She was good at this. After a couple of false starts, she perfected a one-sentence explanation that made it sound as if they’d be doing themselves a huge favour if they agreed to audio-sign the petition, in fact they’d be mad not to. People were surprisingly receptive. Maybe they were so worn down by everything that they would agree to anything that even gave them a chance at something better.

As we got closer to the Banqueting Hall entrance, she took a break from it.

‘So far, so good,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll be able to catch the others inside, if there are people still there and they haven’t been thrown in a dungeon or gone out the back way.’

There were no guards on the door. But people were very patient – another sign that they were worn down – and there wasn’t even any of the normal pushing and shoving you might expect in a queue.

Inside, my mother said it reminded her a bit of an old-fashioned polling-station. Apparently people used to have to go to school and church halls and cast their votes with pencil and paper, even when she was younger.

There were two men sitting at a long table, a flexi-screen alongside them and a small round black thing in front of one of them. It must have been similar to the button I now had in my pocket, because people were speaking into it. Sometimes one of the men just nodded them through after that, and they went out through a door at the far end of the Hall, and sometimes it seemed they were asked to repeat whatever they had said, maybe because it hadn’t worked the first time. Once, a man in uniform appeared through a door behind the men and took somebody out that way. I had an ominous feeling about that door. It could lead to a torture chamber, or a firing squad, or worse. I didn’t confide this idea to my mother. We were silent, like almost all the rest, as we waited.

When we got to the table one of the men said in a bored voice, ‘Just speak your name clearly into the microphone there, and then you’re free to move on to the next stage.’

The next stage? That too seemed ominous. But then, the way I felt after what had happened to Jeff, everything had started to seem ominous.

I said my name and it was fine. They nodded me through. Then I heard my mother say her name, and there was a sort of high-pitched sound. I looked across to the door behind them and saw it open. The man in uniform emerged. I heard him say to her quietly, ‘Emma Hepburn?’

She looked startled. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Come with me.’

‘But why…?’ I heard her say.

He took her by the arm and began to lead her away.

‘No!’ I shouted. ‘I’m coming with you!’

I started towards them, but one of the men had got up from the table and was blocking the way.

‘Stay here, Jen! I’ll see you later!’ she called.

The man from the table was a solid wall in front of me.

I stood still and the tears began to roll down my face.

GAVIN

They didn’t exactly clap us in irons, but Mark and I were locked up together in quite a small cabin. It was hardly a cabin at all, actually. More like a cupboard. There was a very small bunk bed and one chair. We took turn about to use the bed, changing round every couple of hours because both were so uncomfortable. Mark spent some of his chair time trying to do leg exercises. I really wished he hadn’t, but I suppose once a cyclist always a cyclist.

‘Mrs Swan was a bit of a surprise,’ I said to him. ‘She just seemed like a nice old woman.’

‘Never underestimate nice old women,’ he said, puffing a bit with the exertion of manoeuvring his legs into an impossible shape. ‘She isn’t that old anyway, is she?’