The Secret Key

by Lena Jones

  ‘Do you like my labyrinth? It’s great for hunting parties. You can set your prey loose and, however fast they run, they don’t stand a chance.’ This time his voice is posh again, jocular – and I realise this time whose voice it is – it’s the voice of Davenport, the man who said he was from the Environment Agency, who visited Dad.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s game over, little girl,’ he says. But this time he says it in a different voice – another voice I know – with a thick Glaswegian accent.

  And suddenly I make the connection – the man outside the RGS, Davenport, Patrick Maxwell – they are all the same person. And that person is completely nutso.

  The three of us – Brianna, Liam and I – step closer together, huddled in silence. Brianna seems shaky, and Liam and I have to support her between us. Maxwell starts to chuckle as he watches us. It starts as nothing more than a giggle, then builds to rolling, crazed laughter.

  ‘It was just a daydream I had one day,’ Maxwell goes on in a different voice – the drawl of the Deep South of America this time. He might be crazy, but I have to admire his impressions. ‘I sure am impulsive like that. But that’s the nice thing about havin’ money and power over people, ain’t it? You can do whatever you darn well please.’ He smiles thinly and goes back to his Scottish accent: ‘But you, Agatha Oddlow – I can’t control you; you’ve made that much clear. And there’s only one future for people I cannot control.’

  He cocks the gun.

  ‘Whoa!’ Brianna screams, her voice strangled. ‘Put the gun down.’

  I know I should be thinking of a way out, but I can’t take my eyes off the gun.

  It’s an expensive gun – elegant, even beautiful to look at. But that won’t make much difference when it blows the little grey cells out of my skull.

  Liam’s hand reaches round Brianna to take mine, and I don’t shrug it away.

  ‘Stand where I tell you, the three of you,’ Maxwell says, gesturing with the gun. ‘You on the left, Miss Pike –’ he points to Brianna – ‘then Mr Lau in the middle. I look forward to shooting you last, Miss Oddlow.’ He smiles brightly, as though he’s handing out presents.

  With little choice, we do as he says, and for a moment he lets the silver revolver drop to his side, knowing that he has us where he wants us.

  ‘Don’t you just look delightful? I wish I could take a picture …’

  Maxwell is grinning evilly, and is raising the gun again when Liam lets go of my hand. He dashes forward, taking Maxwell by surprise, and barrels head-first into his stomach. Maxwell is knocked on to his back, winded. The gun flies from his hand.

  ‘Run!’ Liam yells, scrambling to his feet.

  He doesn’t need to tell us twice. Brianna has recovered quickly from her ordeal and is already at the edge of the clearing, where she stoops to pick up the fallen gun. I follow close behind, with Liam at my elbow. Maxwell must have had a second gun in his pocket, because a moment later, two shots whizz past my ear, striking the crates in front of us. They burst with a cascade of sugar. We skid on the slippery granules, but keep running. We race round the corner, out of his line of fire, but there’s no time to waste – I can hear Maxwell staggering to his feet.

  ‘You can’t escape!’ he calls after us, but the confident tone in his voice has gone.

  We run through the maze, left and right, far too quickly for me to get my bearings. We start running down a long path, with no branches at all. At the end of the path, I can see an ordinary brick wall – the edge of the maze! But it is so far away. If Maxwell catches us in this corridor, we’ll be sitting ducks for his gun.

  ‘Stop!’ I yell.

  The other two skid to a halt. I can hear him getting closer.

  ‘What are you doing?’ says Brianna. ‘He’ll be here any minute!’

  ‘Exactly – we can’t let him catch us. Give me the gun.’

  ‘What?’ Liam yelps. ‘Agatha, you’re not a killer …’

  ‘Just give it to me!’

  Brianna places the gun in my hand. It’s cold and heavy. I’ve never held a gun before, but I have read enough about them to know how to fire one. The footsteps are so close …

  ‘Get back!’ I shout to Liam and Brianna. I put both hands on the gun, take aim at the bottom crate in the nearest stack, and fire.

  The first shot knocks me back like a punch in the chest, but I aim again and keep firing at the crate. Sugar spills everywhere, and the wood splinters. Finally, I’m still pumping the trigger, but there are only dull clicks – I’m out of bullets. For one awful moment, I think I have miscalculated. But now the smashed-up crate starts to creak and groan. It’s right at the bottom of the giant stack, the white cliff towering above me. The box cracks, splinters flying, and now the stack is starting to lean.

  Just before I turn, Maxwell rounds the corner and takes aim. I run, and behind me there is a crash like rolling thunder. Looking over my shoulder, I see the white cliffs collapsing like a landslide, smashing crates to smithereens. A sugar-powder cloud billows down the empty canyon, faster than I can run, wrapping me in choking sweetness. I run on, coughing and half blind, until I reach the end of the path, where Liam and Brianna are waiting for me.

  ‘Agatha – are you OK?’

  ‘I think so.’ I’m still spluttering, but we’re out of the worst of the sugar dust. My arm aches from firing the gun. I look myself over – ghostly white, covered head to toe in powdered sugar. Looking back into the maze, I can see the wreckage I caused and the sugary mushroom cloud spreading over the room.

  ‘That …’ says Liam breathlessly, ‘was really cool.’

  I smile at him.

  ‘What you did back there was so brave. You could have got yourself killed!’ I say.

  ‘Don’t remind me – I think I might pass out.’ He grins. ‘Do you think he’s …?’

  ‘We won’t be seeing him for a while anyway. But there’s no time to waste – we need to get out of here.’

  I look around. We’ve reached the edge of the maze, but we’re not back where we started. We have ended up on the other side of the room, deeper inside Maxwell’s lair. In front of us is a lift door.

  ‘Seems like the only option …’ Brianna says.

  ‘Come on, then.’

  I press the call button. We hold our breath, waiting to see if any alarms go off. None do, and after a moment the doors slide open. We step into the empty lift, and I look at the buttons. There are none going up to higher floors, only ‘0’ and ‘-1’. Since we are on the ground floor, I press ‘-1’. The doors close, and the lift starts its descent.

  None of us speak, but I can tell from their faces that we’re all thinking the same thing. We’re hoping that, when the lift stops and the doors open, we won’t be met by more guns. After a minute, I realise we aren’t going down just one floor – the lift is moving fast, and shows no sign of slowing. For a sickening moment, I think the lift is a trap – speeding faster and faster until we will be smashed to pieces at the bottom of the shaft. But, finally, the rate of descent slows, and we come to a gentle stop. I hear Liam take a deep breath, then the doors slide open once more.

  ‘What the …?’ Brianna trails off.

  ‘Where are we?’ Liam asks.

  After the dazzling white of the sugar maze, it takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness. When they do, I can’t believe the size of the room we are in. Hewn from the London bedrock is a cavern. In front of us, excavated from its burial like a strange coffin, is a gigantic concrete pipe.

  The London Ring Main.

  Coming down from the ceiling of the cavern is a complicated array of pipes and taps, ending in a silver pipe, that pierces the Ring Main like a needle. This is it! All the proof I need that my suspicions were correct.

  ‘What is all this?’ Brianna asks.

  ‘That –’ I point to the pipework above us – ‘is where the algae have been coming from. That’s where it gets its food – pure sugar, pumped into the water supply …’

  I am waiting
for her admiring response, when a hand clasps a rag over my mouth. In shock, I breathe in, and my nostrils are filled with a sickly-sweet petrol smell – chloroform. The room starts to spin and the sounds around me become distant, as if coming from the bottom of a long corridor. I try to hold my breath, but the grip on me is tight, and I need to breathe in again. A familiar Glaswegian accent speaks in my ear –

  ‘Don’t struggle, or I’ll break your neck.’

  And the darkness takes me.

  When I come to, I’m propped upright, against some kind of pillar – a metal pipe? It takes me a moment to remember Maxwell and the chloroformed rag. The cold at my back is spreading through my blazer and through my veins. I can hear Maxwell’s voice nearby, giving orders.

  ‘You two, get your backs against the pipe there. Keep your hands where I can see them. Don’t think I won’t use this.’ As he says this, I hear the sound of a gun being cocked.

  Pretending to still be unconscious, I peek through one eye and see Maxwell take two pairs of handcuffs from his belt. His dark suit has turned hazy white with powdered sugar, and his hair and face are ghostly. He sets about cuffing Liam and Brianna to either side of a metal post that supports the Ring Main. They put up no resistance. This isn’t like the sugar maze – there’s nowhere to run and hide in this huge, empty room. This is a room that nobody in the outside world knows about, where nobody will ever find us.

  While Maxwell is securing Liam and Brianna, footsteps approach me from behind. I close my eyes tightly.

  ‘Hello, how did you get down here?’ It’s a man’s voice – one of Maxwell’s lackeys. ‘Oh, she’s sleeping!’ he says, poking me with the toe of his shoe.

  ‘Thank you for that brilliant observation,’ Maxwell snaps at him.

  ‘Sorry, sir … I just mean, they’re not supposed to be down here, are they? He wouldn’t be pleased about that, sir.’

  Who is he talking about? I hold my breath, hoping for more information, but all Maxwell says is –

  ‘Well then we better make sure that he never finds out. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir … absolutely … but, well, they’re just kids.’

  ‘Do you think he cares about that?’ Maxwell snarls.

  ‘No, sir, of course, sir.’

  I continue to pretend to be asleep. I wish I could stop my hands trembling, which I’m sure will give me away. I struggle to keep still against the mixture of fear and cold. I keep seeing an image of my body lying on the ground in this cavern, rotting away in the dark under London. I imagine Dad looking for me for the rest of his life, never knowing the truth.

  ‘She’s sedated, but it’ll wear off soon,’ says Maxwell in a more jovial tone. ‘Tie her up while I deal with these two. The ropes are over there.’

  I squint to see what he’s doing – he is crouched on the ground, going through Liam’s and Brianna’s pockets, removing mobile phones, flick-knives and anything else that might help us get out of here. The lackey comes towards me with a coil of rope. I shut my eyes again, frantically trying to think of something clever to do, but the chloroform is still making my brain fuzzy. All I feel is building nausea. I try to swallow down the bile – if I’m sick, it will be hard to pretend to be unconscious.

  But then, if I’m sick, it might get me the moment’s distraction I need. He stands over me, nudging me again with the toe of his boot. Now he is crouched in front of me, wrapping the rope round the pipe and my wrists. I retch, depositing my breakfast down his shirt.

  ‘You stupid little …’

  He stands up reflexively, trying to get away from the vomit, and that’s when I make my move, kicking out with both legs, knocking him off balance. He falls, crying out and hitting his head on the concrete. He lies there, groaning. One down …

  Maxwell, his attention caught by the noise, stops what he was doing and comes running.

  ‘What happened?’

  I close my eyes again and lie perfectly still. If I can trick him into believing that I’m still asleep, that the vomiting was just a reflex, he might not kill me straight away. It works – he strides over, takes one dismissive look at me, then crouches beside the man, who seems unable to answer him.

  ‘Get up, you idiot.’

  The gun hangs in his hand, just out of my reach.

  I jump up with all my strength, smashing into the side of Maxwell, knocking him off balance. The weapon slides from his grasp, landing somewhere in the shadows beneath the Ring Main. He hits the floor hard. Luckily for me, he cushions my fall as I land on top of him.

  I scramble off him and begin to crawl towards the gun, but he recovers quickly. Just as I reach the gun, his hand closes round my right ankle and he pulls hard. I fall flat on the concrete floor and lie on my stomach for a second, useless and winded. Then I hear Brianna and Liam shouting. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but they spur me on. I kick out and must catch him full in the face, because he roars with anger.

  I crawl forward quickly and grab the gun handle. It feels cold and heavy, like the weapon of destruction it is. I stand up and spin to face Maxwell, who is still on the ground. I’m trembling, so I close my second hand round the first to steady my aim. I point the gun down at my tormentor. He laughs – not the response I was hoping for.

  ‘Careful with that thing,’ he says, goading me. ‘You wouldn’t want to do something you’d regret later.’

  My world is spinning; my hands are trembling so hard I can barely hold the gun up.

  ‘I’m not sure I would regret it,’ I say, but the words sound ridiculous. I look to Liam and Brianna, but they have gone silent, staring at me. None of us know what to do next.

  ‘Go on then, Agatha Oddlow – shoot me,’ Maxwell drawls in his Deep South accent. ‘What are you waitin’ for? If you’re gonna shoot me, do it. You only have to pull that little trigger.’

  He’s right, of course – I’m never going to shoot him. But if I put the gun down, he wins. There has to be a third way …

  Oh.

  As the thought hits me, I try not to show it on my face.

  ‘Not got the guts for it, eh?’ Maxwell says, starting to get to his feet.

  ‘Maybe not, Mr Maxwell,’ I say. ‘But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.’

  He pauses, unnerved by my sudden composure.

  ‘Though why anyone would want to skin a cat …’ I mumble. I turn, aiming the gun at the little pipe that’s carrying sugar into the Ring Main and feeding the algae.

  I fire – once, twice, three times. The impact from the gun knocks me back at the same moment that Maxwell cries out, realising what my plan is. He springs in front of me and wrestles the gun from my hand.

  But he’s too late – at least one of the bullets has punctured the sugar inlet pipe high above our heads. Liquid sugar starts to rain down on us. Maxwell makes a grab for me, but I leap to the side and he slips in the pool of syrup and falls. I scramble away, back towards Liam and Brianna, who are calling to me.

  The key is still in the handcuffs behind Liam’s back. My hands are sticky with sugar and I fumble for a moment – but at last I manage to unlock his cuffs and he takes the key from me and releases Brianna.

  From above, there is an ominous ripping sound. Maxwell has run over to a pipe with a huge valve wheel, that he is trying to turn to shut off the flow of sugar. It won’t budge. I look up to where the ruptured pipe is leaking syrup – the sheer force of it is tearing a bigger and bigger hole in the main pipe with every second. Suddenly, it gives way altogether, in an explosion of syrup that hits us like a wave.

  ‘Ugh!’ Brianna cries, wiping syrup from her face, a bedraggled version of her former self.

  After the initial flood, we can see the damage that the explosion has done. Now it’s not just the sugar pipe that has a hole – there is a huge hole in the Ring Main too. And, instead of liquid sugar, there is a lava stream of red slime spewing on to the cavern floor. My nostrils fill with the familiar stench as the algae give off their trademark fumes.

 
‘We need to get out of here!’ shouts Liam.

  The three of us start to run towards the lift door, as a wave of red slime washes over our feet. But this time Maxwell is ahead of us, wading to the lift and pressing the button. The lackey limps in behind him, just in the nick of time, but we are too late. The doors slide closed as we get there, and the last thing I see is Maxwell, grinning hatefully back at me.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Brianna says, choking.

  ‘We have to get away from the fumes,’ I say, but my voice sounds far off. I can’t focus – my head is full of fog. The cavern is fast filling up with slime.

  ‘There are some stairs over there!’ Liam shouts above the roar of the waterfall. Sure enough, carved into the rock face, there is a door with a window in it, and a spiral of metal stairs is just visible beyond. But the floor is flooding quickly, and the door is already half submerged.

  ‘We have to move fast,’ I say, coughing. We start to wade through the foul slime. A couple of times I stumble, accidentally plunging my battered hands into the stinging poison. Liam puts an arm round my shoulders to support me. By the time we reach the door, the algae are up to our chests, and only about thirty centimetres of the door is still visible. Luckily, the door opens outwards. Brianna gets there first and pushes it open, and we half swim through the opening. Liam drags me behind him, until finally my foot is on the first stair.

  We start to climb, our clothes heavy with the ooze. My head is buzzing. After being drugged with the chloroform, my fight with Maxwell, and now breathing the fumes, there isn’t much energy left in me. Adrenaline can only get you so far, and mine is fast running out. My legs feel wobbly as I climb.

  ‘Come on, don’t slow down!’ Liam says. He’s following me up the stairs, watching my faltering steps.

  I look down and can see the red slime rising quickly in the narrow stairwell. As I drag my feet up each stair, one by one, the tide is lapping just below my shoes. Liam scrambles up alongside me, unwilling to go past me.

  ‘It can’t be far now,’ Brianna says, somewhere above.