‘Have to, I’m afraid,’ said Alan. ‘Nowhere else for him to go.’
‘But of course there is!’ said Mrs Baxter. ‘He can stay with us. I’m sure he doesn’t want to sit in a lorry all day!’
‘But if you’re going out …’
‘That’s not till two o’clock,’ said Mrs Baxter, ‘and I’ll get Mrs Murphy to keep an eye on things after that.’ She called up to the cab. ‘Dunstan? Would you like to …?’
But Dunstan was already climbing down from the lorry and marching up the path towards the house.
‘Well, that’s settled then!’ Mrs Baxter smiled. ‘Not much doubt about what he wants to do.’
‘I seem to be saying rather a lot of thank yous at the moment,’ said Alan. ‘One day soon I’m going to have to do something special to make up for it.’ He smiled. ‘You’re sure Tom won’t mind?’
‘Of course he won’t,’ said Mrs Baxter. ‘He’ll be glad of the company.’
Tom was horrified. ‘I can’t look after Dunstan today,’ he protested. ‘I’m going over to Geoff’s!’
‘It’s all right,’ said Mrs Baxter calmly. ‘I’ve rung his parents and asked if Geoff can come round here for a change. They said that was fine.’
‘But … but …’
‘There’s nothing to get upset about,’ said Mrs Baxter. ‘You can still do whatever you were going to do. You just do it here instead of at Geoff’s house, that’s all.’
When Geoff arrived fifteen minutes later, leaving Aquila parked in the garden, Tom told him the news.
‘You don’t have to stay,’ he finished gloomily. ‘There’s no need for both of us to miss the party. You go on your own.’
It was a generous offer, but Geoff said he thought there was still a chance they could both go.
‘If we wait till your mum goes out,’ he suggested, ‘we can fly to Norway then, can’t we? Mrs Murphy’ll never notice we’ve gone. She never comes upstairs, does she? And she’ll be asleep most of the time anyway.’
‘What about Dunstan?’ asked Tom.
‘We’ll ask him if he minds being left behind,’ said Geoff. ‘I’m sure he won’t. He’s got the computer, and at least he’s not stuck on a lorry.’
Tom considered this. ‘How about we don’t ask him,’ he said eventually. ‘Let’s just tell him that’s what we’re going to do.’
After lunch, when Mrs Baxter had driven off to her Bushido demonstration, and Mrs Murphy was downstairs dozing in front of the television, Tom and Geoff had a brief conversation with Dunstan.
‘Here’s the deal, Dunstan,’ said Geoff. ‘We’re going out now and we’re leaving you here on your own.’
‘Just for a couple of hours,’ Tom added. ‘OK?’
Dunstan nodded.
‘But afterwards,’ said Geoff, ‘you mustn’t tell anyone that’s what we did.’
Dunstan thought for a moment. ‘Why not?’
‘Because we’d get into trouble,’ said Geoff.
‘You don’t have to tell any lies or anything,’ Tom assured him. ‘You just don’t say anything about it, OK? If anyone asks if you’ve had a good time, you say yes. You don’t have to say anything about us not being here.’
Dunstan nodded again.
‘But you mustn’t run off anywhere,’ said Geoff, remembering the incident earlier in the week. ‘Remember what your dad said about not going out without asking someone, all right?’
‘All right,’ said Dunstan.
Ten minutes later, Geoff brought Aquila round to the bathroom window, Tom climbed in and they were on their way.
‘We’ve done it again, haven’t we?’ said Geoff cheerfully as he took Aquila up to two thousand feet and pointed its nose to the north-east.
‘What?’
‘We’ve sorted everything out, haven’t we?’ said Geoff. ‘We hit a problem, but we sorted it. We do it all the time!’ He gave the instructions for Aquila to fly them to Stavanger and leaned back in his seat, looking rather pleased with himself. ‘We didn’t know how to get to New York – we worked it out. I got sunburned in France and we needed a story to explain it – we worked it out. We need to get to Norway this afternoon – we work it out … It’s what we’re good at!’
He was right, Tom thought. In a way, working out what to do to get what they wanted was what they had been doing ever since they found Aquila. They had worked out how to fly it, how to bring it home, where to keep it, how it was fuelled … And each time they solved a problem, it made them even more confident that they could deal with whatever came up next.
‘It’s a good feeling, isn’t it?’ said Geoff.
And Tom agreed that it was a very good feeling indeed.
The party was an astonishing affair. Tom had thought the party his mother gave had been quite a grand occasion, but Paige’s birthday was on a different scale altogether.
From the moment Geoff left Aquila in the air at the bottom of the garden and they began making their way towards the house in search of Paige, the boys were assailed on all sides by noise and excitement. The garden, all three acres of it, thronged with hundreds of people, of all ages.
They had only gone a few steps before a waitress appeared, offering them something to eat from a tray, and a few steps later another one offered them something to drink. As well as the guests, they passed a whole series of entertainers – people on stilts, jugglers, knife throwers – it was like walking through a circus. There was even a man with a dog that could do arithmetic. You gave it a sum – like ten minus three – and the dog went straight over and pointed with its paw to the number seven on the ground.
Paige saw them when they were halfway to the house, gave a great shriek of excitement and came racing through the crowds to meet them.
‘You made it!’ She hugged each of them in turn. ‘I thought you weren’t going to come! I am so happy!’
She looked happy, and looked even happier when she opened the presents they had brought. She said they were her best presents ever – all her other friends had just given her clothes or money – and she was going to keep them on the table by her bed like … for ever.
Even making allowances for the fact that Paige always talked like that, she really did seem to be pleased, and Tom noticed that she kept hold of both the photo and the tip of Mont Blanc all the time they were there.
They could only spend an hour, and it sped by. By the time they had met Paige’s mother, had something to eat, met some of Paige’s friends, watched the conjuror and the man juggling chainsaws, met some more of Paige’s friends and had a tour of the house, Tom discovered it was half past three and they needed to be getting home.
They said goodbye and thank you to Paige’s mother, who gave them party bags containing, among other things, several DVDs and an MP3 player, and finally made their way, arm in arm with Paige, towards a part of the garden where, hidden behind a hedge, Geoff could call down Aquila.
‘Are you sure you can’t stay?’ Paige demanded for the umpteenth time, and when Tom explained again about Dunstan, and his mother getting back from the Bushido demonstration, she added, ‘Well, at least promise me you’ll come and visit again one day. I’m not letting you go until you promise!’
‘Of course we’ll come back,’ said Tom.
‘As soon as we can,’ Geoff agreed.
‘Oh, you guys are so brilliant!’ said Paige, and she flung her arms extravagantly round their necks.
Geoff blew the signal on his whistle that would bring Aquila down from where it had been hovering above their head and felt for the solid shape of Aquila beside him.
‘It’s not there,’ he said.
‘What?’ said Tom.
‘It�
��s not there.’ He blew the whistle again, felt for Aquila and … nothing.
‘What do you mean it’s not there?’ asked Paige.
‘I mean it’s not there!’ Geoff moved his arms through the air in the place where Aquila was supposed to be and blew the whistle again … and again … and again. Then Tom tried it. Then they tried using Tom’s whistle in case something had happened to Geoff’s … but the result was always the same. Aquila did not appear.
‘Are you sure this is where you left it?’ asked Paige. ‘Perhaps we’re standing by the wrong hedge.’
Geoff looked around the garden to check, but he knew there was no mistake. Even if he was in slightly the wrong place, it shouldn’t have made any difference. Aquila was supposed to fly down to beside you from wherever it was and it could hear the signal from half a mile away. He blew the whistle again, as if doing it for the hundredth time would make any difference.
‘Could I ask you not to do that?’
Geoff turned round to see the man with the dog that did sums. He came over and spoke in a low voice. ‘That is a dog whistle you’re blowing there, right?’
‘Um … yes.’ Geoff nodded.
‘I thought so.’ The man looked around and lowered his voice even further. ‘I’m afraid you’re blowing the signal for number five.’
‘Number five?’
‘That’s how the trick works, you see?’ The man smiled conspiratorially at Paige. ‘I have this whistle in my mouth that signals Ulrika here to go to that number. You’ve been blowing the signal for number five and unfortunately it is spoiling my act.’
It took a moment for the boys to realize what he was talking about. The man was saying that his dog’s ability to do sums was a trick. What he really did was tell the dog the answer by secretly blowing on a whistle that he kept in his mouth, with a different signal for each of the ten numbers.
Tom was the first to realize what this meant.
‘Is … is two long blasts and two short, one of the signals?’ he asked, and there was a sick feeling in his stomach as he said it.
The man nodded. ‘That’s the signal for number nine, but don’t tell anyone, please! We don’t want to spoil everything, do we?’
Tom nodded faintly. Two long blasts and two short was also the signal that sent Aquila back to the room at the top of the water tower. They used it at the end of each day so that the lifepod would wait in the Eyrie until they called it down the next morning.
Presumably, that was where Aquila was now. The lifepod had heard the signal and obediently sent itself back to wait in the water tower. It had probably been there for most of the last hour.
‘Well,’ said Geoff, as the man returned to his stand with the dog. ‘Looks like we have another problem.’ He did his best to smile. ‘How are we going to get out of this one then?’
But Tom knew that, this time, they faced a problem that could not be sorted, however hard they thought about it. Aquila was in England, and they were in Norway. There was no way they could change the facts, and no way they could get home. This time the problem they faced had no solution.
It was hard to believe, but it seemed that the whole wonderful adventure was finally over.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In his heart of hearts, Tom had always known it would end like this. That it was impossible to keep something like Aquila a secret forever and that, one day, the truth would be discovered. In a way, he was surprised they had managed to hide it as long as they had.
Geoff, sitting beside him on the grass, found it less easy to accept. The idea that he had lost Aquila was something he found almost too awful to contemplate. His face was pale, and he stared sightlessly ahead without speaking.
Paige, at first, couldn’t see that they had lost Aquila at all.
‘You know where it is, don’t you?’ she said. ‘It’s in England. No one else knows about it. All you have to do is go back and get it!’
‘But we can’t, can we?’ said Tom, quietly.
‘Sure you can,’ Paige insisted. ‘You get tickets for a ferry or a plane – I’ll get you the money – then a train once you get to England. It’ll take a couple of days but you can do it. I know you can.’
She sounded so determined that, for a moment, Geoff almost believed that it might be possible.
‘We’d need an adult to buy the tickets,’ he said.
‘So we’ll find an adult!’ Paige answered.
‘What about passports?’ said Tom.
‘What?’
‘We’d need passports to get on a plane or a ferry, wouldn’t we?’ said Tom patiently.
‘In that case …’ Paige hesitated. ‘In that case …’
‘And when we get home,’ Tom continued, ‘what do we tell everyone? What do we say when they ask where we’ve been?’
‘You don’t say anything at all!’ said Paige. ‘You say you’ve got that … you know, that thing where you can’t remember anything. You say it’s all a blank.’
Tom shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t work.’ He thought of all the fuss there had been when Dunstan had gone missing for two hours, and then thought what his mother would do if he went missing for two days. The idea that he could come home after that and say he didn’t remember anything was never going to happen.
‘He’s right,’ said Geoff reluctantly. ‘The police take it very seriously when people our age go missing. We’d have to tell them the truth. Eventually. There’d be no choice.’
‘And when we tell them,’ said Tom, ‘they’ll take Aquila away. There’s no way they’d let us keep it. That’s why we had Rule Number One.’
‘We might as well get it over with.’ Geoff stood up. ‘Come on, we’ll start with your mother. Where is she?’
As it happened, there was no need to go looking for Mrs Legrand, because she was at that moment striding across the lawns towards them.
‘Hey, there you are! I was thinking you hadn’t gone yet!’ She put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder as she smiled down at the boys. ‘Bad news, I’m afraid. You have to go home. Now!’
‘Mom?’ Paige took a deep breath. ‘Tom and Geoff have something to tell you.’
‘Do they?’ Mrs Legrand was still smiling. ‘Nothing too serious I hope!’
‘It is quite,’ said Paige. ‘They can’t go home.’
‘They can’t?’ Mrs Legrand looked puzzled. ‘Why not?’
‘It’s a long story,’ said Tom. ‘Could we … go indoors?’
‘Sure,’ Mrs Legrand agreed, ‘but what about your friend? Do you want him to join us or … or would you rather he didn’t?’
Tom hesitated. ‘Friend?’
‘He’s pretty anxious you leave right away,’ said Mrs Legrand. ‘Says there’ll be all kinds of trouble if you don’t.’
‘What friend?’ asked Geoff.
‘I didn’t catch his name.’ Mrs Legrand was leading the way through the guests towards the house. ‘But he says his dad’s getting home soon and you guys need to be there before he is. He’s waiting over there.’
She gestured towards the house and Tom stared in disbelief at the little figure at the top of the steps that led down from the terrace.
It was Dunstan.
‘He seems to think it’s kind of urgent,’ said Mrs Legrand, ‘but if you really can’t go …’
‘Dunstan?’ Geoff was walking towards him. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We have to go.’ Dunstan lifted his arm and pointed to his watch. ‘If we go right away, we can still get home in time.’
‘You … you think we can get home?’ asked Tom.
Dunstan nodded.
‘Are you sure?’
Dunstan nodded again.
For a moment, both boys stared at him, and Geoff was the one who recovered first. He turned to Mrs Legrand and held out his hand. ‘Thank you again for having us, Mrs Legrand. That was a really good party.’
‘Oh …’ Mrs Legrand took his hand. ‘A pleasure …’
‘Tom?’ Geoff nudged his friend.
‘Oh, yes! Thank you very much. We have to go now …’
It was not until Paige had led them through the house, out the front door and on to the street that Geoff was able to ask the question that was burning in the minds of all three of them.
‘Dunstan … How did you get here?’
‘I came in Aquila.’ Dunstan had taken out a mobile phone and was punching in some numbers as he spoke.
‘Aquila? You’ve got it here?’
Dunstan nodded.
‘I thought it was just us three who knew about Aquila.’ Paige turned to Geoff and then to Tom. ‘Did you tell him?’
Both boys shook their heads.
‘So how does he know about it?’ asked Paige. ‘And how did he know you were here? And how did he know to come and get you?’
Tom and Geoff looked at Dunstan.
‘It might be best,’ he said, ‘if I did the explaining on the way.’ He had taken a stick from the hedge by the side of the road and tapped the air beside him. There was the familiar sound of it ringing quietly against the hull of the lifepod. ‘We really do have to get home. Now.’
‘OK, OK!’ Paige held up her hands. ‘I’ll let you go. But if you don’t come back and explain it all to me very soon, I will die!’
Dunstan’s explanation took most of the flight home, partly because there was quite a lot of story to tell, and partly because Dunstan was not very good at telling it. Tom and Geoff kept having to make him go back and fill in the bits he had missed out. By the time they were crossing the English coast, however, they had got the bones of what had happened, though they both still had trouble believing it.
Aquila 2 Page 8