Keira squeezed my hand and readjusted my hood for me. We walked together in silence and I saw her twisting one of her front braids round and round her finger. I knew that she was thinking hard about what to do next.
‘We never asked him about the key,’ she exclaimed. ‘But maybe right now it doesn’t matter.’
Fourteen
‘Flick, is that you? Oh, thank goodness!’ Mum and Dad ran into the hallway the second my key turned in the lock.
‘I was petrified, love,’ Mum whispered, ‘I’m so glad you’re OK.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’
‘Why didn’t you call us?’ asked Dad. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry or upset.
‘I went somewhere with Keira and I didn’t realise the time. I didn’t mean to.’
‘It’s all right – you gave us a scare, that’s all. Come into the kitchen. Dinner’s ready,’ Mum said, making a face at Dad which meant that she wanted him to let it go.
He ignored her. ‘We were so worried, Flick. You can’t forget to call us. Not now – we have too much on our minds. We love you and need to know you’re safe while we focus on getting Jack home. Think before you do something like that again.’
‘I said I’m sorry!’ I didn’t stick around to listen to the rest of what he had to say. Instead, I flung my rucksack high onto my shoulder and marched up the stairs.
‘Come back, Flick!’ was the last thing I heard before I slammed the door to Jack’s room.
I sat on the bed and stared at Jack’s tree. Four of its branches were now full. The first one which had initially belonged to ‘Sol Falcon’ was still empty. I crossed out his first name and replaced it with ‘Simon’, in bold letters, as I could already sense that he would play an important role. I added in everything that we’d found out. ‘Is Jack within the “eye”?’ I wrote at the end of the leaf furthest to the left. I made a note to ask Simon for a printed copy of the map with all of the schools marked.
I went down to my room to get changed into my pyjamas. I sat in bed, staring at my phone. I’d brought up the map of Peru and zoomed in to see if I remembered the rough contours of Simon’s circles. The area looked even bigger than I’d first thought. It would take Simon ages to call so many different schools.
There was a gentle knock on the door. Mum peered in.
‘Flick, darling, can I join you?’
I nodded and noticing that she might not see me in the half-dark, added, ‘Sure’.
‘I’ve brought you some dinner.’
She sat next to me on the bed with a plate of delicious-smelling beef stew.
‘I’m OK. I ate earlier. But you should have some. It looks good.’
We sat in silence as she ate.
‘I’m sorry about Dad’s reaction,’ she said eventually. ‘You know he didn’t mean it. He’s… we’re a bit overwhelmed by the whole situation.’
‘Yeah. I am too,’ I admitted, and I was shocked to hear myself ask, ‘Do you think Jack’s alive?’ The words escaped without warning.
She opened her mouth, and then closed it again, as if scared of what she might say.
‘I don’t know, darling. Sometimes in the middle of the night I lie there when I can’t sleep and it’s almost as though I can hear him snoring in his room. But when I do manage to drift off, I have the same nightmare that haunts me over and over.’
‘What happens?’
‘I’m walking through the jungle with Jack holding my hand. He’s about three or four – this seems to be a long time before you were born. The sun is breaking through the treetops and we’re singing to ourselves. I point out little monkeys and birds, and he’s giggling. Then, everything goes dark and we hear this almighty roar. It’s louder than anything I’ve ever heard before, and suddenly his small hand escapes my grasp and… just like that, he’s gone.’
‘That sounds scary.’
‘Yeah. And you? What do you think?’ she asked carefully, and for a moment it felt as though she was the daughter and I was the mum.
I avoided answering and shrugged my shoulders. ‘Have you been up to his room recently?’ I was almost certain she hadn’t, but I wanted to double-check. I finally felt ready to tell her and Dad about what I’d been doing.
‘No. I couldn’t quite face it. Why?’
‘There’s something up there that might interest you.’
She took me by the hand, motioning that we should go upstairs together.
Outside Jack’s room, she breathed in deeply, shut her eyes and opened the door. She gasped.
‘I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you about this before,’ I said. ‘It’s Jack’s tree. Keira and I have been trying to figure out where he could be. This is everything that we’ve managed to find out so far. Each branch represents a different person we spoke to who gave us a new clue. To begin with, we mostly discovered things we never knew, or that I never knew about Jack – but maybe you did? Like how he helped people without expecting anything in return. Or how much he loved music, especially guitar, or how he wanted to be a teacher, and how much he cared about Grandma. Do you know that she has a new boyfriend because of Jack? He’s called Mr Percy and she looks happier than I’ve ever seen her. I think we saw one side of Jack – the side that was easy to see. We all knew the Jack who played practical jokes on people and got into trouble. We refused to see anything else.’
Mum stared at the wall, amazed. She knelt down and touched the polaroid of Jack’s face.
‘You went to speak to all these people about him?’ she asked. ‘But who are they? I mean, apart from Grandma? How did you find them?’
I told her everything, starting from when I found the flamingo box with the key and the initials and ending with the map that we’d looked at with Simon a few hours before. I talked and talked and talked, carefully training my gaze on the tree. I couldn’t bear to see Mum’s reaction.
When I finished, Mum and Dad were sitting on Jack’s bed, looking at me.
‘I walked in as you began the story about Sutty and the ghost,’ Dad said quietly. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’
The tiny drummer in my head stood poised with his sticks.
‘Come and sit here,’ Mum said, patting the space between them, and they both hugged me tight.
‘You’ve found out an incredible amount,’ Dad said. ‘And for what it’s worth, I think that you’re right about him going to a school.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes. Most of the things that you’ve mentioned I didn’t know,’ he said, and I could hear the sadness in his voice. ‘But Jack always talked about how much he loved teaching that little boy to read. Do you remember when he was researching different methods to try and build up his confidence?’
‘We thought it was a school project, didn’t we? But he was doing it because he loved it. I told him at the time that he’d make a really good teacher,’ Mum said.
‘And I stopped you straight away, and said that law offers so many more benefits than teaching. I made it sound like teaching wasn’t a worthwhile career. I put so much pressure on Jack that he hid his true ambitions from me, and now I’m being hard on you too, Flick. I’m sorry about what I said earlier.’
I held him close. ‘You’re a wonderful dad. It’s not your fault that Jack’s missing. And you love being a barrister – you thought that Jack might love it too.’
‘Where is this key then?’ Mum asked.
I took off the chain from around my neck and showed it to her. It seemed smaller somehow than the last time I’d seen it.
‘This is what it came in and the note is still there,’ I said, showing her the flamingo box.
Mum opened it carefully. She brought the tiny piece of paper up close to her eyes and spent a strangely long time inspecting it. She had a funny look on her face and the corner of her lip twitched. ‘You did a lot of good detective work, but maybe you didn’t see what was right in front of you…?’
And it was only then that it hit me who S.F. was.
&n
bsp; ‘Sergeant Flick,’ I whispered.
Next to me Dad smiled.
‘Obviously. Who else would it be?’
Fifteen
I couldn’t get to sleep for hours that night. Two very different feelings whizzed round and round my head like loud, circling helicopters. One of them was anger. I was furious with myself for being so careless with the only clue that Jack had left me. What kind of a detective sergeant was I, if I had forgotten my own childhood nickname? But the other feeling was happiness. I couldn’t remember when I’d last felt this happy and relieved. Over the past week, I’d felt I’d lost Jack entirely, as if I didn’t know anything about him any more. Yet it turned out that he’d left me his most prized possession.
I eventually drifted into a restless sleep. A huge pile of keys appeared before me, of different shapes, colours and sizes. Some seemed old and were covered in layers of rust, others were brand new and glistening, as if they’d just been cut. There were thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of keys in the pile and the more I stared at them, the more they multiplied before my eyes. I was desperately running my hands through them, trying to find Jack’s tiny key, but it was hopeless. It would take me months, maybe even years, to sort through all the keys, and even then I might never find it.
I sank to my knees and was about to give in when the pile before me began to shake. It shook and shook, the tremors becoming so bad that keys were thrown in all directions, hitting me on my head and chest and legs.
‘Stop!’ I screamed. I covered my face with my hands.
As quickly as it had started, the shaking stopped and I heard a familiar voice.
I opened my eyes to see Jack emerging from the pile, like a diver resurfacing from deep waters.
‘Come on, Sergeant Flick,’ he said laughing. ‘How did you not realise that the key was meant for you? You’re the only one I trust to solve our mystery.’
I was woken up early by my phone beeping. It was a message from Simon.
No luck with the schools. Managed to get through to three of them – rest unreachable. Power lines are still down in remote areas and there’s been more damage to buildings. Aftershocks caused badly constructed buildings to topple, and people are trapped underneath the rubble. I’ll keep trying. Wanted to update you.
My stomach clenched.
‘OK, thanks anyway,’ I wrote back, ‘I’ll let you know if we hear anything from the police.’
I was skimming through the pages of Grandma’s album when I spotted a photo of her at a market stall. At first I thought she was buying earrings, but when I inspected it more closely, I saw that she was looking at lots of tiny keys. I imagined Grandpa must have taken the picture before he’d bought the very key that Jack had left behind. Below the photo, was a note that said, ‘Souvenir shopping at L…’ The last word was so smudged that I couldn’t work out what it said. I decided that I would call Grandma and ask.
‘Hello, Felicity, darling. Any news about Jack?’
‘Nothing, Grandma, I’m sorry.’
‘Ah, well.’ I could hear her struggling to sound cheerful. ‘Soon, hopefully.’
‘Yes. Grandma? You know the place that you and Grandpa got engaged? Where he bought you the key? I found a photo of it in your album. Do you remember what it was called?’
‘How could I forget? It was a little village called Llave, with a double L. It means “key” in Spanish. It was in the middle of nowhere and it took us an age to get there. I even got fed up and wanted to turn back, but Grandpa insisted because he’d heard from some locals about how interesting it was.’
My heart sped up.
‘Did Jack ever ask you about it?’
‘He did. He was fascinated by it.’
‘Thank you, Grandma. I’ve got to run.’
I raced upstairs to get my tablet and searched for ‘Llave, Peru’. I prayed that the village still existed. A few hits came up, and I clicked on the first entry which was an encyclopaedia article.
It looked like the place hadn’t changed much since Grandma and Grandpa had visited. It was pretty tiny, but there was a larger settlement close by, which was big enough to be a town. It was called Cortegana. I discovered that there were two schools.
I grabbed my phone and called Simon. He answered straight away.
‘There’s a village called Llave that I need you to look up, next to a small town called Cortegana. It’s outside the area that you mapped, but I honestly think that Jack could be there. Could you try the two schools?’
I loved that Simon didn’t ask me anything about how I’d come across these places or why I thought they were important.
‘Sure, I’ll try them now. I’ll ring you back,’ he promised.
To distract myself from the agony of waiting, I researched the history of the village. It had been founded by Spanish conquerors in the seventeenth century and for many years had been home to cattlemen and their families. Until, in the late 1920s, a local businessman opened a key factory there, which soon began supplying keys to the surrounding area and, later in the 1960s, became a tourist attraction. It was around this time that the village changed its name to Llave from its much less interesting name of Aqa.
Next, I looked up Cortegana. I scanned the article. There didn’t seem anything particularly unusual about the town. It was the childhood home of a famous Peruvian film star, and was known as the remotest town in Peru, reachable only by one road. It was encircled by mountain ranges, and in all the images, I could see snow-covered peaks and dense forest.
I prayed that wherever Jack was, he was safe and had access to his medicine. I was about to close the page when something made me click on the image of the town’s cathedral. This brought up a whole new entry. I scanned the page and my eyes rested on the subtitle, ‘Legend of the Inca Gold’.
It was the cathedral that Jack had told Finny about. I punched the air. Just then my phone vibrated on the desk.
‘No connection at either school,’ said Simon. ‘But I rang the community centre in Llave and a guy called Carlos picked up. It was a different type of number so I reckon it could be a mobile. Anyway, he said that there were lots of people staying at the centre and at the supermarket next door, as they were the two larger buildings that had managed to survive the tremors. Many of the houses have been flattened. He didn’t know the names of everyone staying there, but he did say that there were tourists and travellers. Loads of them were asleep, obviously – I’m an idiot for not remembering the time difference – but he took my number and he promised to send me a message if he had any news on Jack.’
‘That’s amazing. Thank you so, so much.’
I could tell that Simon seemed surprised by how happy I was.
‘Hey, no problem. But this doesn’t necessarily get us any closer to finding him, you know that, right? I spoke to a random guy who had mobile signal in a small village somewhere in central Peru.’
‘Trust me on this,’ I told him boldly.
It made perfect sense – this was the place where his favourite key had come from, and it was close to the origin of the Inca gold. I was so certain of being right that I sat cross-legged with my phone in front of me, waiting for the call. I stared and stared at the screen.
Eventually, I couldn’t bear it any longer and I shoved it out of sight under the bed. My fingers brushed against something leathery – the book of riddle tales. I’d forgotten all about it. I brushed off the layer of dust from the cover and flicked through to the last tale I’d written.
The Riddle of the Locked Chest. The memory of the final riddle Jack had told me made my eyes blur. I flicked back through the notebook. There were so many stories there, easily more than a hundred. Jack hadn’t known that I’d written them all down. I wondered if I’d ever have the chance to tell him. I began to hungrily read through them, wishing that I could reverse time to when I’d jotted down the very first riddle.
I was so engrossed that I didn’t notice the time until a car horn brought me back to reality and I pani
cked when I saw that it had already gone 8.30 a.m. Drat, I was supposed to be at Keira’s, ready to walk in together. I weighed up my options. I could go into school and keep my phone in my pocket (which was breaking the rules). That way, when I heard it buzzing, I could make up an excuse and run out into the corridor to take the call.
The alternative was telling Mum that I didn’t feel well and staying at home, but I knew that if I did that, I would likely spend many more hours sitting here on the bed, staring at the phone, which would be torture. Who knew how long it would take the community centre man to find Jack? I took down Jack’s calendar from the wall, and struck through all the days that I’d left unmarked since the earthquake. I heard the echo of his words, ‘Every day you tick off means I’ll be a day closer to home.’ Then I threw on my school uniform, carefully placed the key under my shirt and went next door.
The weather had cooled overnight, and instead of the glorious, spring-like morning that I’d hoped for, it left a miserable, boggy greyness and a fine, cold drizzle. The rainwater ran down the pavement causing tiny, sad-looking rivers that splashed up my leg, leaving annoying damp spots on my tights.
I ignored it, trying to keep hold of the nervous excitement that was filling me to the brim.
‘Why are you so…?’ Keira began when she saw me.
‘Oh, Keira, I’ve solved the investigation. You’ll never believe who S.F. is!’
‘No way! Who?’
‘It’s me! It stands for Sergeant Flick – the nickname that Jack gave me.’ And then I told her all about showing Mum and Dad the tree.
‘I can’t believe we did all that work and it turned out to be you! How mad is that? But you know, I don’t think it went to waste. There’s lots of important—’
‘—He’s going to call today,’ I interrupted her. ‘I know that Jack’s going to call. He’s in a village called Llave. It’s where Grandpa bought the key for Grandma and it’s also close to the cathedral where the Inca gold was stolen. All the clues have come together. I’m certain that’s where he is.’
The Key to Finding Jack Page 10