Chapter Twenty-six
Jack followed my frozen stare. He shifted closer to see what I was looking at, and leaned into my exact line of vision. I could feel his breath on my cheek, ever so slightly, and a small movement sent the hairs of his forearms whispering across my skin.
I swallowed.
I felt hotter than ever.
Focus, Tallulah! I scolded.
‘Was that file like that before?’ whispered Jack.
I shook my head.
‘Will he notice it?’
I nodded my head.
‘This could be bad.’
For once I agreed with him. Should I dash out and fix it? Would there be time? As if sensing my thoughts, Jack mouthed no at me. Not worth the risk.
I was about to argue when there was a sound from the door, then the hiss of it opening.
‘. . . cost millions to build. Regulated temperatures, the lot,’ Mike was saying to someone.
Jack swivelled his camera slowly and carefully and lowered his eye to the viewer. Lifting the boom, I leaned into the stack to get the best possible view. Stinky Mike Burdon and Harry Harrow, big cahuna of Harrow Construction, were in the room. The door swung shut behind them.
‘I know all that,’ growled Harrow. ‘I built it ten years ago, remember?’
Even though Mike was the taller man, Harrow’s pit-bull stature, his thatch of sandy hair, those little miss-nothing eyes rendered him somehow more malevolently powerful.
Mike laughed nervously. ‘You’ve had some interesting projects, Mr Harrow.’ He walked over to the table in the central area, and I felt relief wash over me. It was all going to be fine. They were perfectly positioned for us to catch every word.
‘Nothing as interesting as Coven’s Quarter.’
Mike was walking over to the book stack opposite us, but he stopped and turned to face Harrow. ‘Coven’s Quarter is just going to be turned into townhouses, though.’
‘Luxury townhouses. And once Cluny’s Crematorium sells out to me, I’ll have the whole of that wasted forest space to build on. It’s gonna be the biggest development outside the university.’
‘Ah. Yes. Mabel mentioned that Cluny owned the northwest area.’
Harrow laughed. ‘She told me first. Did you think you’d use that info to squeeze even more out of me? That’s what got me into this tidy little project – her telling me that historical documents show that Cluny owns the mountain from the crematorium all the way to the west side.’
Mike went red. ‘She should be reporting directly to me.’
Harrow laughed again, and pulled out a chair. ‘Handy, innit? Having a little historical mole like her around. Cluny doesn’t know what he’s got, obviously. There was once a deed for the Coven’s patch too, but that’s been missing for so many centuries it’s presumed common land now.’
Clearing his throat, Mike said, ‘You won’t get planning for a development that size. It would change all of Hambledon.’
‘Hambledon needs to change. Once the new rail line is in, thirty minutes to the city, this will be just another happening place on the commuter belt.’
‘New rail line?’
‘Yes, Mr Burdon. I have a reliable source – the mayor got a tidy payment from me for that titbit. Not even the councillors know about the new rail line yet.’
‘I –’ Mike took a step towards the developer, but Harrow wagged his forefinger and leaned back in his chair.
‘Nuh-uh uh-uh, Mr Burdon. You’ve done well here too. Ten grand is a handsome price for the Coven’s Quarter documents.’
‘Not in the light of all you’re talking about.’
‘Now don’t get greedy. Remember that even if the documents were presented on Monday, my friends in the council would refute their significance. But I don’t like to rely on others too much. I’d rather they just weren’t an issue to begin with. Now, hand them over, please.’
My eyes slid to Jack’s, widening in panic. No! That couldn’t be true! I thought about Mr Kadinski’s video evidence. The attack on him. They wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to shut him up if that were true, surely.
‘Why do you want the documents if you have contacts in the council you can trust?’ Mike’s voice was whiny now. ‘Why didn’t you just have me shred them?’
‘Well now. I like to control such, uh, vital information myself. I wouldn’t want certain destroyed documents suddenly turning up on Monday. It could cause delays when my bulldozers are ready to move in. Expensive delays.’
‘But –’
‘Besides, I think I’m going to hang on to these papers. A miraculous reappearance of them once the complex is built will add something priceless to the townhouses. I can see the fancy brochures now: a truly magical home, sited on Britain’s earliest . . . I can’t remember it all exactly; it’s in those documents you’re just not handing over.’ Harrow suddenly stood and Mike took a step back, turning abruptly to the stack he’d been moving towards earlier.
‘They’re right he– Oh! Tha–’
‘What is it?’ Harrow’s fists bunched.
‘It looks like one of the files has been moved.’ Mike rubbed at his forehead, perplexed.
‘What does that mean? Is there a problem?’ Harrow began walking over to Mike. ‘I want that paperwork!’ he hissed.
I felt myself stop breathing.
‘It certainly is a problem.’ Mike put his hands on his hips and looked around as if expecting to see a hoard of file-tamperers with his x-ray eyes.
My heart stopped and I took a tiny step towards Jack, though every cell in my brain was screaming at me to stay very, very still. The silence was so absolute that for a moment I felt claustrophobic, felt how far under the ground we were, how windowless the space was. Everything seemed to be rushing in towards me. All the walls and shelves and even the great height of the ceiling seemed to close in. I thought my legs were about to give way when Jack, eyes still forward behind the camera, reached out and held on to my wrist for a second. It brought me back to earth, but my limbs were still a pile of scaredy-ass jelly.
Mike stooped and ran his finger along the files.
‘Oh, that’s fine,’ he said. ‘Must’ve been me. This is the box the documents are in.’
What?
How typical! I was a total cretin. I’d pulled the file to mark the spot to start checking from again, and had gone on to the next without checking it and pushing it back – it had to be that one, didn’t it?
Mike opened the box file and removed a very old leather folder, which he placed carefully on the table. He opened it reverently and pointed out the text on the first page. ‘It’s quite hard to read. Written with a quill around AD 800, and roughly translated from Old English it means: Keep this place, for it is sacred. Have respect for all its energy.’ He turned another page. ‘There’s weight to the argument for “energy” meaning “magic”, but that’s the fanciful interpretation.’
Harrow stepped towards Mike, and though Mike was one of my least-liked people in the world I winced at the twinge of menace I felt in the air.
‘Just give me the damn folder,’ Harrow hissed, all the conviviality of his previous patter gone. ‘I should have had this a week ago!’ He reached over and snatched it up, pressing it close to his chest.
Stinky Mike frowned. ‘I’ve not caused the delay,’ he said, sounding put out. ‘There was the problem with payment . . . and I told the mayor to explain to you that there was a history tour last week. Campus Security was here. I couldn’t just walk out with some of the most valuable documents this institution holds. And everything’s been on high alert since then. The best I could do was hide them here till it was safe to get them out.’
Harrow shifted uneasily. ‘And you’re sure there’s no security today?’
‘Very,’ replied Mike. ‘Everyone has assumed the documents are elsewhere now, and the library is closed for the weekend. Anne trusts me in here on my own.’
My arms, holding the boom at shoulder height, were start
ing to hurt. I rested my clenched hands ever so carefully on the files in front of me, making sure the boom still stood proud, picking up all the incriminating conversation.
As I took the weight off, a loud crrrcrrcccrr noise crackled into the air. Aghast, I lifted my hands back up. The sound came again. It hadn’t been my clumsiness, but Sergeant Trenchard’s radio, I realised, as yet another burst of transmission echoed across the room.
Mike and Harrow froze to the spot, staring in panic at each other, and then Harrow pulled out a gun and backed into the stack Jack and I were hiding behind. Suddenly we were faced with the rear of his head, thirty centimetres from our noses on the other side of the box files, as he scanned the room in front of him. I could see every shiny black detail of that gun and my skin prickled with a fear so cold I couldn’t move. Then adrenalin flooded into every vein and suddenly I saw that it wasn’t me that was shaking.
It was Harry Harrow.
With that gleaming barrel pointing this way and that, at last he cried, ‘I can see you, whoever you are, behind those shelves! Come out or I’ll shoot!’
As Sergeant Hilda Trenchard came into view slowly, her hands up in the air, I held my breath. ‘A police team outside are coming down, Harrow,’ she said, still walking towards him. ‘And you’d do well to turn yourself in with dignity. You’re not going to gain anything by doing something stupid to me.’
‘We’ll see about that!’ hissed Harrow, and he cocked his gun.
Mum says only someone with scant regard for the value of historical documents could do what I did then, but I disagree. I go with Mr Kadinski’s verdict that I am a brave and wonderful human being. Though privately I know it was the look in Sergeant T’s eyes, changing from confidence to sudden uncertainty, that triggered the tae kwon do kick Carrie taught me last year – lightning fast at knee level – perfect for the job. I smashed the document boxes from my side right through to the next stack and caught Harrow just behind both knees, sending him thudding to the ground.
Sergeant T was on him in an instant. In the same moment, the door to the room hissed open and six more officers flooded in, guns up and ready to shoot.
I was about to jump up and down with wild excitement now that Harrow and Mike were on the ground with revolvers up their nostrils, but Jack hissed, ‘Stay with me, keep the sound at shoulder height,’ and started moving in on the action, camera still running.
He got everything on tape. The handcuffing, Mum retrieving the documents, Sergeant T authorising the arrest of the mayor of Hambledon and his stick-insect sister, Tweedy Mabel. Even Harrow hissing ‘No comment’ between gritted teeth to Jack’s questions.
When the fingerprint guys arrived, Sergeant T asked everyone to reconvene in the staffroom upstairs for a debrief. Mum started ushering everyone up the stairs, and at last Jack lowered the camera.
‘Thanks,’ he said with a grin. He took the sound boom from me, checked all his settings and began packing equipment into bags.
‘You need a hand with anything?’ I asked awkwardly.
He glanced up at me and flashed a quick smile, politely. ‘No thank you, Tallulah,’ and shouldered all of the bags in one go, moving out of the room in front of me.
The stairwell that had been so silent on the way down was filled with laughter and joking as we headed upstairs. I glanced up at everyone ahead of me as natural light flooded in at the first ground-floor window and, seeing Mona and Arnold squashed side by side in the narrow space, had to swallow a mega lump in my throat. They looked so in love. Mum was on her mobile talking to Dad, and Mr K was discussing combat drills with Jack. I felt absolutely exhausted, and awfully . . . alone.
In the staffroom, Mona and Arns got the couch. They were well behaved (I’m guessing they had to be with Arns’s mum fully armed) but the long lustful looks at each other left me more nauseous than ever. I flopped into an armchair to the right of them, figuring if I were just at their side I wouldn’t have to look at them. I kicked my feet up on a low table, stretched my arms out on the armrests and closed my eyes. A minute later I felt the table shift under my feet, and peeked out under my heavy eyelids. Mr K had settled in a matching chair opposite me, his feet right next to my own. I gave him a little finger wave and he winked back. Someone turned a radio on and a soppy song crooned over the airwaves. Mona giggled and I heard Arns’s low tones, making her laugh a little louder.
Oh, geez.
Please. Let this day end.
One by one we had to go into the next room for a debrief with Sergeant T’s boss, who didn’t look too happy to be called out on a Saturday.
Jack was the first to be summoned, and when eventually he sauntered back to the staffroom he threw himself into a chintz-covered armchair, pulled a laptop from one of the bags and began tapping away at the keyboard like a demented person, his dark hair falling forward, even darker stubble shadowing his jaw.
I was the last to be called. I gave my account of events to Sergeant Trenchard, her boss and another officer whom I recognised from the fire last night.
‘Well done, Tallulah,’ said Sergeant Trenchard. ‘It looks like you played a big part in saving this town’s heritage site.’
I shrugged. ‘It was Mr Kadinski, really,’ I said. ‘He filled in all the gaps.’
‘His video footage will prove useful in his assault charge against Harrow Construction, and in the public case too,’ said Sergeant T. ‘I just wonder why it wasn’t prioritised immediately.’ Her eyes drifted to her boss and then back to me. ‘Also, young lady . . .’
Uh-oh, I thought. What have I done now?
‘. . . I want to say how grateful I am for your superagent moves in the book stacks.’ Her eyes twinkled and I grinned. ‘Harry Harrow was about to do something stupid and you saved my bacon.’
‘Oh . . . u-um,’ I stammered.
‘Thank you, Tallulah,’ said Sergeant T, and she held out her hand, though I could tell she would have hugged me if her colleagues hadn’t been there.
I shook it solemnly.
‘Well, we’re all finished up here now,’ she said. ‘Would you let everyone know they’re free to go?’
‘Sure,’ I said, turning to leave.
‘Oh, and happy birthday, Tallulah,’ she concluded, glancing at the information I’d given her. ‘I’m sorry I can’t be there for any celebrations. Got to get back to the station.’ She stood suddenly and patted me on the shoulder with another big softy grin.
Trudging back to the staffroom, I soon felt deflated and very sorry for myself. My first birthday greeting of the day and it comes from a police officer taking down my particulars. Any celebrations would be strictly lonesome ones, though I suspected Dad might have remembered.
Maybe not: twenty-five old people at home and an impaired memory, like thinking he and Mum had been married for an extra year.
I grinned. Maybe I could tell him I was eighteen and able to drive Oscar on my own. So what if everyone knew I was strangely jinxed, with a no-boy perimeter a mile long around me. It would all be negligible in the light of racing Oscar up Port Albert Road all the way to the ocean. With my savings and half of Pen’s winnings I could afford to buy a new head gasket, then I just had to put the engine block back in and voilà!
I was still smiling at my ridiculous fantasy when I pushed open the staffroom door.
Yowzer!
Instinctively, I dropped to my knees, shielding my head from a chaotic bombardment.
A gazillion party poppers, blow-out tooters and people yelling SURPRISE! was absolutely the very best birthday party I could have hoped for. Dad was presiding at the coffee table, holding a very pink heart-shaped balloon with 16! on it (damn – finally it’s official) and wielding a massive knife over a tower of cake. And a good thing there was a tower of a cake because the entire octo-genarian refugee camp had come along to wish me happy birthday too.
‘Rent a wrinkly crowd,’ declared Pen, gesturing at the room. ‘Because you have no friends in Hambledon –’
‘At the m
oment,’ I interjected.
She ignored me. ‘Don’t think the ancients want to pat you on the back or anything – they’re only here for the sugar high.’
‘Must be hard coming down from the caffeine,’ I noted.
Dad came and tied the 16! balloon round my wrist. ‘I’m so proud of my girls,’ he said, and pulled us to him in a painful hug. We both groaned. ‘I am!’ he insisted.
He wandered off muttering about song lyrics and I said, ‘Give me some space, Pen, or I’ll spill the beans on why you wanted my bedroom. Seducing Fat Angus! Ew!’
‘Don’t start on that again, Tallulah,’ muttered Pen. ‘Don’t you get it? I don’t believe in sex before marriage!’ Mrs Capone burst out laughing as she passed by, and clapped my sister on the back.
Pen threw me a huffy stare and flounced off to cut herself another slice of cake.
I didn’t have much time to look around because the lovely oldies made sure I was bombarded with talk and chatter, but, glancing over at the chintz armchair by the coffee machine early in proceedings, I noticed it was empty, and all the camera bags gone.
‘I see your brother escaped the mayhem,’ I said to Mona a little later through a mouthful of cake. She was holding a saucer with a minuscule wedge on it, carefully cutting off the icing and eating the sponge slowly with a teaspoon.
‘Mm,’ she replied, perhaps reluctant to talk with her mouth not quite empty.
‘Jack took the fen raft spider to some guy in the zoo department. A couple of professors are meeting there right now.’ Arns took a sip from a small cup. I noticed with alarm that he was back on the espresso. ‘Nobody can believe you found it behind your bathtub. It’s supposed to live near water, you know.’
‘Yeah, my bathtub’s very far from H2O,’ I said, then in a stage whisper to Mona, ‘I don’t like to wash.’
Arns rolled his eyes. ‘Funny ha ha. Keep that up and you’ll be a Lonely Only for a loooong time.’
I stuffed the rest of the cake on my serviette into my mouth to stop myself from ranting a reply. My mouth was so full I could barely chew.
‘Ignore her,’ said Arns to Mona. ‘She’s trying to shock us with her heathen ways.’
Kisses for Lula Page 23