Rachel glanced across to make sure that Morag and Duncan were still asleep, then lowered her voice. “Their parents were killed. I saw the whole thing in a dream. I guess I must have tapped into their thoughts, or memories, or whatever.” She was aware of Adam’s look. She hadn’t told him: had not wanted to frighten him. “Their car was driven off the road and there were frogmen waiting under the water. They took the children out and left their mother and father to drown.” She waited for a reaction from Gabriel, but did not get one. “I saw it. Those people back there are murderers.” She looked across at Morag and Duncan again. “They orphaned those kids…”
“Take us back,” Adam said. “Now!” His fists were clenched, as though he was a split second from falling on Gabriel and beating him into submission.
“I know exactly what they’re capable of,” Gabriel said, “and they won’t hurt your mother. I promise. She’s safe as long as they’re still trying to find you.” Now he was the one who seemed desperate, and there was something like a plea in his voice. “We’ve got to keep moving; we’ve got to stay ahead of them.” He held out a hand to each of the twins but let them drop when neither Rachel nor Adam responded. “I know how you feel, really, but you’ll have to trust me.”
Rachel and Adam looked at each other, then finally, after a few long seconds, they moved back to their own side of the truck and dropped down among the heavy sacks of vegetables.
There was nothing else they could do.
Rachel thought about the argument she’d had with Adam the night she’d discovered their grandmother’s body. She remembered what he had said about Gabriel: how their lives were easier where they were; how they were better off without him. At the time Rachel had been furious, but now she could see what her brother meant.
She pulled the sack back round her, lay down and cried quietly.
She’d wanted to get away so badly, had been certain it was the right thing to do, had talked Adam into it. But now, within a few short hours of being reunited with Gabriel, she felt as though their lives were no longer their own.
She felt uncertain and terrified and out of control. As though anything might happen.
None of it good.
Rachel was not sure how long she had been asleep when she was woken by Gabriel; how long since the truck had stopped. This time she took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. Adam was already awake, and Morag and Duncan stood next to each other at the back of the trailer, suitcases in hand, ready to go.
The driver had already left by the time they jumped down from the back of the truck and looked around.
“What’s that smell?” Morag asked.
“Gasoline,” Adam said.
Rachel could smell something else. They had pulled up in a vast lorry park, the huge wagons lined up side by side. In the distance, she could see a ragged line of lights moving slowly across an expanse of blackness. She stared until she saw the blackness heave and shift and realized that the line of lights was actually a huge boat.
“It’s the sea,” she said.
A high chain-link fence ran along three sides of the lorry park with a long, low building making up the fourth. A cafe. Through the steamy windows Rachel could see groups of men gathered at tables inside, eating or reading newspapers. She read the sign: MY OLD DUTCH. “I don’t get it,” she said.
Adam pointed to a far bigger sign high above them: HARWICH FERRY TERMINAL. CROSSINGS TO THE HOOK OF HOLLAND.
“That’s where they wear clogs,” Morag said. “Where the tulips come from.” Adam nodded and Morag looked pleased with herself.
Rachel looked at Gabriel. “Why are we going to Holland?”
“It’s the quickest way out of the country.”
“Why do we have to leave the country?” she asked. Gabriel said nothing. “Why this way though? Why not just catch a plane to Africa or Australia or whatever?” Rachel continued.
Gabriel began walking towards the exit and shouted back over his shoulder. “Come on, you heard what Morag said. Don’t you want to try on some clogs?”
Rachel and Adam heaved up their backpacks and started to follow. After a couple of steps, Adam looked back and saw that the younger twins had not moved. He trudged back.
“Come on, I know you’re tired, but—”
“We’re hungry,” Morag said.
Adam nodded, immediately aware of his own stomach grumbling. It seemed a long time since dinner the evening before at the Hope Project. He shouted to Gabriel and Rachel, who walked back to join him. “The little ones are starving,” he said. “I’m starving.” He nodded towards the cafe.
“There isn’t time,” Gabriel said.
Rachel was already walking towards the steamy windows, drawn by the inviting smell that had begun to waft across the car park. “We have to eat,” she said.
The place was far smaller than it had looked from the outside; no more than a dozen small, Formica-topped tables lined up around a serving hatch. While two fat men worked at an enormous, sizzling griddle, an equally large woman, with her grey hair pulled back and wearing a dirty apron, bustled between the diners with steaming mugs clutched between her fingers, or carrying plates, three at a time.
“It’s not like Mr Cheung’s kitchen,” Morag said.
Adam stared as a plate piled high with bacon, eggs and baked beans passed within a few centimetres of his face. “It’ll do.”
They crowded round a table in the window and Rachel waved the waitress over. A badge on her apron said “Dawn”. If she was curious as to what five unaccompanied children were doing ordering breakfast at two o’clock in the morning, she didn’t show it.
Gabriel said he wasn’t hungry. Morag and Duncan each ordered beans on toast, while Rachel and Adam plumped for what the menu described as the “Hungry Trucker’s Breakfast Special”. Dawn looked blank when Adam asked for eggs over easy and even blanker when he asked if there was any maple syrup. She pointed him towards the plastic container on the table, brimming with sachets of ketchup, vinegar and brown sauce.
“Brown?!” Adam said, when she’d gone. “That’s just the colour of it, right?”
The portions were enormous, but they each cleared their plates easily enough. Nobody spoke, and Gabriel stared out of the window as he waited for them to finish.
“Are we done?” he asked, as the last knife and fork clattered on to an empty plate.
“Duncan needs the toilet,” Morag whispered.
Gabriel nodded and watched as the girl led her brother away. He had emptied a sachet of sugar on to the tabletop and was absent-mindedly tracing a pattern with his finger. Rachel looked across, instantly recognizing the familiar shape: the three interlocking blades.
“You mentioned others?” she said. Gabriel looked up. “When we were in the truck.”
Gabriel went back to tracing the shape of the Triskellion with his finger. A quick, smooth motion: his fingertip squeaking against the plastic table.
“You never really answered Adam’s question,” Rachel continued.
Gabriel glanced to his right and saw the waitress coming back to clear the table. He looked into Rachel’s eyes and casually scraped the grains of sugar over the edge of the table.
“There are three of them,” he said quietly. “Three Triskellions.”
When Morag returned with Duncan, the waitress came back to the table and handed over the bill. Gabriel picked it up and looked at her as if he was confused.
“We’ve paid this already.”
“You what?”
Gabriel kept looking, spoke a little more slowly. “We’ve paid this already, Dawn.”
The waitress shook her head for a few seconds as if trying to clear it, then rolled her eyes. “Sorry, I think I must be going mad. Course you’ve paid it. Course you have…”
They watched her walk back towards the counter, muttering, and began to gather their things together.
“I wish I could do that,” Adam said.
“You can,” Morag said. “We all can. You
just need to get the hang of it.”
“Come on,” Gabriel said. “There’s a ferry leaving in five minutes.”
Outside, it had begun to rain gently. The children gathered undercover and Gabriel urged them to hurry. On the other side of the fence, the sea had begun to roll and swell, slapping against the dockside.
Gabriel stepped out, eager to get down to the ferry. Rachel reached out to stop him. “This is the quickest way out, you said?”
“Right. So can we—?”
“The quickest … and the most obvious.”
Gabriel looked at her. “What are you thinking?”
It had struck her in the cafe; just an idle thought at first, but now she was certain of it. “It’s the way they’ll be expecting us to go,” she said. “They’re probably watching the port already.”
Gabriel nodded, stared out towards the North Sea for a few seconds, then turned back, resigned to it. “Any bright ideas?”
Rachel could see by the look in Gabriel’s eye that this was some kind of test. “Where were you planning to take us?” she asked.
“Across to Rotterdam, then down through Belgium and into France.”
“What’s in France?”
“Just a stop we need to make.” He flashed Rachel half a smile. “Maybe a little bit of sightseeing.”
Adam had been distracted by Morag and Duncan and had only half caught the conversation. Now he stepped across. “What’s going on?”
“Ask your sister,” Gabriel said.
Adam looked at Rachel. “There must be other ways to get to France,” she said.
They stood discussing the options, and when it had been decided, they waited a few minutes longer, until a likely looking candidate emerged from inside the cafe.
He wore jeans and a padded waistcoat over a red lumberjack shirt. He turned to say his goodbyes to Dawn, his blonde mullet highlighted by the glare from the sign above his head.
“Dutch,” Gabriel whispered. “Probably just got here on his way to London.”
“He’s perfect,” Rachel said. She watched as Gabriel followed the Dutchman across the car park towards a huge lorry with a foreign number plate.
“What’s happening?” Morag asked.
Adam and Rachel watched. Gabriel was deep in conversation with the lorry driver. He pointed back towards the children still gathered under the awning outside the cafe and the lorry driver stared and nodded enthusiastically, waving his arms around and smiling.
“Whatever he’s saying, it seems to be working,” Adam said.
When Gabriel beckoned them across, they ran through the drizzle and huddled together by the side of the Dutchman’s lorry. Rachel raised an eyebrow at Gabriel. He gave her a small nod: sorted.
The driver opened his arms wide and beamed at them. “Hi, you lot. I’m Ronald. You’re welcome aboard.”
“Thanks,” Rachel said.
“No, no. My pleasure,” Ronald said. “Now climb into the cabin and you can ride up front with me.”
The children did as they were told and moved around to the far door while Ronald climbed into his seat. He patted the seat next to him and beckoned Adam across. “Come on, sit over here next to me.”
“OK…”
Rachel helped Morag and Duncan up, then climbed in herself, waited for Gabriel to join them and shut the door. It was a tight squeeze, so Rachel lifted Duncan on to her lap.
“There we are,” the driver said. “All set?” He turned the engine over and the lorry juddered into life. “Hold tight…”
They pulled out of the car park on to a rain-swept road that curled slowly around the terminal before joining traffic filtering on to a main road and, finally, a motorway. Rachel stared straight ahead, listening to the squeak of the windscreen-wipers and the driver’s constant, sing-song chatter as he told them all about his journey across from Holland.
He had been delighted to offer them a lift and seemed friendly enough.
But people seemed to be a great many things, and Rachel was learning a lot of lessons, fast.
Number one: trust nobody.
The blue sign at the side of the motorway announced that London was just another twelve miles away. Rachel had counted them down from nearly a hundred and now the city loomed, an orange glow on the horizon.
Duncan and Morag were still asleep, as they had been for the last hour or so, in the poky bunk positioned above the cab. Rachel was squeezed between Adam and Gabriel on the seat behind the driver, and every now and again, Ronald would turn and wink at them, offering them gum, before continuing to hum a tune that sounded like the theme from a kids’ TV show.
Twenty minutes later, with the sky getting lighter, a vast, silvery city of skyscrapers and massive glass towers seemed to grow in front of their eyes. Lights sparkled in thousands of windows and multicoloured neon signs shouted corporate names from the rooftops: Citibank, HSBC, Barclays.
“Welcome to London Town,” Ronald said cheerily. The lorry driver’s accent was thick, even though his English was excellent. He opened his mouth in a wide yawn that made Rachel realize how tired she was herself. She yawned in sympathy and saw that Adam was doing the same.
It was not the London they had expected to see. Where was St. Paul’s? Where were Big Ben and the Tower of London? This was something far more modern, newer than New York.
“I don’t recognize any of this,” Rachel said. “Where are we exactly?”
“The Docklands,” Ronald said. “This is the new bit, where the old East End and the docks used to be. It’s fantastic.”
Ronald swung the huge, refrigerated juggernaut round a roundabout and down a slip road towards an industrial area below them, where many more white trucks were parked, lit up by banks of floodlights. Rachel felt uneasy, having spent half the night blinded by spotlights, outside in the cold. She felt queasy and her tongue tasted bitter in her mouth. In the dark, Adam squeezed her hand and, seconds later, Gabriel squeezed the other one, reassuring her.
“This is where we stop,” Ronald said. He swung the truck through a barrier and under a vast yellow canopy with a sign that said: BILLINGSGATE MARKET
Adam and Gabriel helped the weary younger twins down from the bunk and out into the air, where they shivered and blinked in the white light. The smell of fish hit them all like a powerful gust of sea air. Ronald handed down their bags and then jumped from the cabin.
“Thanks for the ride, Ronald,” Rachel said, holding out her hand and shaking the Dutchman’s firmly.
“No worries,” Ronald said. He took a chewed ballpoint from the pocket of his shirt and scribbled down a number on a scrap of paper from the dashboard. “And if you ladies are ever in Rotterdam, give me a call. I’ll show you around; we’ll have a good time!”
“You bet!” Rachel said, dragging the twins away, waving. Adam and Gabriel waved too as Ronald began to open the tailgate of his truck.
“Ladies?” Adam said, affronted.
“Let him see what he wants to see,” Gabriel said. “I convinced him that we were American air stewardesses on our way to the airport.” Gabriel winked at Adam as Ronald had winked at them, then laughed.
The source of the fish smell became evident as the five children walked across the lorry park towards a steel shed the size of an aircraft hangar. They saw hundreds of men in wet, white coats stacking polystyrene crates which rattled with overflowing ice. The plastic sides of refrigerated trucks advertised their countries of origin: France, Spain, Holland. Smaller vans, with pictures of fat-lipped dolphins, mermaids and scallop shells painted on their doors, displayed addresses in Devon, Cornwall, Lowestoft and Hull. All were either disgorging or loading up with fish. There were big, silver fish with dead bug eyes; smaller red-skinned fish with spiny fins; slimy, long ones; flat, black ones; crabs and lobsters, their claws shackled with rubber bands; and tangles of squid and octopus, their suckered tentacles curling and trailing over the edges of the crates, as if in a failed attempt to escape.
Rachel did not like fish at the
best of times – not to eat, at least. She found them alien somehow, mysterious and scary, and was more than happy for them to remain undisturbed at the bottom of the sea. Now, the stench of thousands and thousands of dead ones, catching at the back of her throat after a greasy cooked breakfast, was making her nauseous. As they approached the hangar, she saw men in plastic aprons gutting massive cod from throat to tail with long knives and watched as wet, red guts spilled into big plastic vats at their feet.
Rachel was suddenly, and violently, sick.
Adam rubbed her back as she wiped her mouth with a tissue and spat on the wet asphalt. Gabriel looked at her with an expression of sympathy and curiosity.
“Are you OK, Rachel?” Morag said. She joined Adam in stroking her back. Rachel nodded.
“We’ve got to move on,” Adam said.
Gabriel pointed to a track several metres above them. Against the pink, dawn sky a red train with brightly lit windows was slowly coming to a halt at a station somewhere over their heads.
The train did not appear to have a driver. A robotic voice advised them to mind the closing doors as they sat in seats looking out of the front, where the driver’s cabin ought to be. Their few fellow passengers, wearily texting or reading papers, completely ignored the children and the unfolding cityscape that developed around them. The train followed a narrow electrical track and burrowed into the undersides of the skyscrapers, revealing a stainless steel and glass underworld of supermarkets and coffee shops, each getting ready to open for business.
“It’s like The Matrix,” Adam said.
“Like what?” Gabriel asked.
“It’s a film,” Adam said.
“About the future,” Rachel added. She lifted her pale face from the window and gave Gabriel a sickly smile.
Gabriel looked out of the window as the train hummed to a halt at a station signposted CANARY WHARF. He looked at a pair of men sweeping the platform, their heads down, brushing in opposite directions without acknowledging each other. He looked around the carriage at the weary workers and waved his hand at the labyrinth of offices that towered way above them.
The Burning Page 9
