The Petitioners (18 page)

‘That’s not what he told me,’ observed Dad.

‘It might be our lot anyway,’ said Declan. ‘In which case Gav could get himself into serious trouble. He’d better stay here and we’ll go down the hill.’

‘What about Mark?’ said Fiona. ‘You’re not illegal, are you?’

Mark shrugged. ‘Not as far as I know. Not sure I’m up to speed with what’s going on, though.’

‘You’ve got to be at least as up to speed as Gav,’ said Declan.

‘This isn’t a good time to argue about it,’ I pointed out. ‘I think Dad and I should go.’

I wasn’t sure that my father saw it quite the same way as I did, but he agreed meekly enough.

We worked our way steadily downwards, weaving to and fro in an amateur attempt to confuse everybody. It was quite effective, in the sense that nobody else took a shot at us. But they were probably focussing on their goal, which surely must be Balmoral itself.

‘Get down!’ Dad hissed suddenly, reinforcing his words by pushing me into a prickly bush.

I winced and only just stopped myself giving a yelp as brambles scratched my forehead. I was sure they’d drawn blood.

Not far away, an oddly familiar voice said, ‘I’ll keep my people back here, sir, while you go on.’

‘So you’re letting us walk into the trap on our own, are you, Ms Fairfax?’ said a different voice, one I didn’t recognise. ‘That’s not very sporting.’

She made a faint snorting noise. ‘Sporting or not, I’m not sending them into danger. You don’t pay them enough for that.’

There was a pause. I heard the quiet but unmistakable sound of footsteps walking away on grass, and a sigh, as if the woman had relaxed after facing him down.

‘Tanya Fairfax,’ hissed my father, almost breathing the words into my ear. He seemed a bit cross, which wasn’t like him.

‘I thought she was a friend of yours,’ I whispered back. I couldn’t resist winding him up even in those circumstances.

Just then a hand grasped the back of my jacket roughly and hauled me upright. Another bramble – or maybe it was the same one – scratched my face on the way up.

‘You were right, their spies are everywhere,’ said a man’s voice.

I glanced sideways to find they had also dragged Dad out of the undergrowth. We stood in front of Tanya Fairfax. Her face was in the shadow so I couldn’t tell whether she was angry, amused or what. I half-expected her to come out with a traditional villain’s line like ‘So, Mr Hepburn, we meet again.’ She didn’t.

‘This could work out quite well,’ she said instead.

‘In what way would that be?’ growled my father. I looked past Ms Fairfax and saw the massed ranks of what seemed to be a private army, in the semi-darkness towards the loch. Were they about to attack Balmoral? Whose side were they on anyway?

‘Do you just work for whoever pays you the most?’ I said. I had meant to leave all the talking to Dad, but he didn’t seem to want to do very much of it.

Tanya Fairfax gave a low laugh. ‘Isn’t that the only way for an army to survive these days?’

‘Who paid you to help us?’ I asked.

‘Clever boy,’ she replied. It wasn’t an answer, and I didn’t take it as a compliment either.

‘Who’s paying you now?’ said my father.

‘A consortium,’ she said. ‘Now stop distracting me, both of you. I’ve got work to do.’ She spoke over my head to the man who was still holding me by the back of my jacket, although not as roughly as before. ‘Take them back behind the lines. We’ll need to keep them safe.’

‘I doubt if we can afford your prices,’ was Dad’s final comment before we were removed from her presence.

JENNIFER

There weren’t any scars round her hair line. That was the first thing I noticed. Had they done something to her after taking her away that removed the scars but did something to her brain instead? But there was more to it than that. She kept calling me ‘Jennifer’ which she hadn’t done since I was very small or had done something bad, and she didn’t seem to want to talk about anything that had happened recently.

We were taken into a small sitting-room. It had probably looked much the same when this was a royal residence, with tweedy carpets and oatmeal-coloured furnishings. Maybe somebody had imagined this gave it a particularly Scottish ambience. All it needed was a few haggises hanging on the wall as trophies, and the picture would be complete.

I knew I was focussing on the surroundings deliberately, to avoid considering this impossible problem.

‘Are you all right, Mum?’ I said to her, deciding some carefully worded questions might bring out the truth.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. It wasn’t quite Mum’s voice either. So she had come out of the room with a different voice, a different appearance and a different way of addressing me. Could she still be the same woman? Was there a copy of my mother walking about and if so, which was the copy and which the real person?

‘I see they’ve done something about the scars,’ I said. ‘You must be pleased about that.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘Do you remember when I fell off my bike and cut my head open?’ I reminisced, making it up as I went along. ‘It took much longer for the scar from that to heal. But I suppose there must have been medical advances since those days. After all, I was only – what, six or seven? – at the time. Or was I a bit older?’

‘Oh, seven, I think,’ she said.

I had always been an unnaturally cautious child and had never even attempted to learn to ride a bike. This masquerade, if that’s what it was, seemed less and less convincing. I hesitated, unsure of whether to play along with it in the hope of finding out the truth from this woman, or whether I should try and escape, or raise the alarm, or fight… I hated these moments of decision. I was conscious too that this seemed like a life and death thing, and that choosing the wrong way could mean disaster for my mother as well as for myself.

If only Dad were here – or even Dan, for that matter. Somebody to share the responsibility. For the first time in my life, I felt quite alone. I squashed a memory of Jeff that suddenly strayed into my mind. He couldn’t help me now.

‘So what happens next?’

She gave me a blank look.

‘I mean, can we go now? Or is there something else we need to do around here?’ I said. I didn’t really expect to be allowed just to walk out, but I thought maybe if I played the innocent bystander card then that would seem more realistic. Of course I really was an innocent bystander as far as their power games were concerned. Just because of what Mum had been involved in before, I didn’t consider myself to be any more important or useful than any other storm survivor.

I realised they probably only needed me to verify that this woman was my mother. I wondered if I could put on a convincing enough show of believing it.

‘We wait,’ she said, after such a long pause that I had just opened my mouth to break the silence when she spoke.

Quite apart from the fact that she didn’t sound like my mother, her speech was stilted and false. Either she was an android, straight from the pages of a sci-fi novel, or she was under hypnosis. I suppose Dan would have preferred the first of these hypotheses to be true but I leaned towards the second.

She sat down on one of the porridge-coloured chairs as if preparing for a long wait.

I prowled about the room. The window wasn’t shuttered or curtained. It was getting dark outside, though. I peered out anyway. We overlooked the far side of the Castle, and I saw a stream of people walking away. Were they the others who had come to register as part of the census? Were we the only ones left in here? I couldn’t suppress a shiver. Me on my own against all these people with evil intent. I didn’t have much chance of recruiting help to rescue my mother, even assuming I could escape my captors.

I didn’t think I had heard the door locking behind us when we came in, but of course the locking mechanism might have been one of these modern, noiseless ones. It didn’t have to be the ominous click of a proper big iron key in an ornate medieval lock to keep us confined. There might even be a guard outside, for all I knew.

There was only one way to find out.

Gathering all my courage – which I realised didn’t go quite as far as I would have liked it to – I went to the door and pulled at the handle.

It opened smoothly. The man who was pushing from the other side almost fell into the room.

He glared at me as he straightened, trying to pretend he hadn’t stumbled.

‘Safe room. Now,’ he said to the woman who probably wasn’t my mother.

‘Is there trouble?’ said the woman.

‘We’ve got to keep you out of the way while we get the others into the room. They could have back-up for all we know.’

‘She’ll have to come too,’ said the woman, getting up from the chair. She didn’t even look at me.

‘Where?’ I asked as he grabbed me by the arm and hustled me out of the room.

‘You’ll see when we get there,’ he said grimly.

I tensed, expecting a dungeon. It was worse than that.

It was more like a cupboard. Or maybe a priest’s hole, except that I happened to know Balmoral hadn’t been built at a time when priests were considered to be dangerous or treacherous. I suppose my father could have turned that into a joke, if he had been there. I wished he could have been.

The woman who wasn’t my mother and I were at much closer quarters than I was happy with. Going by the way she flattened herself against the wall that was furthest from where I stood, I could tell the feeling was mutual. I tried to stop the man from sliding the panel closed to shut us in, but he was too quick for me – or I was too slow. I stared at the wood in the dim light of the old-fashioned lantern he had left us. The candle inside was already flickering. If it went out and left us in the dark…

There was a moan from somewhere close by.

I didn’t want to look, but I turned slowly to survey the extent of this cell, and there, at the back, was a dark heap of blankets that moved.

My first thought was that it might be a rat. My mother had been obsessed with rats when we first emerged from our refuge after the storm. She insisted rats would have survived even if every other living thing for miles around had been wiped out, and that they would thrive in the ruins, so we had to be vigilant all the time. I think maybe she had already started to hallucinate at that point, but some of her warnings must have stuck with me.

It was too big for a rat. It started to heave itself up, and a head appeared from under one of the blankets.

I gave a little squeak.

‘What’s that?’ said the woman who wasn’t my mother, flattening herself so hard against the opposite wall that I started to wonder if she could actually demolish it and burst out of our prison just with the power of her fear.

The man under the blankets raised himself to a sitting position, one hand to his head.

‘Blimey, I almost saw stars for a minute there,’ he grumbled.

‘Jeff!’ I wanted to fling myself at him, but held back. I didn’t know how badly injured he was. He had looked as if he might be dead, back on the hillside where we left him.

He blinked. ‘Jen?’

‘I thought you were dead.’ My voice didn’t even wobble. I was proud of my self-control.

‘Not quite there yet,’ he said. I watched as his gaze moved in the other woman’s direction. ‘Emma?’

I shook my head very slightly, hoping he wouldn’t see. I wanted him to confirm what I thought, that she wasn’t really my mother, but for it to be convincing I couldn’t prompt him either way.

He heaved himself to kneeling, but it obviously hurt, because he swayed and put the hand back to his head.

‘Are you sure you shouldn’t just lie still for a while?’ I said.

‘How do we get out of here?’ he said, staying as he was.

The woman who wasn’t my mother said, ‘We don’t.’ She gave a sort of grim chuckle.

Jeff frowned in my direction. I shook my head again, this time hoping the woman wouldn’t see me. But her scary smile broadened and she added, ‘Well, you don’t anyway.’

I wasn’t sure which of us she was speaking to. She definitely wasn’t my mother. Even under hypnosis Mum would never have made a threat like that and in those tones.

Jeff and I could rush the next person to open the door, anyway. They wouldn’t stand a chance.

GAVIN

Slightly to my surprise, when Tanya Fairfax had told two of her minions to take Dan and me behind the lines, that hadn’t been a coded message to them to kill us both. Instead the uniformed men, who were a bit surly but not too rough, hustled us along a track at the side of the loch and then pushed us inside a hut. There was a sort of clanking sound behind me as if they might be barricading the door.

This wasn’t so bad.

I sat down and relaxed against the wall. Sooner or later they would come back and let us out.

‘Dad!’ said Dan in an urgent whisper. ‘Come on, we’ve got to try and get out of here.’

I didn’t see why he was so desperate about it. ‘Just chill, Dan, there’s no rush.’

‘We need to get back to the others and warn them.’