The Key to Finding Jack

by Ewa Jozefkowicz

  As I walked to the entrance, I had a sudden flashback to when Jack and I had first discovered the magic of the estate. We were helping Dad bring the shopping home, and we had heard shouting above our heads.

  ‘It’s just some kids playing,’ said Dad dismissively, but Jack was clearly intrigued. He kept glancing back at the estate building long after we’d passed it.

  ‘There must be a playground or something up there on the roof,’ he told me, amazed. ‘I could hear them playing football.’

  We checked it out after school the very next day. The Fairwick Estate was six floors high, with an arch instead of a front door, which was lucky for us as we could go in without anyone asking questions.

  The alleyway that led to the building from the main road was dark, winding and uninviting. But Jack convinced me that there was more to the place than what you saw at first glance. Although the walls were greying concrete, they somehow held different hues of orange and yellow when the sunshine hit them at the right angle. The corridors and stairwells could definitely use a lick of paint, but walking along them we got the distinct sense that they would lead somewhere special – and they did.

  When I opened the door to the rooftop my legs ached from walking up six flights, but I was so relieved to be there. The air was different on the roof – lighter somehow and fresher. Jack told me that it was further from the pollution caused by the buses, taxis and other cars on the high street.

  I imagined the pollution particles, small, spiky urchins. If I strained my eyes enough I could almost see them; each detaching from its cluster, emerging slowly from an exhaust pipe or office window and floating up into the charcoal sky.

  I was pleased to see that nothing had changed. My mind felt clear for the first time in ages. I perched in my usual spot on the old roundabout. It had been some architect’s grand design – a playground on a rooftop. There was fencing all around and a sturdy sheltered area for rainy days. But what this big thinker was not aware of was that Fairwickers were not the sort to be told what to do. Give them a playground and they’d turn it into a football pitch or an open-air recording studio.

  I loved the roof of the estate. I’d decided that I loved it the very first time that Jack had brought me here. There were possibilities on the roof that existed nowhere else. Possibilities for brain space and clearer thoughts, or more precisely a thought, that ran in circles through my head.

  I took out my phone and looked at the photo I’d taken of Jack’s tree. It had five branches now – Sutty, Manfy, Grandma, Finny and Sol, although this last branch needed to be replaced with Simon.

  ‘What are the facts, Flick?’ I heard Jack’s voice in my ear.

  ‘These are the facts, Jack,’ I said aloud into the cold winter air.

  ‘One: You’ve been missing for five days.

  Two: You’re somewhere in Peru.

  Three: You didn’t go on the trip to Lima, which is a really good thing.

  Four: You love playing guitar.

  Five: You like teaching. It’s something I didn’t know.

  Six: You can’t speak Spanish, or at least not very well, so if you wanted to do voluntary teaching, you would probably teach English. (This had just occurred to me. It meant that the pool of schools to call would be smaller than I had originally thought.)

  Seven: You are very kind, kinder than most people know.

  Eight: You have a key that used to belong to Grandma, which was given to her by Grandpa when they were in Peru, long before Mum was born, but you left it behind.

  Nine: I have found five people with the initials S.F. which you left with the key, but none of them seem to think it was meant for them.’

  ‘Although we haven’t spoken to one of them yet…’ said a voice behind me, ‘and maybe we should because he could have something interesting to say.’

  Keira sat down next to me and gave me a tight hug. I squeezed her back.

  ‘I miss him,’ I whispered, ‘I really miss him.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’ve been incredibly brave. Try not to cry. You won’t be able to think properly if you cry. And your brain needs to be working to solve Jack’s riddle.’

  I put my hands to my face and noticed that they were wet. I hadn’t even realised that I’d been crying.

  ‘How did you know I would be here?’

  ‘I remembered you telling me how much you and Jack used to love this place.’

  ‘Yeah, he really enjoyed coming here and looking at the view. Look, you can see our house and he knew every building on the horizon.’

  ‘Mmm… I know.’

  ‘Keira, I’m scared it’s not Simon either,’ I blurted out. Had that been my real reason for coming here? A way to avoid going to find Simon?

  ‘What do you mean? That he’s not who the key is meant for?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well even if that’s true, he’s not the last S.F. in the world, is he?’

  ‘He’s the last one we know.’

  ‘At the moment, yes. But we’ll keep searching until we find the right one. You can’t avoid one of our top leads though, because you’re scared he might not be as useful as you think. Imagine what Jack would say.’

  She was right of course. I forced myself up.

  ‘Are we going to Sutty’s?’ I asked her.

  ‘No. Simon wasn’t there when I dropped in on the way here. Sutty says that he’s taken the rest of the week off. I messaged Manfy to ask if she knew where he lived. She sent me his address. It’s less than a ten-minute walk. If we hurry, we should be able to speak to him and still get home before six.’

  Thirteen

  The closer we got, the more convinced I became that it wasn’t a good idea. I wasn’t sure that Simon would want to see us.

  ‘It’s this one,’ said Keira, motioning towards a house with a neat front garden, complete with a mini palm tree struggling against the wind, and a swing seat.

  I rapped on the door before I could change my mind and a split second later it swung open. A tall greying man stood before me in jogging bottoms and a zip-up hoodie. There was a black sports bag slung over his shoulder. He was rushing out and clearly hadn’t expected anyone to knock. He was probably Sol – the first S.F. whose name I’d discovered. I’d never met Simon’s dad before.

  ‘Hello, is Simon in?’

  ‘Oh, hi,’ he said absentmindedly and motioned for us to come inside. ‘He’s in his bedroom,’ he said sighing and there was a fleeting look of worry on his face. ‘Shout up to him, he’ll come down,’ he advised and then headed out. Before I could say anything else, he was gone. The front door slammed behind him and moments later we heard the bleep of his car door unlocking and the engine starting.

  ‘What do we do?’ I asked Keira.

  ‘Call his name.’

  ‘I can’t. Won’t he think we’re right weirdos, standing here inside his house? We need to go back out and ring the doorbell again.’

  She nodded and I lifted my hand to undo the lock, careful to be as quiet as possible.

  That was when we heard the Spanish voice upstairs and Jack’s name among the scramble of words.

  I froze. There was movement on the landing. Simon was coming down the stairs, an exasperated look on his face.

  He was so engrossed in his conversation that it took him a while to notice us, but when he did, he smiled a sad smile and finished the call.

  ‘We’re sorry. We didn’t mean to turn up like this,’ I began, ‘your dad let us in…’

  ‘It’s fine – don’t worry. Are you all right?’

  ‘Kind of. Not really. You?’

  ‘Same.’

  ‘This is Keira,’ I said. ‘Have you met before?’

  ‘Yes, at your house once. Hi, Keira. D’you both want something to eat? I’ve put on a pizza.’

  ‘Sure, I’d love some,’ I said, feeling suddenly ravenous. ‘I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m not brilliant. But we lived in Barcelona when I was younger and alt
hough I went to an international school, we had some lessons in Spanish. We moved around a lot because my dad’s a diplomat.’

  ‘Oh yeah. That’s why you only came to our school in sixth form, right?’ I could tell that we were both avoiding the subject of Jack.

  ‘Yeah, it wasn’t easy to be honest. I’d moved schools a lot but I’d never found it that bad. It was only here that it was tough,’ he said, manoeuvring the pizza onto the chopping board.

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘There were a couple of guys in our class who had it in for me from the beginning. They laughed at my weird accent and braces. It was like they were looking for someone to bully.’

  I glanced at Simon’s immaculately straight, white teeth and wondered whether they would be laughing now.

  ‘It was awful. One day they cornered me after school. It was this time last year and it was absolutely freezing. They nicked my coat and emptied a bucket of water over me. By the time I got home, I was properly shaking. I got ill after that and I think they freaked out that I’d tell one of the teachers. Tuck in,’ he said, motioning to the pizza and offering us both plates.

  ‘And did you? You should have done!’ I said, feeling furious on his behalf.

  ‘No, I didn’t in the end. Jack convinced me not to. He said it would make it worse. Anyway, they seemed to back off a bit when Jack, Darren and Leon made friends with me. It happened when things got so bad I was seriously contemplating quitting school.’

  ‘Quitting? But where would you go?’

  ‘Oh, I have no idea. I suppose I was thinking I might miss the end of the year and then start again in another sixth form in September. At the time I’d come back from school and lie on my bed for hours and hours. Dad persuaded me to go to the tennis club with him and that’s where I made friends with Jack. I knew him from school, but not very well. He started inviting me to stuff with him and his friends, and slowly life became more bearable.’

  ‘Because you had people to hang out with?’ I knew that Jack and Simon had met at the club, but I had no idea about the other things he’d mentioned.

  ‘Yeah, I think they respected Jack in a weird way and weren’t sure how to react when we started hanging out. They laid off me after that. Jack was awesome. He’s one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met.

  ‘And now this… It was meant to be the trip of a lifetime. I’m sorry, that’s a stupid thing to say,’ he said, running his hand over his face, embarrassed. ‘I was supposed to meet Jack there on Saturday – I’d had my stuff packed for ages. I still can’t believe it.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘We overheard you talking to someone on the phone. Was that about Jack?’

  ‘Yeah. I called Ariane, who Jack mentioned in one of his last emails – she’s the woman who ran the trip to Arequipa, which he was on before all this happened. I wanted to find out if she knew him or if he mentioned his plans for what to do next.’

  ‘How did you find her? What did she say?’ Keira asked.

  ‘I looked her up online and found her contact details. It’s amazing I managed to get through as a lot of the phone lines are down. She was so helpful – she said that she remembered Jack very well as he’d made friends with loads of people. He apparently met an Aussie guy called Rowan there, who he hung out with for most of the trip. This guy was a teacher and he’d been volunteering at a Peruvian school. If only he’d said more in that last message…’

  ‘What last message?’

  ‘Jack sent me a message a few days before the earthquake, saying that he had a surprise for me. He was going to send me all the details in an email about where to meet him, which never happened. Your dad rang me the other day to ask about this, and I wish I had something more to tell him. But it looks like Jack never got a chance to send that email.’

  ‘I have a feeling he went to volunteer at a school,’ I said. I told Simon all the information we had from Finny. ‘But how would we ever find out which one? I bet there are thousands in Peru. Maybe slightly fewer if you remove the ones who don’t accept English-speaking teachers.’

  ‘A school? Normally you have to sign up for these volunteering schemes months in advance.’

  ‘But you know what Jack’s like. He would have found some way around that. Or maybe this Rowan guy he met knew of a place that needed volunteers.’

  Simon’s eyebrows shot up as I was talking. ‘Let me show you something,’ he said, and gestured for us to follow him. He took us upstairs to his bedroom – a tiny room mostly filled up by his bunk bed and a desk beneath it. He fiddled with something on his laptop and a map appeared on the opposite wall to us. I noticed that Simon had done the same thing as Jack – he’d covered the wall with whiteboard paper. That way he could label the map with a red marker at specific points. There were also black dotted circles going outwards from a central location.

  ‘This is where Jack got off the bus on Wednesday night,’ he said, grabbing a pencil and tapping the centre of the smallest circle. ‘According to Ariane, they arrived after six p.m. The earthquake hit before four in the morning the next day, around ten hours later. So the question is, what could Jack have done in that time? There are loads of possible answers, but the one thing we know for certain is that he didn’t go to Lima, which is excellent news because that would have been really close to the epicentre of the earthquake.’

  Keira tracked the circles with her finger.

  ‘What are these?’

  ‘The first is a rough outline of where you might get to if you walked for a couple of hours. Jack loves walking, but even he probably wouldn’t manage more than a two-hour stretch with a backpack. Plus, he would have wanted to get a hostel for the night, and by the time he got off the bus, it wouldn’t have been long until it got dark.’

  ‘And this one?’

  ‘That’s a rough estimate of how far you could get by bus in ten hours. I think it’s doubtful that he would have got on another bus straight away. I imagine he would have waited until morning and got one the next day, but there’s a chance that he did. I wanted to leave it there as a possibility. The other thing is that he knew I was flying into Lima airport – here – and I don’t think he would have made me do a long bus journey to meet him straight after my flight, so that is another thing to think about. You see this blue line, here? That’s where you can get to within a five-hour bus ride from Lima. I know five hours is a shot in the dark, but I needed to have some sort of estimate of where he might have asked me to meet him.’

  There was a small area like a lop-sided eye where the blue circle overlapped with the outer black one.

  ‘So do you reckon this is where we should be looking?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a good place to start.’

  There were two towns within the ‘eye’, Nazca and Ica. Other than that, there was a tiny lake and two large national parks, one shaped like a baseball bat.

  ‘It’s mostly desert in these parts, apart from a few areas of greenery. There are sand dunes everywhere and tourists go dune-boarding – it’s the Peruvian equivalent of snowboarding. I was going to check it out with Jack, but there’s quite high wind at this time of year. We’d have had sand blasted in our faces.’

  ‘Is there a way that you could find out where all of the schools are in this area?’

  Simon frowned.

  ‘I’ll see if there’s anything on this map that allows me to do that.’ I watched over his shoulder as he fiddled with the different dropdown menus. At first, petrol stations appeared on the map, then hospitals, and finally, he managed to locate schools.

  There weren’t nearly as many of them in the ‘eye’ as I’d imagined. They were mostly clustered in and around the towns, which wasn’t surprising.

  ‘Can you bring up the names?’ I asked, not quite sure what I was hoping to see.

  ‘I’ll have to hover over them and then the name will come up. Or, wait – this programme lets me download all of them into a spreadsheet.’

  Within a few seconds, we were looking at a
list of schools, with their addresses and phone numbers.

  ‘I think we need to try calling them to find out whether they have seen Jack,’ I decided.

  ‘Do you think it’s possible he would have arrived at one of these schools within ten hours? Even if he’d hitched a ride, or taken a bus, he would’ve got there at nighttime, wouldn’t he? And then the… then the earthquake would have happened,’ said Keira, looking at the floor.

  ‘Yes, but these areas were luckily outside the immediate danger zone,’ said Simon. ‘I checked all of this yesterday. Anyone living east of here,’ he said, pointing to a dotted straight yellow line that I hadn’t registered, ‘would have experienced tremors and power outage. There will have been damage to buildings and some fallen trees, but no casualties reported yet.’ He sounded as though he’d memorised the line by heart.

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Yep, pretty sure. I’ve seen it on several news websites.’

  I felt the tiny drummer in my head slow his frantic beat, as if reaching a calmer part of the song.

  ‘How many of the phone lines do you think are down?’ asked Keira.

  ‘I’m sure that some of them still are, particularly in remote areas, but I managed to get through to Ariane, didn’t I? Plus, I can see if there are any mobile phone numbers. Sometimes when landlines have cut out, mobile phones still work. I’ll get started on the list tonight,’ he promised. ‘They’re five hours behind us, so if it’s six p.m. now, it’s only lunchtime there.’

  ‘Is it six already? We’ve got to run.’ I pulled out my phone and saw four missed calls from home. I sent a message to Mum straight away, feeling guilty. It was bad enough that they were worrying about Jack.

  Simon put his phone number into both mine and Keira’s phones and assured us that he’d be in touch as soon as he had any news.

  As we walked back through the dark streets in the direction of home, I felt lighter. The cold breeze brushed my face and I thought of Jack. I imagined him standing on top of a huge dune, the sand blowing against his cheeks, a powerful wind playing havoc with his hair.