by Lari Don
So Death and a witch walked down the Royal Mile, phoning a man who’d happily kill us both.
I dialled Malcolm, but he wouldn’t answer a call from an unknown number in the middle of a complex job.
I texted:
Take call from bain re getting lomond codename copy
Then dialled again.
“Bain! Where are you? What the hell are you doing?”
“I know where the copy is, Malcolm, and I can get it, if you let me past to the uncle’s residence.”
“You can’t get at the uncle’s, you stupid boy. It’s surrounded by plainclothes. We’ll get past when one of them dozes off tonight, or in a few days when they run out of overtime. Stop distracting me.”
“I can get there. The girl can get me in and she knows where the copy is. Let us past and we’ll bring you the copy.”
“Why would I trust you with that? You’ve made a total arse of it so far.”
“I’ve made an arse of it, have I? I got all the way from London to Edinburgh without you laying a finger on me.”
“Then you killed a man outside Harvey Nicks and brought the whole Scottish police force down around us. Just like you brought the Surrey police down on us when we had to kill the older girl because you couldn’t keep your mask on.
“You’re a threat to this whole family and we should have drowned you at birth. Bring yourself in now or I’ll send Daniel after you with instructions to bring nothing back but your over-sensitive skin.”
I lowered my voice. “Malcolm, I won’t just bring you the report. I’ll give you the girl too.”
“What?”
“She thinks I’m on her side. She’s helping me get the copy so you won’t kill anyone else in her family. But she knows too much about us now, it’s not safe to let her go. If you allow me past to get the report, I’ll give you them both. The copy and the girl.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m sick of being on the run, Uncle Malcolm. It’s scary out here on my own, and I want to be back with my family. So if we find the report, then I give you the girl and the copy, will you let me come home? You know, without…?”
“Without a Q&A?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re such a wimp, Bain. Letting your girlfriend die, just to save yourself a bit of discomfort.”
“She’s not my girlfriend!”
“Alright, Bain. This is how it’s going to work. I’ll order everyone to let you and the girl past. Then when you come out with the copy, you come straight to me. Not to your mother. If you bring me the copy and the girl, then I will welcome you back to the family without question or punishment.
“But if you make a mess of this, or if you try to cheat me, then I will let my son loose on you and I will not tell him to stop. Not until he’s finished what he’s started so many times. Do you understand me?”
I did understand. I had just heard my uncle pass a death sentence on me. I said politely, “Thanks for making it so clear. See you soon, Malcolm.”
I switched my phone off and turned to Lucy. I even managed to smile at her. “He went for it. He believes I’ll give him everything just for a warm welcome home.”
“You didn’t tell him how we were dressed. They won’t recognise us.”
“They’ll recognise our minds. That’s why I had to negotiate a way past.”
She shrugged. She was getting nervous about the whole idea. Presumably she was going to ask more about our tactics…
“So who did he think was your girlfriend?”
“What? No one!”
“No, I suppose not. The fainting and the throwing up when you hold hands isn’t very romantic. What you need is someone on the internet in Kazakhstan.”
“It’s not funny, Lucy.”
“This whole thing is hilarious, Bain. You’re a murderer dressed as Death and I’m about to ask my uncle to dump my nana’s ashes into a witch’s cauldron. It’s completely absurd.”
That was certainly a more cheerful way of looking at the evening than the picture Malcolm had just put in my head. So I smiled at her again and agreed it was absurd.
As we walked past the palace at the bottom of the Royal Mile and turned left towards Leith, Lucy finally started to think about tactics.
“We have a free pass through your family and the disguise will get us past MI5. We might even get past MI5 again on the way out, if Uncle Vince doesn’t blow our cover. But how do we get past your family again? Without giving them… everything. We can’t go in without a plan to get out.”
“I have a plan, but I’m not going to tell you, because I don’t want any hint of it in your mind as we go past my family.”
I had to be careful about what they sensed from me too.
It was alright for Malcolm to know that I was genuinely keen to be back with my family. With Uncle Greg, who was trying to teach me to read minds without losing my own. With Roy, who was as close to a normal friend as I’d ever have. With my mum, I suppose.
But I couldn’t let him realise that I wanted to be back on my terms. With respect for my abilities, as well as understanding of my weaknesses, and if possible without the death of another Shaw girl in my head.
I had to make sure they didn’t pick up any of that on the way in.
“Nearly there, Lucy. Don’t think about an escape plan, just think about what we’re doing now. Being nervous is fine. Nasty thoughts about me will work too.”
“That’ll be easy.” She pulled the witch mask down over her face. “What will you be thinking, Ciaran Bain?”
“I’ll be thinking about saying goodbye to you, Lucy Kingston Shaw.” And I pulled down Death’s mask.
Lucy Shaw, 31st October
As we started up the hill towards the colonies, Bain nodded at two men in a four-wheel drive. Further on, I noticed his mum, smoking a cigarette and slouching at a bus stop, dressed much less elegantly than at Kings Cross. She frowned at Bain and beckoned. But we stayed on the other side of the road.
I kept thinking, I don’t trust him, I have to trust him, I don’t trust him, I have to trust him. Like I was ripping petals off a flower. Or legs off a spider.
Then a boy stepped out right in front of us. He wasn’t in a Halloween costume, just jeans and a t-shirt. He was tall, with dark red hair and a squint nose like a boxer or a rugby player. He looked ready for a fight, but he gave Bain a genuine smile.
Bain stopped; so did I.
“How you doing?” the tall boy asked.
“Surviving.”
They both laughed, quietly.
“Can I help?”
“Maybe later. Just go with the flow, and don’t let Malcolm detect you expecting anything unusual.”
“Anything unusual? You’re dressed like a skeleton and you’re hanging out with a hag. I can’t possibly expect anything usual.”
The tall boy turned to me. “Hello, Lucy.”
This must be the cousin who wanted Bain to test his survival skills, the one who’d wanted to rescue Viv. I nodded from behind my warts. “Hello, Roy.”
Roy glanced at Bain. “How much does she know?”
“Everything.”
Roy shook his head. “You idiot, Bain. That’s not fair on her…”
“Leave it, Roy. Read me the moral lecture when this is over. Come on, Lucy.”
Roy looked back at me. “Nice to meet you, Lucy. Don’t worry. This boy is brighter and better than he thinks he is.”
We were passed by a gang of tiny witches, with orange plastic pumpkins already filled with jelly worms and smarties.
“We have to go,” said Bain. “You’ll be in trouble for speaking to us.”
“I’m a big boy. I can take it.”
They slapped hands, then Roy went downhill and we kept going uphill.
When we reached the corner of the narrow entrance to the colonies, I saw a tall man in sports kit with a baseball cap shading his face, standing by black recycling bins on the other side of the road. He had a box full of newspapers and was
slowly feeding them into the bin.
Bain whispered, “Malcolm. Don’t stare.”
We walked towards the first terrace, past a clean black car, with a man and a woman in the front. Bain jabbed his elbow into my side. “Spooks.”
Then he dropped a bit of paper into my cauldron. “Roy’s number. He just passed me it. I know it off by heart, so he must have meant you to have it. He might be angling for a date, which is unlikely with those warts, or he might be offering to save your life. Put it in your phone.”
“I don’t have a phone. You stole it, remember.”
“You’d have to be a complete idiot not to have bought a pay-as-you-go when you were out. Put Roy’s number in and remember he’s the nearest thing to a decent human being in my whole family.”
As I saved the number into my new phone, we saw a group of guisers heading towards us. The tallest guiser was dressed in two foil-covered cardboard boxes and a pair of silver wellies so he looked like a 1950s robot. Walking beside him were a couple of witches, a plump boy in a tiger onesie and a small pink fairy.
We joined the group as they passed us.
“Can we go round wi’ you?” Bain said in a stronger Scottish accent than I’d heard him use before.
“Aye, no problem,” rumbled the robot, as we turned right into the first terrace.
The tiger lifted the fairy up to press the first doorbell and I realised I’d forgotten one vital element of my plan.
CHAPTER 32
Lucy Shaw, 31st October
“Lucy? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t have a song or anything. For at the doors.”
“Just do a joke.”
“I don’t know any jokes!”
“You were full of poisonous jokes when we first met. Ok, here’s one: Why couldn’t the skeleton pay his bus fare?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because he was skint!”
“I don’t get it.”
“Don’t worry. Everyone else will.”
So we all stood there, in black cloaks, orange fur, silver foil and pink lace, facing a woman with a toddler on her hip.
The fairy skipped forward. “I’ve got a joke from my gran. What do you call two burglars together?”
The mum smiled. “I don’t know, petal, what do you call two burglars together?”
“A pair of knickers!”
The mum laughed and the fairy ran back to the tiger, who asked a riddle about a towel. What gets wetter the more it dries? I wished I’d thought of that.
The two little witches sang a song about a black bat and the robot made his eyes flash, which made the toddler giggle. Then it was our turn.
I stood at the back and asked the skeleton joke as quietly as I could. I was surprised when everyone laughed. “Good one,” said the robot. I still didn’t get it.
Then Bain sang in a clear voice about a goose getting fat and an old man’s hat.
The mum said, “We’ve all heard that one before,” and brought out a big box of sweets. We each took a couple. Bain dropped his into my cauldron. The robot put the sweets straight into his belly, posting them through a hole in the box round his middle.
We knocked at six more doors, doing our party pieces in the same order each time. Then we walked up to the next terrace, past another dark car with adults in both front seats, and I stopped at the corner. We’d done enough to be identified as guisers, so I said, “I’m taking a break, because my witch’s shoe is coming off. You go on, but can you do me a favour, fairy princess? For some of my magic sweets?”
She looked up at the tiger, who nodded his stripy head. I held up a folded note, carefully drafted earlier in the hostel.
“When you get to the blue door with the snake knocker, please give this note to the man. Don’t say anything, just give it to him, when you do your joke. You can have all my jelly worms.”
She gave her wand to the tiger, then grabbed the note with one hand and the tangle of sticky worms with the other. I bent down to re-tie my laces while the robot and his gang moved away.
“Well done,” whispered Bain. “We’ll visit another couple of doors on the way to your uncle’s, to give him time to find the urn.”
We stood and watched as the fairy’s group climbed up my uncle’s stairs.
I saw the door open, saw the fairy step forward and my uncle crouch down to listen to her joke. I saw her pass the note to him. He put it in his pocket, rather than read it while the tiger did his riddle.
Once my uncle had closed his door, Bain and I did our usual party pieces at three more houses, collecting sweets at each one. Then we did the last door before my uncle’s, singing the fat goose song together this time, to make the whole thing quicker, and we took an apple each.
“Quite right,” the man at the door said to me, “you want to avoid sweeties with skin like yours!” Bain laughed at that, but I couldn’t.
I was so nervous. It was my plan, so it was my fault if it all went wrong.
“Don’t worry,” said Bain as we approached the bottom of the steps. “It’s a great plan. We’ll be fine.”
We walked up to my uncle’s. Hearing laughter and songs all along the terrace, I grasped the snake knocker and banged three times.
Ciaran Bain, 31st October
She was so nervous. So was her uncle behind the door. I’d sensed his shock when he read the note. I knew Malcolm could sense our emotions all the way down the road, but nervous and shocked were fine. Anyway, I wasn’t concerned about what my family thought right now, so long as the spooks didn’t pick up anything suspicious.
I was finding it hard to stay calm around so many kids I didn’t know, but at least their emotions were all positive, nothing grating or draining. As we stood at the door I sensed a couple of cheerful guisers behind us. I turned as Lucy knocked for the last time. A short pirate and a tiny grey bat were trotting up the stairs.
“Come and join us,” I said, and let them get in front of me.
Then her uncle opened the door.
I knew he was grieving and confused, but he smiled at the children on his doorstep anyway. A nice man. From a nice family, I suppose.
Lucy sang a song. Not one she’d sung at any other door, a couples of verses, with a Caribbean rhythm. I could sense his nostalgia, and his desire to grab her and keep her safe.
But he nodded, then said in a croaky deep voice, “What do the rest of you have for me?”
I did the skeleton joke and he laughed, clearly having lived in Scotland long enough to understand the language. After the pirate and bat sang a nursery rhyme, he said, “Sweets for you all, and the young lady can have this.” He handed me a bowl of sweeties to pass round, while he placed a black and gold urn carefully into the witch’s cauldron.
“Thanks,” she whispered behind her mask.
“Go home safely, all of you. And don’t leave it a year before you come back.”
“Do you want us to come back soon, Professor Shaw?” asked the pirate.
“Is that little Liam from downstairs? Yes, Liam, you and your mum can come and knock on my door whenever you like.”
“He has a snakeskin in a drawer he can show you and he does really nice hot chocolate,” muttered Lucy through tears that must have been audible to everyone. “Bye.” She almost ran down the stairs, the cauldron banging against her leg.
Vincent Shaw gave me a very hard stare, before I turned away and chased after Lucy.
We jogged towards the narrow road linking all the terraces, then stopped on the corner.
“It’s ok, Lucy. You did brilliantly. You’ll see him again soon. Now we have to get out of here.”
She took a deep breath. “Tell me your plan.”
“I can’t tell you in case Malcolm senses us plotting. Just follow my lead, and don’t ask questions. Can you manage that?”
If she did ask questions, I wasn’t sure I could justify my plan, because it relied on guesswork, variables out of my control and chaos.
First, I had to draw attent
ion to myself. Not something I enjoyed doing. Then I had to draw attention to my family. Which was something I was hardwired to avoid. Then I had to escape using a route that I’d only been able to recce at a distance and therefore wasn’t even sure was viable.
But it was the only plan that offered a slim chance of protecting my family permanently, and an even slimmer chance of keeping Lucy alive.
Lucy sighed. She wanted to ask questions, she wanted to be involved in the decision-making, she didn’t want to be a follower. I knew all that from the emotions I was sensing. But I was fairly sure I would have known it anyway, because I’d spent two nights and two days with her. Not by reading her mind, but by knowing her as a person. Presumably this was how the mindblind always had to work out what was going on.
As I pulled an empty rucksack from under my cloak and put the urn in it, Lucy said, “Just get us safely out of here. I won’t argue with that.”
So I shouted at the top of my voice, “Sweetie thief!” Everyone swung round to look at me.
“Sweetie thief!” I pointed at Malcolm, down by the recycling bins. “He stole my little sister’s sweeties!”
All the guisers in sight swung round to look at Malcolm. Most of the spooks’ heads turned too. The group we’d been knocking doors with appeared from a nearby garden.
“He’s hidden the sweeties in that box,” I shouted even louder. “He’s been taking them from all the little kids.”
The robot and the plump tiger walked towards us, and I almost staggered backwards as their anger and aggression crashed into me. Tigger asked, “Really? Has he been nicking sweeties from the wee kids?”
I nodded. “Aye. I’m not sure if he’s a mad dentist trying to protect their teeth or if he’s going to eat them all himself, but they’re hidden under those newspapers.”
I could sense concern from Malcolm, who didn’t like being the centre of attention, but who didn’t want to move away because he was trying to keep me in range.
The pink fairy was poking inside a glittery bag. “Did the sweetie thief take my sweeties?”
I could sense Lucy’s doubts about this tactic, but she crouched down beside the fairy. “Yes, my love. He took lots of chocolate. You hardly have anything left.”
