by Ben Jeapes
“Not tonight, we don’t,” Malcolm said with finality and, as far as Ted was concerned, total incorrectness. The lights changed, Malcolm put his foot down again and they drove for a minute until they could pull up outside the bank. Ted waited in the warm, dry car while Malcolm darted over to the cashpoint. He came back to the car and pushed a sheaf of notes into the ashtray.
“That’s all I can take out in one transaction. Should see us through for a while–”
The last stop, as promised, was the petrol station. Again Ted waited in the car while Malcolm did the business.
Arse! We so don’t need to be in Trowbridge. Nothing’s in Trowbridge. Everything’s here …
Malcolm put the nozzle back in its holster and strode towards the kiosk, with a cheery wave at Ted as if to say, soon be going! Ted returned it with a grimace.
Malcolm, I know you mean well and I appreciate it but you’ve got to let me …
Unfortunately Malcolm held all the cards – all the things that could keep Ted out of trouble until they could, as he put it, consolidate. Car. Money …
Money?
The cash Malcolm had taken out still sat where he had left it, minus some twenties for the petrol. Ted raised an eyebrow, daintily extended a hand and leafed through the remaining notes. Yeah, that would certainly keep them going – one man, one boy, on the run from the law.
It would keep one boy on his own going even longer. Fewer overheads …
He bit his lip and glanced up. Malcolm was almost-patiently waiting behind two more drivers to pay.
Stealing from Malcolm … He had thought he was over that.
No, not stealing. This cash was intended for fighting the King, and that was all Ted intended to use it for. He would gladly return a fully accounted-for balance to its owner when this was all over.
He twisted in his seat and looked back, away from the kiosk and the lights of the station, out into the dark. Cold, wet …
… but what he had to do.
Arse!
In one movement he had shoved the cash into his pocket, opened the door, slid out, closed it again quietly. Malcolm wasn’t facing him and wasn’t alerted by any slamming doors.
This must be like leaving the womb – an assault on his senses after the soft comfort of the car. Damp air, traffic noise, smell of petrol. He was back out into the world again; the last shreds of sanctuary had vanished. Ted pulled the drawstrings of his hood tight, thrust his hands into his pockets and disappeared into the dark.
This way was best.
Though ‘best’ was an extremely relative term.
*
It took almost an hour to walk into the city centre. Ted had walked briskly, head down, which was natural to anyone out in this kind of weather. He hadn’t made much effort to avoid being seen, on the grounds that the last thing the inspector would be looking for was him walking into town from outside it.
Once he was in town, that was another matter. Ted sidled along the north side of New Canal, sticking to the few pools of dark between street lamps. Then he realised he was just looking suspicious. There were still people about – coming out of the last show at the cinema or cruising between pubs or preparing to settle down in the doorways for the night. So he changed tactic and simply walked along to the Agora, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and let himself in.
The streetlamps outside threw a monochrome half-light over the bookshelves, which seemed to draw into themselves as if to avoid being noticed. Ted got the feeling they were holding their breath, deliberately trying not to move until he went away again. The preliminary beeps and the glowing panel of the burglar alarm guided him across the floor: with that silenced he locked the front door again and let himself into the back room.
He still didn’t put the light on and with no window it was pitch black, but he didn’t want anyone looking through the shop windows to see an outline of light around the back room door. He fumbled his way to the computer on the desk, and turning it on gave him a little more to see by. Ted looked glumly at the outlines of the cupboards, the filing cabinets, the kitchenette – his room for the night. He couldn’t help contrasting it with the warm, comfortable frilly bedroom he had been expecting to sleep in.
“Arse,” he muttered.
But, it was secure. The door was locked. No one knew he was here. It was categorically not somewhere anyone would expect him to stay the night. And because Malcolm refused to open the shop on Sundays – “Sundays are for reading books, not buying them” – he could stay here undetected until Monday morning, if he had to. Not that he intended it that way, but it was good to know.
He needed to use the toilet in the back, and did.
“Hey,” he told his reflection in the mirror as he washed his hands, “en suite!” Back in the frilly bedroom, the bathroom had been down the hall. “What are you complaining about?”
His reflection replied with a raised eyebrow: sure, you’re going up in the world.
When Malcolm had bought furniture for the shop, he had strangely omitted to install a bed for his staff. The only chairs were the office variety, with built-in padding, so Ted couldn’t even arrange cushions on the floor. The thought of making a mattress out of the rarest of Malcolm’s rare editions brought the ghost of a smile to his face – he might actually prefer to face up to the King rather than brave his employer’s wrath.
Well, he had to sleep somewhere, and he didn’t fancy slumping on the desk in front of the computer all night. That strategy worked for getting you through a dull lesson but not for several hours. He turned the computer off and gingerly lay down on the floor.
Bloody hell, was the floor really that solid? Okay, it was meant to take the weight of people walking about on it and stuff, but couldn’t it have a little give in it?
He sat up, took his coat off and folded it up into a pillow. His head was now cushioned but the floor had taken the opportunity to grow even harder, and it took about ten seconds to remember that the heating was off for the night and he was going to get very cold.
Ted swore, but at least he could do something about that. He got up again and used the light from his phone to find his way to the boiler and study the controls. He located the timer override, and there was a welcoming roar and whoosh as the gas lit up in blue flames behind the small window.
He went back to his place on the floor, trying to convince himself that the boiler wasn’t as loud as your average concrete mixer and that he could tune it out if he tried hard enough. He lay on his back with his hands folded on his stomach and stared into the dark at the ceiling. What did this remind him of? The memory tweaked another very faint smile. Oh yeah, one of the knights in the cathedral, lying stone and cold on his tomb, hands together in prayer, dressed in chain mail (which must be even more uncomfortable to wear when you’re lying on a stone surface than Ted’s own clothes were when he was lying on the floor), awaiting the glorious resurrection when he could finally go to the toilet. That last bit had been Sarah’s contribution.
And suddenly, before he could put up a single defence against it, as if it had fallen on him from the ceiling like a net, a cloud of misery dropped onto him and overwhelmed his defences. The only clue that it was coming was the half second as his eyes suddenly filled with tears and then every cell in his body was wracked with grief, and he hammered the floor with clenched fist and howled, “I want to go home!”
There had been that brief appearance of tears, back in the frilly bedroom, but he had quickly got rid of them. They had learned their lesson: now they knew to come at him out of the dark, without warning.
“I want to go home!” he screamed again. He curled up into a tight ball on the floor and sobbed into his knees.
“I want to go home!”
He could feel the different parts of his mind gathering round to stare and wonder what had happened to their master: cool, self-assured, cynical Ted?
“I want to go home,” he mumbled into the fabric of his jeans.
Someone
rapped, hard, on the shop’s front door. The voice that reached the back of the shop was muffled but authoritative.
“Anyone in there? Hello?”
Ted lay as still and alert as one of Mr Furry’s mice, desperately hoping the big predator with the teeth and claws would just think he was part of the landscape.
Another knock.
“This is the police.”
Ted’s body was still but his heart pounded and his mind raced. He had turned the computer off; they couldn’t see the light. There was no clue that he was here, none at all. They were just guessing. If they had worked out that he worked for Malcolm then obviously they were going to check Malcolm’s shop. If they knew he was here then they wouldn’t be asking if anyone was.
It was nice and reassuring to have a little voice inside him speaking sense, though Ted wasn’t one hundred per cent sure it wasn’t just the voice of wish fulfilment. He felt his heart slowing down until it was only going as fast as your average drum’n’bass beat, and there was no more knocking on the door.
He gave it another ten minutes, just to be certain. Apart from sitting up with his legs crossed he didn’t even move, so by the time he was sure the police had gone his bum was numb and cold. But he used the time to think through his options, going over everything he had discussed with Zoe, and by the end of it he had a plan.
Zoe thought the plan was a really, really stupid one, but she hadn’t come up with anything better.
He pulled his phone out again, looked at it thoughtfully. How long did it have to be on before it could be tracked? It was the kind of thing a self-respecting geek like him should know without even thinking. But in the meantime he wasn’t going to risk it. There were ways around that.
He climbed back into the chair and turned the computer on again. This time he logged on and waited for it to connect to the internet, which always took slightly more time than your average glacier takes to move a few feet.
There was a web service he had subscribed to back when he had lost his phone, just before college started, and for a nightmare 48 hours was out of touch with the world. Anyone could have been texting him anything and he wouldn’t have known about it. The service let you send and receive text messages by email. The police couldn’t track that because his phone wasn’t on.
Okay, they could check the computer’s IP address, but he knew a few ways around that too …
It was all a lot more complicated than just pulling out your phone and using that, but after a few minutes he was in a position to send:
do u still want to know what happened in summer at the cathedral like yr dream?
Sarah wouldn’t be awake but she would get it first thing in the morning.
Zoe’s right. This is about as stupid as it gets.
“Yeah,” Ted sighed. “Yeah, I know.”
And he clicked on ‘send’, before he found himself agreeing with Zoe that the plan was not only stupid but dangerous too, and logged off.
So, now he just had to get through the night, very probably without sleeping. This was going to be severely boring.
He had the entire World Wide Web at his fingertips, of course, with no filter or parental controls to get in the way. But there were some things he had never done at work and he didn’t intend to start now, and anyway, even a masked IP address could be tracked eventually. How badly did the King’s pet police want to find him?
He assumed the worst – that they wanted him very badly indeed, and had unlimited resources to throw at the problem – and pulled out the internet cable, leaving the computer switched on. Then, by the light of the screen he searched for a pen and a pad of paper, and wrote:
Mum v Barry
Sarah v Robs
Ted v Mr Furry
Then he opened the Games menu. Studying the range of what came installed with the computer, he wondered if this was how a nuclear physicist felt if he ever went back to primary school.
“Okay,” he said, “let the World Crappy Games Tournament begin! In Round One, Mrs Heather Worth and Mr Barry Worth will each play a game of Patience. First off, Mrs Worth – oh, did you see that? She put a red seven on a black eight. A classic opening move, Gary, deceptively simple yet with hidden depths? Well, yes, David: it could be that this part-time finance and human resources administrator for thirty hours a week from Salisbury – mother of three children, by the way, from back when she was Mrs Gorse – has got off to a very good start. Oh, look at that! Black queen on red king! Yes indeed, Gary, and how satisfying to see the king just disappear like that, would that they all could. But speaking of those three children … Well, that’s right, David, you have to remember that the oldest of the three, Ted, cut his teeth on games like this while he was still in nappies, and if he doesn’t emerge as winner of this tournament then there will be a lot of very surprised faces. Well, you say that, Gary, but you have to remember Ted is up against the family cat, and while Mr Furry’s gamesmanship has always been handicapped by the lack of opposable thumbs, he knows his way around a mouse and has watched Ted play a shitload of games, indeed he was very often sitting on Ted’s lap when the young man scored some of his most famous victories, and with such exposure to world class talent it would be impossible not to have picked up a few tricks of his own–”
*
Clouds scudded over the thick grass like a speeded-up movie. From the way the horizon just dropped away, Ted could tell he was on a hilltop. He was reasonably certain it was Old Sarum, though there was no ditch, no ruined castle – just a large, wooden palace.
The King strode past him twenty metres away.
“Where are you, boy? Where are you?”
Um, here? Ted thought with a nervous giggle, but had the sense not to say anything out loud. He glanced about him. The grass only came up to his ankles. How could the King not be seeing him? Of course, it was because his friend was standing between them.
A short distance away the Queen strolled vaguely over the grass, seeming more interested in her fingernails than looking for him.
“Boy, boy, where are you, boy …” Her Majesty sounded supremely bored.
“Don’t look round,” Ted’s friend murmured.
Ted looked round and gulped. Inspector Stewart had none of the King’s bluster or the Queen’s languor. She would section off part of the hilltop and study it minutely – every cue, every trace, every trail followed to its logical end before moving off into another area.
“He’s set his Hunter onto you.”
Sometimes she was the police officer Ted had met in the burger bar, she of the unexpected snogging, and sometimes she was something much deeper and more powerful. Her authority and power came not just from her uniform but some inner resource, some primeval sense of purpose with the sole intent of finding.
The inspector moved with a silent, deadly purpose that covered half the area in just a few moments. It reminded Ted of how he played Battleships with Robert. Robert would send his shells randomly around Ted’s board, sometimes hitting something, sometimes not. Ted would send his shells methodically in lines across Robert’s ocean. Two times out of three, Ted would win.
“The King has the power but the Hunter has the subtlety.” Ted’s friend still kept his voice down. It wasn’t a whisper because a whisper stands out as much as a shout. It was pitched just enough to be barely distinguishable from the background noise of the wind and footsteps in rustling grass.
“She’ll find me in no time!” Ted moaned.
“Not necessarily. Anyway, you’ve done this before.”
True, Ted thought. Sometimes he still dreamed about it, or when the clouds were just right he thought he saw her again in the sky. He had lurked with Robert – well, with someone he had thought was Robert – in meta-Salisbury while the face of the witch covered half the sky, scanning the city below, looking for two boys. He had been able to hide then, with the right state of mind. He could work on doing it again now.
“I will find you, boy!” Ted flinched. The King had come right up be
hind him and Ted’s friend had already moved to stand between them again. Ted swallowed at the fury that was stamped on the man’s face.
“Don’t move, don’t say anything, just stay there,” his friend murmured. Ted nodded violently in agreement, though he also strained for a glimpse of his friend’s face because he was quite curious to know who it was.
His attention was caught by a naked woman who wandered casually by. She looked a bit like Zoe.
“Um, what’s she–”
Ted’s friend glanced in her direction.
“Oh, you’re meant to be having sex with her at the moment. Don’t worry, I’m blocking it.”
“Gee, thanks.” Ted watched her go with only a vague regret and wished he wasn’t quite so used to not having sex with naked women, especially ones who looked a bit like Zoe.
“Oi, less of the attitude! It would make you flash like a beacon for the King to find. You need to be nice and mellow and I’m keeping it that way for you. And, see that lot?”
Ted’s friend pointed at a group of dwarves in chainmail who were trotting across the grass. They were singing words that were simultaneously deep and profound and also utterly meaningless, to the tune of the Hi Ho song, and carrying a very long, jagged, rusty saw between them.
“You’re not sleeping in a very comfortable position and they’d be cutting into your spine if I wasn’t stopping them. Oops, hang on–”
The King was walking away again but the Hunter had worked her way close enough to touch. Ted’s friend had to move very quickly. She was crouched down on the grass, almost at Ted’s feet, and her hand moved slowly over the tops of the blades as if she were searching for a dropped coin. Ted’s friend took hold of Ted’s ankles and lifted them up, one at a time, so that her hand passed beneath Ted’s feet. The Hunter pulled a face and moved away.
“I will find you, boy!” The King was a safe distance away again, and after the close brush with the Hunter the futility of his rage was almost like comic relief. “I will find you and I will rend you limb from limb!”
“He will, too, if he can,” Ted’s friend noted quietly.
“But you’re protecting me,” Ted protested.