by Glass, Lisa
Mr Hitchcock was waiting over the trapdoor to the bunker.
‘What’s up, Mr Hitchcock. Didn’t expect to find you here.’
‘That makes two of us,’ he said. ‘But the News has been going on and on about those girls and I felt compelled to do something. Before I knew it, my feet had taken me here.’
My brain started going a hundred miles an hour. I liked the old bloke but how likely was it of him to have innocently found a bunker that the police had missed? Maybe my parents had been right when they told me it was weird of an old man to want to hang about with a kid. Maybe Luke’s dad hadn’t been the only old perv in Hayle.
‘What ain’t you telling me?’
My dad moved closer towards me so that he was between me and Mr Hitchcock.
Mr Hitchcock threw up his hands impatiently. ‘Mrs Schwab’s late husband had some old war documents amongst his effects, including a decoded message that referred to this base and the probable existence of a secret command and control bunker. You are not to tell that boyfriend of yours, as his grandmother does not know that I went through her things this evening like a common thief. I rather suspect that she was one of the famed “Nazi ballerinas” in her day and that her husband was part of the SS. Fascinating really, but really now, this is not the moment for lengthy explanations.’
I yawned. ‘Where’s Lizzie? Is she okay?’
‘She’s at home, nursing the pups most likely. There’s no let up for her at the moment. But you’re not to worry about her any more. She’s fine.’
He turned back to the trapdoor.
‘It’s wedged shut. You’ll all have to help.’
We all gathered around and took a hold of the trapdoor handle, which was rustier than the burnt-out chassis of the Land Rover that had been sunk in the sands of Hayle Towans beach since time began.
My dad said, ‘One, two, three . . .’ and we pulled as hard as we could. With a groan, the door gave way.
And there they were.
Chapter 31People thought that a serial killer had them. Thought it was some CSI situation with arteries spurting blood on old floor tiles, maybe a trio of molesters with razor blades and power tools. Nobody wanted to say it, but people had to have been thinking that, what with the things on the telly and in the news.
But when we discovered them girls down there beneath that trapdoor, they said that it wasn’t like that at all. Each of them said, word perfect, that on that foggy night they had been exploring and the door had closed mysteriously behind them. Some of the girls said that someone must have shut them in, maybe one of the other contestants even (the newspapers loved that) and others said it must have been the wind. There was no sign of Edith.
It was one month later before Edith was discovered. Edith, I should say, didn’t turn up in a pile of blood with her throat cut. Her body didn’t wash in on the morning tide with seagulls pecking its eyes, and it wasn’t found stuffed in a weirdo’s chimneybreast. When the truth came out, people said they’d never heard the like.
Edith was in Newquay. Stressed by tight filming schedules and chronically low blood sugar, she had hitched a ride with a stoner surfer to Fistral Beach and she had been living on doughnuts, spliffs and Irn Bru in his campervan ever since. The bloke was Scottish and proposed to her after a week. She said yes, decided to give up her modelling ambitions, pulled out her hair extensions and went back to wearing glasses. She didn’t call her mother because she said she was fed up of being nagged about her life choices, which was, I thought, a lesson to all mothers everywhere.
It took one day for Vega to become a household name. She went on the television and gave interviews about her ordeal. The image of those girls coming out of that bunker, all white-faced and trembling, was media gold. The thing the media seemed to like most was that nobody could say for sure that a psycho hadn’t locked them in. Somehow that door had closed. A group of beautiful young women was bound to attract stalkers and freakazoids. Security was minimal, so anyone could have been around. The mystery element made the story even better. A rich man called Max arrived in town and offered all the girls representation. Rumour had it that Vega earned enough from the newspapers to keep her family in clover for the rest of their lives.
The story went that after a night of drinking games, boozed up and stupid, the girls decided to dodge the cameras and go off in the fog to explore the base. It was part of an elaborate game of Truth or Dare, they said. If they’d been following the show’s rules, they should all have been in their bunks getting their beauty sleep but instead they had been on the prowl. Vega found the storeroom, then the trapdoor hidden by dirt and dust. Drunk on vodka, they admitted, they had all gone down through it and not thought to prop the door or leave someone on look-out. Food-wise, they only had the snacks in their pockets but lucky for them the water supply had been reconnected for the show, so the taps still had water and the toilet still flushed. They wouldn’t have lasted much longer unless we had found them though, because even models need more than a few squares of Dairy Milk.
When we jumped down there to see where they had been trapped, Vega in her quietest voice showed me the pitiful conditions where they had been huddled, with only one blanket to keep warm. Vega being the exhibitionist that she was, had been showing off with her musical instruments during the game of Truth or Dare, so at least they’d had her music for entertainment, if you could call it that. I noticed she had both a harmonica and a violin.
‘Didn’t know you played the violin?’ I said.
‘My family made us all play instruments. Why, something wrong with playing the violin?’
I couldn’t answer that. The way she looked at me with that odd face of hers, no make-up and no front. She looked so much younger than before.
Later in an interview for the News, one of the girls let on that they had stripped naked in the nights and cuddled under their one blanket to maximise on body heat. The journalists loved that, but I caught Vega rolling her eyes, and so I doubted it was true.
The sight of those girls all clean-faced and in nighties and jammies was well strange. No wonder the world went cuckoo over them. It was such a big story. Missing models trapped and starving to death in World War Two secret bunker. Saved by gawky local girl and her dad.
They didn’t know about the help we had. Mr Hitchcock and Luke Gilbert wanted to be kept out of it, and judging by the media circus, they were onto something. I became a little bit of a celebrity myself and was given enough money for press interviews to stop my dad having to go and work in some scabby factory or on the dustcarts up in Exeter. My dad did alright too, but a dad was never going to be as newsworthy as his teenage daughter and so it was me that raked in the big bucks, and I milked it for all that it was worth.
I knew I wasn’t as camera-friendly as Vega and the heroine thing would never make me a millionaire, but some journalists wanted quotes from me, so we became richer than we’d ever been before and ever would have been otherwise. By the end of the month, my parents had banked one hundred and forty-three thousand pounds. We gave Timothy what he needed to make the improvements and stop our site being torn down, and we banked the rest.
It was only after the hubbub had died down that it came to me. I couldn’t sleep because my mind kept churning the images of the night we found them all crouching in that room together, so shocked to see us. It was all so surreal and relieving and amazing that I could hardly process what my eyes was seeing at the time. But something had stuck in my brain because it came to me afterwards. Something was there in that bunker that shouldn’t have been. Something wrong. Something white amongst the gloom. My eyes had looked through a doorway and there I had seen the lavatory. And on the cistern, clear as day, was a gleaming white toilet roll.
Chapter 32Why was there a fresh new toilet roll in a seventy-year-old bunker? That was a good question. My mind started to race with the possibilities. It was for instance possible that one of the
girls went about carrying a toilet roll, but I thought it was unlikely. For one thing, I doubted any of them ever ate enough to get the trots. I thought about it for hours and there was no getting back to sleep.
I knew Vega was back in Hayle because it was in the newspaper that she’d had to come back from London to give another statement after the first one had been lost in a filing cock-up. She was staying at the White Hart Hotel down in Foundry Square, which was where all the really rich tourists stayed when they came to visit Hayle. No more tents or bootcamps for her.
I texted Han.
I know u have it so give me Vega’s number. Right now.
A few seconds later my phone beeped. Just the number. Nothing else. No message. No apology.
Burning up with hate at Han for having her number in his phone and being such a git, I wrote a text message, writing it one way and then another. Eventually I went with:
Did u shut urselves in? From Jenny who found you. She replied straight away.
No.
U did. I saw the bog roll.
Meet me under viaduct in an hour. Don’t say NEthin to NE1.
I got up and slipped on my baggy jeans and second-hand Converse All Stars, tiptoed into the kitchen, filled my pockets with Rich Tea biscuits and walked into the orange dawn.
*
By the time I got to the viaduct, my brain was in overdrive and the walk had made me sweat, even though my face was freezing from the sea breeze. I found her blowing on her hands and pacing about, trying to keep warm. She looked worried.
I smiled and she smiled back. Her smile was nervous; mine was angry.
‘So you staged it all?’ I said.
She paused a bit and then nodded.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘To be famous, of course.’
‘You would have been famous anyway. After the show went out.’
‘Not particularly. Not enough.’
‘Didn’t you care about making everyone worried? What about your folks? They must have thought you’d been abducted and murdered by some psychopath.’
‘But not for long. I was only gone a few days.’
‘That’s ages when you’re worried though.’
‘Yeah, I know. But they’re rich now. They’ll never have to stress about money again. Mum can get her knee operation now and Dad can quit the office. He hates that bloody place.’
‘You gave me fifty quid. You said you were already rich.’
‘I lied.’
‘The nerve of you. Don’t you feel bad for telling everyone a load of crap? You’re all just liars now.’
‘It doesn’t matter, not when the lie is better than the truth. People love the story, especially as it has a happy ending. It sold like trillions of newspapers. Max says I could be an actress or anything now. Whatever I want.’
I nodded. She was right. She had made herself a star.
‘I’ve already got meetings set up. One of them is with Brad Pitt’s film company. In Hollywood. They want to buy the rights to my life, and maybe even let me act in the film of all this.’
‘Cool,’ I said. Because it was cool. But it also wasn’t. ‘So what am I supposed to do now? I feel bad knowing something that no one else does. I ain’t good with secrets.’
‘Do you want money to keep quiet? I could easily give you ten grand. Twenty even.’
She wasn’t really getting what I was trying to say. Money wasn’t the thing that bothered me. I didn’t care that she was going to be mega-rich. I just didn’t like how devious those girls had been.
‘Nah, keep it. I’ve made a few quid out of this myself, I must say.’ If I had felt guilty before about accepting that money, I felt triply guilty now. Lie money. ‘But I’m not going to waste mine. I need mine.’
‘Good. I’m glad. And don’t go doing something stupid, like giving it all away to charity, because I know what you’re like.’
‘You don’t know me at all. You should give some of yours to charity. You should. Help you square away your conscience.’
‘You’re obviously a far better person than I am, Jenny.’
I was inclined to agree with her.
‘Couldn’t you have just waited a bit? Waited until the show aired? You know you’d have made it eventually. Everyone believed in you. You didn’t have to do all this.’
‘It’s about platform. I was good enough to be a model before the bunker, but I wouldn’t have got many jobs. It’s about people knowing who you are, and liking your personality, and I had no connections in the right places to help me. And I didn’t want to sleep my way to the top like most of the girls.’
‘Yeah, but the thing is other people were involved too. A lot of people cared and was out searching. People was even praying for you. And there were sniffer dogs and everything. They got policemen in from Devon. Coppers all over the place, there were. This was about more than just you, is what I mean. It affected loads of people.’
‘Yeah, and lots of those policemen have been on the telly too, talking about it. One of the blokes has even signed a book deal about the case. Some detective from over the water. It’s been a money-maker for lots of people. Maybe try to see it as a good thing, Jenny.’
Something was still bothering me. They had made me part of their lie, and I didn’t like that. Being used. It sucked.
‘If I ask you a question, will you tell me the truth?’
‘No point lying now, is there?’
‘What would have happened if I hadn’t found you? How would you have got out of that place? The door was wedged shut.’
Vega looked away at the fishermen sorting out their gear, totally concentrating on what they was doing and not giving two hoots for us.
‘You said you’d tell me the truth,’ I said.
‘Well, I didn’t expect you to ask that. I thought you’d ask about . . . something else.’
Thing is, she didn’t have to answer. She had someone on the outside. Course she did. How else would they have got out? They hadn’t banked on me finding them.
‘One of the other girls was supposed to find you,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me, Edith?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t even know where Edith is. She could be in a ditch for all I know.’
‘Who then? Not Han? Please not Han.’
‘Not Han, no.’
I exhaled with relief.
‘Megan. You stole her thunder, kiddo. She was due to come the next morning. See, 8a.m. is my best light and she was going to come at 7, so the journalists would have got the best shots of me.’
‘Who’s Megan?’ It wasn’t one of the contestants. Without wanting to, I had their names and most of their vital statistics memorised.
‘Producer.’
The spineless lady with the loud voice, who had fired me when Morgana asked who I was.
The Show was in on the deception all along.
I sat down on one of the wooden benches. It got worse and worse. Now I was part of a giant corporate fraud by greedy television people.
Vega put her hand on mine very gently.
‘It wasn’t just about a few girls getting rich and famous. It was about the big bucks. It was about the show getting sky high viewing figures and commercial sponsors and worldwide syndication of the British version. And the plan has worked beautifully. The only difference is that you got to be the hero instead of Megan, and I’m glad, because she was already rich and didn’t need the dosh. You did. You can do whatever you want now, Jenny. You could be famous too if you went about it the right way. You could move to London and be whatever you want to be. The sky’s the limit and you could be one of its stars.’
‘I don’t want to be a star. And I don’t want to move to bloody London.’ Just the thought of it gave me the heebie-jeebies. Dirty old buildings covered in pigeon poo, and millions of angry people on the
stinking Tube. No thank you.
‘Well, what do you want then?’
I thought about this.
‘Nothing.’
‘Everyone wants something.’
‘I don’t want anything from you. My dad’s not leaving Hayle anymore, old Timothy ain’t going to lose the site to holiday flats and my mum is smiling more than I’ve seen her smile in my whole life.’
‘You don’t want anything for yourself? I could buy you a car.’
‘There is something you can do for me. Just give me an honest answer to one more thing, and I’ll know if you’re lying, so don’t.’
‘Okay.’
‘Do you love Han Smith?’
She paused for longer than I liked.
‘ – yes. I do.’
I smiled my angry smile at her.
‘And he loves you, don’t he?’
‘Yes, but –‘
‘I don’t want to hear it,’ I said. ‘Save your excuses for some gullible person who might just believe them.’
Then right behind Vega, I saw it. There’s this really rare bird down here that hardly anyone’s ever seen. It looks like a crow but it has a red hooked beak and a stupid name. People go absolutely mad for it and some twitchers even held a funeral for one that a fisherman found floating a mile out to sea. There sitting on a lamppost behind Vega was a Cornish Chough.