by M A Bennett
We’d decided to go separately, so that if any of the Stepford Servants saw us we could make some excuse about going for a drink of water or something. I remembered the way from my snooping session that morning, and briefed the other two in Shafeen’s doorway. The passageway was mercifully empty, because by the time we’d finished all our chat it must have been the small hours of the morning. ‘You go down the grand staircase,’ I whispered, ‘and turn right. It’s through a set of huge double doors on your left. Oh God …’
‘What?’ whispered Shafeen and Nel as one.
‘What if it’s locked? It’s got properly valuable books in there. I don’t mean just first editions; I mean actual manuscripts.’
Shafeen considered. ‘I don’t think it will be,’ he said. ‘Rich people trust each other. It’s a club. They’d never dream that someone they’ve invited for a weekend would try to rip them off.’
‘We’re here though, aren’t we?’ put in Nel. ‘We’re not part of the club. They’ve made that very clear. They might lock the doors against lowlifes like us.’
Shafeen frowned. ‘True. OK, I’ll go first. If it’s open, I’ll go in and close the door behind me. If I’m not back in five minutes, follow me, one at a time. If it’s locked, I’ll come back and we’ll just have to try in the morning. Of course that will be much trickier.’
I privately thought searching in the morning would be pretty impossible. One: the place was crawling with servants. Two: weren’t we supposed to be going fishing? But we had no option, so we had to try Shafeen’s plan.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘If you’re not back, Nel will come down.’
‘Wait, why me?’ said Nel.
‘You’ve already been badly spooked once,’ I said. ‘This way you’re always with someone, except for on the stairs. Shafeen’s in the library, I’m here. It’s the fox, the chicken and the corn.’
‘I guess I’m the chicken,’ said Nel ruefully.
‘You’re the bravest girl I know,’ I said truthfully. ‘Go on, Shafeen.’
I don’t think we breathed while we waited that five minutes to see if Shafeen would come back. I counted in my head, and when I got to three hundred seconds I gave Nel a little nod. She nodded back, and set off down the great staircase on silent feet. She’d taken off her posh shoes to go barefoot and when my turn came I did the same. Luckily the carpet on the grand stairs was thick, and I moved soundlessly. It was pretty creepy though, I can tell you – hardly any light at all, just the knowledge that those enormous landscape paintings loomed above my head, with the cows and the shepherdesses staring down at me, and, above that, the huge great hulking chandelier ready to drop on my head out of the dark like something from The Phantom of the Opera.
We all met up just inside the grand double doors in a white pathway of moonlight streaming in through the glass doors to the garden. Anyone entering would see us at once, especially Shafeen, who looked like a white ghost in his towelling dressing gown.
‘This way,’ I said, and I led them both up the little spiral staircase to the mezzanine, my bare feet hurting a bit on the cold wrought iron. I went straight to the long low shelf I’d seen that morning, the shelf full of books which were all leather-bound, and all had dates instead of titles. They went in decades, tens and hundreds of them. I knew what they were now. They were game books from all the weekends, all the years and all the centuries that the de Warlencourts had been killing for fun. We walked right to the far end, and found the most recent book, with the current decade tooled in gold on the spine. I pulled it out, remembering that I’d done the same this morning. If I’d managed to look at it then, and I hadn’t been interrupted by the Cinderella chimes of the clock, would I have seen Nel’s name written there? Would I have seen the truth then, and run up the hill to warn Shafeen? I turned the pages, riffling the heavy-grade, top-quality paper, the other two hanging over my shoulders, until I found today’s entry. Nel shone the torch in close. There were the damning words in Henry’s neat calligraphy:
Sunday 30th October
122 x Pheasants
1 x Shafeen Jadeja
‘Jeeeesus,’ breathed Shafeen. ‘I mean, I believed you, but … wow.’ He shook his head.
Nel tapped the screen of the Saros and it flashed a couple of times. ‘Photos,’ she said. ‘They upload to the Orbit, which is the Saros’s satellite storage. We have evidence now, even if they take the phone off me.’
Then she put out her broken-nailed finger and turned the page back one. There she was too.
Saturday 29th October
1 x Warrantable Stag
1 x Chanel Ashton
I saw her face in the white light of the phone. I feared she was going to be sick.
But instead she took a deep breath and tapped the screen again, taking another photo. ‘Gotcha,’ she said.
I had a sudden thought. I turned back the pages to last year’s Michaelmas Justitium. ‘Look!’ I exclaimed.
They both looked.
Saturday 31st October
1 x Warrantable Stag
1 x Gemma Delaney
Wordlessly, Nel took another photo, and I had to lean on the balustrade. I couldn’t breathe. I remembered Gemma, that shining girl from Bewley Park Comp, all glossy hair and confidence. She’d been reduced to a shadow of her former self, a broken girl, but still with the kindness and the courage to come to me after chapel at STAGS, because I was another Bewley Park old girl, and beg me not to go to Longcross. And now the Medievals had tried to break Nel and Shafeen.
‘Well,’ I said to Shafeen softly, so angry I could hardly speak, ‘you wanted proof. You got proof. We’ve got the photos. Let’s go.’
‘Wait,’ he said. He prised the Saros 7S from Nel’s hand and started to walk back down the line of books. He was running his fingers down the spines and counting softly. We followed him and the wavering light, and stopped where he stopped. He shone the Saros at the spine of the book and the gold-tooled lettering shone out from the matte black leather.
1960–1969
Then I knew.
Shafeen was looking for his father.
He prised out the book and riffled through the pages, going back and forth as though desperate to find something, but dreading it too. At last he stopped and Nel and I crowded in. Shafeen crumpled cross-legged on the floor of the mezzanine, and we had to kneel to read over his shoulder.
Sunday 26th October 1969
98 x Pheasants
1 x Aadhish Jadeja
I started to say, ‘Shafeen –’
‘He never told me,’ he interrupted in a small, broken voice. ‘He never said.’
I put my hand on his towelling-clad shoulder. I knew why he hadn’t. What man wants to admit such a thing to the son he loves? That he’d come to England in the 1960s, to a prestigious school, and was included and accepted as an Indian boy so far as to be invited to a country-house weekend. He must have been so excited. It made me want to cry. I wanted to stand right there and weep for young Aadhish Jadeja, an Indian princeling but still, always and forever, an outsider.
Shafeen slammed the book shut so hard that both we girls jumped. ‘They have to be stopped,’ he said, in quite a different voice.
Nel put a hand on his other shoulder. ‘We will stop them. We have the photos now.’
‘It’s not enough,’ Shafeen said. ‘They could say these entries are a joke. Or they could say it’s like an accident book, you know, like the one we have in woodwork at STAGS if you cut your finger and you have to write it down.’
‘But it’s all here,’ protested Nel loudly. ‘They’re hunting kids! Shooting kids!’
‘Shhh.’ I calmed her down. ‘You don’t want the minions to hear us.’ But just as I said this, the room darkened as a huge silhouette blocked the moonlight from the garden doors.
A silhouette with heavy boots and a flat cap.
Perfect.
The headkeeper stood there for a long moment, still as one of the statues outside, just watching. His long, g
rim shadow stretched out across the polished floor, giving him giant proportions. Then he reached out and turned the handle of the doors.
I signalled wildly for Nel to kill the torch and for both of them to get down. I flattened myself on my front on the narrow balcony. The little beads of my mum’s dress dug into my stomach, but I could see perfectly between the banisters of the balustrade and just prayed that, as Perfect was far below us, the angle of the mezzanine would hide us from sight. I was most worried about Shafeen. Not only was he taller and broader than Nel and me, but in the white towelling robe he stuck out like a polar bear in a coal mine. If Perfect looked up, he would see us at once.
From my viewpoint I saw the headkeeper step quietly into the room, his hobnailed boots barely sounding on the polished floorboards. An icy autumn draught entered with him, and I gave an involuntary shiver. The dangling crystals of the huge chandelier tinkled a little in the night breeze and, as if summoned by the sound, Perfect walked into the middle of the room and stood right under it. (He moved surprisingly quietly for such a big lunk. Probably he’d had years of practice stalking innocent creatures through the undergrowth.) Then he slowly turned around under the chandelier, scanning through three hundred and sixty degrees. It was like that bit in Beauty and the Beast when the Beast dances with Belle.
Except there was no Belle.
And no music.
And no candlelight.
Just a beast.
In the moonlight I could see that Perfect was holding something in one arm, a something that he was resting casually on his shoulder. As he turned, I could see the dull metallic gleam of two long barrels. A shotgun.
Perfect raised his chin. I swear he was sniffing the air, like a hound. Then he looked in our direction, and it felt like he looked right at me. It was as if he’d spent so long staring at me throughout the weekend that he could now sense where I was. It was all I could do not to cry out.
Then Perfect did something that made my heart nearly leap out of my frock. He took the gun from his shoulder, held it in both hands and cocked the hammer. Then he walked slowly and silently towards the spiral staircase.
I didn’t breathe.
Perfect laid a hand on the iron stair rail, and put his foot on the first step. Just then an owl hooted loudly outside, and he turned, quick as a cat, both barrels pointing out the door. Then he moved quickly and quietly back across the room and went out into the grounds, closing the doors carefully behind him.
chapter twenty-four
We all waited a good five minutes before we dared speak.
I rolled onto my back and breathed out a soft whooooo of relief. Shafeen raised himself up on his elbow, hair flopping in his eyes. Nel sat up and tapped the Saros to make the torch come back on. ‘Sheesh!’ she said shakily. ‘D’you think he saw us?’
Privately I was almost sure he had; how could he not have done when he’d looked right at me? But if he had seen us, why would he just leave us and go? Not wanting to spook Nel, I said, ‘Apparently not.’
‘What do you think he was doing? Was he looking for us?’
It certainly felt that way, but, again, I didn’t want to freak her out. ‘For all we know, it’s what he does every night. Patrols the place, making sure everything’s as it should be. Maybe that’s his headkeeper thing.’
‘Well, he’s gone for now,’ said Shafeen, raking his hair back from his face. ‘So what do we do about this?’ He was still clutching the game book from the 1960s. ‘It’s a good start, but we need more.’
I hauled myself to a sitting position. ‘He’s right, you know,’ I said to Nel. ‘It’s what they call “circumstantial evidence”. Watch any courtroom movie. We need more. We have to catch them at it.’
Shafeen carefully rested his chin on the closed book. ‘The thing is, there’s only one more opportunity to do that. And that’s when we go fishin’. So, Greer, it’s down to you. Tomorrow, if we stay, it’s your turn. You do know that, don’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Huntin’ shootin’ fishin’. Nel got hunted. I got shot. Tomorrow, it’s you. So you have to decide what you want to do.’ He got to his feet. ‘They invited us because we are misfits. We are upstarts, all at a school where we don’t belong. We are to be kept down, to be frightened so much that we won’t get ideas above our station in future. We might even be culled, to restore the natural order. Look at all these books.’ He waved his arm back along the shelves, embracing centuries of books in the gesture. ‘Nel and I were lucky. How many haven’t been? How many kids over the centuries, before forensics, and DNA, and all that CSI stuff, have been killed? Even in this century, how many accidents have been covered up, because the de Warlencourts still live this feudal life where they own every tenant on their land and every servant in their house? The little lordlings want their fun, and no one’s powerful enough to stop them. Until now.’ He turned to Nel. ‘You and I have been prey already. It’s too late for us to trap Henry. It’s up to Greer now.’ He turned to me. ‘If you’re willing, it’s you who will have to catch him in the act.’
I thought of Gemma Delaney, of Nel, and of Shafeen. But most of all, weirdly, I thought of poor Aadhish Jadeja. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ I said.
Shafeen breathed out. ‘Then we need a plan.’
‘It would help if we knew where we were going fishing,’ said Nel.
‘Well, that’s easy,’ said Shafeen. ‘It must be the lake where we were the other day.’
‘The lake where the stag stood at bay?’ I asked.
‘That’s the one. It’s on Longcross land so it belongs to Henry. Even the Medievals wouldn’t dare to try anything on a public lake. I think it’s north-west of here, but I’m not really sure.’
‘There’s a room with this huge map all over one wall. Just down the passageway.’
‘That’ll be the estate room. Come on. It would be good to know the lay of the land.’ Shafeen still had the game book from the 1960s in his hands.
‘Aren’t you going to put that back?’ Nel asked.
‘No way,’ he said. ‘This one’s coming with me.’ I couldn’t tell if he wanted to have, finally, a long chat about things with his dad, or if he thought the book was somehow shameful, and didn’t want the evidence of his dad’s defeat to remain at Longcross.
‘Won’t they notice?’ I asked. There was a gap in the long shelf of books like a missing tooth, so Shafeen went along the shelf moving all the books a tiny bit until the gap was closed.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Good as new. They won’t notice unless they’re really looking. Come on. And let’s be really quiet. That mastodon might still be hanging around.’
Nel tapped off the torch, and we crept down the passageway as I counted the doors – I was pretty sure the map room, as I thought of it, had been at the end of the same passageway the library was on. But things look pretty different when you’re swanning down a passageway channelling Elizabeth Bennet, feeling pretty sure that you are the lord of the manor’s girlfriend, to when you’re stumbling along in the dark, plotting to bring the same lord of the manor down, while his tame heavy is prowling around with a gun. I took a guess and pulled the other two into a doorway.
Nel tapped on the torch again, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It was the room I remembered, with the walnut desk and the antique globe and one wall covered with an old-looking but detailed Ordnance Survey map of every inch of the Longcross estate. I went right up to it, looking at the incredible detail in the powerful white circle of light thrown by the Saros’s torch. I traced the house with my finger – the house I’d looked over, and loved, only this morning. Then I let my finger travel to where we’d been huntin’ and where we’d been shootin’. And then, in the next valley, I let my finger rest over a long, irregular oval.
The lake.
There were letters written across it, spaced out because the lake was so big. ‘L-O-N-G-M-E-R-E,
’ I spelled out. ‘Longmere.’ The lake was enclosed at one end, and at the other flowed into a little stream with jagged lines drawn above it. Nel moved the phone closer. ‘Conrad’s Force,’ she read.
Shafeen said, ‘It’s pronounced “foss”. It’ll be a waterfall.’
‘No doubt named after the famous Conrad de Warlencourt, top knight, thief of the True Cross and all-round scumbag.’ My tone was flippant but I don’t think anyone was fooled; my voice sounded pretty shaky. My eyes travelled back to the lake as if pulled there, and we all stood in silence looking at the long, dark smudge.
I knew what Shafeen was thinking. Then he said it out loud. ‘Can you swim, Greer?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I used to swim for my school. My old school, obviously. Not STAGS.’
I was a good swimmer; actually I’d been one of the best at Bewley, but I’d never tried out for any teams at STAGS, sure there must be lots of baby Olympians who’d been paddling up and down their own vast swimming pools since they were in swim nappies, so I’d never bothered. But, in an environment with no phones and no friends, I had spent quite a few lonely hours thrashing up and down the state-of-the-art pool at school, and now I was glad I had.
‘Good,’ said Shafeen. ‘Because the chances are that before tomorrow is over you’ll be making a close acquaintance with that lake.’
‘Unless they just shoot me,’ I said, thinking of Perfect and the gun.
‘No,’ said Shafeen. ‘It’s fishin’, remember? Their own rules are the only ones they follow. And they won’t just drown you either. It’s the chase they crave.’
‘But we can’t just let Greer be bait.’ Nel turned to me. ‘I don’t want you to go through what I went through,’ she said. ‘We need a plan.’
So, by the light of the Saros 7S – which, thanks to Nel’s dad, had been designed with a battery lasting seven days – we made one.
It must have been 2 a.m. when we left the estate room, ready, we hoped, for the next day.