A MESSAGE FROM CHICKEN HOUSE
Set in his native Lake District, Danny Rurlander’s thrilling debut novel follows a group of brave kids and a bunch of home-made drones. Together, they’re the only ones who can foil an assassination plot! This is a perfect adventure of the absolutely classic kind – think Swallows and Amazons brought bang up to date.
I love it!
BARRY CUNNINGHAM
Publisher
Chicken House
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Copyright
For my children:
Esme, Chloe, Lachlan and Lucy
‘You haven’t seen a tree until you’ve seen its shadow from the sky.’
AMELIA EARHART
CHAPTER 1
It was an hour before school, and Tom Hopkins was beginning the return leg of his morning flight. A half-eaten plate of toast at his elbow, he turned north and followed the drystone wall up the side of Raven Howe. A few Herdwicks, their russet flanks catching the morning sunshine, watched his shadow warily as he passed overhead. He drew level with the top of the hill, the sheep now brown dots on a cloth of green, and was about to continue over it before heading back across the lake for home, when he noticed a man looking straight towards him through a pair of binoculars. He backed away and tried to make himself disappear into the oblivion of sunshine, his heart thumping as he set the controls to hover. The man was tall, with a smart jacket and a shock of white hair showing beneath a straw hat – not the usual hiker or dog walker Tom would expect to see this early on the fell tops.
At last the man turned away. Tom blindly stuffed in a mouthful of toast and followed his gaze down the slope to where a hazy outline of fells was mirrored in the strip of water below. Making its way up from the group of wooded islands that divided the lake in two, the passenger steamer Teal was the first boat to break the morning calm, like a knife slicing open a sheet of tinfoil.
‘Thomas, dear, do you know what time it is?’ The voice of his aunt drifted across the lawn from the kitchen door.
He glanced at the clock in the corner of the display. Six minutes before he needed to leave for the bus.
He was about to head for home, when he noticed that the man was now typing into a laptop that was resting on top of the concrete pillar of the trig point. He zoomed in to try and see what was on the screen, but the man’s back was in the way. He stopped typing and turned his binoculars to the opposite shore. Tom followed his gaze and saw two boats emerging from behind a headland and moving towards a narrow inlet. The first, an orange speedboat, was towing a boxy old motor cruiser behind it.
Tom shut down his motors and glided low over the canopy of the beech wood, to get clear of the man with the laptop. When the hill was well behind him he powered up again, crossed to the other side of the lake and circled above the boats to take a closer look.
The speedboat’s name, Invincible, was visible on the side, and Tom could see why: the row of three massive outboards would make her one of the most powerful boats on the lake. There was a man and a woman on board, and they seemed to be waiting for something. The woman had red hair and wore a camouflage jacket. She was looking back up to the top of Raven Howe through binoculars. The man had his hair in a tight ponytail. He sat hunched over his watch, occasionally glancing at the sky.
‘Thomas, you’ll be making the bus wait for you again.’
He could hear the concern in Aunt Emily’s voice. If he lingered much longer he’d have to face a busload of stares as he stumbled up the steps.
He was close enough to read the name of the old motor cruiser: Clementine. She was drifting with no one on board. Something strange was going on. Let them stare, he thought. Let them stare. He had to see this play out.
Tom swivelled back to Raven Howe. The man with the straw hat raised his arm and then lowered it, like someone starting a race. At this signal the couple in the speedboat sprang into action. They cast off the tow rope, throttled away from the cruiser for a hundred yards, and then curved back in a tight circle to face it. They sat there for a few moments, staring at the other boat.
Tom was aware of the workshop door opening.
‘Thomas, it’s five minutes till the bus.’ He did not look up, but could picture the bewilderment on her face. Since his great-aunt had taken him in, he’d had a nagging feeling, despite her endless kindness, that he baffled her. ‘He’s just at that age,’ he had overheard her say to the physio once when Tom had skipped a session. But that wasn’t it at all. ‘Can’t you press pause, or something, and finish the game later?’
He met her eyes now and tried to look calm, while delicately holding a steady hover. Why did she have to choose this moment to butt in? ‘Don’t worry, Aunt Emily,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I’ll be right there.’
‘You won’t want me driving you in again, Thomas, will you? Not on the last day of term.’ When she’d gone, the metal door of the workshop crashed behind her like a warning.
He whipped his head around to face the monitor. He had taken his eyes away from the screen for only a few seconds, but when he looked back, the Clementine was engulfed in flames, black smoke swelling into the air like a bruise, and jets of fire spurting from the hatches. Then the bow tilted into an angle that made Tom’s stomach churn and the boat sank so quickly that, by the time he engaged the camera and started filming, there was nothing but a circle of simmering water and a thinning cloud of smoke where the cruiser had been.
Three minutes later Tom slumped into a seat on the bus and realized he was shaking. He stared at the chequered headrest in front of him and tried to replay the last few minutes of the flight in his mind: the man and woman on the Invincible looking on while the old cruiser blazed and sparked, then the Clementine going down in flames like something in a war zone. And the tall man with the straw hat and laptop, watching everything calmly from the top of Raven Howe.
CHAPTER 2
The final Friday of the school year was a half-day, but to Tom it felt like it would never end. During French the ‘end-of-term treat’, as Madame Henderson called it, was to sit through a quirky French film about a dog. Tom was sitting with Manky McDonald, the small, straggly-haired boy everyone avoided because, they said, he stank. Tom didn’t mind. He certainly did smell, but Manky, whose real name was Alasdair, was also the most laid-back person Tom knew. And he didn’t ask Tom any questions about himself, which suited Tom just fine. Now, with the lights dimmed, Manky chuckled his way through the film, occasionally nudging Tom in the ribs about something funny, oblivious to the fact that Tom’s mind was elsewhere.
He ran over what he’d seen earlier. Whatever it was that he’d witnessed in the empty stillness of the morning, he knew no one was suppose
d to have seen it. He found a blank page in his exercise book, and sketched a map of the northern half of the lake. He drew Raven Howe where he’d seen the man in the straw hat. Then he marked the place where the Clementine had sunk with a cross. He remembered this was the deepest part of the lake. He was imagining the wreckage of the old cruiser now, resting on the lakebed, its decks split and shattered, silently imploding with the weight of water above. How had it happened so quickly? And what did straw-hat man have to do with it? If only he had not taken his eyes off the screen at that moment! And why would anyone want to send an old tub like that to the bottom of the lake anyway? Revenge? Some kind of prank? A warning to someone, perhaps? Tom was trying to come up with other possible reasons for the sinking, when he found himself tuning into a whispered conversation a few rows behind him.
It was Snakey, Podge and Sam Noyland, the little threesome who called themselves – in a ridiculous take-off of the elite Navy unit – the ‘Special Boat Squad’, or SBS for short. Usually he filtered out their moronic banter about farts and girls, but a few words caught his attention.
‘Dad’s away . . .’
‘Stingray . . .’
‘. . . the island . . .’
Stingray was the name of Paul Hodgson’s father’s ski boat, a beast of a machine with a belching Cobra engine that growled and spat. Tom thought the boat suited the Hodgsons the way dogs sometimes suited their owners. He guessed that if the parents were away, the three boys would be planning on using the boat for some end-of-term anarchy on the island they treated as their private mini-kingdom.
As the final bell went, and the clatter of desks and chairs exploded around him, he sat alone for a few minutes, his thoughts returning to the other speedboat, Invincible, with her unusual row of three engines. He pulled himself up and decided to go and hunt for it as soon as he got home.
He trudged purposefully towards the lockers, people spilling past him on either side, like a river rushing around a stone. By the time he reached the cloakrooms, the commotion had receded into the yard and he thought he was alone. He stuffed the contents of his locker into his rucksack.
Then, without warning, his walking stick was sliced away with a kick. He hit the floor like a tree being felled, and looked up to find Snakey kneeling over him, his hands on Tom’s neck, eyes popping with amusement.
‘Hello, Hop-Hop-Hop-Hop-Hopkins!’ Snakey let out a laugh.
With his almost-cute freckles, below average height and glasses, Ryan Snaith did not look like the brutal tormenter he had been since Tom’s first day at the new school, just after he had moved up to live with Aunt Emily. Perhaps that was how he got away with it.
Tom caught the familiar whiff of body spray as Snakey leant close, and could see Podge and Sam leering over his shoulders. Sam was munching on a handful of the sour wiggly worms he seemed to live on. Podge had his rubbery chops clenched around a lollipop stick. Snakey raised his fist behind his shoulder.
‘Go on, Snakey!’ Podge shouted hoarsely, a gurgle of phlegm in his throat. ‘Give him an end-of-term nosebleed!’
Snakey hesitated. He relaxed his arm. ‘I’ve got a better idea. Remember the mines? Let’s make him beg.’
A moment later the three boys were dragging Tom towards a row of large lockers. He tried not to scream. But the old fear took hold, like cats’ claws scraping the lining of his stomach, and he couldn’t stop himself from yelling out and begging at the top of his voice.
‘Please, Snakey, please don’t put me in there! You know how much . . . Please, Snakey. No!’
Tom writhed and thrashed like an animal, grabbed Snakey’s leg to try and pull him over, but the other boy lashed out with his free foot and Tom felt a crack at the side of his head. He went limp and felt merciless hands on his shoulders and legs, pinning him down, pushing him into the darkness.
He saw a flicker of fear register in Sam Noyland’s face. ‘Careful, Snakey. We don’t want to actually hurt him, do we?’
Snakey shot Sam a look of disgust.
‘I mean, I don’t want to get into trouble at the start of the holidays!’
‘Just stuff him in the locker and leave him,’ said Podge, chewing his lolly.
Then the door slammed, and everything went black. He was alone, his legs folded under him, his head pressed against cold metal. The panic rose inside him like a bubble, his heart throbbing in his ears, his eyes drowning in darkness, until the memory of the slate mine overwhelmed every other thought.
CHAPTER 3
Tom was only half aware of the click of the bolt. In the black-blindness of the locker he had driven himself into a state of semi-conscious horror, neither awake nor asleep, and the light and the air and the voices now flooding in, all became part of the nightmare.
He sensed light behind his eyelids. A warm hand gently touched his forehead. He flickered open his eyes for a moment and saw Jim Rothwell looking down at him, serious but calm, concern showing in the slightest twitch of his greying moustache.
Someone was speaking nearby. ‘It wasn’t us, Mr Rothwell. We were just getting our things from the lockers.’ That was Podge’s voice, squeaky with indignation.
He felt himself being carried. Rain in his hair. More voices. Doors banging. He opened his eyes again, and this time he was sitting in the front of Jim’s ancient Subaru Forester, with its familiar smell of pipe tobacco, and the debris of fishing tackle and bits of old rope strewn around the seats.
Tom stared ahead, humiliation and anger competing with relief and thankfulness for being rescued. He opened the window and let the breeze cool his face. Jim said nothing, but Tom was aware of his sideways glances as they crawled through the main street of the village, where tourists were hurrying to unfold their cagoules.
‘Aunt Emily will be mad,’ he said at last.
‘And so she should be. Those lads deserve a good hiding.’
‘I mean about me missing the bus and needing a lift home. I’m not even going to tell her about the other thing.’
Jim braked to let some pedestrians cross the road. ‘I know she’s a bit of a fusspot sometimes, Tom, but she does her best. And she ought to know what just happened.’
‘I know, but she’ll think I can’t look after myself. It’s bad enough that I needed to be driven home by the school handyman on the last day of term.’
‘Even if that school handyman happens to be your friend?’
‘Please, Jim. She’ll just worry even more.’
They left the village behind and Tom watched the road as it tracked around the bottom of Brockbarrow, clinging to the curves of the drystone walls. The last thing he needed now school was finished was a big fuss. All he wanted was to be left alone in his workshop, detached from everything below, lost in the silence of flight.
‘All right,’ said Jim, looking at him, one hand loosely resting on top of the wheel. ‘I won’t mention it.’
Tom let out a breath and managed to return Jim’s smile. ‘Thanks.’
Jim braked and turned off the road through a stone gateway with ‘Cedar Holme’ marked on a piece of blue-green slate. He pulled the handbrake on.
‘This time,’ he said.
As soon as Jim had gone Tom headed across the lawn to his workshop on the bank of the Elleray, the river that flowed past the house and on towards the lake. He quietly unlocked the rusty double doors that faced the little stone harbour, and was about to pull them open when he heard Aunt Emily’s cheerful call from the other side of the garden.
‘Good afternoon, Thomas! Changeover day, remember?’
Tom inhaled. He could feel a shift in the weather and was desperate to get into the air before it was too late. He squeezed the rusty padlock closed again, and stomped through the damp garden to ‘River’s Edge’, the old converted boathouse his aunt rented out to people for holidays. He pulled himself up the iron staircase that led to the balcony overlooking the river.
‘How was your last day?’ said Aunt Emily brightly, when he stepped inside and slumped on to a sofa in
the big open lounge.
‘Fine, thanks,’ he said. He put a hand over the lobe of his ear, where a crust of dried blood was forming. ‘What shall I do to help?’
‘Actually, Thomas, dear, I’ve nearly finished getting the house ready. But I wanted to tell you about the family arriving tomorrow.’ She was standing by the bathroom door, folding towels. ‘A family called the Greens, from Manchester. The mother has an unusual name. Chinese, I think. Now let’s see . . .’ She pulled out a notebook from a pocket at the front of her apron and pushed on a pair of glasses that were hanging on a cord around her neck. ‘Ah, yes. Mr Donald Green and Mrs Jia Green. Two children. Joel, twelve and Maggie, fourteen.’
Tom knew what was coming next.
‘Perfect.’ His aunt snapped the notebook shut.
Tom pushed himself up to leave. He had to get out.
‘Now,’ Aunt Emily continued, ‘they’re staying for four weeks, so—’
‘A whole month!’ Tom blurted out before he could stop himself.
‘Yes, Thomas. And I’d like you to show the children around tomorrow. It will be an opportunity for you to make some new friends. Mr Green is a vet, doing a locum for someone in the village. And Mrs Green is recovering from an illness. So, no doubt the children are going to be at a loose end a lot of the time, and I’m sure it would mean a lot to Mr and Mrs Green if they knew the children had someone their own age to look after them and make them feel at home.’
‘But, Aunt Emily, they’ll want to climb mountains and swim in the lake the whole time – that’s what they always want to do. And, anyway, I don’t need new friends.’
‘No one expects you to do miracles, Thomas. But I would like to see you doing things that are normal for a thirteen-year-old boy – with other children – rather than sitting in a shed all day in front of a computer screen.’ She was looking straight in front of her, arms moving like a machine. ‘And, yes, Thomas, dear, I believe you do need some new friends.’
She disappeared into one of the bedrooms.
There was a time when Tom would happily have played the tour guide that Aunt Emily wanted. He thought back to his brief time at Kingsgrove College, the boarding school in Lincolnshire his father had enrolled him in during his final tour of duty in the Middle East. He may not have been at the centre of the popular crowd, but he’d fitted in fine. At Christmas he had even brought two friends, Theo Marshall and Moses Kamau – whose parents were also overseas – to stay with Aunt Emily. He’d taken them on a night climb up Dollywaggon Pike for the sunrise, followed by a freezing swim in Grisedale Tarn as a dare. They’d nearly got hypothermia and had laughed hysterically about it for hours while they thawed out, drinking hot chocolate and eating Aunt Emily’s cheese scones in front of the wood burner. But now, all he wanted was to get back to his workshop, lock the doors behind him, put on his gaming goggles, and soar into empty air until the twists and folds of mountains spread out beneath him like cushions and he was utterly alone in the silent sky.
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