Raising Arcadia

by Simon Chesterman

  Or rather there is nothing. No dust. She looks across the tops of the magazines and specimen jars and sees that the dust that had been accumulating for some weeks is now gone. Mother occasionally asks her to clean her room, but she would not go in without asking her. For an intruder, dust is almost impossible to replace — once disturbed, it was simpler to clean the room rather than try to restore it. Someone has carefully gone through her room, putting everything in its proper location except the dust that once covered it. Curious.

  She sits down on her bed. Downstairs, the doorbell rings and she hears her parents invite a police officer inside. Three pairs of footsteps ascend the stairs. Her back is to the open door of her room but a faint smell of coconut oil precedes the policeman.

  “Constable Lestrange,” she says before turning around. “I wasn’t expecting to see you quite so soon.”

  “You two know each other?” Father asks.

  “Indeed,” she replies, standing up. “Don’t you recall that he was the officer at the school gate when you dropped me off yesterday?”

  “Of course he was. Sorry, Constable, it’s been a bit of a stressful day.”

  “Not at all,” says the officer. “Now, have you established what is missing?”

  “So far just the television.” Father leads them back downstairs. “My wife and I have a safe in the bedroom, but it hasn’t been touched. There were some coins on the dressing table — they’re still there. We’ll need a little while to see if anything else has been taken, but there isn’t actually that much of value.”

  “Have you noticed anything missing, Arky?” Mother asks, still frowning at her phone. “You have good eyes for that sort of thing.”

  “Missing? No. Though it would be worth looking around nearby rubbish bins to see if the television turns up.” She pauses. “The thief might have had a change of heart.”

  “Oh, this blasted thing!” Mother mutters, putting her phone on the table.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m trying to get hold of Magnus and the phone isn’t working.”

  “There’s been some kind of interference recently,” Constable Lestrange says. “The police radio has been acting up also.”

  “Let me call him on the landline for you.” She dials Magnus’s mobile number and waits until her brother finally picks up the phone after the sixth ring.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello, brother dear.”

  “Why, Arcadia, what an unexpected pleasure,” Magnus’s languid voice intones. “Are the police still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask how I knew the police were there?”

  “It’s one officer, and no I wasn’t planning to ask.”

  “Simple deduction: my caller ID shows that it is a phone call from our home and yet it is my sister calling me on a school day. Trouble, clearly, but not of the kind that takes you to a hospital. Ergo an incident at the house, I’m guessing theft and/or property damage. Correct?”

  “Remind me, Magnus, this graduate degree you are now pursuing at Cambridge: is it a doctorate in stating the obvious?”

  “Oh very droll, Arcadia. I suppose Mother wants to speak with me?”

  “Yes, but first I wanted to thank you.”

  “Oh?”

  “For the key.”

  “Ah.” There is a slight squeak of leather on the other end of the line as her brother shifts his prodigious weight, probably in an overstuffed chair in his college’s common room. “Not bad, Arcadia. It only took you three years.”

  She knows better than to ask what the key opens.

  “Don’t tell me you are going to ask what the key unlocks,” Magnus purrs down the line.

  “Of course not. But I was curious if there were in fact any missing letters — or was that merely a rumour that you had started yourself?”

  “Come, come, sister dear. You know what a staunch monarchist I am. I would never stoop to dishonourable rumour-mongering.”

  “So there were letters. But you would only plant your own message and the key if you knew that the letters were safe, or destroyed. When did you find the original letters?”

  “When I was in remove in second year. I was visiting in the room formerly occupied by our distinguished alumnus and observed that the air coming through the ventilation duct was flowing inconsistently. At an opportune time I opened the duct and found a stack of letters to the former student. They were all addressed with the same male hand, postmarked from London. The fact that they lacked a return address but had been carefully kept indicated a close but secret personal relationship.

  “I discreetly reached out to the, er, family — not a simple thing at the age of fourteen — and offered to return the letters or burn them. A car was ultimately sent with a man who collected them. They asked if I would care for a reward but I declined. It was my patriotic duty, I said.”

  “And you didn’t read the letters.”

  “Perish the thought, Arcadia. These were private. And, more importantly, they were Royal.”

  “So the little puzzle you left for me — I am, presumably, the heir apparent?”

  “Naturally: ‘He who will come.’ It would have been a little too obvious to say ‘She who will come.’ In any case, as you know, the Queen is occasionally made an honorary man in order to enter certain of London’s more traditional clubs.” He paused. “Though I suppose if someone else had found the message and the key then he would have been my true heir. Yet I always had high hopes that it would be you, Arcadia.”

  “How very fraternal of you.”

  “Well, Mother does always tell me to look after you.”

  “Speaking of Mother, she does want a word with you. But there is one last thing I wanted to ask.”

  “Hmm?”

  “On the placement of the key itself, I hadn’t realised that you had such an interest in Chapel. Is there something I don’t know about you?”

  “Why Arcadia, what you don’t know about me could fill volumes.”

  Mother insists that she have lunch with them before returning to school. She prepares some sandwiches while her daughter lays the table. The doorbell rings and she opens it for Constable Lestrange, who has returned from some further investigation.

  “Would you care for a sandwich, Constable?” Mother asks, ever hospitable.

  “No thanks, Ma’am. I have good news and bad news for you on the television.”

  If the bad news is that it’s broken then finding it hardly constitutes good news, but she holds her tongue.

  “The good news is that we found your television. It was in a skip on a building site two streets down. The bad news is that it is most likely damaged beyond repair. It seems the thief got tired of carrying it or was worried about being caught and threw it in the skip. The screen is cracked and some parts have fallen out. I am sorry about that.”

  “Well, thank you for letting us know,” Mother says. “Can I at least get you a cup of tea?”

  “That would be grand. White and one sugar, please.”

  “Do you think it’s odd?” Arcadia asks.

  “What, lass?”

  “Someone breaks in here without leaving a mark on the door. He walks around much of the house. Messes up one room, takes one thing, and then abandons it two streets away. This is a decidedly atypical burglar, highly skilled, but with no obvious motive.”

  “Well I’m getting bars put on the windows this weekend,” Mother announces, giving Constable Lestrange his cup of tea.

  The officer takes a sip. “Often you can’t tell with teenagers. They don’t always act rationally.” He glances at Arcadia and clears his throat. “Well, most of them don’t act rationally. Maybe this kid was looking for money or drugs and then got spooked. He grabbed the most expensive thing to hand and legged it. A teenager walking around carrying a TV is going to stand out, though, so he decided to dump it and call it a day.”

  “Possibly.” But she is unconvinced. The mess in the living room is too contai
ned. It is also the room through which the intruder entered and left the house. He would not have wanted to make so much noise at the beginning, so it must have been at the end. Someone carefully went through the house, but then at the last moment attempted to make it look like a burglary. Why?

  Constable Lestrange soon finishes his tea and stands up. “Thank you for the tea, Ma’am, but I’d best get back to the station. We’ve got you and your husband’s statements, but if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us. Oh, and we did dust for fingerprints around the door, but our intruder appears to have worn gloves. I’m sorry I can’t be more help.”

  Arcadia walks him to the front door. “Thank you, Constable Lestrange.”

  “Only doing my job, lass.” He hesitates, then takes a card from his pocket and writes a number on the back. “This is my mobile number in case you think of anything that might help.”

  She pockets the card and closes the door.

  A thief who breaks in, moves carefully around the house, and then — is interrupted? He did not expect to be seen and then quickly had to create an explanation for the break-in, making it look like a burglary. But what was the original intent? Not to take a television, surely.

  Looking for something else? Nothing appeared to be missing.

  Or leaving something behind?

  She returns to the foyer and looks more carefully at the marks on the carpet. In addition to a jumble of footprints, four small squares are identifiable on the carpet adjacent to the hat stand, forming the corners of a larger square about a foot wide. A chair? From the dining table she carries a chair back to the foyer. The four legs fit precisely into the imprints.

  An intruder would not position a chair in a hallway in order to sit. She stands on top of the chair, head now above the hat stand by the door and almost touching the metal light fitting that hangs from the ceiling. She turns around, trying to imagine what interest the intruder could have had in the ceiling.

  It is so small that she almost misses it, a piece of black plastic only slightly larger than a matchstick attached with invisible tape to one of the bars of the light fitting. A slim cord runs up the bar and behind the lightshade where it plugs into a black cube two inches square and an inch deep. A power source and transmitter for the tiny camera that now peers out on the entrance to their home.

  She is looking at the camera from the side, meaning that she has probably not come into its field of vision. She climbs back down and takes the chair in the direction of the dining table, scanning the carpet as she walks, but without moving her head. Two more sets of indentations help her locate cameras that have been placed on top of the bookshelf facing the living room and in another light fitting in the dining room itself. Upstairs, in her own room, it takes a little longer as she must pretend to be looking for something else, but she soon finds a camera concealed on top of her wardrobe. There are probably more.

  The cameras are sophisticated. What would a teenager be doing planting them in her parents’ home? She contemplates telling Mother and Father immediately, but knows that their reaction would be to leave the house at once or start tearing down the cameras.

  Could there be some connection to the elaborate surveillance network at the Priory School? This seems implausible. But who would bother to go to such lengths to spy on a family like hers?

  She needs more information and at present the best way to gather it is to leave the cameras in place. For the moment, then, she will say nothing — at least until she is able to confer with Magnus. That will have to wait until she is back at school, however, as she must now assume that the house telephone is bugged also. Before then, she will do a little more investigating of her own.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Pike. How are you today?” She offers her most winning smile when their elderly neighbour answers her knock.

  “Oh, can’t complain, young Arcadia,” Mrs. Pike replies, opening the door for her. “Would you like to come in?” An asthmatic bulldog bounds towards the door from the hallway inside, but she blocks its path with her foot. It breathes heavily, tongue dangling from one side of its mouth.

  “That’s very kind of you, but I’ve got to get back to school. The police told us what a courageous thing you did. I just wanted to say thank you.”

  Through the layers of makeup she cannot be sure, but the older woman appears to blush. “No bother, no bother. Have they caught the rapscallion?”

  “Alas no,” she sighs. “Your description was very helpful, however. They said it had given them a good shot at catching the, uh, rapscallion.”

  “Good, good,” she nods.

  “If you aren’t too exhausted by the episode, would you be able to tell me what happened? It’s ever so exciting.” She blinks her eyes enthusiastically, trying not to overdo it.

  It has the desired effect. “To be honest,” Mrs. Pike begins, “I didn’t get much of a look at him when he was loitering around your front door. Then he went and climbed over your gate. At first I thought he was you! Forgive me dear — you can’t tell boys from girls with these baggy clothes that children wear these days. Winston and I were on our walk to the park — you know my Winston” she scratches behind the ear of the bulldog wheezing at her feet — “he loves his walks does Winston. But then I said to Winston, ‘Young Arcadia is at school!’ I said. ‘And why would she be hanging about outside her own front door and jumping over fences?’ So, on our way back I popped over for a closer look. The lights were out and he was skulking about inside. This was passing strange, so Winston and I crept over to see what kind of funny business he was up to. My guess is that he knew your pa was a doctor and he was after some of those drugs. That’s what I said to the boys in blue. Anyway I couldn’t see too well inside on account of the lights being off and it was a sunny day outside but it was clear he was not on the side of the angels. That’s when Winston and I knew we had to call the police. Didn’t we, boy?”

  The bulldog’s panting is taken as an affirmation. “So I took out my phone and was calling the police when I think he must have seen me. There was this terrible crash of glass and then I heard your back door open and slam. I thought he might come after us so Winston and I hurried back to our home and bolted the door. I kept an eye out on the street after that, but we saw neither hide nor hair of him. And then the police showed up — too late, as usual.”

  “You were very brave,” Arcadia says. A pool of saliva has started to collect on the floor below Winston’s chops. “Both of you.”

  “Oh we were just doing what any concerned citizens would do.”

  “Do you recall anything else about the boy? What he was wearing?”

  “Like I said, I didn’t really get a good look at him but he was about your height and slim like you. At first I thought he was a girl — but of course girls don’t get up to this sort of mischief. What I should have done is take a photo with my phone. Oh, but every time I try to do that I end up with a picture of my finger.

  “He was wearing all black: black shoes, black trousers, and one of those black sweater things with a hood over his head. Or it might have been blue. I told all this to that nice young policeman, so I do hope they catch him.”

  “So do I. Thank you again, Mrs. Pike.”

  “You’re welcome dear. Give my best to your parents.” A tug on Winston’s collar and the two of them disappear inside once more.

  She crosses the road back to her house where her parents are preparing to drive her back to school. Mother has declared that she won’t stay in the house by herself and will spend the afternoon with Father at his clinic.

  “Mrs. Pike sends her best,” she says as they climb into the car.

  “That’s sweet,” says Mother. “We should drop off a cake or some flowers to thank her for sounding the alarm.”

  They drive in silence for a few minutes.

  “I’m looking forward to your concert tomorrow night,” Mother says eventually. “That should brighten up the week. And it’s not like we would be home watching t
he telly!” She smiles to herself.

  Mother abhors silence, though her daughter has always been comfortable in it. To be alone with one’s thoughts can be a frightening or a liberating thing. Liberating if it opens up vistas of knowledge and the potential for understanding. Frightening if it underscores the reality that we are each ultimately and irrevocably alone.

  Mother’s finger is poised over the radio but she decides against turning it on. “Arky,” she continues, “you’re growing up so fast now. I mean, you were always very mature for your age, but now you’re becoming a woman.”

  Where is this going — not sex education in the car, surely? Yet her tone is different. Mother has something more serious on her mind.

  “As you get older, you get more responsibilities — you know that. But you also find out more about the world, about your place in it. And you have to work out where you stand. Sometimes this can be difficult. That’s true for children but it’s also true for parents.”

  She is struggling for the right words. “You know your father and I love you very much.”

  “Of course.”

  “And we would never do anything to put you in danger. But we won’t always be able to protect you. I’m not sure we protect you that much now. Because sometimes parents can’t control everything that affect their children. That’s when, as a parent, you have to hope that you’ve done enough that your kids can protect themselves.”

  She is telling the truth but being evasive. What is she worried about? Something more than the break-in.

  The silence resumes until this time it is Father who interrupts it. “What Louisa is trying to say is that if anything ever happens to us, you and Magnus will need to look after each other. I know you two don’t always get on, but you’re family and sometimes that’s all you can hang onto.”

  “I understand,” she says.

  But she does not.

  “My dear sister, two calls in a day. Are you suddenly becoming sentimental?”

  “No more than you, Magnus. But I thought you should know a little more about today’s adventure at home.” She is standing at the school gate after waving off her parents. Mobile phones must be switched off on campus during school hours so she has made the call from the edge of the school grounds.