The Messenger Bird

by Ruth Eastham

  I left Mum in the kitchen and went upstairs, Bones shuffling after me. Hannah was in her room; I heard her laptop keyboard clacking. I went into my bedroom, then Mum and Dad’s, while Bones pattered alongside me, his back all hunched and his nose sniffing, but I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I heard Hannah come out of her room and the bathroom lock click, then the noise of the shower, so I checked her room out too, even though she’d have gone mad if she’d known I was in there. Nothing to report.

  I decided to check the attic library next and went up the spiral staircase, Bones clattering after me on the bare wooden steps. There was a layer of snow on the skylight and I weaved through the gloom and the junk piles to switch on the lamp. The tassels shook, making spider legs of light scuttle up the flowery wallpaper and the old photos hanging there in frames. I looked around awhile before I realized it would be pretty much impossible to work out if anyone had been snooping around in all this mess.

  I found myself looking at the photos. There were some young versions of Auntie Hilda, and lots of people I didn’t know, all with labels at the bottom of the pictures in the same tiny, neat handwriting in curly black ink. I peered close to read a few.

  Hilda with Auntie Susie and Auntie Sarah, Oxford, 1949…

  Hilda Vane with her mother (Ethel) and father (Peter), 1942…

  Bones nuzzled my leg, and I patted his fur.

  My eye was drawn to the photo in the furthest corner: a woman wearing a long, dark coat and an army-type hat, standing with a bike. I read the label, and then went even closer to read it again in case my eyes were playing tricks.

  Lily Kenley, 1940. BP, Hut 6

  The doorbell went, Match of the Day style, making me bump into the mannequin and knock off one of its arms.

  I struggled to reattach it. “Get that, will you, Nathan?” I heard Mum bellow. “I’m busy!”

  I sprinted down the stairs, my brain in a tangle. Lily Kenley. 1940. BP. Hut 6. Bletchley Park? There were buildings there called huts and they all had numbers; I remembered from our school trip. Now here was a link between the Bletchley Park on the milestone and Lily – it must be where her trail went next!

  “Friday the eleventh of November, five eighteen p.m.,” Josh called through the letter box, so I knew he was stressed. I went and opened the front door. Sasha was with him.

  “Sorry we’re late,” said Sasha as she stamped the snow off her shoes in the hall and took off her coat in the front room. “But the bus didn’t come, so my mum picked us up and wanted to go to Tesco on the way and she was taking ages, and then she decided she needed a new pair of shoes for winter – you know how she is – so we had to stop at a shoe place, and we ended up getting Josh a pair as well.”

  “Yes, sorry.” Josh sat down and smiled sheepishly as he lifted his tatty trouser leg to show me a gleaming pair of trainers. “They’re water impermeable, luminous and aerodynamic, with high-technology cushioned rubber soles and an excellent tread. Sorry.”

  “Anyway,” Sasha said, “my dad’ll come and pick us up later, to save us walking back in the dark. Any news?”

  I shook my head. It was too hard to tell them about my dad. Even if I wanted to, me thinking about bugs being everywhere, like scuttling, dirty little insects with enormous ears … that image was just too much.

  Josh took off his woolly hat and his hair stood on end with static. He stared at me, wide-eyed. “You don’t know what he’s been arrested for yet?”

  I shrugged, trying to look like it was no big deal. “We went to see his solicitor. But he didn’t say much.”

  I heard Mum clattering about in the kitchen, still in robot mode most likely. I heard the radiators trying to clang into action like they were in competition with each other.

  Josh rubbed his nose with a frown.

  “You still don’t know what he’s been arrested for!” said Sasha. “If I were you, I’d be going crazy!”

  I thought about Mr Edwards telling us about Dad and the Prevention of Terrorism Act; about the chance he’d be sentenced to life in prison. “He didn’t say much,” I repeated, my voice shaky. Bones whimpered from his basket and curled back into an uneasy sleep, his back twitching. I tried to switch topics. “How was school?” I asked.

  “OK,” said Sasha, shrugging and giving me a funny look. Stupid! Like anyone asks that, except parents. She’d know straightaway I was trying to change the subject. She probably knew I wasn’t telling her everything.

  “The teachers beat us in the football match,” Josh said mournfully. “Miss Mussi scored a hat-trick.” He sneezed and put his hat back on and opened a bag of crisps. “I can help you get a fire going if you want,” he crunched. “It’s unfriendly, having a cold house.”

  Sasha shoved Josh in the ribs and pulled a face at me, trying to get me to laugh. “Subtle as ever, Joshua.”

  I smiled back. It felt good to smile. Weird. Wrong, what with the stuff going on with Dad. I had to work out the lion eagle clue! I had to get to Bletchley Park – first thing in the morning, as soon as it opened!

  Josh frowned. “Oh. Sorry.” He shoved in another crisp. “What happened to the pigeon?”

  Trust Josh to notice! I bent down by the grate and took some coils of newspaper from the basket. Sasha screwed her face up at the bird’s empty eye socket. “Strange the solicitor couldn’t tell you anything about your dad, Nathan.”

  Now it was her turn to be subtle. I piled up more paper coils. Keep Sasha and Josh out of it, I told myself.

  “Yes, it is puzzling,” said Josh. “But I don’t get a good feeling about any of this business. Not at all.”

  I shoved a white firelighter cube into the pile of newspaper. Don’t tell them anything, I said to myself. You must not say a thing. “Mmmm,” I said, keeping my head turned away.

  I spun the wheel of the lighter and held the flame to the cube. The edges lit and turned black, and then the paper caught and I built a pyramid of twigs over it.

  Sasha came closer. I felt her eyes on me. “You can tell us, Nathan. We’re not going to blab to anyone, you know.”

  “No,” said Josh, looking hurt. “Course we won’t.”

  “You’d better not,” I said. The words came out all fierce. I didn’t mean them to. I dumped a chunk of wood on the growing fire, feeling the heat on my face.

  “Nathan,” said Sasha gently. “What is it?”

  “We’ll help you any way we can,” said Josh, and I knew he meant it. We always stuck up for each other. Ever since primary school when we’d been put on the same table. I looked at my friends, and suddenly it all felt too much to keep in any more. I couldn’t help it. I felt my face start to crumple.

  “Tell us, Nathan,” said Sasha quietly, and she was close to me with her hand on my arm and I could smell that vanilla kind of smell in her hair.

  “Nathan?” said Josh, his face all serious and upset.

  I dropped another log on the fire and watched the flames curl up the wood. I waited until it was properly alight. I swallowed. Then I told them. Nothing the people listening wouldn’t know already; I told them what Dad could be charged with and that he could go to prison for life, and after I’d said it relief slapped over me like a wave, leaving me shivering.

  Sasha gasped. “But that’s terrible, Nathan.”

  “I saw that on telly once,” said Josh, wide-eyed. “Someone was pinching files off a top-secret computer and selling them for loads of money.”

  Josh watches a lot of that kind of crime stuff on the telly. Thanks to his hopeless dad, he watched a lot of telly in general.

  “But why would they think it was your dad, Nathan?” said Sasha. “He would never do anything like that!”

  I said nothing. The rest was a secret. Dad’s and mine. I’d promised. I stabbed the fire with a poker. I definitely couldn’t tell them any more, bugs or no bugs. I stared at the flames a while so I didn’t have to look at them.

  “What’s this?” asked Josh. I turned slowly and it took me a few seconds to register w
hat he was flapping about in his hand. “Who’s Lily?” he asked way too loudly. “Why does she need help?”

  I leapt up and tried to snatch the paper back, but he’d read it. He’d only gone and read it! My jaw went tight. I felt sick. Great idea, Nathan, to put the message in with the pigeon! Why did Josh have to be so nosy?

  “But this Lily,” Josh went on. “We need to find her and…”

  I clamped Josh’s mouth with my hand and he fell back on to the settee in surprise. Sasha looked at me in shock. “Take it easy, Nathan. I read it as well!”

  I gestured wildly for them to be quiet. They’d read the first clue! They’d both read it! My stomach twisted up. Worse than that, Josh had said: Who’s Lily? Why does she need help? We need to find her. If the bugs had picked that up… I’d have to pray they hadn’t.

  I went to close the door between us and Mum in the kitchen, and then I turned on the telly and remote-controlled the volume up. I gestured them closer, mouthing over the noise. “The house is bugged.”

  I jabbed a finger at the date on the message, and Josh’s mouth formed an “O” shape and he stayed sitting there gripping a cushion. “I was only trying to sort out your pigeon,” he said as the telly blared. “It was disturbing.”

  But now Sasha and Josh knew.

  Would Dad be upset when he found out? He’d said it had to be our secret. That the more people who knew, the more dangerous it was. Would he think I’d let him down? I would have kept it secret, though, I was sure I would have.

  I crouched back by the fire. I prodded the flames and sparks sprayed up. Dad said we couldn’t trust anyone, I thought miserably. I imagined him, an old man in a prison cell.

  And then – maybe it was the way Josh was rocking and staring around for secret devices and looking so worried, or the way Sasha was resting her head on my shoulder, and maybe it was just because I was rubbish at keeping secrets, and they knew the first clue now anyway – but I hunted out a big pad of lined paper and a pen and I started to write.

  I wrote about Dad collecting evidence on people at his work, and about Lily’s strange trail, right up to the last clue on the milestone, and my theory that Lily had worked at Bletchley Park – all in brief, obviously, or it would have been a novel, and it took me ages as it was – and how I had to get to the end of the trail because I thought it would lead to the evidence. I explained how Mum and Hannah hadn’t been told anything

  AND SHOULD NOT BE TOLD!!!!! DAD SAID IT WAS DANGEROUS.

  I wrote about the car with tinted windows and Mr Edwards and the bugs and the figure I thought had been watching me, and about the pigeon’s eye and how I knew someone had broken into the house.

  They read as I wrote, saying nothing, and they stayed really still and wide-eyed for quite a while after I’d finished. They were trying to take it all in, I guess. I stared at the pages of writing on the pad on my knee. It would have made a good book, if it hadn’t all been true.

  I ripped the pages off the pad and screwed them into a ball and tossed it on the fire. I slapped the notepad shut and flung down my pen. My fingers were killing me from gripping the pen so tensely and pressing on the paper so hard. I hid Lily’s message back in the bottom of the glass dome, thinking I’d find a better hiding place for it later. “Let’s go in the garden.” I gestured with my thumb and clicked off the telly. The noise was doing my head in.

  “But I was just getting warm!” whispered Josh, as Sasha pulled her coat back on and dragged him out.

  We stood on the lawn by the rusty air-raid shelter with its sprinkling of moonlit snow, stamping about in the cold, but well away from any bugs, I hoped.

  Sasha gripped my arm, bubbling with questions. “Someone broke into your house? Who do you think it was? What were they after?”

  I told them my theory about corrupt members of staff at my dad’s work.

  “Bound to be!” said Josh, all scared-looking. “I saw a film about that once. Yes, They need to find the evidence as soon as they can, and destroy it!”

  Sasha hugged herself tight. “What do you think the evidence is – a big folder of papers or something? How come your dad didn’t give it to Mr Edwards?” she said. “Or just tell him where it is? Surely he trusts his own solicitor!”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought that too. There’s something weird going on there.”

  “The corrupt staff got to him, probably,” said Josh, and we turned to look at him. “They probably threatened to, you know, do nasty things to his family or something. Your dad could have known the corrupt staff would threaten Mr Edwards, maybe bribe him with money, but threats are easier. That’s why your dad didn’t want to tell him where the evidence was.”

  I thought that through. What Josh was saying – it made sense. I remembered the way Mr Edwards had looked nervously at the photos of his kids on his desk – what had he said again in his office? Something about finding your weak spots… They find your weak spots, that was it. Apply pressure. They’d threatened him, that must be it, and Dad must have guessed they had.

  “Mr Edwards warned you, though, Nathan,” said Sasha, “so he can’t be all bad, right? I’m not sure I’d trust him totally, though.

  “But there’s something I really don’t get,” she continued with a frown. “These Special Services people who are investigating all this. They’re part of the Ministry of Defence, right? They’re just going on the information they have about your dad to get a prosecution. They’re only trying to find out the truth, surely.”

  I nodded hard. “At the moment they think Dad’s making stuff up, but they’d investigate everything, wouldn’t they?” I said. “Every little thing. If it’s so important to national security and all that; if soldiers were killed…”

  I stopped dead; felt my mouth clamp shut. Sasha stared at me, shocked. “Soldiers died?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled. I hadn’t told them that bit yet. It still made me feel sick, just thinking about it.

  We went quiet. I jabbed a toe in the snow.

  “So as I was saying.” Sasha cleared her throat. “These Special Services people. All they want to do is find out if your dad’s guilty and if anyone else is involved. If they had the evidence, they’d see your dad wasn’t to blame and they’d release him. So why is he so worried about telling them where the evidence is, or even what it is? It makes him look like he’s got things to hide.”

  I felt that same shiver of worry. Even if we found the evidence, what might it say about Dad? Might he get into more trouble?

  “Maybe your dad can’t say anything,” said Josh quietly.

  We stared at him.

  “Maybe he knows that some of the people questioning him are corrupt too,” Josh continued. “Had you thought of that? It’s not too unlikely.” He hopped about, his new trainers shining in the moonlight. “I watched this programme once – True Crimes: Traitors!”

  “If it is true there’s dodgy people in the Special Services as well as the Ministry of Defence,” said Sasha breathlessly, “your dad would definitely keep his mouth shut about the evidence, Nathan.”

  “OK. Let’s think this through.” Josh started pacing about, half talking to himself. Tree branches creaked against each other in the wind. “OK, your dad works in a place where there’s loads of really secret information, and imagine one day he accidentally finds out that someone in his department is doing something wrong, like selling classified army files.” Josh blew on his hands. “But your dad knows he can’t just accuse people like that. He needs evidence.”

  I remembered Dad’s words to me before they took him. Without evidence we’ve got nothing. Mr Edwards had pretty much said the same thing.

  Sasha opened her mouth to speak, but Josh was on a roll. “But once the corrupt staff knew Nathan’s dad was on to them, they’d want to know exactly what he’d found out. Your house could have been bugged for days, Nathan!”

  “We have to get rid of those bugs straightaway!” cut in Sasha.

  Josh shook his head hard. “
Even if we could find them, if we did that They’d know we were on to them! No, the only thing the corrupt staff would want to do now is destroy all the evidence Nathan’s dad collected that proves they’re guilty, and then… Oooh!” He put a hand either side of his face. “If they don’t want to just kill Nathan’s dad and make it look like an accident…”

  Kill Dad? My panic levels soared.

  “…they’d probably try and make it look like he did the secrets-selling instead!” continued Josh excitedly. “They’d try and frame him – that’s it! They found out Nathan’s dad got to know what they were up to, and now they want to frame him so he gets the blame instead of them!”

  Me and Sasha looked at each other. Was all this just Josh’s overactive imagination? The result of spending way too long in front of the telly? I had to admit, though, it fitted.

  “Hang on, Josh. Hang on,” said Sasha. “These corrupt staff or whoever, how would they make it look like Nathan’s dad did it?”

  Josh shrugged. “Plant evidence … twist evidence … destroy evidence… It would have to be someone high up at work for Mr Vane to be that worried. He would have just gone to his bosses at the Ministry of Defence otherwise. It has to be someone with a lot of power. There could be a whole group of them.” His eyeballs glinted. There could be a whole network of corrupt members of staff, not just people at the Ministry of Defence and Special Services. There could be police, too, even, all in it for the money. We could be talking millions, if they’ve been selling military secrets to foreign governments. Then there’d be no one you could tell!”

  “So everyone is in on it, are they?” said Sasha with a short laugh. “The entire police force too!”

  “No, course not!” said Josh. “But how would you know who to trust? It’d be better not to trust anyone and not to tell anyone anything.”