The Secret Key

by Lena Jones

  Anger flares like a flame in my chest. ‘How can you talk to me like that? After everything I just found out?’

  ‘Somebody has to.’

  ‘You are so arrogant,’ I shout. ‘You think you’re in charge of me? That you can just boss me around?’

  ‘I’m arrogant? You’re the super-genius detective – I’m just some dopey sidekick to you. Oh, Agatha, how fascinating! Oh, Agatha, you’re sooo clever!’

  ‘Oh, yeah – I’m such a golden girl. Agatha Oddball, Oddity, Odd Socks … I’m a really difficult act to follow, aren’t I?’ I feel hot tears prickle at the back of my eyes.

  ‘That’s not who you are, Agatha.’ Liam stops and takes a deep breath. We’re blocking a group of tourists, who navigate around us. ‘Those names have nothing to do with the real you. I don’t mean to be so angry. It’s just …’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I get it.’

  ‘Taxi home, then?’

  ‘Taxi home,’ I agree.

  In the cab, I’m dying to discuss the revelations about the Guild – and my mother – to see if Liam thinks the professor is trustworthy. But I don’t want to make him feel even worse, so we sit in silence. The taxi is soon depositing me at the gates to Hyde Park.

  ‘Take care,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, climbing out. I watch the taxi drive off. Liam’s face is blank at the window. For the first time I feel a rift open between us. The tears I’ve been holding back spill out. Dumb, I think to myself, wiping my cheeks.

  By the time I reach our cottage, I’ve stopped feeling so tearful, but I’m still miserable. Through the front door I call out to Dad, but there’s no answer. I don’t like the way the house echoes. I peer into the kitchen, where his algae samples are bubbling away, like a mad scientist’s lab. I hunt for Dad, the professor’s words ringing in my ears – Look after your father. He is too trusting.

  To my relief, I find Dad in the living room, fast asleep on the sofa, fully dressed and snoring loudly. Oliver is curled up on his lap, purring like a lawnmower. I don’t want to wake him – he looks exhausted.

  Apart from the ice lolly, I haven’t eaten since the Orangery. I rummage for some bread and cheese in the kitchen, and take the food and a small glass of water up to my bedroom. Dad has brought back a gallon bottle of water from the shops, but it cost him as much as a week’s shopping usually does.

  I sit on my bed and start to drift off.

  The film projector is in front of me again, shining memories on to my bedroom wall. I watch the film of my day for a long time, seeing myself on the London Eye, talking with Liam on the South Bank, being in the capsule … The images replay in front of me, but it doesn’t help me think. My mind flicks back, swapping today for a day seven years ago. I see Mum pottering around the kitchen, swaying a little in time to the radio, buttering slices of toast for my breakfast.

  Here is the quiet woman who introduced me to Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot and I’m grateful that I can still see her like this – that the images haven’t fled from my memory. And I know that the professor is telling me the truth about her. Mum might have been quiet, but she was anything but ordinary. I feel a bubble of excitement fizz up inside me. Mum. My mum. My totally amazing, kind, loving mum had been a secret agent.

  I’m running through the silent corridors of St Mary’s hospital. Turning left and right through the maze, I see figures standing in the shadows out of the corner of my eye. There are quick footsteps behind me. They are going to catch me, but I have to reach my destination first. The hospital is so dark. Finally, I push open the door to a room. This is the place I was searching for – Dad’s room. He’s in a hospital bed like the professor’s, but he’s unmoving, kept alive by machines. The door behind me opens …

  I wake gasping, sitting bolt upright, as though someone has been holding me underwater. I wait for my heart to slow. The bad dreams all blend together, but the fear they leave behind stays with me. I creep down to the first floor and put an ear to Dad’s door. I’d intended to wake him up after my snack and make sure he got into bed, but I must have dozed off myself. Thankfully, I see that he’s made it off the sofa and up to bed at some point, and is now snoring loudly. I resist the childish urge to wake him up.

  I’m torn. In my daydreams there are no consequences to solving a crime. You either get it wrong, or you get it right. But the real world isn’t like my dreams – there are risks at every turn.

  I have a quick breakfast of toast with marmalade and make up a buttered roll with cheese for JP. If JP is spying on us for some reason, I should pretend that I haven’t noticed. As the old saying goes – keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I make myself a small cup of peppermint tea, scrawl a note for Dad and prop it in front of the toaster –

  Off to visit Mum.

  Dad will know what I mean.

  In the park, JP is nowhere to be seen. I hold the roll in my hand, as though it might summon him from his hiding place. Curious, I check his usual haunts – an oak tree near the lake, a bench surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and the railings by a patch of swaying poppies. Finally, I go to see if he’s in the hollow of the famous upside-down tree. A huge weeping beech, the upside-down tree’s branches hang down to the ground, making a sort of cave inside.

  I crouch down to a gap in the branches and crawl into the darkened space. The air is oven-warm and smells of dry earth. This is a good place to hide in a rainstorm, for a while at least, until the rain bleeds through the canopy. There is nobody in here and I’m about to crawl back out when I glimpse a dark-red object among the roots of the ancient tree. It’s a notebook. Crawling closer, I tug on the notebook, which comes free with a dusting of soil. There’s a ballpoint pen stuck in the spiral binding. I look around, but I’m alone.

  Only the first page of the notebook has anything on it.

  22:43 – Arrived at house.

  23:07 – Left house.

  02:00 – Cutting flowers.

  My heart speeds up. These notes are about me. Or, at least, about Dad and his mysterious visitor. The first two timings are obvious to me – this was when Davenport had turned up at our house and when he had left. The third time is less clear, but the note must refer to the person who had cut all the flowers off the clematis under my window.

  Who could this notebook belong to? If it’s JP’s, then is he spying on us, and, if so, who for? Was JP the person who had cut all the flowers? Whatever the truth, I’m creeped out by the thought of someone watching our house.

  I close the notebook, replace it in the root hollow, and crawl out again.

  It takes me about half an hour’s walk before the black metal railings of the cemetery come into view, with the two red phone boxes like sentries on either side of the gates. I’m hot and thirsty, but I’m on a mission.

  There are a lot of famous people buried in Brompton Cemetery – and Mum. I think Mum would have liked the thought of being buried alongside the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, opera singers and boxers, the inventor of the Christmas card and Native Americans from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.

  Mum’s grave is small and discreet. I’m sure that to anyone else it would look plain, like it doesn’t belong to a person at all, but only a name. Even I have to look at it carefully, almost squint, until I can picture her in her tortoiseshell glasses, and smell the fruit cakes that she baked each week. Then it isn’t a grey slab of stone any more, but a dusty grey window, to which I can press my face and glimpse her reading a book or dancing around the kitchen with the radio on, in another world altogether.

  I sit down on the cool stone like I’m sitting on the edge of someone’s bed.

  ‘Hey, Mum …’ I start, feeling lost for words. It might seem strange to some people, talking to someone who can’t talk back. But Dad always says that Mum was a good listener, so I don’t think she would mind.

  ‘Sorry I haven’t been for a while; it’s been a strange week. Oh, but I did bring you this …’

  I take a crime novel ou
t of my bag that I’d picked up in a charity shop on the way, and place it on the stone. The one I left last time is still there, so I put that back in my bag. Sometimes they are soaked with rain, and sometimes they are gone altogether, but it feels more right to me than bringing flowers.

  I sit for a minute in silence, not thinking about anything much. Then, when I feel ready, I start to talk about everything that has happened. I talk about the hit-and-run, Professor D’Oliveira and the strange tattoo. I talk about the faceless man who attacked me, and the red slime that’s spreading all over London. I talk about Brianna, Liam and the professor warning me not to get involved. And, of course, I talk about the key – the present that she left me, and which I’ve finally found.

  ‘I knew you had a secret, Mum … I just knew it.’

  I’m talking and, out of nowhere, I start to cry. Maybe it’s because talking about everything makes it seem more real. Maybe it’s because I start to remember how scared I was when I was attacked. But mostly I think it’s because I miss my mum.

  As I cry, and the tears fall on the dusty stone, I feel a sinking tiredness come over me. The world turns sideways, until I’m resting my head on the grave, which seems as comfortable as my bed at home.

  ‘You shouldn’t be scared, you know.’ She brushes my hair with her hand. My face is buried in the pillow so I can’t see her.

  ‘I just … I feel like this is what I’m supposed to do.’ I sniff. The pillow smells of her perfume – a scent I’d almost forgotten.

  ‘But …?’ She coaxes.

  ‘But … but I don’t want anyone to get hurt.’

  She sighs, and for the first time she sounds sad. ‘Oh, sweetie, people always get hurt. That’s the way life is. But to not live life to the full … Well, that’s worse, I think.’

  Her hand is soft, and my shoulders hunch up, like the feeling you get when you know you’ve got nothing left to cry. I raise my head from the pillow to look at her.

  ‘Thanks, Mum …’

  I look around me but no one is there. I’m in the cemetery, and the grave is a grave, not a bed. The stone is still wet with my tears. I sit up and wipe my eyes. Something has changed, and it takes me a moment to realise what it is. The heavy weight in my heart has lifted.

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ I repeat.

  ‘Morning, love.’ Dad shuffles into the kitchen, yawning and stretching. It’s Monday and already I feel like a different person from the day before. ‘You making breakfast?’ he asks.

  I nod and grin. ‘I thought we could both use it.’

  I take the frying pan off the stove and divide the eggs, sausages and mushrooms between the two plates. The toast pops up on cue. I’ve begun to discover that, in times of stress, the best thing I can do is keep busy. Being still for just a moment feels like a strange paralysis. Dad sinks into a chair, sighing.

  ‘Smells great.’

  I present the plate of food and coffee, which has used up the last of our fresh water. Dad eats quietly, while I alternate between bites of my breakfast and cleaning up the kitchen as best I can without water.

  ‘Don’t you want to sit while you eat?’ he asks at last.

  ‘Just … tidying,’ I say. ‘Don’t want to get in the way of your experiments.’ I try to sound as cheery as possible, but only get another sigh from Dad.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about them. I’ll be chucking the lot down the sink today anyway.’

  ‘Oh?’ I am surprised. ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  Dad shrugs and looks despondent. ‘Happened? Take a look – they’ve all died, that’s what.’

  I peer in at them over the counter. The algae are all shrivelled up to a tiny mass. ‘Isn’t that a good thing?’ I say.

  ‘No – I was trying to keep the algae alive, in captivity, to find out what it eats. If I can find that out, I’d know how it’s growing underground, in the ruddy dark!’ Dad gets up and takes the lid off a blacked-out fish tank. I go over to join him and peer in. It’s full of brown sludge.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘This is what the algae look like when they run out of energy – the stuff in the Serpentine is going the same way.’

  I poke the sludge with a spoon, making sure it’s dead. It smells gross like old rotten eggs.

  ‘So it doesn’t feed on sunlight, or other plants, or animals … How can it still be growing and coming up through people’s pipes?’

  Dad slumps back into his chair with a grunt. ‘That’s exactly what I’d like to know. I’ll leave science to the scientists from now on.’

  We get ourselves clean as best we can, using wet wipes, and I hurry off to school.

  As I walk down Kensington Road, chaos is all around me. A line of police cars and ambulances speed past, sirens blaring. A convoy of tankers and Green Goddess fire engines head in the other direction, bearing water into the dried-up city. But no quantity of water is going to be enough – the biggest convoy in the world can’t replace the millions of miles of pipe that are now clogged with slime.

  A crowd is marching towards Parliament Square, people with placards and megaphones, shouting and blowing whistles. They’re calling for more to be done about the water shortage, and for controls to be put on the price of bottled water.

  From a side street I can see people running, boxes under their arms. They’ve clearly looted them and are being chased by police officers. Looking closer, I can see the writing printed on the cardboard – not televisions or computers, but bottles of mineral water. It’s a really desperate situation that we’re in. I look down at the pavement and walk on. There’s a tension in the air, you can really feel it, and I almost jump out of my skin when someone calls my name.

  ‘Agatha! Hang on.’

  I turn – it’s Brianna Pike. What’s she doing here? She’s sprinting the short distance to me, hair streaming behind her like the ears on a golden retriever. She’s wearing a blue jacket instead of her school blazer, and smiles in welcome. But I’m not ready to forgive her silence in the park.

  ‘Hey …’ I say slowly.

  If she notices my coldness, she doesn’t show it.

  ‘Hey. Mind if I walk with you? Things are kind of crazy at the moment.’

  ‘Sure.’ I’m not sure if she means that London is crazy, or that Brianna Pike walking to school with Agatha Oddlow is crazy. ‘Don’t you normally get a lift?’ I ask.

  She shrugs. ‘Couldn’t drag my brother out of bed this morning to drive me, and my parents are still away.’

  ‘Doesn’t your brother work?’

  ‘Not for much longer, if he keeps refusing to get up. Dad got him a trainee job with our uncle – something to do with –’ she wrinkles her nose, as if in thought – ‘diamonds? Or gold? I don’t know. But Sebastian’s meant to be in work at, like, nine in the morning, and he keeps sleeping through his alarm. He is so going to get fired.’

  ‘Won’t your dad go mad at that?’

  She rolls her eyes and flicks back her honey-coloured hair. ‘Totally. Mummy and Daddy call us every night, but Sebastian just pretends he’s going into the office on time. I don’t know how he thinks he’ll get away with it.’

  She looks sideways at me, and then asks a question that takes me by surprise –

  ‘Anyway, what are you reading at the moment? I’m just finishing this book about unsolved London murders from the 1920s and 30s …’

  ‘Hey, I’ve read that book! It’s got the stabbing of the acrobat, Martial Chevalier, in Piccadilly, right?’

  ‘Exactly! And the case of the unidentified body parts found at Waterloo Station.’ With her long strides, Brianna is walking slightly ahead of me. Now, she stops and turns to face me and I stop quickly. ‘So what age were you when you first got interested in investigating?’

  I shrug. ‘I don’t know. Maybe six or seven.’

  ‘Six or seven?’ She shakes her head and goes back to walking. ‘So I’ve got a lot of catching up to do! I didn’t start till I was eleven. Eleven!’

  I couldn’t believ
e what I was hearing. Brianna? By the time we’re nearing St Regis, I’ve forgotten all about my bad feelings towards her. We come to a halt just short of the school gates.

  ‘Well, uh, I’m just going to stop here and check my make-up,’ she says.

  I hesitate, about to offer to wait, then I realise what’s just happened – it’s fine to talk to me out of school, but Brianna doesn’t want to be seen with me once we’re inside. I raise an eyebrow. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘What?’

  I shake my head. ‘Whatever. See you around, maybe.’

  Again, she seems to miss my tone. ‘That would be cool.’ She smiles, pulling out a compact and dabbing her nose.

  I shrug and walk away from her. As I make my way into the playground, I see bottles of water being handed out by men and women wearing branded uniforms. The words ‘Alpha Aqua’ are emblazoned on their aprons. Of course, there’s no crisis so bad that someone isn’t making money out of it. I see Liam in the crowd and wave to him.

  He looks away.

  What’s going on? Liam has never ignored me before. Whenever I’ve investigated things before, Liam has encouraged me. Now, I’m trying to solve a mystery much bigger than last year’s ‘Who stole Bernie Sipowicz’s lunch money?’ and Liam seems to be getting cold feet. Why can’t he trust me to look after myself?

  ‘Hey, Oddlow!’ A voice shouts over the crowd. I can tell it’s Ruth Masters, without even so much as looking round. ‘You look like you haven’t showered in weeks. Nothing new there, though, is there?’

  Everyone within earshot laughs. I feel a flush of anger, but pretend not to have heard. St Regis students look after themselves a lot better than people on the street but even so, the people I saw on my walk to school looked as grimy and thirsty as me. They were quiet and careful not to use more energy than they had to.

  ‘Agatha!’ A familiar voice speaks behind me. I spin round, ready for another insult. It’s Brianna again. But she isn’t in CC mode this time – her smile is friendly, not mocking.

  I still haven’t quite forgiven her for stopping just outside the school gates. ‘What is it, Brianna?’ I say.