About thirty rugby players snuck out of their dorms just after nine. The organisers located their illicit stash of beer in woodland on the edge of school grounds and met up with the rest in the parking lot behind Barnsdale School’s swanky maple-clad boathouse.
A boombox blasted rock and rap as shouty lads chugged beers, bragged, boasted, tossed rugby balls around and fought for the attention of the modest number of females who’d decided that this was how they wanted to spend a Friday night.
Clare Gisborne was in her element. She drank every beer handed to her and drew cheers as she wrecked the egos of two rugby players who made the mistake of challenging her to a wrestling match. A third earned a fat lip for the sexist comment he made as she rolled around on the ground.
But it was closer to Little John’s idea of hell. He stayed on the edge of the gathering, sipping his first beer until the tin grew warm. When he wandered off into trees where lads were peeing, he kept going until he reached reeds at the edge of the huge artificial lake.
He spent ages watching ducks cruising in the moonlight, but it took a rare moment of quiet in the mayhem by the boathouse to hear girls laughing on a wooden pontoon less than ten metres away.
John’s face went hot when he realised how close they were. He had a horrible feeling they’d think he was some weirdo who’d been staring at them, but the ground was soft this close to the water and his shoe squelched as he turned away.
It was only mud on one knee and the palm he put down to save himself, but a pretty barefoot girl came running. John knew she was called Amber because she was in his art class, though he’d never spoken to her.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked.
‘Just muddy,’ John said, as she scrambled up.
‘We saw you staring at the water,’ she said. ‘Not enjoying the party?’
John shrugged. ‘Not really my scene.’
Amber led him back to the pontoon. Two more girls sat with their feet in the water, and John liked the way the moonlight caught their skin. They said hello, but let Amber do the talking.
As John swished his hand through the water and rubbed his knee to wash off the mud, she explained that they came out here once or twice a week when it was warm, just sitting around chatting or playing with their phones to get away from the noise in their dorm.
‘And then my rugby mates pile out here and ruin it,’ John said. ‘Sorry!’
John and the three girls spent ages talking. He felt annoyed when Robin got mentioned, but overcame his shyness as he told a story about his little brother being sad after his mum died, and how he climbed out of a third-storey window and perched on top of a roof.
‘Robin had only just turned seven. Adults kept saying his mum was up in heaven, and he told my dad he’d climbed up so he could be closer to her.’
‘That is so sweet,’ Amber said, as the other two made Aww sounds.
John was enjoying having the three girls paying him lots of attention and started another anecdote.
‘Robin was always wild,’ he said. ‘When he first started getting into archery, he saw a video about flaming arrows. So, in the middle of the summer holidays, he persuaded me to film him setting fire to arrows and shooting them at the mailbox of an abandoned house.
‘Every time the arrow hit the mailbox, the flame snuffed out. So Robin stuffed the mailbox with dry grass soaked in petrol from the can my dad used to fill his lawnmower.’
‘Oh my God!’ Amber gasped.
‘It made a huge fireball!’ John said, shaking his arms dramatically. ‘I was filming and it crisped all the hairs up my arm.’
‘You could have been really hurt,’ Amber said.
‘Obviously,’ John said. ‘Kids do stupid things . . .’
‘Did you get in trouble?’
John shook his head. ‘Not really. There were whole streets of abandoned houses around where we lived in Locksley. The fire didn’t spread beyond a patch of burned grass, and we wiped the video because our dad would have murdered us if he’d seen it.’
‘You must worry about Robin,’ Amber said sympathetically.
John nodded. ‘We don’t have much in common, but I do love him.’
John felt sad as he said this, then excited when Amber shuffled up a little closer and gently stroked the back of his hand. He briefly made eye contact and it felt like the moment in a movie where people kiss. Except it wasn’t, because her two friends were way too close and then there was a radical change in the noise coming from around the boathouse.
The music had stopped and there was wild animal moaning. Someone was in a lot of pain and everyone else seemed to be gasping and running away.
‘Sounds like they’re getting busted,’ one of Amber’s pals said, as she pulled her feet out of the water and reached for her sandals.
‘We’d better shift out of here,’ Amber agreed.
39. YOU’RE GONNA CARRY THAT WEIGHT
The forest canopy shaded the heat, but with drones patrolling the sky and a forest full of informants, the group of ten had to avoid popular routes. Fresh spring growth meant regular halts while Seb and Azeem used machetes to clear their path.
The two vets – Chris and Adrianna – were new to the forest and had a tough time, but it was Robin who had the heaviest pack relative to his size and kept falling behind. After two hours striding north, Freya and Lyla took pity and Robin felt ashamed as they took stuff out of his pack to make life easier.
‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped.
‘Just make us look good when you write your autobiography,’ Lyla joked.
‘And give us a cut of the money,’ Freya added.
There were ten kilometres between Designer Outlets and Sherwood Castle on a map. But avoiding paths, bandits and an area known for bears added 4K and steep terrain to the route.
Their overnight camp was in dense forest half a kilometre from the heavy fence around Sherwood Castle’s private grounds.
A four-person advance party had set up camp days earlier. Three family-sized tents had been erected, each coated with greenery to diffuse heat and prevent detection by patrol drones.
To breach the heavy fence, the advance party had dug a nine-metre tunnel near the castle’s hunting grounds, and a back-up in case Castle Guards discovered them.
They were also supposed to set up a satellite connection, enabling the AFM raid to be live-streamed over the internet. But the tunnelling had fallen behind schedule, so Robin and the others arrived to find none of the tech stuff working.
Robin liked messing around with computers and normally would have been happy to set up the remote internet connection, but the sun was low when they finally arrived and all he wanted was to kick off his boots, eat his sandwich and crash out in a corner.
Instead he found himself ten metres up a tree with a head lamp, a tool belt and a coil of rope. After sawing a couple of branches to create a clear line of sight for the dish, Robin lowered the rope. At the bottom, Freya tied on a small satellite transceiver and, once he’d pulled it up, Robin balanced precariously as he screwed a clamp to a branch and mounted the dish.
It took ten minutes’ fiddling with a signal meter to get the dish pointed towards the right satellite and Robin had a painful climb down because his hands were full of splinters.
Most of the AFM activists were vegetarian, so Robin sat in moonlight getting bitten to death by midges, dunking his sandwich in vegan goulash with one hand, while Indio tweezered splinters out of the other.
‘Marion thinks she’s missing out!’ he joked, as she pulled a large splinter that left a trickle of blood down his wrist.
While Robin ate, Freya finished setting up the internet connection and successfully tested live video from one of the helmet cameras.
Robin had left his expensive new laptop back in his den, but he’d put his hacking tools on a memory stick. He needed to make some final checks on Sherwood Castle and yawned as he plugged the USB into a toughened Panasonic laptop and tunnelled into the StayNet system.
Azeem, Lucy and a guy who smelled exactly how you’d expect after four days digging tunnels without a shower formed an audience as Robin logged in and opened the staff module.
‘I went in here a week ago and changed the shifts for the Castle Guards,’ he explained as he ticked a box so that the module showed active security staff on a timeline. ‘I thought someone might notice and change it back, but it looks like nobody checks shift rotas after they’re entered into the system.’
‘What have you changed?’ the mud-caked tunneller asked.
Robin scrolled up the screen, showing a grid with lots of red dots.
‘The Castle is full of VIP guests ready for tomorrow’s trophy hunt. According to the schedule, they should be having welcome drinks in the main ballroom right now. Each of these twenty-nine dots is a guard on duty. The yellow dot means someone called in sick.’
Robin scrolled down to the following day, and a grid with a lot less dots.
‘I cancelled a heap of guards on tomorrow’s rota. When we enter the castle grounds in the morning, there should only be eleven guards covering the whole compound.
‘Why not cancel them all?’ the tunneller asked.
‘We pulled as many as we dared,’ Lucy explained. ‘But they’d notice straight away if no guards turned up at all.’
‘Eleven of them, fourteen of us,’ Robin said, stifling another yawn. ‘And we have the element of surprise . . .’
40. OWW, ME LEGS
Sebsebe bet his pals on the Barnsdale rugby squad that he could climb on the roof of the boathouse, make a running leap over the muddy slipway used to launch boats and land in water deep enough not to kill himself.
Since he landed in water and didn’t die, he won the bet. But the slipway extended further into the water than the sozzled teen expected and he’d broken his heel and dislocated his shoulder when he slammed concrete beneath a metre of water.
While several onlookers laughed and uploaded the fail to social media, more considerate teens lifted Sebsebe out of the water. One called an ambulance, while another anonymously phoned the school office.
Clare Gisborne hadn’t seen the horrifying leap, but after two wrestling bouts and too many beers, she found herself caught in a fleeing mob.
Staff traditionally turned a blind eye to older kids having a little fun after curfew, but that didn’t stretch to YouTube videos where the son of Ethiopia’s richest businessman hurled himself off the boathouse. Barnsdale had a reputation to protect and there would be consequences for any pupil caught near the scene.
Clare tripped when someone cut across her path. Someone else almost trampled her, but moments later the crowd was gone and she was face down in damp grass, with nothing but moonlight and Sebsebe’s distant moans for company. She rolled onto her back and laughed drunkenly as she stared at a swirling grey sky.
Clare knew if she got caught, her dad would probably laugh. She’s a wild one, like her old man! But that felt wrong; she’d spent years seeking Daddy’s approval, but now she’d grown out of it. She remembered her plan to study hard and go to a uni as far from Locksley as she could.
But when Clare tried to get up, her legs were jelly. She felt like crying, laughing and puking all at the same time.
‘Look at the state of you!’ Little John gasped, arriving on the scene as another of Sebsebe’s moans echoed across the rowing lake.
‘I’ve never drunk this much before,’ Clare confessed. ‘You’re a nice guy, coming back for me.’
‘I couldn’t see you in the pack and I saw how much beer you were necking,’ John said, trying not to think about how he’d be most of the way back to school now if he’d legged it with Amber and her pals. ‘Put your arms around me.’
Clare managed to sit up as John squatted down to give a piggyback. He still had aches and sunburn from rugby practice and Clare had a hefty frame and muscle from years of kick-boxing.
‘You’re like concrete,’ he moaned, as he started waddling forward.
But John was strong and, once he got going, piggybacking Clare wasn’t bad.
After half a kilometre cutting through trees, the school buildings were in sight, but the last stretch to their hall of residence was the most precarious. Crossing the open ground of two sports pitches.
Several of the school’s carers, teachers and senior staff were out on the fields. Some of the mob had been caught, while other kids got lucky and made it through.
‘We’re so busted!’ Clare said, her voice jerking to the rhythm of John’s huge strides.
Little John dithered before breaking onto the pitches, but he had two advantages. First, he’d drunk less than half a beer, so unlike most kids, he had his wits about him. Second, all the staff he could see were dealing with kids they’d already nabbed. So being among the last to get back had actually worked to their advantage.
‘Hang on,’ John said. ‘It’ll get bumpy!’
As Clare pulled her arms too tight for comfort, John broke into a full sprint. He made it across one soccer pitch, but as he reached an all-weather pitch closer to the dorms a man shouted, ‘Get ’ere, you little hooligan!’
One of the school grounds-people went wide to intercept, but bottled it when he saw John’s bulk charge out of the shadows. John reached the hall of residence seconds later, but the main door didn’t budge.
‘Around the side!’ a boy shouted, gesturing from an upstairs window.
John scrambled around the long building. A couple of kids had opened the windows of their rooms to let escapees climb in, but with Clare in a state John figured it was best to go the extra distance to a side door that someone had propped with a mop.
He had to put her down on the threshold so he didn’t whack her head on the door frame. He hoped she’d regained enough coordination for the walk upstairs up to her room, but when he set her feet on the ground, her head rolled and her legs gave way.
‘Great,’ John groaned, as he caught her.
The dormitory ceiling was too low for another piggyback. Several excitable kids had their heads poking out of their rooms as John grabbed Clare around the waist and threw her over his shoulder.
He got a thigh workout carrying her up to the first floor, and the lad who’d shouted out of the window helped by opening the door of her room.
‘She OK?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ John said, grunting as he straightened Clare’s duvet with his free hand before flopping her onto the bed, unconscious. ‘I guess she’ll sleep it off.’
41. THE PROBLEM WITH FINGERPRINT LOGINS
Little John rolled Clare onto her front so she couldn’t choke, then gently pulled her muddy Nikes off, though he suspected she wouldn’t have stirred if he’d set off fireworks. Finally, John crashed into the chair at Clare’s desk, catching his breath and realising that he had a shocking pain in his shoulder and skin peeling off his sunburned neck.
The houses at Barnsdale were mixed, but there were strict rules about boys and girls going in each other’s rooms, especially after dark and with doors closed.
John wanted to be in his own bed looking innocent if staff came knocking, but as he stood he noticed Clare’s phone bulging in the pocket of her shorts. She’d been the closest thing he’d had to a friend since he’d arrived at Barnsdale, but he still wondered if Clare’s transformation from ninja-star nutter to vulnerable human was a ploy to get information about Robin.
John felt guilty as he unzipped her pocket and slid out her phone. He’d seen her unlock it with the index finger on her right hand. She was snoring with her fists bunched, but didn’t stir as John uncurled the finger and dabbed it on the screen.
Fingerprint Recognised
John studied the icons on Clare’s home screen and tapped her messaging app. After glancing to make sure she was still zonked, he opened the conversation between Clare and her dad.
He skimmed through heaps of routine daddy–daughter stuff. School pickups, orthodontist appointments, pleading for money to join Barnsdale’s showjumping club
, dates for a family party and updates on a great-aunt who tripped on a kerb and broke her arm.
John decided the most likely way to find out whose side Clare was really on was to scroll back to the date when he’d first arrived at Barnsdale. He found a short, upbeat message from Clare to her dad.
I’m alive! Wasn’t too much traffic on the highway. Room and teachers seem OK. But guess who I ran into!
In the days that followed, Clare sent messages where she sounded lonely and homesick, but as she’d told John, Guy Gisborne showed little interest in his daughter’s welfare and peppered her with excitable and sometimes bizarre suggestions for ways she might get information about Robin out of Little John.
They ranged from flirting and blackmail, to smuggling in wine to get John drunk. John felt offended when Gisborne suggested that Clare try and make friends with John’s friends and she’d replied:
Little John’s a weirdo, he doesn’t have friends.
But mostly he was relieved, because Clare clearly hadn’t been spying on him. He even smirked at the irony when he read a message where Gisborne suggested that Clare sneak into his room and try reading the messages on his phone.
John looked up as Clare made a gasping snore, but she showed no sign of waking. It was good knowing Clare had become a true friend. But that also made him feel guiltier about stealing her fingerprint and reading her private information.
As John scrolled back to more recent messages, it seemed that his name had dropped out of the conversation. But as he was about to give up, his eye caught Robin’s name in a bout of three-day-old messages.
Clare: Hi-ho daddy-o! Did you pay school for my China trip yet? 20% deposit due Friday.
Daddy: Didn’t get chance today. Came out of meeting earlier and found Black Bess II with tyres slashed and Robin Hood Lives graffiti.
Clare: Bummer!
Daddy: People have zero respect now. Your little brothers are teased at school, your ma got donuts flung at her in the street and business is way down. It can’t go on, but I’m close to fixing the little brat who set it all off.
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