“I keep thinking about her, wandering around somewhere, upset and confused, and I feel so guilty. If anything happens to her…” His voice broke.
Miss Wren gave him a quick hug. “Don’t worry, Ian. She’ll turn up, I know she will. Would you like me to make some discreet enquiries at Holtech? See if anyone’s seen her hanging around there?”
“Thanks, Lucy,” said Dad, and you could hear the relief in his voice. “I really couldn’t face That Woman at the moment.”
When Miss Wren (I still couldn’t think of her as Lucy) had gone, Nan said to Dad, “I didn’t know you were friendly with any of the teachers, Ian.”
“I needed some help writing the program for Hamish,” he said. “An IT teacher seemed the obvious place to start.”
By now I was no longer interested in Dad’s love life. I was as worried as he was about Donna, and getting her safely back home was the only thing that mattered.
At five o’clock Miss Wren returned to report that nobody had seen Donna at Holtech. She was beginning to look as worried as Dad. By now it was almost dark, and the rain, which had been falling on and off all day, had turned into a steady downpour. The wind had got up too and was getting stronger by the minute, blowing flurries of rain against the windows. Dad shook his head. “Just listen to that!” he said. “We’ve got to find Donna before it turns into a gale. I’m going into town to look for her.”
“We can use my car,” Lucy said. Assuming I was going with them, I went for my coat, but Nan shook her head. “Not you Alex. You stay here in case Donna rings or comes home. I don’t want you disappearing too.” The three of them left hurriedly, throwing their coats on as they went.
After they’d left, I couldn’t sit still. I roamed restlessly from room to room. The wind whistled down the chimney in the sitting room, and through the window I could just make out the tree in the garden of the house opposite, which was bent almost horizontal by the force of the wind. When, after about twenty minutes, the phone started ringing, I prayed, Let it be Donna, please let it be Donna! I grabbed the receiver and shouted, “Hallo?”
“’Hello,” said a wheezy voice. “Is that Alex?”
It was Kath. Talk about bad timing. Why did she have to ring now, when finding Donna was far more important than finding Kiki?
“What do you want?” I asked impatiently.
“Oi!” she said, reproving me. “Where’s your manners gone? Ain’t you got no respect for your elders?”
I sighed. “Sorry. Things are a bit difficult at the moment. Could you ring back later?”
She snorted. “A bit difficult? I’ll say! I just been hearing the whole sorry tale from your sister.”
I gasped. “You’ve seen Donna? Where is she?”
“Never mind Donna. She’s fine. Don’t you want to know where that missing dog is?”
I decided the quickest way to find out where Donna was would be to humour Kath.
“OK. Tell me about Kiki.”
“Kiki? Is that her name? Pretty little thing, ain’t she?”
“You’ve seen her?”
“Oh, yes. You see, she’s been with me all along.”
It didn’t make any sense. “She wasn’t with you either time we met in the mall,” I said.
She laughed. “We fooled you, didn’t we, me and Rocky? I was afraid you’d guess.”
I was so worried about Donna that it was really difficult keeping my temper. “Guess what?” I said. I couldn’t keep the frustration out of my voice. Donna was missing, and all Kath could do was play games.
She seemed to sense my mood, and her manner changed. “All right, ducky. Here’s what happened, and you gotta believe me ’cos this is God’s own truth!”
The way she told it, it had all been an accident. The day Kiki went missing, Kath was pushing her old pram along the promenade, up the path to the mall and out the other side into the market square. She was wrapped in her own thoughts, not paying much attention to what was going on around her. She went to the churchyard, because there was a nice comfortable seat there where she could sit undisturbed for as long as she wanted. However, when she got there and sat down, she realised she had two dogs with her, not one.
“I reckon Kiki must have taken a shine to Rocky and just tagged along when we was walking up to the mall. Once we was inside, she wouldn’t hear anyone calling her. She wasn’t wearing a collar, and by the time they’d been chasing each other round that muddy graveyard for a bit, Kiki was so dirty, I thought she was a stray.”
“But Kath,” I said. “If you thought Kiki was a stray, why didn’t you take her to the dogs’ home?”
“Ah, well,” she said. “Rocky seemed very taken with Kiki, which was strange, because he don’t normally pay much attention to other dogs. I thought, it’s boring for him hanging around with me all day, I’ll give him a treat, let him have a playmate. I’d do anything for my Rocky, I would…” Her voice trembled a little.
I was still confused. “So where was Kiki the first time we saw you in the mall?” I asked.
“I been naughty, I admit it. Alex, you gotta promise me that if I tell you the truth you won’t report me to the RSPCA. If they took Rocky away from me, I don’t know what I’d do.”
She and Dad would make a good pair, I thought. Both of them were obsessed with secrecy. “OK,” I promised. “If you give me Kiki, I won’t tell anyone anything.”
“You’re a good boy!” she said. “The thing is, Alex, poor little Kiki’s led a sheltered life. She ain’t used to trotting round all day in the cold and wet, and sometimes she yaps like you wouldn’t believe. People were getting cross when I couldn’t shut her up. Once or twice I left both dogs with a mate of mine, but I couldn’t do that very often. That Saturday, the day we first met, I cadged a sleeping pill off one of the other dossers and I gave her half of it in her food. I reckoned half a pill wouldn’t do her no harm. After she fell asleep, I tucked her up in the pram like a baby, with a couple of bags on top so you couldn’t see her unless you looked real close. But she took so long waking up from her sleep that I thought I’d killed her. I didn’t dare risk it a second time. I know I shouldn’t of done it, but I only did it the once, Alex.”
No wonder she’d looked worried when Rocky stood up on his hind legs and tried to sniff inside the pram. I thought of all the time we’d wasted on Atlanta and Sergei, when Kiki had been right under our noses that day in the mall. Sherlock Holmes would have been ashamed of us.
I wondered why Kath had suddenly decided to own up. “Why did you wait so long to tell us?” I asked her.
“Can’t afford to keep her anymore,” she sighed. “Rocky eats whatever he can scrounge, but not Kiki – she’s picky about her food. You’ll be doing me a favour if you take her off my hands.”
She hadn’t said anything about the reward, so I decided not to mention it. “OK, I’ll come and pick up Kiki, but you’ve got to tell me where Donna is. Everybody’s out looking for her.”
Suddenly there was a lot of noise from Kath’s end of the line and I heard her say to someone “All right, all right!” I panicked. I couldn’t let her ring off before she’d answered my question. “Kath, are you there?” I shouted. At last she came back on the line. “Sorry, I gotta go. Meet me by the pier soon as you can.” The line went dead.
I punched the wall in frustration. It seemed that the only way to find Donna was to go and meet Kath. As I picked up the phone again to ring Nan and Dad and tell them to meet me at the pier, I noticed that, in the rush to get going, Nan had left her mobile on the table. All I could do was leave a note for Dad and Nan on the kitchen table saying where I’d gone, in case they returned before I did. Then I put on my sodden jacket and set off for the seafront.
An icy wind was gusting in off the sea, making it hard to stay upright, let alone run. Dad was right. The last time there had been a wind like that, it had turned into a gale overnight, and we’d woken up the next day to find fences down and broken roof tiles and dustbin lids lying in the road. It was t
he sort of night when nobody in their right mind would go out if they didn’t have urgent business.
The promenade, when I reached it, was deserted. There was a high tide, and huge waves were crashing against the base of the sea wall. Showers of spray came over the railings on my right and hit me in the face. Now I was angry with Donna as well as with Kath. Why did she have to choose a night like this to go missing?
When I reached the square in front of the pier-head I paused, searching for a figure that might be Kath. Many of the street lamps in the square had been vandalised, and it was difficult to see anything clearly in the murky light. She had to be there somewhere. I began to run towards the pier, splashing through giant puddles as I went. Maybe she’d taken shelter in the old observatory. As I drew level with the Portakabin where we’d heard the dog on Sunday, I saw a light shining inside. A second later the door swung open and a tall figure came out, almost cannoning into me. I turned to run off, but he was quicker. He grabbed my arm and swung me round to face him. I saw recognition in his eyes. “You!” he roared. “I want word with you!”
Before I could squirm out of his grasp, he’d pulled me into the Portakabin and slammed the door shut.
Chapter Twenty One: DESPERATE REMEDIES
Inside the Portakabin it was warm and dry, but I was trembling. Even if Sergei wasn’t the head of an international dog-napping gang, he was still twice my size and looking even meaner than the Pitbull in a bad mood.
He pushed me into a chair and bent down to put his face on a level with mine. “So. The little snooper,” he said. “Why you interested in my office, eh? You and that girl. What I got that you want?” His thick accent was hard to understand, but I could sense how angry he was.
“Look,” I said, desperate to calm him down. “We weren’t trying to break in. You’ve got it all wrong.”
He glared at me. “If stuff go missing from here, I get the blame. I lose my job. My wife and my little Tati go hungry, and is all your fault!”
As I stared at him, I noticed the logo on his sweatshirt: ‘ASHTON SECURITY’. He was a nightwatchman! Just my luck to run into the one nightwatchman in the whole of Holcombe Bay who had a grudge against me. What if he called the police and they discovered that I’d already been caught trespassing once that day? I’d be in deep, deep trouble.
That was when I really panicked. I started gabbling on about how we’d been looking for a missing dog and had heard noises from inside the Portakabin. I was so scared, I didn’t really know what I was saying, but it didn’t take long to realise I’d made another mistake. The minute he heard the word ‘dog’, Sergei went bananas. He grabbed the collar of my jacket and yanked me towards him, pushing his face into mine as he roared, “Dog? What you know about dog?” I couldn’t answer, because by this time he was strangling me with my own collar, and anyway, I had no idea at all what he was talking about. If he wasn’t a dog-napper, why was he so angry?
Suddenly there was a muffled bleep from somewhere under all his layers of clothing, and he loosened his grip on me just enough to dig in his pocket and find his mobile. “’Hallo?” he grunted. “Yes, sir… Yes, all is quiet… No, no problems. Goodnight, sir.”
Things were getting weirder and weirder. He’d had the chance to shop me and he hadn’t. Why? He switched off the mobile and had just stuck it back in his pocket when there was a loud knock on the door. Sergei cursed. “You stay there!” he said as he went to open the door. He needn’t have bothered. By that time I was so terrified, I felt as if my arms and legs were fused to the chair. A blast of icy air hit me as he opened the door, and I heard him say, “What now?”
Then a voice I recognised only too well shouted above the roar of the wind, “Sergei, you ain’t seen a young boy hanging round here, have you?”
“Come in, quick!” Sergei said, and a moment later the door banged shut again. I looked round and Kath caught sight of me. “Alex! What are you doing here? I been looking all over for you.”
Sergei stared at Kath. “You know him?”
“’Course I know him. He’s a friend of mine. He’s come to collect Kiki, take her off my hands.”
He frowned at her for a moment, then he gave a little shrug and turned to me. “Right. You keep quiet about dog, and I don’t report you to police. OK?”
“OK,” I said, though I hadn’t the faintest idea what he meant. Then, bit by bit, things started to fall into place. Sergei was the friend who Kath left Kiki with. Kiki must have been in the Portakabin with Rockerfeller on Saturday when, for the second time in a week, we’d just missed her. Sergei was afraid his boss would kick up if he discovered he had been keeping dogs in the Portakabin, and that was why he wanted me to keep my mouth shut.
“Go now! Both of you.” He waved us towards the door.
Kath turned back as we were about to go out of the door. “Thanks, Sergei,” she said. “I owe you.” Sergei nodded. I got the impression he couldn’t wait to get rid of us.
Outside in the wind and the rain, Kath propelled me in the direction of the pier. “Kiki and Rocky are in the old observatory!” she yelled. “With my friends. If they arrest us again, at least we’ll have a warm, dry cell to sleep in!”
I wasn’t really listening; there was only one thing I wanted to know. “Where’s Donna?” I shouted back.
“She’s there too. Been there all afternoon. Come on!”
I heaved a great sigh of relief that Donna was safe. At last I could relax. As we made our way towards the end of the pier, we had to fight to keep upright as the wind tried to blow us back the way we’d come, and we kept slipping and sliding on the wet planks underfoot. We were only halfway there when a girl appeared out of the rainy darkness ahead. I recognised her as one of the dossers I’d seen getting into the police car two days before. She had big, scared eyes in a chalk-white face, and her hand trembled as she tried to keep the hood of her anorak from blowing off her head.
Kath put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “What is it, luv?” she asked.
The girl shot a frightened glance at me. “You Donna’s brother?” she shouted.
I could barely hear her above the noise of the wind. I nodded. “Is she OK?”
The girl shook her head. “Come quick. She’s up on the platform by the telescope. I think she’s going to jump.”
Terror overwhelmed me, and for a moment I couldn’t move. This was what I’d feared all along, that Donna would do something desperate to pay Dad and Nan back for keeping us in the dark for so long. Then the girl shouted “Come on!” and started running towards the end of the pier. I plunged after her, leaving Kath to follow as fast as she could.
As we approached the observatory, I noticed a group of people huddled together to one side of it, staring at something I couldn’t see. I yelled at them to get out of the way, and they moved aside as I elbowed my way through. Then I saw Donna. She was sitting on the platform next to the telescope. There was only a low railing between her and the raging sea below. She was staring into the darkness beyond the end of the pier. If she lost her balance, if the railing gave way…
A wave of fear gripped me, and for a moment I stopped breathing. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Was she out of her mind? I wanted to call out to her, but I was scared that would startle her and make her lose her balance.
A man came and stood beside me. He had an old blanket round his shoulders and a woolly hat on his head, and he smelt of beer and cigarettes. “That your sister?” he said, jerking his head in Donna’s direction.
I nodded. “What’s she doing up there?” I asked him, and fear turned my voice into a croak.
“You tell me, pal. She was in a right state when she turned up here this afternoon, but Kath calmed her down and we thought she’d be OK. Then, next thing we knew, she was up there…”
“Let me speak to her,” I said. I moved slowly towards her until I was close enough for her to hear my voice over the sound of the wind and rain. Then I called her name. She turned her head towards me.
“Please come down from there, Donna! Everyone’s out looking for you. You’ve got to come home!”
“Leave me alone. Don’t come any nearer!” she shouted back.
I stepped back a few paces then, to show willing. “OK, OK. But why are you doing this, Donna? Is it because we had that argument earlier?” She shook her head. “Everything’s such a mess! Dad, Holtech, Diane… She could help him, I know she could, but Dad’s so pig-headed, he’ll never speak to her. He’d rather go on being miserable, and we’ll all go on being poor. I just can’t stand it anymore.” She was crying now, and as she lifted her hand from the railing to wipe away the tears, my heart lurched. She could lose her balance – but she didn’t. She put her hand back on the railing, and I breathed again.
What could I do? What could I say to get her down? I thought of Diane Fairchild sitting in her plush new office with her doting husband, awaiting the arrival of a perfect baby, and I saw exactly why both Donna and Dad hated her. Vivid images of our meeting with her (was it only this morning?) flashed in front of my eyes. And then I realised there was something I could do. In my pocket I still had Diane Fairchild’s business card with her home telephone number. It had to be worth a try.
“Listen!” I yelled. “If I can get Dad to speak to Diane Fairchild about Hamish, will you come down from there?”
“You’ll never do it. I won’t believe it, until I see them both standing where you are now, talking to each other.”
“OK!” I shouted. “You’re on! Just give me a little time to arrange it.”
I didn’t want to leave her there. I was terrified that if I turned my back for an instant, when I looked again, she’d be gone – dead, lost forever underneath the churning waves… But if I was going to keep my promise, I was going to have to make a very tricky phone call, and I couldn’t do that surrounded by a crowd of dossers and deafened by the roar of the storm.
Eye Spy Page 11