CONTENTS
Day One: Tuesday
Chapter One: You Oscillate it
Chapter Two: Socked
Chapter Three: The Shank
Chapter Four: On The Case
Chapter Five: God Save the Queens
Chapter Six: CSI
Chapter Seven: Chinatown
Chapter Eight: A Dangerous Lady
Chapter Nine: A History Lesson
Chapter Ten: A Cat, A Dog, A Cold Welcome
Day Two: Wednesday
Chapter Eleven: The Girl
Chapter Twelve: An Act of Gallantry
Chapter Thirteen: The Hit
Chapter Fourteen: Interzone
Chapter Fifteen: Forbidden Flesh
Chapter Sixteen: Back to the Shank
Chapter Seventeen: Some Advice from the Cat
Chapter Eighteen: Starbucks
Day Three: Thursday
Chapter Nineteen: The Three Sisters
Chapter Twenty: The Dwarf’s Story
Chapter Twenty-One: An Orpheus for the Underworld
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Collector
Chapter Twenty-Three: Sick Bay Blues
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Queen Moves
Chapter Twenty-Five: Two Clues For Comfort
Chapter Twenty-Six: Of Love and Demons
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The White, The Red, The Blue
Day Four: Friday
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Counsellor
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Safe
Chapter Thirty: The Final Clue
Chapter Thirty-One: The Cast Assembles
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Briefcase
Chapter Thirty-Three: The Knife that Wasn’t
Chapter Thirty-Four: Schrödinger’s Tortoise
Chapter Thirty-Five: The Last Chapter
Acknowledgements
For Rebecca Campbell, whose silken thread guided me through the labyrinth
DAY ONE
TUESDAY
CHAPTER ONE
YOU OSCILLATE IT
I was sitting on the can when it all kicked off. Third cubicle from the wall. You could be pretty sure of finding me there at 11.30 on a Tuesday morning. That’s because 11.30 on a Tuesday morning meant double maths, and even the sour tang in the boys’ pissoir beat the heck out of quadratic equations, and the stale pleasure of speculating about whether Mr McHale would be wearing the brown safari jacket with red food stains, or the red jacket with brown stains.
I’d grown kind of fond of cubicle number three. The busted lock meant it was never used for any of the more depressing activities that can happen in school toilet cubicles, and the graffiti in there was of a slightly higher standard than usual, including the classic:
How do you titillate an ocelot?
I could usually while away an hour pondering such matters, but this morning I had other things on my mind. My great aunt or some such obscure relation had shuffled off her mortal coil, and Dad, Mum and Sis were going to throw dirt on the coffin. This was all happening down on the coast and they were set to be away for the week. It was my first time alone in the house, which was cool. But Mum and Dad kept hammering me about my meds, even as they were lined up by the door, all ready to go.
“You’ll take your pills, John?”
“Sure, Mum.”
“The white, red and blue ones?”
“I know, Mum. The white, red and the blue.”
“You understand why?”
“I’m not an idiot…”
“The boy’ll be fine,” said Dad, and gave me a look that was supposed to say I trust you, but had too much raw hope in it for that. “Come on, we’ve got to get going.”
I picked up my sis, and held her high and shook her till she giggled.
“Bye, John-John,” she said, and I lowered her down so she could kiss my cheek.
On the way out of the house I looked at the special dispenser with thirty-one compartments, containing my medication for every day of the month. A white, a red and a blue in each little box. But I was late and in a mad rush and I told myself that it would be OK if I took them when I got back from school.
So I was playing the goodbye scene over again in my head in cubicle three when I heard the door to the toilets creak open, and felt that electric line of tension crawl across my shoulders.
There were a couple of possibilities. It could be some kid who’d put up his hand in class and begged to be allowed to relieve himself. The alternative was that it was one of the Shank’s patrols.
This was a more troubling prospect.
The Shank – or Mr Shankley to give him his full name – was the new Deputy, brought in to “save our failing school”, although that turned out to be pretty much in the way the harpoon saves the whale. There was no escaping Shankley. He was all over us like scabs on a leper. A crew-cut Nosferatu, he prowled the corridors looking for kids to murder. His preferred weapon was a voice that could either slit you open with the sly precision of a stiletto, or blow your head off like a roadside bomb.
So, you can see why I wasn’t too pleased to hear the toilet door creak open.
I pulled my legs up and hoped the Shank – if it was him – would settle for a quick look under the row of cubicles. Of course, if he went to each stall and kicked back the door, then I’d be up to my neck in the brown stuff.
What happened was a pause, a rustle, then a sort of faint skittering noise, like the sound of peanut shells falling out of a bag. Then there was a metallic rattle, loud enough to make me jump. And then, well, then some other sound that might have been a cough, or a laugh, or just one of those untranslatable noises that bodies make sometimes.
Then the door opened and closed, and I was on my own again.
All kinds of intriguing. So, up I got and pulled open the cubicle door, using the upperside of my foot on the lowerside of the door, because, frankly, you don’t want to be touching anything in there with your hands.
I wasn’t expecting much, and not much is what I found.
At first.
In fact, not much seemed to be selling it big, because what it looked like was nothing at all. The room was empty. The six sinks still stood in a line, echoed by the six yellowing urinals on the opposite wall. With the six cubicles, that made 666, the number of the beast. Some architect’s idea of a joke? Or maybe Satan himself liked to hang out here, skiving off from maths lessons in hell.
Then I looked down at the floor tiles. Once white, but a lot of amber liquid had flowed this way over the years. There was something on the floor – besides the archaeological deposits of urine, that is.
No, some things on the floor.
Dry, brown things.
My eyes didn’t want to focus. I moved closer and bent to study the whatever-they-were scattered across the tiles. I stretched out my fingers, not meaning to touch them, but just assessing the scale of them, getting their dimensions into my head.
Then a couple of things happened pretty close together, and I really couldn’t say which was first. One was the door opening again, and one was me realizing that these dry, brown things had once lived in a glass tank in the biology lab. I think that my lips may even have begun forming the words “stick insects”, when I looked up into four cruel eyes and two malicious smiles.
CHAPTER TWO
SOCKED
AS I looked up, Bosola and Funt looked down.
This was not good.
Shankley himself would have been grim, but at least you’d know roughly what to expect. You’d get yelled at, and you’d get detention. You might get suspended. You might get expelled. But you wouldn’t get your head kicked in. With these two jokers you couldn’t rely on that.
Bosola and Funt weren’t the kind of kids you’d normally expect to find wearing pre
fects’ badges, but then that went for all the prefects in our school. The Shank had hand-picked the scumbags, and trained them up to act as his bullyboys and enforcers, thereby neatly getting round the quaint rule that said the teachers weren’t permitted to kick seven types of merde out of you any more. The prefects had a thumb in almost every racket that went on in the school, from bun-running for the Lardies to the tax on the Year Seven’s dinner money, extracted in a very business-like manner at the school gates. They also ran the lucrative trade in stolen exam papers, and the word was that the Shank got a ten per cent kickback for turning a blind eye.
These two badasses were the lowest of the low. Funt was the muscle and he followed Bosola around the way a foul burp follows a cheap burger. Funt looked like one of those Easter Island statues, and his conversation was just as lively. He was an idiot savant – you know, one of those guys who can’t tie his shoelaces or catch a bus, but have one special ability, like knowing pi to a million decimal places, or being able to remember exact cloud formations on a particular day when he was six years old. Funt’s special ability was that he could punch you in the mouth and spit in your eye at the same time.
OK, so maybe not such a savant. Maybe just an idiot idiot. An idiot squared. Either way, he was the nearest the duo got to a good cop.
Bad-cop Bosola looked like a girl, but if ever you bumped into him it was a good idea to check afterwards to make sure your throat hadn’t gotten itself accidentally slit. He was a pink-eyed, white-haired albino, but he died his hair black and wore coloured contact lenses. It was said that if he took his contacts out and gave you his pink-eyed stare, you’d go mad or drop down dead or, at the very least, soil yourself – but I reckoned that was just his PR machine, and deep down he was a sissy. He spoke with the sinister high-pitched whine of a dentist’s drill:
“Oh, now just when I thought the day was a write-off, here it is, like a gift from heaven, wacko Middleton, squirming like a cockroach on the toilet floor.”
Funt grunted. It was the sound you’d get from a pig when you put its slops out at feeding time.
“And what do we do to a crap-house roach?” continued Bosola’s whine.
“We stamp on it,” replied Funt, his voice rumbling like a dumper truck in a quarry. And he stepped forward, ready to put precisely that plan into operation.
But before the stamp, came a crunch.
“What the…?” said Funt, looking down. He lifted up his shoe and peered at the sole, like a caveman trying to work out how to change the fuse on a plug.
Bosola checked out the floor too. He also looked puzzled. Then he smiled. “This is nice. This is better than nice. We haven’t just got some skiver; we’ve got a psycho.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, getting up. “I found these here, same as you.”
“Not what it looks like to me, pal,” said Bosola. “Mr Shankley’s gonna do his nut when he sees this. He loves his little pets, doesn’t he, Futs?”
Another grunt from the monolith. He peeled a stick insect off his shoe, like spiky gum.
Bosola was right about one thing. As part of the New Regime, Shankley had filled the school with all kinds of animals. The thinking was that it would diffuse some of the violence, bring in a dash of that “awwww, ain’t it cute” vibe. So that’s why we had those damn stick insects in the biology lab, as well as three nervous (and eggless) chickens in a run near the playing fields, a couple of guinea pigs called Snuffy and Sniffy in the Sixth Form common room and, most important of all, a tortoise called the Venerable Bede, who was the official school mascot.
Actually, the tortoise wasn’t part of the New Deal. He’d always belonged to our Principal, Mr Vole, and was said to be the same age as the old man.
The Shank used the poor beasts in his Friday assembly orations, lauding the loyalty of the guinea pigs, the sagacity of the tortoise, and the community spirit of the chickens, who would happily have given up their eggs if they’d ever managed to lay any. Maybe, for all I can remember, he even praised the artful cunning of the stick insects.
But now the stick insects had gone for the big sleep and I was up to my neck in manure.
“Pick ’em up,” said Bosola, looking me in the eye.
“Pick ’em up yourself,” I said amiably back, though amiable is not quite the right word for the thoughts in my head. I knew that the second I bent to pick up the insects, I’d get a boot in the face. “If you don’t mind standing aside, I’ve got to get back to class – I’ve a hot date with a really sexy quadratic equation.”
Suddenly Bosola’s soft, feminine face hardened.
“Oh, so he doesn’t want to pick ’em up! Doesn’t he know that we’re prefects, and that as he’s just a Year-Ten zero, he’s got to do what we say?”
Funt grunted.
I still didn’t move.
“So, in that case it’s back to plan A,” said Bosola.
Funt looked at him uncertainly.
Bosola gave a little groan. “The stamping!”
“Oh, yeah.”
Now, Funt was slow, but only in the sense of being thick. When it came to using his body rather than his mind, he was anything but sluggish. He reached me in two quick, boxer’s steps. I put my left up to parry his right, but it didn’t come. Instead he grabbed my throat and shoved me back against the wall, keeping a hold on my neck. Now he drew back his fist, going for a straight right to the middle of my face. It’s the sort of punch you use on little kids. A nose buster or lip burster. It won’t put down a real fighter – you need a nice clean hit to the chin to do that – but it’ll make a kid cry.
The trouble was, I now didn’t have the time to parry, or even duck, not with Funt’s speed of hand. So I rolled my face to the right, and the punch slid off the side of my skull, like a rock bouncing down a mountain, and smashed into the wall behind me.
Funt yowled and let go of my neck. He was still in close, so I gave him a back-handed slap with my left to make some room. The slap made a good noise as my knuckles rapped against his hard bones. I stepped out from his shadow and drew back my arm, going for the thinnest part of the jaw. I gave myself a 50–50 chance of cracking it.
But halfway there, my fist sort of died. It took me a second to realize that I’d been sapped. I found that I was down on my knees. I looked up. Bosola was holding something. Something soft with something hard inside it. Then he swung it again and the world went supernova.
CHAPTER THREE
THE SHANK
“WHAT d’ya sock him with?”
“A sock.”
“A sock?”
“A sock with a spud in it.”
“How d’ya find a sock with a spud in it?”
“I put the spud in the sock.”
“Oh. Why d’ya put the spud in the sock?”
“Jeez. Look, a spud in a sock makes a good cosh. It takes a guy down. But if you get pulled in, what have you got? Just a sock and a spud. You put the sock on, you eat the spud. Right?”
“Right.”
Well, that was the quality of entertainment I had on the trip, once I came round. The two of them were half dragging, half carrying me along. One of them had hold of my shirt collar, choking the air out of me. I think that’s what brought me round, dying being one of the things I’ll gladly wake up to avoid. I tried to get my feet to take some of the weight, but they slipped and slid on the polished floor of the corridor.
“Looks like the baby woke up.”
They held me low and hard, so I had to trot along bent double. We went up a flight of stairs, along another corridor. Twice I stumbled, and twice they hauled me up by the collar, each time yanking it tighter.
And then we were outside the Shank’s office.
I should give you some geography. And maybe a bit of history. We were in the section of the school called the teachers’ corridor. You’d know it with your eyes closed: it was the only part of the school that didn’t smell of disinfectant and urine. First, you came to the school office, where the secretary, a spi
nster called Miss Bickersniff lived, then the staff room, then the Shank’s office with a sign saying Chief Executive on the door, and then the Principal’s office.
The Principal, Mr Vole, was a sweet old guy, smelling faintly of pipe smoke and peppermint, with a whiff of fruitcake. His milky eyes peered benignly over the top of a pair of half-moon glasses, and his only desire, so far as anyone could tell, was to get through to his retirement with as little bother as possible.
Before the Shank came along, most of the work fell on the shoulders of the old Deputy, a fuzzy-haired guy called Mr Bathgate. Bathgate was a nervous breakdown waiting to happen, and after yet another disastrous school inspection he had a total collapse. Miss Bickersniff found him sitting on the wastepaper bin in his office, with his pants shucked down around his ankles, shouting for his mummy.
So, Shankley was brought in as the new broom, and everything changed. The old sweet chaos was replaced by fastened top buttons and lots of shouting. The thinking behind it all was to run the place like a business, which was why Shankley had that Chief Executive nameplate put up on his door. Much to his obvious bemusement, Vole found himself described as the “Managing Director”. But the truth was, the school was now more like a military dictatorship than either a corporation or an institution of learning.
Bosola knocked on Shankley’s door. A bark came from inside. Then the door was open, and I was facing the Shank across a wooden desk as big as an aircraft carrier.
Facing Mr Shankley wasn’t something you’d choose to do for entertainment. His eyes were a weird pale-green – so pale, in fact, that sometimes it seemed that there was no line between the white of the eye and the iris. He wore his sparse, gun-metal-grey hair slicked back, and his mouth was twisted into a near-perpetual snarl, which only occasionally softened itself into a sneer. If he could have got away with it, he’d have gone full-on Gestapo and added a monocle and leather gloves.
The Shank’s narrow lips pursed. He had a wart like a rice crispy on the side of his nose.
“What is this?”
“Sir, we found this slimeball in the bogs. I mean toilets, sir. And not just that, sir, but he had these.”
Hello Darkness Page 1
