Deflated, Oz clambered out of the room of reflection and trudged back through the passages to the library. Just in time, too, because the next minute, he heard his mother calling him down for tea.
Thankfully, Rowena Hilditch had already left, and all that waited for him in the kitchen was a steaming bowl of penne with pesto. On the TV, an early-evening news correspondent outside Number Eleven Downing Street was telling everyone how terrible a state the country was in.
“You can turn that off, Oz,” Mrs Chambers said from next to the sink, where she was rinsing the pasta pan. Oz picked up the remote and was about to press the off button when the image changed to the news anchorwoman. She turned her head slightly in the way commentators did to indicate a new story and said, “Police are continuing to investigate the strange case of a man found buried up to his neck in horse manure near Seabourne in Bourneshire.”
Oz blinked and made a face. He was mildly intrigued now.
“The man, Hugo Bendle, a reclusive antique dealer, was found in his own front garden by neighbours drawn to the spot by the unusual and pungent smell.”
“What?” Oz whispered. He glanced around. Mrs Chambers was busy rinsing the colander. He leaned closer to the TV, trying to block her view and concentrate on what was being said.
“Bendle, whose controversial business practises had been under scrutiny by the fraud office, was too traumatised to explain to police how his attackers managed to break through the elaborate security measures at his property. Hospital sources later said that Mr Bendle, a known victim of compulsive cleanliness disorder, had entered a state of catatonic shock after having been trapped in the manure for several hours.”
The scene cut to a hospital corridor, where a man in a white coat said, “It’s difficult with these CCD cases. Being in contact with warm manure is pretty horrific for someone completely obsessed with germs. He is unable to speak at all at the present time. We probably won’t know the truth of it until he snaps out of it.”
The scene flicked back to the studio and the anchorwoman, whose hair was so stiff it looked like it was made of papiermâché. “A police spokesman said there was no evidence of robbery as a motive and admitted they were baffled. They have appealed for witnesses with any information to come forward.”
Oz flicked off the TV and sat down heavily, blinking rapidly as he tried to decide what to make of it all. On the wall opposite was a painting of a harbour with brightly coloured cottages. His dad had bought it for his mother once on a trip to Pembrokeshire. Oz stared through it whilst he tried to gather the thoughts careering around inside his head.
Bendle!
Suddenly, it was as if his insides had fallen through the floor into the basement while the rest of him was still sitting at the kitchen table. A dreadful thought had just occurred to him. Was it pure coincidence they had seen Bendle just a few days before? Because if it wasn’t…if the two things were somehow linked…
Mrs Chambers appeared at the table with a small bowl of grated Parmesan cheese.
“Penny for them?” she said.
“What?” Oz asked, coming back to himself.
“You look like someone who’s just heard an announcement that all Xboxes are to be collected and buried at sea.”
“Oh, no…just exam stuff, you know.” Oz looked down at his food to avoid her inquisitive gaze and began eating. He knew it was delicious, but suddenly, his appetite had gone AWOL. Every time he put another forkful in his mouth, the thought of Bendle in that mound of manure turned the food to mushy sawdust. Worse, had their incursion into Chivyon House ruined Bendle’s alarm system and let the attackers get in? Finally, after another two failed forkfuls, he pushed his plate away virtually untouched.
“You’re not worried about Rowena, are you?” Mrs Chambers asked with a note of alarm.
“Rowena?” Oz said, once again caught off-guard by his mother’s question.
“Yes, Rowena. She of the rainbow therapy.”
“Should I be worried?”
“No, you shouldn’t. She’s asked me to do some copy editing of her manuscript, and she’s actually a very interesting person and a very good listener.”
“Really?” Oz said, stifling the urge to say that a poisonous snake was probably a very good listener but that didn’t make it any less poisonous.
“I know she’s a bit…flaky, but she may well be paying rent soon as well, don’t forget. And I think it’s good that I’m exploring these other avenues of experience, don’t you?”
“Other avenues of experience” sounded like page one of the Rowena Hilditch book of gobbledygook, but Oz just nodded mildly. He promised to eat his pasta later, using the lame excuse of wanting to finish some revision, and excused himself. He felt his mother’s anxious gaze on his back as he left the room.
But it wasn’t his mother or Rowena Hilditch or even Redmayne’s letter that kept him from concentrating on his science revision that night. It was an image of fastidious, germ-obsessed, round-the-bend Bendle trapped in a pile of horse poo.
Thinking of someone up to their neck in manure was almost funny, but for Bendle it must have been a total nightmare. Okay, so Bendle was, to quote Ruff, a bit “barking,” and, Oz reminded himself, he had tried to entomb Ellie, Ruff, and Oz in splatter bombs. Yet try as he might, Oz couldn’t find anything remotely amusing about the image that Bendle’s sickening plight threw up.
He got Soph to replay the report half a dozen times, and each time left him with the same unanswered question.
Who was so mean as to find someone’s weakness and exploit it in such a horrible way? It wasn’t just humiliating; it was cruel and spiteful. He knew very few people who might be capable of such a thing, but he did know some. He was in school with one of them, though he realised Pheeps couldn’t have done anything like this.
On the other hand, behind Pheeps was her father, Lorenzo Heeps—who had tried to get his grubby hands on the artefacts once—and behind him was the big cheese himself, Jack Gerber. What had happened to Bendle struck Oz as having all the hallmarks of Gerber’s diabolical handiwork.
Chapter 11
Second Strike
Oz spent a restless night as his buzzing mind bounced among unpleasantly imagined images of Bendle neck-deep in manure, Ruff’s sour-faced response to his science test result, and Ellie’s inexplicable outburst in the bus bay. Floating in the murky mix, too, was the second half of Redmayne’s letter and the mysterious events surrounding Richard Worthy’s death two hundred and fifty years ago. In the end, it seemed he had just dropped off when the alarm woke him from a deep slumber. He zombied through breakfast with uncombed hair and, after much cajoling from his mother, just made the bus to school.
He needed desperately to talk to Ellie and Ruff about things, but it was obvious, even to his groggy brain, that neither of them was in a talkative mood when they eventually got to Room 33. They both arrived late, with bulldog-chewing-a-wasp expressions, and to cap it all, the whole of 2C was once again held up by Skelton sticking his thick-skinned head into the classroom.
“Just seven days left until the trip, and just one exam for those of you wishing to make certain of your place,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “As an added incentive, yesterday Dr Heeps informed me that JG Industries has generously offered tiered sponsorship. That means that the top ten in the class only have to find £50 for the whole week, the remaining ten, just £75. Therefore, it will be well worth trying your utmost to ace the next test and improve your rankings.”
The whole class reacted with a sudden burst of excited whispering, which was, Oz assumed, exactly what the science teacher had hoped for. Another dangled carrot from Heeps and Gerber? What exactly were they up to? But when he looked across at Ruff, whose head had shot up on hearing the announcement, there was no acknowledgement. Instead, Ruff’s gaze slid back to the doodle he’d been engrossed in ever since entering the classroom. And all Ellie could do was shrug in response to Oz’s questioning glance.
At the f
ront of the class, Mr Skelton’s teeth gleamed as his head swivelled to face Miss Arkwright.
“And of course, it isn’t too late for Miss Arkwright to accompany us,” he added. “Totally free.”
Miss Arkwright, however, shook her head and sighed.
“But everyone wants you to come,” Mr Skelton implored. He turned to the class. “Don’t we, 2C? Show of hands, if you will.”
Almost the whole of the class put their hands up, even though only about half a dozen had even the remotest chance of going on the trip themselves. Miss Arkwright looked startled.
“Look, it’s not a question of what you or 2C want,” she said in a voice blending irritation and panic. “I’m afraid I have other plans.”
“Oh, come on. You know it’ll be fun.” Skelton just wouldn’t give up.
“With you in charge, what else could it possibly be?” she muttered through a fabricated smile. “However, as I have tried to explain…”
The door suddenly opened, and Mr Gingell stuck his head in, his face adorned with its usual good-natured smile. When he saw Mr Skelton, however, the smile slid off, replaced by a confused frown.
“Ah, sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt. Wanted a word about next…” He glanced at an unusually silent 2C, who were waiting with bated breath for what he was about to say, took in Miss Arkwright’s glare of irritation, and finally turned back to the idiotically beaming face of Mr Skelton.
“Right. Never mind,” he said. “It’s nothing urgent. I’ll just, ummm…come back later, then, shall I?”
A curtain of solid silence descended as the two men regarded one another before Mr Gingell withdrew and left Mr Skelton with a bewildered look on his face. He eventually cleared his throat and mumbled, “As I said, just a few days to go to the final test. So…study…hard…” He turned and walked out of the room.
Miss Arkwright watched him go, her arms folded resolutely. Oz thought he saw her mouth a silent word, which looked very much like “Prat.”
By the time the little soap opera was over, they were all late for French, and Madame Chang kept them five minutes extra going into break. Oz couldn’t find Ruff or Ellie in the canteen, and by the time he’d bought and wolfed down a piece of toast, the bell went for geography.
Everyone knew that Mr Gingell and Miss Arkwright were an item. Everyone except Skelton, it seemed. Though they tried their best not to show any sign of it in school, Ellie thought it was “really sweet.” Oz had not gone quite that far but had given it his seal of approval, since Arkwright and Gingell were his two favourite teachers in the whole of Seabourne County.
Gingell, being second generation Trinidadian, was a huge cricket fan and coached the under-fifteen school team. His lessons had inspired the failed water cycle project and since Oz had fixed the sabotage to get it working again, the Perspex box usually sat on display at the rear of the geography classroom. That morning, Oz was puzzled to find it on the desk at the front. He wondered if Mr Gingell had put a shoal of piranha in the bottom of it, from the way Ruff kept his eyes glued to it throughout the lesson. Ellie, meanwhile, kept her head in her textbook whenever Oz tried to catch her eye, even after he’d passed her a note that read, “Did you see stuff about Bendle in poo on news?”
Finally, the bell went for lunch, and 2C began filing out noisily. Gingell sang out above the din, “Don’t forget, your homework is to design a poster for a biosphere park based on the Japanese Eden Globe in New Seoul we’ve just studied. Oh, and Ellie, Rufus, and Oscar, can I see you for a minute, please?”
When the rest of the class had tramped out, Mr Gingell called the three of them to the front, where he waited for them next to the water cycle model.
“You all know how brilliant I think this piece of work is,” Mr Gingell said, his dark eyes twinkling.
They nodded. Mr Gingell told them at least three times a week exactly that. “Well, I was wondering how difficult it might be to modify it a bit. You know we’ve done extremes of weather and natural disasters this term.”
Oz nodded. Mr Gingell’s cousin in Port-of-Spain had sent them a video from the middle of a tropical storm the previous week, and the howling wind had sounded, according to Ruff, like a banshee choir.
“So, I was thinking, if we put a little bit of sand under the soil on the mountainside, when it rained we might get a mudslide, which would set up a tsunami inside the box. Of course, it would mean we’d have to rebuild the mountain each time.”
Oz waited for Ruff to say something triumphant, since it’d been his idea right from the start to do just that. He normally would have, Oz was sure, but he was still in “silent miserable git” mode.
“Shouldn’t be too hard,” Ellie said eventually.
“Definitely.” Oz nodded.
“Piece of cake,” Ruff mumbled.
“Really?” Mr Gingell said, his eyes wide with delight.
Oz looked at Ellie and then at Ruff, who didn’t look back, the three of them settling on a series of vague nods and shrugs in response to the suggestion.
Mr Gingell frowned. “I may not have expected cartwheels and whoops of joy, but a little flicker of enthusiasm might not go amiss,” he said.
Three pairs of shoes were inspected by the trio.
“Do I detect that a touch of frost has descended on the normally warm and rosy Ellie, Oz, and Ruff gang?”
No one spoke.
“Hmmm,” Gingell said. “If you ask me, the silent, moody look doesn’t suit any one of you very much. If you’d like to talk about it…” He let the question hang in the air, where it shrivelled and died. “A fresh take on the subject is quite often very valuable in such situations,” he suggested again.
Silence.
“No? Well, I must say I am surprised. You three normally seem so…grown up. Clearly, there are some things that are not quite ready to be approached from an adult standpoint. So, would you like to make a start on the model after you grab a quick bite?”
“Maybe Ruff and Ellie can, sir,” Oz said and grimaced an apology. “I’ve got orchestra practise.”
“Ah, of course. Well. Sorry to have kept you, Oz.”
“No problem, sir,” Oz said.
But it was a problem. The orchestra couldn’t really practise without a drummer, and it was Oz’s job to get there early and set up. Now he’d be keeping everyone waiting while he fiddled with adjusting his high hat and cymbals.
He hurried along corridors heaving with hungry students going in the opposite direction, but instead of thinning out the farther from the canteen he got, the throng became denser. When he finally got to the corridor leading to the hall, a knot of people was jammed up against the doors. Most of them were orchestra players, and their cumbersome instrument cases compounded the congestion. Everyone was straining to stare in through the glass panels in the hall door while from somewhere outside, the blaring sirens of an approaching emergency services vehicle grew ever louder,
“What’s going on?” Oz asked Aaron Bradley.
“Don’t know, really. All happened so fast. I’d just walked in through the door when there was this scream and Fidler did a headless chicken up to the stage, and then he came back out looking really white and told Martha Trump to go and fetch Mr Manning and the Volcano, and then he told the rest of us to go and wait out here and…”
He didn’t get a chance to finish. Something was happening in the hall. The crowd suddenly surged back as the doors were thrust open.
“Coming through,” yelled Mr Fidler. The school nurse was by his side, fussing over a bundle in his arms. Said bundle wasn’t moving very much, but did let out a moan.
“That’s Phillipa Heeps, isn’t it?” Aaron hissed as he craned to see.
Oz didn’t answer. The bundle was indeed Pheeps. Her pretty face was deathly pale and her eyes were shut tight, her limbs hanging doll-like over Fidler’s arms as he pushed his way through the throng of students and out to the waiting ambulance. Everyone watched in dumbstruck silence, which was eventually broken by a very fam
iliar voice.
“Can I have the jazz orchestra in here at once, please?” The Volcano sounded peeved at the best of times. Now, she sounded like the top of her head was going to blow off at any moment.
The crowd parted to allow the orchestra to shuffle in under the Volcano’s unsmiling glare.
“As you will have gathered, there has been…an incident. I will want to speak to each of you in turn—”
“Is Phillipa all right, miss?” asked Martha Trump, tearfully.
“She appears physically unharmed, but she is in shock.”
“Was it the same thing that happened to Kieron Skinner, miss?” Martha Trump continued is a hoarse whisper. “Do you think it was the Beast of…”
“That’s enough of that,” snapped the Volcano. “There is no such thing as the Beast of Seabourne, and I do not want to hear any such tripe mentioned in this school again, do you understand?”
No one spoke.
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
The Volcano’s strident voice echoed around the hall. Oz didn’t think he’d ever heard it at such a volume, and he found himself glancing at the glass panels in the doors to make sure they hadn’t shattered.
“Now, the staff and I are determined to get to the bottom of this very quickly. But for the moment, orchestra practise has been put on hold, and I suggest you all go and get some lunch.”
The band picked up their instruments and filed out in shocked silence.
Oz was almost at the door when he heard his name being called.
“Oscar Chambers,” boomed the Volcano. “I want a word with you.”
Oz looked up. The Volcano was still up on the stage, sending him a thousand-watt glare. Oz had to push back through a knot of his fellow musicians to get back inside. Martha Trump sent him a dagger stare and made a great show of giving him a wide berth. He made his way along the length of the hall with a lead weight in his gut. He could feel a dozen pairs of eyes on the back of his neck, and he knew what they were all thinking. Blood rushed to his face in a flush of embarrassment. The Volcano waited until the last person had left the room before walking down from the stage, her echoing footfalls emphasising the fact that they were completely alone. She strode up to him and leaned forward, her eyes behind the dark-rimmed glasses full of a cold anger, her voice dripping with disdain.
The Beast of Seabourne Page 17
