by David Gilman
So who was Max’s real dad? Snow began to tumble. The book and music were forgotten. Out of the dreamlike storm, the small red postal van appeared.
“Anything?” Drew asked, shoving a stick of chewing gum into his mouth.
Stanton pressed his earpiece. “They’re shuffling stuff. Letters. Jackson is moaning about junk mail. He’s asking if that’s everything … if there’s anything for the Gordon boy. The other teacher’s in there with him. Says no. That’s it. OK. Now he’s telling him to take everything to the mailroom and make sure the kids get their letters.”
Drew looked at Stanton and shrugged. “Well? If the dead kid didn’t get to send anything, it’s all hunky-dory. Let’s get back to London. I can’t stick all this fresh air.”
Stanton was less impatient. Maybe they should wait out the day. But what was the point? If Maguire had sent anything before he died, it would have been delivered by now, and nothing Jackson had said suggested it had. Drew was right. Job done. Time to go back.
Something wasn’t right, though, and Stanton didn’t know what it was. He nudged the hood out onto the narrow tarmac, but his thoughts were still held by this Max Gordon. He hadn’t laid eyes on the boy, so why did it bother him so much? He swung the Range Rover across the hillside and felt it tilt as it angled downward. It righted itself as the wheels found the path. Snow sluiced off the windscreen.
“Look out!” Drew shouted.
Sayid squinted against the snow as it caught his eyelids. His ski beanie was pulled across his ears, and his scarf was tucked up to cover his mouth. Pushing his legs to keep going up the incline and balancing the wheels against the settling snow, he crested the rise with a decent turn of speed. As he angled his face away from the wind-driven flurries, he failed to see the black boulder of a car as it eased down from the sheltering tor and nudged into the road.
He jerked the handlebars away from the looming 4?4 and felt the front wheel slide. Boy and bike separated and crashed down into the snow, skidding along for a few meters until his twisted body thumped into one of the small raised banks that flanked the roads across the moor. His last thoughts were of sliding toward the front radiator grille of the 4?4-a monster’s jaws. The impact on his back knocked the wind out of him. A sudden pain shot through to his chest and darkness closed over his mind.
Drew was already out on the road. He bent down, eased Sayid’s body gently so it lay flat and quickly felt for any broken bones.
Stanton stood next to him, looking left and right. It was highly unlikely any other vehicles would be using this isolated strip of road, but if they did, he would not hear their approach in the snow’s blanketing silence. He stayed alert.
“Is he dead?” he asked Drew.
“No, out for the count.”
Drew was still on one knee and twisted to look back at Stanton. The two men stared at each other for a moment. Both knew there was a decision to be made. The cyclist was obviously a boy from the school. Had he seen them when they’d visited? If he had, would it appear suspicious to him that the men in the Range Rover were hanging around? They couldn’t just leave him, because he or one of the teachers might consider the vehicle driver responsible and report the accident to the police.
Breaking his neck would solve the problem.
It would look like the boy had fallen on the slippery surface and landed badly. Snow was already covering the Rover’s tracks.
“Well?” Drew asked, knowing full well the thoughts they both shared.
The boy groaned.
Stanton shook his head. “Help him up.” And as Drew eased the fallen rider into a sitting position, Stanton righted the bike. It wasn’t damaged.
“You OK now, son?”
Sayid nodded groggily.
“Your bike’s all right. You came over the blind hill like an Olympic skier,” Stanton said, subtly shifting the blame onto the boy. “We didn’t have a chance to see you.”
The man who first helped him put an arm under his shoulder. Sayid recognized the two men, and he didn’t want them staring too closely at his face. His beanie was still intact, and he pushed himself up, getting to his feet. He took his bike from the other man. The snow flurries were now a blessing; he could avert his eyes from their faces as if shielding himself from the wet flakes.
“Sorry I gave you a fright. My fault. I should’ve been more careful,” Sayid said, but thought that he should go one better to make sure the men didn’t suspect he recognized them. “Are you lost? Are you looking for somewhere?”
Drew and Stanton glanced quickly at each other. “The Country House Inn,” Stanton said. “Yeah, we’re lost.”
Sayid settled himself back onto the bike. He mustn’t panic now.
“The Country House Inn? No, I don’t think there’s anywhere called that on this side of the moor. Sorry, can’t help.”
“Not a problem,” Stanton said. He had made up the name. Now he was satisfied. If the kid on the bike had come up with a set of false directions, just to get the men away from him, his suspicions would have been alerted.
They watched a moment longer as the boy’s tires cut a furrow through the snow, then banged their boots clear and climbed back into the 4?4. The wheels creaked over the powder, and they turned their backs on the cyclist and Dartmoor High.
Sayid sped down the final stretch of road, hands tightly gripping the handlebars, desperately wanting to look over his shoulder to see if the men were still there. But he didn’t, because he was scared and did not want them thinking he knew anything, because if they thought he did …
His imagination was running away with him faster than the wheels beneath him. He did a satisfying skidding halt at the bike sheds and didn’t even bother to kick the snow from the mountain bike’s tires. There were more important things to do.
At the pub, he had spun a line to Phil, the postman, about his birthday present from his parents being late, and as this was half-term, he was going to his aunt’s place in a nearby village. Could Phil check for him? The postman had no doubt the boy was from Dartmoor High and obliged him.
Sayid crunched across to the school building. So, if those two men were looking for Max and for the letter Danny Maguire had sent him, they didn’t know how close they’d come to having it in their hands.
There was a satisfying crinkle of the envelope tucked under his arm beneath the jacket.
4
Sayid breathlessly told Max about the men who had nearly run him over.
“They must have been watching the school,” Max said as he fingered the envelope, suspicion making him wary. What if this was a letter bomb? That was a stupid anxiety, he decided. It was more the anticipation of what lay inside it that was making him nervous.
“They must have been watching for you,” Sayid said.
“Or for this being delivered. That’s what they came here for, isn’t it? A letter from Maguire to me?”
“But they were out at Hunter’s Tor. You’re not going to see Postie deliver a parcel with your name on it from there, are you?”
Max knew it didn’t make sense, but right now it was this envelope that was important. Max suspected Danny Maguire had died trying to get it to him.
The two boys sat on Max’s bed. A bold, strong hand had written Max’s name and Dartmoor High’s address on the packet in block letters, so there could be no mistaking for whom it was intended. He carefully cut open the padded envelope, and a tangle of string fell out.
“What is that?” Sayid asked.
“I’ve no idea. Are you sure this was the only thing Postie had for me?” Max said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, it must mean something. It’s not just … string. Is it?” Max teased the strands apart. The pattern across was as big as the palms of his hands side by side. A top strand of coarse string had several other pieces tied on to it, like a small skirt. Each of the dangling strings had knots tied in it at various places along the strand. A few turns in the string were dyed red.
Max rubbed the ro
ugh strands in his hand. Was this what Danny Maguire had died for? A handful of string?
He pressed a button to bring his laptop out of hibernation, then keyed in “string messages.” Google said there were 877,000 bits of information and started with string messages in Java computer language.
“You think there’s any link between this and computer code?” Max asked Sayid.
Sayid watched as Max scrolled down. The links continued in the same vein: protocol and error messages. “Maybe. This might be something you’re supposed to decipher. Y’know-one knot means something in the binary of a specific string that he’s laid in somewhere. Has he sent you anything by email that we could look at?”
Max shook his head. “Only that he was coming to London and he’d be in touch. That was a month ago.”
“Well, this is going to take some kind of genius to work it out. I’m happy to have a go at it.”
“Nothing like modesty, Sayid. Who appointed you chief scientific officer?”
“Someone’s got to try.”
“This hasn’t got anything to do with computers; I’m sure of it. He was doing field studies in South America. This has something to do with where he was. What is it he’s trying to tell me?”
Max scrolled down the screen. There was nothing apparent. String instruments of South America, shoestring holidays … nothing that indicated what he was looking for.
The door burst open. Max slammed the laptop’s lid down. It was Baskins, as subtle as a bull in a china shop. “Hey, Max, I need one more for seven-a-side. Be great in the snow, yeah? Oh, hi, Sayid. You up for it, Max? Come on, it’ll be raining again soon, and where’s the fun in that?”
“No, thanks. I’m busy.”
“Ah, come on! I need some speed and muscle on my team. Look, I’m sorry for what I said, OK? No hard feelings-you caught me a good one. My ears are still ringing. Why’ve you got a khipu?” Baskins rattled on, never drawing breath as he picked up the tassels of string.
“A what?” Max said.
“Khipu.”
“How would you know what this is?” Max said.
“We did a whole thing on South America with Mr. Peterson last year. Hoggart called ’em kippers when the bloke came down from the university and told us about them. Hoggart’s such a prat at times. It was all about ancient stuff. It was so boring except for the sacrificial bits. That was cool. They used to disembowel their victims and-”
Max took the strings back and cut short Baskins’s gory recounting of blood sacrifices. “What’s it for?”
“Apparently, Incas used them for keeping tabs on things. Y’know, how many bags of corn they had, information and stuff, shorthand or something. Look, I dunno. Are you coming or what?”
Max eased him out the door. “I can’t right now. Thanks, you’ve been a great help.”
Baskins had never been a great help to anyone before, so the compliment needed some thought. By the time he’d reached the top of the stairs, he still had no idea what he’d said that was so useful, but he remembered someone else as a replacement for Max. He pounded down the corridor to press-gang the boy.
Max tapped another query into the computer: “k-e-e-p-u.” That made no sense at all. He reached for his dictionary. He couldn’t see anything that spelled what Baskins had said.
“Let’s try Incas,” Sayid said as his fingers quickly touched the keys. “Here we go!”
They scrolled down the information bars. Incas: pre-Columbian tribes, distinct language, located in Peru, Ecuador and Chile.
Max clicked on one of the links: British Museum: Sun God Exhibition. A series of photographs spread themselves across the screen. Figures carved into stone tablets, double-headed snakes made of jade, burial masks, temples, figures decorated in plumes of exotic birds.
Sayid double-clicked another link. “Stand back-genius at work.”
They had found the correct spelling. Max read the paragraph on the khipu, which described it as an abacus, but then went on to explain that khipu knots might well be arranged in a binary code, which meant they held more information than a simple memory aid.
“Y’see, I was right,” Sayid said. “Binary. You send an email or anything and what you see is really eight-digit sequences of ones and zeros. Then that gets translated by the computer that received your text.”
“Then maybe there is a message here somewhere.”
“Well, you’re good with knots.”
“I’ve never seen any like these, though. And what’s this got to do with Mum?” Max inadvertently asked the question aloud that echoed around his mind.
Suddenly, what had been upsetting Max recently was becoming more apparent. “This is about your mum?” Sayid asked carefully.
Max nodded. He fished out the half-dozen photographs and gave them to Sayid, who thumbed through them.
“But she was in Central America when she … when she died, wasn’t she? I thought Maguire was doing his field trip in South America,” Sayid said.
“That’s right,” Max said, taking the pictures back, regretting mentioning his mother. “But there has to be a connection. I’m just not sure what it is.”
“Do you want to tell me what this is all about?” Sayid asked.
“I just want to find out more about her, that’s all. I put a thing out on the Net. Danny Maguire said he knew about her.” Max did not want to tell even his best friend about the accusation against his father. That he had left his mother to die alone in the jungle. That in fact even Max did not know exactly how she had died.
“But your dad must know all that stuff.”
“But how do I get it out of him? The way he is, I mean.”
Sayid did not press his friend. It was obvious Max was being cagey, and given his recent unsettled behavior, he did not want to risk pushing any wrong buttons, as Baskins had done earlier. Word had zipped around the few boys left at the school that Max Gordon had lost it big-time.
“Maguire’s death was suicide,” Sayid said gently.
Max gave him an “oh yeah?” look.
Sayid shrugged. “Well, OK. The guys who came here were pretty creepy, and maybe it is a bit of a coincidence. But they thought Maguire was involved in drug smuggling. We don’t know for sure.”
Max pulled his backpack down and began folding clothes. “I’m going to see my dad. And I need a couple of things.”
“Like what?”
“A school letterhead, and Mr. Jackson’s signature.”
“Max, that’s crazy. It’s impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible, Sayid-you should know that. Anyway, that’s the easy bit. I need my passport.”
“To go where?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Well, your passport’s in the vault. End of story.” It was a flat statement of finality.
The vault was 133 steps below Dartmoor High’s granite walls. Each boy had a safe-deposit box, and in each box, which could be opened only by a key that Mr. Jackson held, was that boy’s life. A passport, a legal guardian’s letter, a parent’s last words. If anything fatal happened to any of the boys’ parents, Mr. Jackson would take him down into the gloomy cavern, open the box and hand the boy a prerecorded message on an MP3 player. It was a final act of love from a father and a mother to their child-the last words the boy would hear from his parents.
The vault gave everyone the creeps-it was as if the dead were waiting.
Max had almost finished rolling T-shirts, cotton shorts and cargo pants. He pulled the compass cord over his head and let it sit below his sweatshirt.
“I know. But I have to get it.”
“Just like that? You get caught and they’ll kick you out.”
“If we get caught, they’ll kick us out,” Max said, giving Sayid a comforting smile that the other boy did not find reassuring.
Stanton had changed his mind. Why would Jackson have phoned the nursing home to inquire about Tom Gordon? Stanton’s people had already checked the place out, and there had been no sign of Max
. That was understandable given his father’s condition. So why phone? To reassure a boy about his father? He had underestimated the possibility that Jackson might be canny enough to be suspicious of them.
Jackson had lied; Stanton was beginning to be sure of it. He was protecting one of his pupils. Max Gordon was somewhere in that school, and if somehow Maguire had managed to get any kind of message to him, what would he do? Try to find answers.
Under cover of darkness, Stanton edged the Range Rover beneath the overhang of a hollowed-out rock face. The night shadows swallowed the 4?4 easily, and the shelter allowed a brief respite from the cutting wind. The rain had not come, but a scarring north wind had frozen the last snowfall. From their vantage point, he and a less-than-happy Drew gazed across the hills, beyond the moon-white river, toward the fortresslike Dartmoor High.
Wind crept and growled. Oak beams, hundreds of years old, creaked and twisted, moaning their discomfort like trapped ghosts. In the darkness of the school, only a couple of dim lights glowed at the end of each corridor.
Max’s headlamp cut a wedge into the blackness. Sayid followed him down the stairs, a constant whispering of apprehension, teasing Max’s ear like a draft from below the heavy-paneled doors.
Max stopped. “Sayid,” he said quietly, “shut up.”
“Sorry. But it’s two in the morning and I’ve never liked the dark. And all this creaking and groaning gives me the creeps.”
A door banged closed somewhere. Max turned off the light, grabbed his friend’s arm and pulled him into the blackness of the stairwell.
Footsteps. Leather shoes creaking. A cough. A door opening and closing. Somewhere to the left. Max whispered close to Sayid’s ear. “Probably Mr. Chaplin. He’s the only one who wears leather-soled shoes. And he fancies a hot chocolate before he goes to bed.”
