He could hear Aunt Emily moving around in the bedroom. ‘You will be friendly, won’t you, Thomas?’ she said, popping her head around the door. Tom opened his mouth to speak, but she disappeared again before he could reply.
Tom breathed in deeply. River’s Edge was, Aunt Emily often told visitors, ‘one of the finest Victorian boathouses on the lake’. Below the living area was the wet dock where Aunt Emily kept an ancient wooden sailing dinghy, Bobalong, for the use of guests. It was like a stone barn built over the water, with a pair of half-submerged wooden gates opening on to the river, and swallows nesting in the rafters. Tom loved the sweet, earthy scent of the lake that lingered in the air, and the dainty play of light on water that broke through cracks in the doors. He thought of the times his father had taught him to sail in the holidays when they had come up to stay with Aunt Emily, before his old life had suddenly been kicked away from under him, the day his father’s reconnaissance plane had disappeared off the radar.
‘That’s settled, then.’ Aunt Emily emerged from the bedroom with a vase of wilting flowers. ‘They’re arriving tomorrow morning.’
‘I—’
‘You just need to show them round and make them feel welcome. They won’t bite.’
‘But—’
‘Oh, and by the way, Thomas, I somehow managed to lose my engagement ring.’ She began to arrange fresh flowers in the vase. ‘Forty-two years, and now it’s gone. I think it must have been when I was hanging out the washing yesterday morning. I can still see the moment your Uncle Ted asked me. On the lake, it was – it always had to be a boat with Ted.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tom, grateful for the change of topic.
‘If I did lose it in the garden, it must still be there somewhere. Will you keep a lookout for me?’
‘It will have been trodden into the soil by now.’
‘Oh,’ said his aunt. She looked at her left hand.
‘We’d need a metal detector.’
‘Do you have a metal detector?’
‘No. But I think I could make one.’ Despite himself, he found himself smiling back at Aunt Emily’s sudden hopefulness. ‘Probably.’
Tom left River’s Edge and stepped into a downpour. He looked up, fat droplets pelting him in the face. The sky had been drained of colour. A lone bird worked the wind for a while, and then curved into the treetops for refuge.
He pushed the workshop door closed against a gust, and didn’t even bother looking at the anemometer. It was force five at least, and the rain was set in. There would be no more flying that day.
He brushed a space clear on the worktop, sank into the chair and pulled out his exercise book. He found the map he’d sketched in the French lesson and stared at it, his head in his hands.
But the blackness of the locker was still there, like the glare that stays behind the eyes when you’ve glanced at the sun, but in reverse.
He remembered Sam Noyland’s caution: We don’t want to actually hurt him, he’d said. Then Snakey’s face appeared in the black of his mind and Tom wanted to punch the silly smile away.
‘But you already have hurt me, Noyley,’ he shouted to the rain-washed windows suddenly, thrusting the exercise book across the room. ‘You already have!’
CHAPTER 4
The next morning a fine, steady drizzle was falling, and the garden smelt cleansed and fresh. On his way to the workshop, Tom stopped to have a root around under the washing line, but he didn’t find Aunt Emily’s ring. A blackbird hopped about on the lawn, scattering flecks of water with its feet as it hunted for worms. The robotic lawnmower, one of Tom’s first creations, was idle at its charging point, obediently avoiding the wet. He wondered if it could have picked up the ring and spat it out somewhere on its circuit of the garden.
In the workshop he fell on to the battered office chair opposite his cockpit, letting his walking stick clatter to the floor. The brick-built former boatshed had been Uncle Ted’s, when he ran a boat hire business at Blackrigg Bay. After Uncle Ted died, Aunt Emily had left it completely untouched for more than ten years, and it was full of a partially organized clutter, as if he had just stepped outside to have a cup of tea and would step back any moment to carry on working. Arranged along one wall were soldering irons and electrical testing equipment. On another was a bandsaw and a metal working lathe. Scattered around the floor were spools of wires, oil drums, pumps and outboard motors with their insides showing – like anaesthetized patients in the middle of half-finished operations, Tom had thought when he was first given the key.
Since then, it had gradually become his own. The cockpit was a bank of computer monitors, controls and home-made instruments arranged along one side of the room. Next to that was an old trestle table which served as a desk. On this there was a scattering of maps, a wonky Airfix model of a Hawk T1 in Red Arrows livery, and a photograph of Tom’s father, smiling on the tarmac by the nose cone of his Tornado. Although the colours had already started to fade, and although the photo made him sad, the sky behind the plane was still blue and bright and big, Tom always thought, and somehow full of promise.
He ran through the preflight checks. Then, at the press of a button, a skylight opened and folded itself back against the pitched slate roof with a hiss. He twisted a knob and a sound like a nest of angry wasps could be heard in the rafters. A CCTV image showed the lawn, surrounded by the red-barked cedar trees that gave the house its name. The garden was clear. With a well-practised movement, Tom pulled back the control stick for take-off. If anyone had been walking past the workshop at that moment, they would have seen, emerging from the cavity of the roof like a butterfly from a chrysalis, a sleek black machine about the size of a raven. This was Skylark.
The drone lifted away from the workshop, and Tom felt his world expand, and the worries of the week recede. He accelerated towards the river, skimming the top of the cedars, and disappeared into the distance, leaving only the indignant squawk of a magpie to disturb the silence left behind.
Strangely, in that infinity of sky, it was the little things Tom noticed most: an early-morning swimmer plunging from a jetty; the tottering steps of a newborn fawn hidden in a bramble thicket; the first scratch of a plough in a field. Everyday things made magical because no one else was there to see them. Once a fox, curious but fearless, had allowed him to come so close that Tom could see specks of dew on its whiskers, before it sauntered on its way, tail swaying in the crisp morning light. Then there was the time he had tried to round up a flock of sheep, herding them into the corner of a field, like a champion sheepdog with invisible legs. Another time he had tagged on to the end of a formation of migrating geese, and followed them all the way to Morecambe Bay while the sun rose in a tiger-striped sky.
His love of flying had begun when his father had hoisted him into his cockpit on his ninth birthday. The thing he remembered was the smell. It was like the zingy straight-from-the-factory smell that hits you when you unpackage a new electronic gadget or toy for the first time, but behind it, the grown-up smell of hot oil. It was that cockpit smell, almost a taste, gulped down in a few excited breaths as his dad talked him round the baffling array of dials and switches, that made Tom decide there and then to become a pilot. It made him think of speed and burning metal and wide open skies, and he loved it. He had never imagined then that pilots sometimes fell out of those vast skies, and disappeared, leaving their children wondering which part of earth, water or sky had swallowed them without trace.
It was the sight of the man with the ponytail that shook him out of these thoughts. The same man he’d seen the day before on the Invincible. It was his hair, shiny in the wet, that gave him away, as Tom approached Raven Howe from behind. He was looking south-west across the lake through his binoculars, towards Rigg Knott, a small hill on the opposite shore. Tom throttled away in that direction to see what the man was looking at.
Rigg Knott was an even-sided hill surrounded by conifers, with a view of the whole northern quarter of the lake. Tom kept high as he
approached it, but immediately recognized the red-haired woman in the camouflage jacket who’d also been on the orange speedboat the previous day. She was standing alone near the trig point that topped the hill, looking northwards through a pair of binoculars.
Tom remembered his father once telling him that from virtually every trig point in Britain it is possible to see at least two others. At the head of the lake, behind Tom’s home on the edge of Watertop, was Brockbarrow, a third hill with a trig point. This formed the top of a triangle, with Rigg Knott to the south and Raven Howe to the east. It was towards this peak, with its limestone crags rising through the bracken, that the woman was gazing.
Tom checked airspeed, altitude, GPS position and battery power. He had plenty of flight time left to head to the third peak and see if his hunch was right. Passing over Blythe Bay campsite he could see families doggedly unpacking tents in the drizzle. And then, suddenly, beneath him was the Teal, empty as a ghost ship. Normally she would be laden with pointing and waving tourists, but apart from a lone crew member coiling a rope at the bow, her decks were deserted.
Arriving above Brockbarrow, Tom spotted straw-hat man, just as he had suspected. He was holding an umbrella over a laptop, which he was studying closely. A few yards away a family were standing looking at the view: a man and a woman, a boy and a girl – all in bright raincoats – and a black-and-white dog.
Tom had been concentrating so hard that he hadn’t noticed his right leg going to sleep and now it was wracked with cramp. Ignoring the pain, he put Skylark into a slow circuit five hundred feet above the hilltop and stared at the screen, trying to piece together what he was looking at. Three people on three peaks, all acting the same way. On their own, each of them looked perfectly ordinary, blending into the landscape like everyone else. No one would ever have put them together from the ground. But from the air their connection was unmistakable.
The man was still bent over his screen. The girl had backed closer to him, and was energetically tossing a stick to the dog, who fetched it straight back and dropped it at her feet for her to throw again. Tom moved a few yards nearer, mesmerized by the way she was absorbed in the game, her hair wet with rain, her whole body straining with a kind of wild excitement as she tried to throw the stick further and further each time, laughing as the dog bounded off and brought it back.
Then, as she threw the stick again, the girl, oblivious to the man at the trig point, stepped back into him and caused him to stumble. And for a moment his laptop was exposed, and Tom had a full view of the screen. Tom steadied the drone and zoomed in fully until he could see what was on it. There was a satellite image with the whole length of the lake. At the top of the screen were the words: Operation Larus.
Tom felt a cold shiver work its way down his spine as he stared at the image. There was something unsettling about these alien words, in matter-of-fact white on black computer font, above the familiar crinkled bow of the lake.
But he’d got too close and the man was looking straight at him.
He dropped away from the hilltop like a stone, bracken, trees and rocks a blur in the display. Near the bottom he missed a drystone wall by inches and pulled up again into an arc that he felt in his stomach, before steadying himself above the river. Keeping low over some yew trees, he headed towards the church that stood on a rocky hump at the bottom of the hill. He weaved through the graveyard and climbed to thirty feet behind the church, until he could glimpse the top of the hill again through the slatted openings of the bell tower without being seen. The family had gone, but straw-hat man was still there, peering out with his binoculars.
‘Idiot!’ Tom berated himself. ‘He’s looking for me now.’
Keeping the church tower between himself and the hillside, he was setting a bearing for home when something airborne loomed past, eclipsing the light for a second. With a twist of the controls Tom spiralled skywards, spun back and found himself staring, with horror, into the windshield of a helicopter.
The sight of it filling the screen made his stomach churn. It was a hefty military type – menacing air intakes, bulbous nose. He could see Skylark’s reflection in the pilot’s helmet visor, like a moth in the eye of a hawk. He saw a gloved hand point at him and felt the slap of turbulence as the aircraft pitched towards him. Tom sped away, like a leaf chased by the wind.
He twisted the throttle and watched the airspeed indicator surge: thirty knots . . . forty . . . forty-five . . . fifty. Through the controls he felt a bone-deep tremor in his fingers as the drone was bounced and buffeted on a cushion of air. He was over the lake now and still accelerating, sixty knots, sixty-five. Any faster and Skylark’s wings would come off, or the motors would burn out.
His only chance to outmanoeuvre the helicopter was to flip up and over into a tight loop, ending up in its blind spot, and then take refuge somewhere low before he could be found again. If he were fast enough.
He searched for somewhere to land. In the middle of the wide basin opposite Dowthwaite Bay, he spotted a long wooden rowing boat with a grey-haired man attending to one of the rods that were fixed on either side of the boat. He couldn’t see the man’s face, but he was sure it was Jim Rothwell. When he came close enough to read the name of the boat, Swallow, painted on her side in yellow letters, Tom exhaled with relief and decided to drop into the boat and hide until the helicopter had gone. He took a deep breath, put both hands on the control stick to steady himself, but when he pulled back – bracing himself for the sudden glare of sky and then the inverted horizon of the loop – nothing happened. He wiggled the stick sharply, but Skylark kept flying steadily towards the shore, and he knew the drone’s control signals had been jammed.
Furiously tapping commands into the computer keyboard, he tried changing frequencies, shifting to autopilot, boosting the transmission signal, but he knew he had lost control. He watched helplessly as the drone headed towards a thick knot of trees. He saw Jim looking up, pipe in his mouth, cradling a fish in both hands. Then a blur of water, trees, more water, and trees closer still. As the drone passed over the jagged shoreline into Dowthwaite Bay, the helicopter overtook it, its rotors whipping up a circle of white. In the entrance to the bay Tom noticed a black police RIB with an armed crewman standing guard. The last thing that filled the screen before Skylark crashed into a bank of rhododendrons was the Teal, tethered to the jetty, her hulk filling the inlet, as out of place as a swan in a bathtub.
CHAPTER 5
Tom padlocked the workshop doors, and hurried towards the harbour to go and find the drone in Maggot, his old flat-bottomed dinghy. He felt like a criminal. He had always been scrupulously careful to avoid encounters with manned aircraft. He knew how to stay clear of the RAF’s Hawks and Texans practising low-level flying over the lake. And watching out for Typhoons blasting up the valleys was all part of the thrill. But now Skylark was stuck in a bush, having been chased and jammed by a military helicopter. Meanwhile the Teal had been taken out of service and was being guarded by armed police. He had to find out why. But first he had to retrieve the drone, before someone beat him to it.
The sun had come out and burnt away the morning dampness. His aunt was sitting on the bench at the front of the house looking out for the new guests. He could feel that familiar panic swelling inside. It was like the suffocating feeling he had in small spaces, when it seemed the world would close in and crush him. He found himself hoping that their car had broken down, or some long-lost relative from Australia had been taken sick and they had to cancel their stay and go and visit them, or they’d won the lottery and would suddenly decide to go on a cruise in the Caribbean instead of coming to River’s Edge to ruin his summer.
But just then a Volvo estate pulled in and, before the car had even come to a standstill, the girl he had seen on the top of Brockbarrow shot out, followed by the rest of the family in their bright raincoats.
‘Thomas.’ It was all his aunt needed to say.
He stood like a rabbit caught in headlights, while Aunt Emily went
over to the new arrivals. The man was tall, with light-coloured hair and looked like the kind of outdoorsy type they always had staying in the summer. His wife looked tired and clung on to his arm. Aunt Emily had mentioned that she was recovering from an illness.
‘Welcome to River’s Edge,’ said Aunt Emily, taking Mrs Green’s tiny hand. ‘How was your journey?’
‘Terrible,’ said the man, smiling. He jerked a thumb towards the house. ‘Lovely place you’ve got here!’
Tom had stayed too long. He turned away and began the strenuous thirty-yard journey down to the river. He could hear them introducing themselves.
‘Hi, I’m Maggie and this is Joel.’
‘Lovely to meet you. You can call me Emily.’
He picked up the pace, his walking stick like a third leg, flailing beside him on the path.
‘. . . and that’s Thomas, my great-nephew.’
Tom could feel their eyes on his back, but he carried on, abandoning himself, in his hurry, to what was now his trademark gait: the whole-body droop to the right, followed by a convulsive shake with each step, like someone getting up from a chair with a bad case of pins and needles. There was the sound of scampering on the gravel behind him, then suddenly the wretched dog was at his feet, and he tripped over it and fell flat on his face into the only remaining puddle from the morning’s rain.
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