by Ali Sparkes
‘We’ll get some magazines and newspapers and stuff, and some batteries for the radio,’ he said, from under his arm. ‘And see if Uncle J can mend the telly and get the satellite dish back up—and for the next week you’re going to have to learn everything you can. If you can’t do that and you turn up at Amhill Secondary like you are now—well, we might just as w-well put you back in your sleeping chambers, b-because, trust me, your life won’t be worth living!’
Freddy rolled onto his front and sank his teeth into his apple. ‘Benedict, old chum,’ he said. ‘You worry too much.’
Ben exhaled and thought maybe Freddy was right.
‘Honestly,’ said Freddy. ‘We’ll be right as rain and gay as ninepence! You’ll see.’
The deepest vaults of the Kremlin storehouses were as bad as anyone’s cellars. It fell to a young intern to sort them out late that spring. He re-labelled and re-shelved boxes and boxes of documents from another time, before glasnost, before the welcoming of McDonald’s into Russia’s capital city, from long before he had even been born. If he’d had the time to rummage through them, they might have been fascinating, but there were far too many. They were to be catalogued and sorted, that was all.
At the end of his second day of housekeeping, Ivan paused in his work. Lying alone on one of the highest metal shelves was a white oblong envelope. On it were the intriguing words: ‘To be opened only by the Leader of the Soviet Union in 2007’.
Ivan put down his pen and clipboard and flipped the envelope thoughtfully. He’d always wanted to deliver something to the president.
They found Uncle Jerome in the front garden as they all skidded to a halt by the gate later that afternoon. He was up the chestnut tree and gave them a shout of excitement as they got off their bikes.
‘Look! It’s still here! Well … what’s left of it. Not working, obviously.’ And he reached down from a low branch which he’d been balancing on (a paint-spattered stepladder was set up below it) and in his hand was a rusty box, about the size of a small shoebox. A lichen-encrusted circle at the front had once been a glass lens and a metre or two of kinked and ivy-clad wire trailed from the back of it. ‘This was the camera!’ shouted Uncle Jerome, his voice high with excitement and altitude. Climbing a tree was not something they’d ever seen him do.
‘Do get down, JJ, before you break your neck!’ laughed Freddy. He was quite cheeky, really, thought Ben—but then he was Uncle J’s uncle. It still made Ben’s brain bend to think of it.
Uncle Jerome handed Ben the camera and came carefully down the stepladder. His eyes were glittery; dark lines underneath them. It was entirely possible he had not slept at all since yesterday. They had seen him like this before, when his work in the attic got very exciting.
‘You need to eat,’ said Rachel. ‘I bet you haven’t had anything at all, have you?’
‘What? Oh, nonsense. Don’t worry about that,’ said Uncle Jerome. ‘Time enough, time enough. I want to talk some more about what happened on Wednesday the sixth of June. I have one or two leads to follow up.’
‘Well, you can do it over some cake and tea,’ said Polly, firmly, arriving at Rachel’s side. ‘You’ll make much more sense of it all then.’
‘What leads? What have you found out?’ asked Freddy, clearly not remotely worried about how undernourished Uncle Jerome was.
‘Well,’ said Uncle Jerome, taking back the camera and turning it lovingly in his hands. ‘That man—the one Polly spotted on the film, walking by just before the car came that afternoon. I’ve studied him on freeze frame. I couldn’t believe it at first—but now I really think I know who he is.’
‘You do?’ breathed Polly. ‘Who? Who could it be?’
‘Well, if I’m right, it’s very good news, because he’s still alive. And he knows a lot about the investigation into your father’s disappearance. On the other hand, talking to him could be trouble.’
‘Who? Who?’ squeaked Polly, sounding like an anxious owl.
‘Percival Shaw,’ came the reply. But it didn’t come from Uncle Jerome’s mouth. Uncle Jerome’s mouth was wide and his eyes were blinking in shock through his glasses. The voice came from behind them all. They spun around and there, leaning on the gate as he so often did, was old Percy.
Normally old Percy just stared away at the trees behind the house, his rheumy eyes distant and his face impassive, as inscrutable as an ancient Japanese warrior. Today, his eyes were fixed on Polly and Freddy, his elderly teeth gnawing on his lower lip and his head shaking in amazement. ‘It is you. It is, isn’t it? I saw you this morning and I thought I’d gone senile. But no … here you are. Frederick and Pauline Emerson. Maybe I am senile. Maybe I’m in a bathchair now, down at Sunset Mansions where the old folk get put out to pasture …’
Uncle Jerome stopped his gaping, strode across to the gate and grasped Percy’s arm. ‘No—no, Percy. It’s real. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I always say? He didn’t do it! He didn’t! And now we have proof. Well … sort of. I mean … nobody’s ever going to believe it, I suppose. But yes … this is Pauline and Freddy. The professor managed to suspend them— cryonically—truly! They’ve been frozen for fifty-three years! Can you believe it?’
Ben felt very uneasy. He could see Freddy and Polly did too, and Rachel was raising her eyebrows at him urgently. What should they do? Percy was still staring at the sixty-six-year-old boy and his sixty-fiveyear-old little sister.
‘Tea,’ said Polly, suddenly. ‘Everyone come inside and we’ll have a pot of tea.’
‘For fifty-three years I’ve not been able to get the Emerson case out of my head,’ said Percy, formerly Detective Inspector Percival Shaw of the North Hampshire Constabulary. ‘For fifty-three years I’ve known that it didn’t add up. None of it made sense. It’s needled and needled away at me—all my career I wanted to crack it. And even when I retired … well, it just wouldn’t let go of me.’ He picked up his teacup and sipped at the hot brown brew, his eyes continually roaming from the brother to the sister, and back again.
‘Uncle J,’ said Ben, quietly. ‘What now? What if he goes and tells people? What if—you know—the authorities and all that come along? They’ll take Freddy and Polly away for testing and stuff and we might never see them again.’
‘Is that why you keep coming up to the house and leaning on the gate?’ Rachel asked Percy.
‘Well, this always was my constitutional—walking up to the wood on the hill,’ said Percy. ‘Kept me fit. I didn’t think anything of it. But in the summer of 1956 that changed—for ever. You see, I was the last one to see the house before—before the suspected murders were reported. They even had me down as a suspect for a while—but not for long. I met Clara up along the track, you see. We were courting. She was my alibi—and her brother John. And anyway, we all knew, in the force, that it was fishy. Suspect. Nothing run of the mill—all very hush hush. It never sounded right. Never rang true. A cracked bell—that’s what it was. Never rang true.’
‘But don’t you see!’ Uncle Jerome, stuffing down a bit of ginger cake left over from the picnic, sprayed crumbs across the table as he began to get agitated again. ‘Don’t you see—you might be the key! You were the last person to pass on the security camera. You may have seen something—you see, there was a car. A car that came along only seconds later. You may well have looked back over your shoulder and seen it. Did you? Can you remember?’
Percy screwed up his face and ran an age-spotted hand through his thinning grey hair. ‘It’s too long ago now,’ he said. ‘Some things I remember better than last week … but …’ He looked hard at Uncle Jerome and shook his head. ‘Truth be told, Jerome, I don’t even know if I’m here right now, or gone ga-ga, down at Sunset Mansions, after all. How can this be, eh? How can these two be?’
‘I’ll have to take him down—show him the film,’ said Uncle Jerome.
Freddy was on his feet instantly. ‘No! You promised. Absolutely not!’
‘But if he sees the film, he may remember. This
could make all the difference!’
‘Father said we must never let anyone else in. It’s top secret. I won’t hear of it, I tell you!’
Polly touched his arm. Her eyes were full of hope. ‘Freddy, it might be the only way to find Father. Let him see the film! Please! What good is it to us now, keeping everything secret, if we can’t get Father back?’
Freddy stared at her for a long time, biting his lip. Then he sat back down and sighed. ‘We have to make him promise—really promise. He can’t go around blabbing about it. That won’t do.’
‘Percy, will you give us your word that what you are about to see you will not speak of—to anybody?’ asked Uncle Jerome.
Percy shrugged. ‘Nobody listens to an old codger like me anyway. Why would I bother?’
‘But you were a policeman—a detective inspector!’ said Ben, and the old man smiled and nodded sadly.
‘Was a detective inspector,’ he said. ‘Just another old codger now. You’ll see, lad—in another sixty years … you’ll see.’
Percy struggled a bit with the rungs down into the shaft, but his daily walks up the hill had kept him reasonably fit for a man nearing eighty and he made it to the Ampex room in one piece, staring in amazement around the time capsule sitting room as he passed through.
They discovered that Uncle Jerome had carefully attached another length of blank oxide tape to the first lot, making it easier to weave the film back onto the spools and move it back and forth while he scrutinized the grainy image of the young man with the stone in his shoe and the black car’s arrival. Percy leant on the front of the huge video machine and peered at the tiny screen above it intently. He chuckled and shook his head as he watched himself, fifty-three years younger, walk by, stop to sort out his shoe, and then walk on again.
‘And you don’t remember seeing anyone here, while you did that?’ prompted Uncle Jerome.
‘No, it was just normal. The front door was open a bit, I remember that much. Someone had been cooking; I could smell lunch. Made me feel a bit peckish. Of course, I only remember this now because a week later I was making a statement about it—and then getting everyone else’s statements too. For what they were worth—which was nothing.’
Now the black car rolled into view, on the last few images. Everyone waited while Percy looked at it, screwing up his eyes and tilting his head—trying to read the number on the registration plate.
‘A 5 3—that’s all I could make out—after hours of trying,’ sighed Uncle Jerome. ‘What do you think? Is it a car you recognize?’ Percy was straightening up again now, and frowning. ‘Is it? What do you think, Percy?’
‘I don’t need to see the number, Jerome. I know what car that is,’ he said. He stepped away from the Ampex, shaking his head. ‘Better give it up now, unless you want a whole lot of trouble.’
‘What? What does that mean?’ demanded Freddy.
‘It means you’re not ever going to find out what you want to know, young man, that’s what it means. That car came along for a purpose. It didn’t just happen by. And if I’d remembered seeing it on the day, chances are I wouldn’t ever have happened by again.’
They all stood, staring at him, waiting for him to make sense. Percy regarded them all gravely. ‘It’s a government car.’
Freddy shook his head. ‘But—but Father worked for the government! So that’s probably why they came to see him. He worked for them.’
‘Did they ever come by before, lad?’
Freddy swallowed and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Never.’
‘I thought not,’ said Percy. ‘I saw that car—or one like it—a few times in my career. Whenever it drove through, misfortune and confusion weren’t far behind. It was a Clean Up car—that’s what we used to call it back then. Whatever happened here to your dad, it was cleaned up. That’s why we kept turning up nothing but dead ends on our investigation, I’ll warrant. Somebody at the top sent in the Clean Up car.’
Ben felt a chill creep into him. ‘But—surely not his own government …? The people he’d been working for …?’
‘Ah well—our government, someone else’s government … much the same thing back then,’ said Percy. ‘You have to understand, lad, it was very bad times in the world. Nobody trusted anybody. Spies were going east and spies were going west and terrible weapons were being made so we could all kill each other much more efficiently. Professor Emerson knew a lot of people and a lot of people knew him. Moving in his world, you could find yourself connected to some very bad people and not even know it. And look—here it is—he did have something to hide, didn’t he?’
Percy looked around him and back through the open door to the sitting room. ‘Reckon it’s about time you showed me the rest, don’t you?’
Uncle Jerome took Percy on a tour while the rest of them sank onto the dusty chairs and sofa in the sitting room, trying to absorb what the old man had told them.
‘He always did say they weren’t to be trusted,’ muttered Freddy. ‘But he said that about everyone! I never thought they might … they might …’
‘Well, we don’t know, do we? It’s no good worrying about it—we just have to keep trying to find out. Emersons don’t give up,’ said Polly. As she’d promised Rachel, there was no more ‘blubbing’.
‘It’s why he didn’t tell them about our sleeping chambers,’ went on Freddy. ‘He didn’t trust them not to do something terrible while testing them.’
Ben and Rachel exchanged glances. It seemed to them that Freddy and Polly’s father had done something pretty terrible himself while testing them. They didn’t say so.
‘Did the government have any idea what he was doing here?’ asked Ben, at length.
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Freddy. ‘He was working on all kinds of things up in London—and cryonics was just one of them, but I think it just involved insects and rodents and so on. It didn’t work well in the labs up there. The rats used to bleed afterwards and sometimes lose their claws and teeth. They’d go blind too—and then die. Horrible. They stopped the research after a while—said it would never work, but Father didn’t agree. He always felt sure he could crack it—and he did. He found a different method and the rats survived. But he wanted to test it thoroughly before he let anyone know, so he started working on it here instead. I don’t think they knew—or had any idea of how much further he’d taken it. He froze himself, first. He had to show us how to put him in the chamber and then get him out again. That was jolly scary, but we soon got used to it. The problem was, he needed to be taking notes, too, so he needed someone else to go in. So we volunteered.’
Percy re-emerged in the sitting room, looking stunned. ‘Say what you like about him,’ he said, patting Freddy’s shoulder as he passed, Uncle Jerome close behind him, ‘but your father was a genius. No mistake. A genius.’
Freddy sprang to his feet before Percy could move on to the door to the shaft.
‘Your word! I need your word!’
Percy held out his hand, which was trembling slightly, and looked Freddy straight in the eye. ‘I give you my word I won’t speak to anyone else about what I’ve seen today.’ Freddy nodded gravely and shook his hand. ‘But I will try to find out more about that car— and look back through my old case notes. See if there’s something I missed which could help. And there’s also the thirty year rule now.’
‘The thirty year rule? What’s that?’ asked Freddy.
‘Well, in theory, government secrets get opened up after thirty years have passed. It’s the law … or supposed to be. Of course, some of them get made right back into secrets as soon as they’re uncovered. A judge extends the rule for up to a hundred years sometimes. But that could be something you could look into, Jerome … with your connections. If there was a cover-up in 1956, they might be ready to uncover it again now. Especially thinking there’s nobody left to care.’
Uncle Jerome nodded. ‘Yes, I think I should. Discreetly, of course. I know one or two people who might be able to help. I have a
good friend in Whitehall … he can be trusted.’
‘Thank you,’ said Freddy, to Percy. ‘Thank you very much.’
After tea that night—macaroni cheese from the freezer which both Freddy and Polly thought was awful—they listened to the radio, which Freddy and Polly also thought was awful. Ben had taken care to tune to Radio 2, to be kind, but Polly was still shocked rigid by the rude jokes of the presenter and the words in the songs. ‘Why do they want us to keep shaking our ass?’ she queried, dismayed. ‘That would be cruel. I hate cruelty to animals.’
Ben and Rachel tried to explain, but the truth was even more shocking to poor Polly.
They got to bed early, exhausted, intrigued, and worried by the talk of government clean up men. Freddy was quiet and Ben could tell this was on his mind.
‘We could go into town tomorrow, if you think you’re ready for it—do some research at the library,’ Ben offered, hoping to cheer the boy up. ‘They keep all the newspapers in the vaults from way back—we can follow all the stuff that was written about your dad, and see if there are any more clues. Maybe find out if Mrs Minstead knew anything …? She might still be alive?’
‘I doubt it … she was pretty ancient even fifty years ago,’ said Freddy. He sighed and dropped his head respectfully. ‘But yes … into town. That would be whizzer,’ he added, lying back in the lower bunk. Just as Ben was about to reach over and switch off the lamp there was an urgent thud on the door and Polly and Rachel almost fell into the room. Ben and Freddy shot up in bed when they saw their faces. Both girls looked white and scared.
