by Emma Jameson
The lift dropped whisked her to the condo’s second floor, which was divided into two outrageously large bedrooms, each with a full en suite bath. Ritchie’s door was open. He was listening to the radio while disassembling a Lego project.
Kate stopped to watch, untroubled by his failure to acknowledge her. He was pulling apart one of his mysterious creations. When that was done, he’d sort the plastic bricks into piles, assign each group to its own compartment in his Lego box, close the box, and stare at it. Sometimes he stared at his closed Lego box for hours. Maybe he was meditating on the completion of the cycle. Maybe he was envisioning what form those bricks would assume next.
Henry’s door was closed. A whiteboard hung on it. Its message, in crowded block print, varied daily. Sometimes it was an announcement; sometimes it was a doodle, or a cinema quote. Tonight it was a declaration.
YOU COULD LEARN TO SHARE KATE NOW COULDN’T YOU
Kate knocked. She was careful to always knock and announce herself before entering. Her mum had taken a different approach, breaking in whenever she pleased and taking anything that sparked her fancy, especially items she could swap for gear. Kate wanted Henry to know she was in charge and what she said was law. But she didn’t want him to feel besieged in his own space, with not even a corner to call his own.
“What?” Henry bellowed from behind the locked door.
“Pax.”
Henry didn’t answer.
“I’m invoking the Pax Wakefield. I have three. This is my first one this year. Let me in.”
Henry opened the door. He hadn’t been crying, which was good. He regarded her suspiciously. “When you use the Pax, the row never happened. No punishment. No discussion.”
“I know.” Kate stuck out her hand.
Henry shook it. “So I can play Xbox? Or get on the computer?”
“Is your homework finished?”
He nodded.
“Did Tony look at it?”
“He looked at the maths. I repeated the problems he marked. He doesn’t look at my English or Science anymore,” the boy said proudly. “He says it’s unnecessary.”
“Then Xbox or the computer is fine. Can I come in?”
Henry stepped back to allow it. “I put the sheets on the bed. Aren’t they cool?”
“Yeah. But you’ve got a corner bollixed up,” Kate said, automatically smoothing the bottom sheet and tucking it securely. “Right. Now it won’t spring loose in the middle of the night.” She fluffed one pillow, which featured Thor, then the other, which depicted a hunky Captain America. “Listen. Henry. About Maura….”
“You used the Pax. You have to drop it!”
“I’m not arguing. I’m just saying. You and me and Tony need to have a discussion before too much longer,” she said carefully. “I know you think her problems could be solved with money. And maybe some could. But it’s more complicated than that. For adults, it’s not just about paying off debts and having nice things. It’s about self-respect, and feeling beholden. There’s a power dynamic,” she finished lamely, wondering if a nine-year-old could possibly understand.
Henry looked thoughtful. “So you think she’d resent help?”
“She might.”
“Nobody likes charity. But sometimes people need it. Mum’s been sick. She’s still sick, really, even with her meds,” Henry said. “She needs a hand up. If we need to talk about it, why can’t we do it now? Tony will be home any minute.”
“I know. But Paul’s coming, too.” Kate, who’d inwardly winced when Henry again referred to Maura as ‘Mum,’ hoped her face hadn’t given her away. “Tony’s on a case that touches on crimes the three of us worked on at Scotland Yard. We’re going to discuss it over dinner.”
Henry brightened. He’d grown very fond of Paul, whom he seemed to view more as an older brother than an authority figure. Whenever Paul joined the Hetheridges for a meal, Henry inserted himself in the occasion, often trying to stick around even after the conversation turned to murder.
“Can I come down and join you? I’ll be quiet as a mouse, I promise,” he said, shifting quickly from query to outright begging. “I won’t ask questions. I won’t make a sound at all. I just want to be there.”
“Nope. You can eat up here,” Kate said. “Here you have your choice of Xbox. Computer. Your new book about Greek myths. You can even play with Ritchie, if he isn’t too wrapped up in his Legos. Much more fun up here, I promise.”
“But I’d rather be with you guys. Family time. And it would be educational!”
Smiling, Kate shook her head no, closing the door behind her. When she was almost to the lift, something occurred to her. Returning to the whiteboard, she erased Henry’s challenge, replacing it with one of her own.
What new chores will you do to earn yourself a mobile?
Beneath that, she drew a heart, signed it with a giant K, and went downstairs to await Tony and Paul.
Chapter Five
Henry Wakefield loved living at One-oh-One. He loved Wellegrave House, too. Together they were like Betty and Veronica—both too good to be true, but in completely different ways.
Wellegrave House was wonderful because it was creaky, cozy, and packed with curiosities. Curled up by the Regency-era fireplace with a book and a cup of tea, he liked to imagine himself as one of the Pevensie children, on the brink of discovering a magical wardrobe. Or a student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, studying in Ravencroft’s common room.
An agreeable amount of danger lurked around Wellegrave House’s every corner. Bogs that overflowed if you asked too much of them. A splendid antique lift that sometimes failed, trapping the rider between floors. A guest bedroom with an unpleasant odor that someone had probably died in. Moreover, there was Harvey, always watching and waiting. Mrs. Snell also seemed to materialize at will, appearing just as Henry reached for a vase or pried open a locked drawer, but at least she liked boys. She understood his thirst for adventure. Harvey was determined to squash it. But there was no Harvey at One-oh-One.
In the condo, Henry felt independent, even grown up. At Wellegrave House, he wasn’t allowed to cook for himself, not even a snack. Henry had been cooking as long as he could remember, but he wasn’t permitted to use a single appliance in Wellegrave House’s cavernous kitchen, lest Harvey’s combover braid itself. In the manservant’s eyes, nine-year-old boys were such babies, apparently, they couldn’t spread jam on toast without stabbing themselves, or heat up leftover curry without breaking a bowl.
In the condo, Henry could stroll into the mod-con kitchen and go nuts. Scramble eggs. Boil pasta. Even use the cooker to warm some milk, crumble in chocolate and cinnamon, and voila—a mug of Café Diablo. He’d often seen Tony make himself a cup of tea and drink it alone in the living room, contemplating the cityscape. After school, Henry liked to make his own spicy hot chocolate and sip it while he, too, looked out over London. He felt very much like Tony in such moments, an experience as sweet as the drink itself.
Moreover, at One-oh-One, there was room to explore. And not just the interior of their overlarge condo. Henry’s resident key card allowed him almost full access. And where he wasn’t meant to be, he went anyway, often with great success. A quiet, self-possessed boy could lurk on the periphery of several adult spheres without raising suspicion for a surprisingly long time.
Take the fifth-floor pub, Skittles. It was what Paul called a “gastropub corporate nibbles monstrosity.” As near as Henry could tell, that meant it was clean and well-lit, with wall-mounted tellys and a standardized menu. Skittles wasn’t meant to entice the residents, except on quiz nights, when it was packed. It was designed as a hub for conventioneers networking or having a break between seminars. Because One-oh-One hosted so many conferences and corporate retreats, Skittles was always packed with grownups identified by lanyard name tags, the way cows are tagged by ear. A nine-year-old boy should have stuck out like a sore thumb. But Henry had discovered that bothering no one and studiously keeping his nose in a boo
k was as good as a wizard’s invisibility cloak. And invisibility was key, because it meant hearing the truth at last.
Adults always accused kids of lying, but as far as Henry was concerned, they were the ones who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them. Harvey talked down to him. Mrs. Snell, although friendly, talked at him. Kate bossed him, Tony bossed him, and even Paul bossed him, or tried to. They only spoke freely while bossing. The rest of the time, they were on guard. How often had one of them looked up from a conversation, seen him coming, and clammed up?
At Skittles, the adults talked and talked. Sitting in a mini-booth with an open maths book, pencil, and paper, Henry could monitor unfiltered grown-up communiques until his head hurt. They nattered on about everything. Who was getting the sack. Who ought to get the sack. Which supervisor was shagging which subordinate. Plenty of it was incomprehensible, but Henry nevertheless sat and absorbed it. He felt sure that one day it would all come clear, like a string of arcane symbols resolving themselves into words.
Skittles wasn’t the only place he could turn invisible. He went lots of places no one, including garden-variety grownups, were meant to go. At One-oh-One there were so many possibilities. You just had to look beyond the obvious. The lobby was a prime example.
Everyone knew there were public lifts for visitors and private lifts for residents. But behind an unlocked door was a private lift for staff. It needed no code, went everywhere, and moved like a rocket. Henry suspected there was supposed to be a code, but harried housekeepers, servers, and janitors kept it disabled for their own convenience.
Then there was the lobby-level bar, Archie’s. From four o’clock in the afternoon until midnight, Archie’s served drinks and starters. But from six o’clock in the morning until ten, Archie’s served coffees, teas, pastries, and fresh fruit. Coffees were highly individual, right down to the temperature or the number of syrup shots. A robot barista couldn’t handle such complexity. So for four hours every morning, human beings staffed Archie’s. And that meant the system had multiple vulnerabilities. Purely for sport, Henry had nicked pastries from the bell jar, slipped behind the bar to help himself to a bottled Pepsi, and rifled one of the barista’s backpacks to see what the hip young man was reading. (The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien.) He didn’t consider himself a thief or a snoop. He was simply honing his spy skills.
One-oh-One’s lobby even had direct access to the alley behind the tower, an unloading dock. Henry had been thrilled to discover an ingress/egress that didn’t require the use of his key card. It was like being off-the-grid. If Kate ever got her knickers bunched, she could literally track his movements by pulling the key card’s swipe data. Except when he wafted like a ghost through an open door, in which case the trip was logged on someone else’s account.
Alas, the unloading dock, where lorries dropped off newspapers, crates of liquor, coffee supplies, etc., wasn’t a realm of high adventure. It wasn’t even dodgy, like an alley in Batman’s Gotham city. It was clean and dull. The industrial-style rubbish bin smelled halfway decent. And there was no nosing around on a lorry. The overall-clad workers who drove them, the sort who clomped about in reinforced-toe boots while unloading them, saw straight through Henry’s invisibility cloak.
“What’s all this, then?” the woman delivering the Independent and other daily tabloids had demanded the moment she set eyes on Henry, sitting quietly on the curb pretending to do his homework.
“Waiting on my dad,” he’d said. Henry’s First Law of Boy Spies: when parked in a strange place, it’s no good saying you’re waiting on mum. No one will believe it. But he could sit smack in the middle of Skittles, a nine-year-old surrounded by grownups sipping pints, claim his dad had dropped him there for an unspecified duration, and have everyone take it on faith.
“Waiting on my dad,” the woman had repeated. “Am I a mental defective? Am I all on my own without the sense God gave a llama?”
“Naw, he’s Oliver Twist, innit?” A little black man, dressed in a uniform identical to the skeptical woman’s, had snatched Henry’s purported homework out of his hands.
“Oh-ho! A spy,” the little black man had crowed. “‘Sunday concierge shift change at seven am. Door to his booth open today. Locked last week.’ You casing the joint?”
Mortified, Henry had snatched his notes back as the man added, “That’s not how you spell concierge. I before e, my lad. I before e.”
“A real spy writes in code, I reckon,” the woman announced, slinging around twenty-pound tabloid bundles like they were cotton balls. “Piss off, phony spy. Go on, or I’ll report you. Piss off.”
The experience had taught Henry two things. (Three, if one counted the proper spelling of concierge.) First, to make his notes illegible through strange abbreviations. It wasn’t exactly a code per se, but close enough. Second, to think up a plausible excuse for his presence whenever somewhere that working-class people might turn up. They were more aware of their surroundings and less likely to write off anyone, even a child, as automatically harmless. He respected that.
But despite the occasional roadblock, Henry’s explorations in and around One-oh-One were a cracking success. Kate was a detective. Tony was a detective. Paul was a detective. Henry would make a fine detective, too. Or an agent for MI-6. Possibly both.
Tony will be so impressed when I show him all the data I’ve gathered, Henry thought. He was sitting on the floor of his room, a half-eaten plate of chicken tikka masala abandoned nearby. Now he wanted something sweet, but his stash of lemon sherbets was long gone.
The only reason he hadn’t yet shown Tony was, of course, Kate. Kate would overreact to everything, as always.
Even if she doesn’t shout at me for eavesdropping, she’ll say it’s dangerous. Tell me I’m nine years old. Jeez. She always says that. Does she really think I don’t know how old I am?
Whenever he returned from visitation with Maura, he found Kate’s ways more irritating than usual. When he grew up, he wouldn’t waste time carping over the distant past. Imagine that—being twenty or thirty and still cross with Ritchie for burning down the house. It was stupid.
Yes, the fire was terrible. They all could’ve been hurt or killed. Tony had lost countless estate doodads; Kate had lost coats, suits, shoes, and a box of keepsakes from her late teens. So what? Henry had lost more personal items than the two of them put together. Everything in his room had been destroyed. Toys, books, school papers that earned top marks, his favorite trainers, his old photographs. Including the only baby picture of him that ever existed, a snap taken of him in Maura’s arms when he was three days old.
I could have scanned it into my phone. If I had a ruddy phone, he thought. The picture, once safely tucked in his sock drawer, had long been his private link with eternity. Once, he’d been a tiny baby and his mum had been young, pretty, and happy, at least in that snap. He had no father, not even in theory; no name, age, or occupation. Virtually all Henry’s memories revolved around Kate, Ritchie, and their old flat in South London. But that snap had been proof that once upon a time, he’d been an ordinary kid with an ordinary mum cuddling him in her arms as if she’d never let go. Thanks to Ritchie and his blinking Lego obsession, the picture was ash. If he was willing to let that go by the time he was, say, twenty-eight, why couldn’t Kate let go of her grudge against Maura?
She thinks she’s in competition with Maura to be my mum. And she is. Kind of.
It was hard to suss out how he felt about the situation. For ages he’d toyed with the idea of calling Kate “Mum.” Other kids had mums. Other kids didn’t have to frequently launch into a short speech: no, she’s my aunt, yes, my “real” mum is alive, no, I don’t live with her, no, it’s really not very interesting and let’s talk about something else, thank you very much. Next, people invariably asked, “But what about your dad, then?” It took superheroic self-control to answer politely instead of kicking the questioner in the shins.
So yes, calling Kate “Mum” would be neat and easy. It would el
iminate questions from nosy parkers and make Kate happy. But calling her “Mum” wasn’t just a case of substituting one noun for another. Words were important. Names, even more so. In ancient Britain, the Celts had believed if you knew a person’s true name, you could control them. If he named Kate “Mum,” he was choosing her as his mother. He was closing the door on that young, pretty, happy version of Maura with the blue-swaddled baby in her arms. He was saying Maura didn’t matter, and he came from someone who hadn’t wanted him.
That was tough to think about. When Maura first announced she was suing for full restoration of her parental rights, Henry had gone sick with dread. He’d wanted to be adopted by Tony and Kate; the proposal felt like a dream come true. But then came the fire, incinerating so much that he treasured, including that baby picture. Was it a sign? Was God punishing him for wanting to become Tony and Kate’s son?
Maura had never said anything of the sort. But she and her solicitor, a reedy man with square spectacles and no hair whatsoever, not even eyebrows, seemed eager for him to take their side. After the fire, they’d amended Maura’s original petition, citing it as proof that Henry was unsafe in Tony and Kate’s care. That, plus Kate’s round-the-clock work schedule and her and Tony’s run-ins with criminals, often murderers, constituted a good case, according to the solicitor. What would make it even better was testimony from Henry stating a desire to live only with his mother.
One day Maura and the solicitor had sat him down at his favorite restaurant, McDonald’s, and suggested over a Happy Meal that he make a video statement to that effect. Henry had lost his appetite. Then he’d snapped the head off the accompanying toy, a transforming robot. While the solicitor droned on, he’d squirted ketchup on the tabletop, placed the head and the body in the red mess, and changed the subject to decapitation.
That was the last time Maura asked him to meet with the solicitor. But after she bought him the Marvel Infinity War bedsheets, she’d asked him to stop calling her Maura and start calling her Mum. So he had. And he’d called her that in front of Kate, who’d looked hurt.