The Secret Key

by Lena Jones

  ‘Promise me something?’

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘Try not to get expelled tomorrow?’

  I roll my eyes. ‘I promise.’

  He grins. ‘Come on, then – you can walk me to the bus stop.’

  I’ve just finished liquidising a pile of vegetables when Dad walks into the kitchen, begrimed with mud and smelling of manure. I’d forgotten my tiredness in the excitement of making something new.

  ‘What on earth are you doing, Aggie?’

  ‘Making dinner,’ I say.

  ‘With all the green mush, I thought it might be some kind of science experiment,’ he laughs.

  I sigh – Dad can be soooo closed-minded sometimes. He isn’t a bad cook, but he isn’t a very good one, either. I often make dinner for the two of us, but it’s usually one of his favourites – something easy, like sausages and mash or beans on toast. Who can blame me for wanting to try something different for a change? I’d found a dog-eared copy of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire from a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, and then spent an evening trying to decode his instructions from the original French. Dad looks over at the wreckage, shaking his head, and trudges off to get clean.

  Dad – Rufus to everyone but me – has been a Royal Park warden since he left school at sixteen. He’s worked his way up to the position of head warden of Hyde Park, so we live in Groundskeeper’s Cottage. Still, even though Dad’s in charge, he refuses to let others do all the dirty work and is never happier than when he’s got his sleeves rolled up and is getting his hands dirty. He reappears in a fresh shirt, smelling strongly of coal-tar soap, which is an improvement from the manure. He looks over at the food I’m making, stroking his gingery-blond beard.

  ‘What … is it?’

  ‘Vegetable mousse, with fillets of trout, decked with prawns and chopped chervil.’

  ‘Looks quite fancy, love.’

  ‘Just try it – you’ll never know if you like it otherwise.’

  Dad shrugs and sits down.

  I’ve been saving up for weeks for the ingredients. Dad gives me pocket money in exchange for a couple of hours shovelling compost at the weekend so it’s been a hard earn. But it’s worth it – everyone should have a chance to try the better things in life, shouldn’t they? Dad reaches for his fork, staring at the plate. He searches for something diplomatic to say, and fails. ‘It’s not very English.’

  I smile.

  ‘Poirot says something like, “the English do not have a cuisine, they only have the food,”’ I recalled.

  He groans at the mention of my favourite detective. I go on about Hercule Poirot so much that Agatha Christie’s great detective is a bit of a sore spot for Dad.

  ‘You and those books, Agatha! Not everything that Poirot says is gospel, you know.’

  I ignore this last comment and plonk a plate of the fish and veg medley in front of him. He takes a fork of everything, and I do the same.

  ‘Bon appetit!’ I smile, and we eat together.

  Something is wrong. Something is very wrong.

  I look to Dad, and I’m impressed by how long he manages to keep a straight face.

  Something awful is happening to my taste buds. I can’t bring myself to swallow for a long moment, and then I force it down, gagging.

  ‘I may have … mistranslated.’

  Dad swallows, eyes watering.

  ‘Might I have a glass of water, please?’

  When the last of the mousse has been scraped into the bin, we go off to buy fish and chips. I decide not to paraphrase Poirot’s thoughts on fish and chips, that ‘when it is cold and dark and there is nothing else to eat, it is passable’. I don’t think Dad would be amused and, besides, I really like fish and chips.

  After carrying them back from the shop in their paper parcels, our stomachs rumbling, we eat in happy silence. I savour the crisp batter, the soft flakes of fish, the salty, comforting chips. For once, I have to admit that Poirot might have been wrong about something.

  While we eat, Dad asks about my day, but I don’t feel like talking about school and the CCs, or the headmaster, or about how I’d zoned out in chemistry class, so I ask about his instead.

  ‘So are the mixed borders doing well this year?’

  ‘Not bad,’ he grunts.

  I think of the book I’m reading at the moment.

  ‘And do you grow digitalis?’

  ‘If you mean foxgloves, then there are patches of them down by the Serpentine Bridge.’

  ‘What about aconitum?’ I eat a chip, not looking Dad in the eye.

  ‘Monkshood? You know a lot of Latin names … Yes, I think there’s some in the meadow, but I wouldn’t cultivate it. It’s good for the bees, though.’

  ‘Ah … what about belladonna?’

  ‘Belladonna …’ His face darkens, making a connection. ‘Foxglove, aconitum, belladonna … Agatha, are you only interested in poisonous plants?’

  I blush a little. Found out! Poisonous Plants of the British Isles is sitting in my school satchel as we speak.

  ‘I’m just curious.’ Deep breath.

  ‘I know that, love, I do. But I worry about you sometimes. I worry about this … morbid fascination. I worry that you’re not living in the real world.’

  I sigh – this is not a new discussion. Dad loves to talk about the REAL WORLD, as though it’s a place I’ve never been to. Dad worries that I’m a fantasist – that I’m only interested in books about violence and murder. He’s right, of course.

  ‘I’ll do the washing-up,’ I say, quickly changing the subject. Then I look over at the sieves, pans and countless bowls that I’ve used in my culinary disaster. Perhaps not.

  ‘My turn, Agatha,’ says Dad. ‘You get an early night – you look tired.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I hug him, smelling coal-tar soap and his ironed shirt, then run up the stairs to bed.

  When we’d first moved into Groundskeeper’s Cottage, I chose the attic for my bedroom. Mum had said it was the perfect room for me – somewhere high up, where I could be the lookout. Like a crow’s nest on a ship. I was only six then, and Mum had still been alive. Before that, we’d squeezed into a tiny flat in North London, and Dad had ridden his bike down to Hyde Park every day. He’d been a junior gardener when I’d been born, still learning how to do his job. The little flat was always full of green things – tomato plants on the windowsills, orchids in the bathroom among the bottles of shower gel and shampoo …

  The attic has a sloping ceiling and a skylight that is right above my bed so, on a clear night, I can see the stars. Sometimes I draw their positions on the glass with a white pen – Ursa Major, Orion, the Pleiades – and watch as they shift through the night.

  The floorboards are covered with a colourful rug to keep my toes warm on cold mornings. We don’t have central heating, and the house is draughty, but in mid-July it’s always warm. It’s been scorching today, so I go up on my tiptoes and open the skylight to let some cool air in. My clothes hang on two freestanding rails. Dad is saving to get me a proper wardrobe, but I quite like having my clothes on display.

  On one wall there’s a Breakfast at Tiffany’s poster with Audrey Hepburn posing in her black dress. Next to her is the model Lulu. There’s also a large photo of Agatha Christie hanging over my bed, which Liam gave me for my birthday. On the other is a map of London … Everything I need to look at.

  My room isn’t messy. At least, I don’t think it is, even if Dad disagrees. It’s simply that I have a lot of things, and not much room to fit them in. So the room is cluttered with vinyl records, with books, with a porcelain bust of Queen Victoria that I found in a skip. Every so often, Dad makes me clear it up.

  And so, I try to tidy now. But with so little space it just looks like the room has been stirred with a giant spoon.

  I take the heavy copy of Le Guide Culinaire and place it on my bookshelf, which takes up one wall of the room. I sigh – what a waste of time. What a waste of a day.

  I run my hand al
ong the spines of the green and gold-embossed editions – the mysteries of Poirot, Miss Marple, and Tommy and Tuppence – the complete works of Agatha Christie, who my mum named me after. She’d got me to read them because I liked solving puzzles, but said I should think about real puzzles, not just word searches and numbers. When I’d asked what she meant, she had said –

  ‘Everybody is a puzzle, Agatha. Everyone in the street has their own story, their own reasons for being the way they are, their own secrets. Those are the really important puzzles.’

  I feel hot tears prick the back of my eyes at the thought that she’s not actually here any more.

  ‘I got called in front of the headmaster today …’ I say out loud. ‘But it was OK – he just let me off with a warning.’ I continue, tidying up some clothes. I do this sometimes. Tell Mum about my day.

  I change from my school uniform into my pyjamas, hanging everything on the rails and placing my red beret in its box. What to wear tomorrow? I choose a silk scarf of Mum’s, a beautiful red floral Chinese one. I love pairing Mum’s old clothes with items I’ve picked up at jumble sales and charity shops, though some of them are too precious to wear out of the house.

  Next, I go over to my desk in the corner and unearth my laptop, which is buried under a pile of clothes. I switch it on and log in. People at school think I don’t use social media, but I do. I might read a paper copy of The Times instead of scrolling down my phone, and write my notes with a pen. But I’m more interested in technology than they’d know. You can find out so much about people by looking at what they put online. Of course, I don’t have a profile under my own name. No – online, my name is Felicity Lemon.

  Nobody seems to have noticed that Felicity isn’t real. Several people from school have accepted my friend requests, including all three of the CCs. None of them have realised that ‘Felicity Lemon’ is the name of Hercule Poirot’s secretary, or that my profile photo is a 1960s snap of French singer Françoise Hardy.

  I scroll through Felicity’s feed, which seems to be endless pictures of Sarah Rathbone, Ruth Masters and Brianna Pike. They must have flown out to somewhere in Europe for a mini-break over half-term. They pose on sunloungers, dangle their feet in a hotel swimming pool and sit on the prow of a boat, hair blowing behind them like a shampoo commercial. Despite myself, I feel a twinge of jealousy and put the lid down.

  Rummaging through my satchel, I take out the notebook that I started earlier in the day. I put it by my bed with my fountain pen, in case inspiration strikes in the night – that’s what a good detective does: they note down everything, because they never know what tiny detail might be the key to cracking a case.

  Most of my notebooks have a black cover, but some of them are red – these are the ones about Mum – all twenty-two of them. They have their own place on a high shelf. My notes are in-depth – from where she used to get her hair cut to who she mixed with at the neighbourhood allotments. Every little detail. I don’t want to forget a single thing.

  I look over at Mum’s picture in its frame on my bedside table. She’s balanced on her bike, half smiling, one foot on the ground. She’s wearing big sunglasses, a crêpe skirt, a floppy hat and a kind smile. There’s a stack of books strapped to the bike above the back wheel. The police had blamed the books for her losing control of her bike that day – but Mum always had a pile of books like that. I don’t believe that was the real cause of her accident. That’s not why Mum died. Something else had to be the reason.

  I climb into bed and pull the sheet over me, then take a last look at the photograph.

  A lump rises in my throat. ‘Night, Mum,’ I say, as I turn out the light.

  ‘Dad, will you stop letting Oliver walk all over the work surface? It’s unhygienic.’

  I’m trying to wash up the bowl I used for breakfast, but our cat is sitting by the sink and keeps batting my hand with his tail. He’s purring loudly at the fun new game he’s invented. I turn to look at Dad, who is hunched over a bowl at the table. He shrugs and shovels in another spoonful of cereal. He’s running late, as usual.

  ‘I can’t watch him all the time, Agatha.’

  Sighing, I scoop Oliver off the counter. He’s grey, and on the portly side from all the treats Dad feeds him. He causes so much trouble, but he has a special place in my heart. He’s middle-aged in cat years, and his main hobby is sitting – on the work surface in the kitchen, in front of the mirror in the hall or on the threadbare armchair that used to be Mum’s. I suppose he misses her too. When he isn’t sitting, he’s lying down.

  Oliver rubs his face up against my chin and I scratch the soft fur of his neck. I can feel his low, rumbling purr in my chest. I think back to the day I first met him. It was a rainy afternoon, and I was sitting by the fire, reading. Mum had come in through the front door with a cardboard box, which she brought over and set down in front of me.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Why don’t you find out?’ she said, smiling and shaking the raindrops from her hair.

  I opened the wet cardboard box. At first it seemed to be full of nothing but blankets. I looked at Mum, puzzled.

  ‘Keep searching – just be careful.’

  I pulled back the layers of blanket, realising that there was a sort of hollow in the middle of them, like a nest. And there – curled into itself and barely bigger than my fist – was a kitten. My eyes widened with surprise, and I didn’t dare touch the sleeping creature.

  ‘Go on – you can stroke him.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Yes, he’s a boy. You’ll have to think of a name.’

  I thought about this for a moment. ‘Why do I have to think of a name?’

  Mum laughed. ‘Because he’s yours.’

  ‘He’s … mine?’

  Something like a shiver passed through me as he opened two huge ink-black eyes and looked up at me.

  Then Mum had put her arms round me from behind and held me while I held Oliver. I closed my eyes.

  The memory was so clear – even though that kitten was fully grown now, Mum was still somewhere behind me, holding her arms round me. He might have been mine, but his heart always belonged to Mum.

  I put Oliver down on the tiles and clear my throat. As I finish my washing-up and dry my hands, Dad brings his empty bowl over to the sink.

  ‘Are you OK, love?’

  I nod and manage a smile. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘It’s just, you look a bit …’ He puts his head on one side.

  ‘… of a genius?’ I suggest, trying to deflect the attention from myself and clear the lump in my throat, but he doesn’t laugh.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Dad is more interested in things that grow in soil than things that live in houses, but sometimes he notices more than I expect.

  ‘I’m fine, Dad, really …’

  ‘Really?’ He puts a shovel-sized hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Yes, really, Dad. Now go – get to work before you’re late!’ I reach up on tiptoes and hug him. For Dad, actions make more sense than words. He softens.

  ‘Hold on,’ I say, ‘your collar’s all twisted.’ I sort out his polo shirt and he stands very still, like an obedient child.

  ‘Right – you’ll do,’ I say, giving him a kiss on the cheek. ‘Off you go.’

  ‘Have a good day, love.’

  Dad goes, and I rush back upstairs to finish getting ready. I brush my teeth and pull on my blazer, brushing my hair until my dark bob shines. I tie Mum’s red silk scarf round my neck like a lucky charm and, finally, put on my tortoiseshell sunglasses – perfect for observing people without them noticing. Next, I pack my satchel – notebook, magnifying glass, sample pots for evidence, fingerprint powder and my second-best lock-picking kit. (My best one has been locked in the headmaster’s shiny desk since yesterday afternoon.)

  Outside, the sun is bright. Dewdrops sparkle on the emerald-green lawns and the sun fades. It’s been hot today. I feel a swell of pride – the beautiful trees, the grass and flowerbeds, all lovingly
tended by Dad and his wardens. I step through the wrought-iron gate of Groundskeeper’s Cottage and close it behind me, taking my usual route along the Serpentine lake. I’m looking forward to my morning chat with JP, who lives in the park. JP isn’t supposed to live in the park – he’s homeless – but Dad pretends not to notice when he’s still there at night-time. Dad says he scares off the occasional graffiti artist. This morning, as I approach, I see JP sitting with his eyes closed, looking pale.

  ‘Hey, JP!’ I hurry towards him. I have a premonition that he will fall forward as I reach him, a knife sticking out of his back. He would murmur something as he fell into my arms – ‘Agatha, you must avenge me.’ Then I would …

  ‘Morning!’ JP calls brightly, his eyes flicking open.

  He’s not dead.

  ‘Were you comfortable last night?’ I ask.

  ‘Not too bad. I slept under the weeping tree in the Dell. Don’t tell your Dad, though.’

  ‘Did you make sure not to leave a trace?’

  ‘Not a fingerprint.’ He laughs and eyes my pockets hopefully. ‘Do you have anything to eat?’

  I pull out two pieces of toast, sandwiched together with butter and marmalade.

  ‘Thank you, my dear.’ He takes a large bite, then speaks through a mouthful. ‘Now, by the way …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t you have a school to go to?’

  I check my watch. It’s 8:37 already; school starts at 8:55. ‘Yup, I’d better run. Bye!’ I set off at a brisk walk.

  ‘Have a good day!’ he calls after me.

  I walk along the path. There aren’t many people around at this time, but I nod to an old lady as I pass her, and she smiles back. She’s walking fast, wearing a light tan coat and matching hat.

  As I pass under the canopy of beech and willow trees, I hear a roar ahead. Approaching me, far too quickly, is a motorbike. Motorbikes are banned from the park, the same as any vehicle. I feel cross, but I have no time to react as the bike shoots past me, down the footpath and out of sight. A moment later and I hear a screech of tyres, a loud thud, then nothing.