by Sam Hepburn
She wasn’t to know that Bailey was about as likely to send me snail mail as he was to take up belly dancing. I sauntered slowly across the lawn to the shed, feeling Doreen’s eyes burning into my scalp, and waited till I’d slammed the door and taken a couple of deep breaths before ripping open the envelope. A twist of grubby paper fell out and something sparkly clattered to the floor. Oz gave it a sniff. It was a narrow gold bar with a fastening on the back like a badge. I picked it up. My old headmaster used to wear something a bit like it clipped to his tie, only his wasn’t gold and it didn’t have a stonking great diamond in the middle of it held up by a couple of prancing bears. My hands went clammy. That was the crest on the keys to Elysium, and on the archway over the gate. There was no message with it but I knew exactly who’d sent me this tie-clip. It was Yuri. And how did I know that? Because I’d seen it before. In that old Oxo tin he’d had in the cellar of Elysium. And just like the other jewels in there, this looked pretty real to me. This was his way of saying thanks and letting me know he was all right, I couldn’t chance Doreen finding it and asking difficult questions so I carefully clipped it to the top of my boxers. The diamond dug into my stomach every time I moved, but at least I’d always know where it was.
Oz was jumping up, ready to get going, but I went on squinting at the postmark on the envelope, trying to make out where Yuri had posted it. It looked like London somewhere but the rest was too smudged to read. I folded it up, stuffed it in my pocket and fed Oz. Then I took him for a long walk, right through the village and round to the river. When I got back I nicked a bit of paper out of next door’s recycling, scribbled a spidery note asking me how things were going, signed it ‘from Bailey’ and left it by my bed, all ready for Doreen to find next time she fancied a snoop through my stuff.
CHAPTER 8
I spent the journey to Cambridge flicking through Ivo Lincoln’s notebook, trying to stop Oz climbing on the seats and worrying about Yuri. There was a chance that he’d flogged the rest of that jewellery and gone off to sun himself in the Caribbean, but deep down I was scared he was sick again, lying all alone in some abandoned building muttering to himself like a crazy man. Wherever he was I had to track him down. He was my only chance of finding out why Mum had been in Lincoln’s car.
The train whooshed into darkness, filling my ears with a juddery roar. Should I tell Professor Lincoln about Yuri? The answer jolted from yes to no with every sway of the carriage. As soon as I got off and saw him standing at the ticket barrier in his woolly scarf and posh tweed suit I knew I couldn’t risk it. He was definitely the kind of bloke who thought coming clean to the police was the answer to everything. His swept-back hair was thinner and greyer than I’d remembered, his lanky body seemed more stooped and even though he was making a big effort to look cheerful his face was rigid, like a sad face mask. Maybe mine was stuck like that, too.
The centre of Cambridge was a maze of old buildings the colour of half-sucked toffees and cold mashed potato, all fluffed up into domes and towers. The Prof said he’d give me a tour after lunch but first we’d go to his rooms.
Walking through the gates of St Saviour’s was like stepping into one of those costume dramas Mum used to glue herself to on Sunday nights, only instead of girls in bonnets trying to bag themselves a husband it was full of students in jeans lugging books around. The Professor picked up his post from the porters’ lodge, which was a kind of office to one side of the main gate, packed with keys, phones and pigeonholes. He introduced me a tubby bloke with wolf-man eyebrows and a bowler hat standing behind the desk.
‘This is Albert Brewster, Joe, our head porter. Rules this place with a rod of steel.’
Albert looked me up and down. ‘Pleased to meet you. And since you’re a guest of the Professor’s I’ll turn a blind eye to the dog. Just this once.’
We traipsed across a couple of windy courtyards, through a maze of stone corridors and up these narrow steps to a massive book-lined room that smelled of leather, wood, paper, polish and coffee all stewed up for years and years. Through a half-open door at the back I could see a bedroom.
He told me to make myself at home. Yeah, right. As if any home I’d ever live in would have a carved wooden desk the size of a tennis court and those big pointy windows you get in churches, with a view straight on to the river. It didn’t bother Oz. He went straight over and stretched himself out in front of the gas fire like he owned the place.
I put down Ivo’s holdall and stood next to him, listening to the flames hiss and pop while the Prof fussed around making tea and telling me how glad he was I’d come. The mantelpiece was crowded with photos of Ivo and a dark-haired girl who looked just like him.
‘Is that Bitsy?’ I said.
He nodded, clearly pleased I’d remembered her name.
We talked a bit about Cambridge and him teaching philosophy and what exactly that meant, and he showed me some book he’d written about old coins and said he’d been collecting them since he was a kid. Neither of us mentioned Mum or Ivo till the Prof picked up the holdall and took out Ivo’s notebook, holding it gently like it was a precious old relic.
‘I’m so glad you brought me this, Joe. Somehow these blank pages seem to keep his potential alive. Is that stupid?’ I shook my head. ‘But I’d like you to keep his laptop.’
‘Thanks, Professor,’ I said. But he’d turned away as if it hurt too much to think about why it was going spare.
I waited, listening to the wind rattling the windows and watching his grip on the edge of the desk grow tighter. After a bit I said, ‘That thing you said about Ivo’s notebook. Yur . . . a friend said something like that about the way it hurts when someone you care about dies.’
The Prof’s shoulders stiffened. ‘Said what, Joe?’
‘That the pain is good because it keeps the dead person alive in your heart.’
His head sank on to his chest, as if it had suddenly got too heavy to hold up. He stayed like that for a long time, with the notebook clasped in his hand and this sad feeling fluttering between us like it had a life of its own. After a while he made a tearing noise in his throat and put the notebook down.
‘So, Ivo’s laptop. Did you find anything interesting on it?’
Careful, Joe. Watch what you tell him. Take it slow and steady.
‘There was something . . .’
The look he gave me was mostly pity but he couldn’t hide the glint of curiosity in there as well.
‘Ivo emailed this bloke at The Times and asked if he could write him an article about the KGB archives in Kiev – interviewing people whose names were in the files, hearing their side of what happened to them, stuff like that.’
The Professor pushed a few strands of longish grey hair off his face and gave a spot on the carpet a kind of faraway smile. ‘Sounds like Ivo. He was marvellous at that sort of human story.’ His watery blue eyes drifted back to me. ‘But how does that back up your conspiracy theory?’
I took a breath. OK, here goes. ‘What if he found something in the files, some secret information about KGB spies that someone powerful didn’t want him to write about?’
The Professor raised his palm as if he was trying to push the idea away and said slowly and stiffly, ‘Everything in those files has to be at least twenty years old. I think it very unlikely that anyone would kill to keep their contents quiet.’
‘Unlikely. Not impossible.’
‘Well, no,’ he said wearily. ‘Not impossible.’
I picked up the notebook. ‘This writing, can you understand it?’
The Professor let out a sigh. ‘No. It was Ivo’s private shorthand. It made things much safer for him and his sources when he was reporting under cover.’
I turned the notebook towards him. ‘Look at these dates. First one’s the eleventh of February, last one’s the day before the crash, the third of March. So this is all stuff he wrote in Ukraine.’
He nodded.
‘’So why bother writing it in code if he wasn’t writing someth
ing secret?’
A tiny frown creased the Professor’s forehead. I grabbed a pen and paper from his desk. ‘OK, so think about it. Ivo goes to Kiev on the first of February. On the tenth of Feb he emails The Times about doing a story on the KGB archive. On the eleventh he starts investigating something and writing secret notes about it in this book. On the third of March, just as he’s about to leave Ukraine, he has his laptop stolen. He flies home and buys a new one. The following night he goes to see my mum and they both get killed.’
I felt his eyes on me as I flicked through the notebook. ‘Oh, yeah, and on the eleventh, right at the start of his investigation, he jots down these mobile numbers. They’re probably contacts he was interviewing. Can we call them?’
‘All right.’ His voice was steady but his hand trembled as he handed me the phone.
I put it on speaker and rang the numbers. Each time I got a recorded voice telling me I’d dialled incorrectly. The Prof went over to his desk and tapped his computer.
‘Try them again using the country code for Ukraine, that’s 00380, and the one for Russia, which is 007.’
I looked up. ‘You’re not serious.’
‘I’m afraid I am. It looks like someone in the Russian phone industry also had spies on the brain.’ He tried to smile but didn’t quite make it.
I dialled every combination – no luck.
‘Maybe they’re not mobile numbers at all,’ he said, thoughtfully.
‘Eleven digits, starting with an 0. What else are they going to be?’
Even as I said it I was getting this niggling feeling I’d seen another set of numbers just like them. Recently, too. I just couldn’t think where. We tried writing them out, swapping the numbers for letters to see if they were some kind of code. All we got was a jumble of rubbish. The Prof heaved himself out of his chair. ‘I don’t know about you but my brain always works better on a full stomach. Come on. We’re having lunch in the Senior Common Room. Better not be late.’
The Senior Common Room was like something out of Hogwarts; two long wooden tables down the middle and a lot of old portraits hanging round the walls. I was half expecting some wizened old gnome to hobble in and serve up stuffed swan and I was a bit miffed when it turned out to be a help-yourself choice of liver and bacon or breaded fish. I had the fish with rhubarb tart for afters. It was a bit like a posh school dinner except everyone was old and I had to keep stopping between mouthfuls so the Professor could introduce me to his mates. This is my good friend, Joe Slattery. I wish Mum could have seen me sitting there will all those crusty old professors. It would have made her year. She used to badger me all the time about going to university, getting a better life, not ending up like her. I was nodding, being polite and struggling to keep my elbows in, but all the time I was stressing about the questions I should ask Professor Lincoln. I was certain that if I only asked the right one I’d hit on the connection between Ivo, Mum and Yuri. But what that question was, well, that was anyone’s guess.
After lunch the Prof took me and Oz on a tour of the town, pointing out a chapel the size of a cathedral, guiding me through narrow cobbled alleyways, dodging streams of students on bikes and letting me peer into a few more ancient colleges that looked like stately homes. I’m not usually into that kind of stuff but he made it pretty interesting, telling me stories about famous people who’d studied there and the wild stuff they’d got up to as students. Only instead of getting ASBOs they’d all gone on to become prime ministers, bankers and bishops. Even the ones who’d ended up as robbers, spies and murderers seemed to have got away with it, mainly because they were rich and posh. Just like Greville Clairmont. When I said that to the Professor he gave me a funny look.
‘You’re a bit young to know about the Clairmont murder,’ he said.
We’d crossed a narrow stone bridge and as we walked along the river bank I let Oz off the lead and told the Prof about living in Saxted, my nan working for Norma Craig and how I’d had a peek inside Elysium when the cleaners were there. He was so interested that I got a bit carried away and nearly let it slip about Yuri. I stopped myself just in time.
‘The murder was a huge story at the time,’ he said. ‘The papers talked about little else for weeks. And you’re right. Clairmont was a Cambridge man.’ He pointed to another big toffee-coloured building on the other side of the river. ‘He was at Trinity, that college over there. Read History if I remember correctly.’
History!
The word lit a spark in my brain. It flickered for a couple of seconds then flared, lighting up a great big gap in my search of Ivo’s laptop. I stopped dead.
The Prof turned and looked back at me. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m an idiot. I never checked Ivo’s browsing history.’
We hurried back to St Saviour’s and as soon as we got to the Professor’s rooms I ran to Lincoln’s laptop and hit the keys.
No triumph. Just a paralysing rush of fear. According to Ivo’s browsing history, between the evening of 3 March and the morning of 4 March he’d searched the name Sadie Slattery nine times. Half of me was desperate to know why. The other half was suddenly terrified of what I might find out.
I glanced up at the Professor, who was scanning the screen over my shoulder. He’d gone very pale. But he said, coolly and calmly, ‘We mustn’t get carried away. It’s possible that Ivo just wanted to hear your mother sing.’
I wasn’t even pretending to be cool or calm. ‘Come on, Professor. I’m probably Mum’s greatest fan and when she was on form her singing was really good. Just not good enough for anyone to get off a plane and start looking for her next performance before they’d had time to unpack. And anyway you don’t go to the births, marriages and deaths register, the electoral roll or the vehicle licensing agency to find a music gig.’
I clicked through all the sites in the list till I got to the last one.
‘Look at this, Professor,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Ivo even knew that Mum was a singer till the morning of the crash.’
He peered closer. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘That’s when he found her on the Trafalgar Arms events page.’
The Professor pulled off his glasses and rubbed his temples. ‘This is all very unsettling, Joe. However it is hardly proof that my son and your mother were murdered.’
But as he paced up and down the room I could see his planet-sized brain was working overtime, turning over all the evidence we’d got so far.
All the way back to the station I was going mad trying to match those numbers in Ivo’s notebook with the hazy memory floating in my head. I was still thinking about it when the Prof grasped my shoulders, thanked me for coming and said we should meet up again as soon as he got back from a lecture he was giving in Edinburgh.
I boarded the train, put Oz under my seat and spread the list of numbers on the table in front of me. The door slammed. Maybe the sound jolted my brain or maybe it was seeing the paper against the brown plastic table that did it but a picture suddenly flashed in my head. Eleven black printed numbers on a white label . . . stuck on a brown cardboard box . . . on a still frame . . . of a YouTube clip.
‘Stay there, Oz. Don’t move.’
I barged back through the line of passengers coming down the aisle, ran for the door, jammed down the window and stuck my head out. The train was pulling out.
‘Professor! I’ve got it! Those numbers. They’re files! The KGB files Ivo looked at!’
A sudden smile cracked the sadness on his face. Raising his fists in a double thumbs-up he shouted into the wind, face flushed, eyes bright, hair whipping wildly round his head. ‘Well done, Joe! I’ll order copies and get them couriered.’
I waved till he was just a small lonely dot on the platform, and jumped when a tall heavy man brushed passed me lugging a suitcase. I stumbled to my seat, scared and excited, and lifted Oz on to my lap. He fell asleep pretty quickly and I was suddenly so exhausted it didn’t take me long to drop off too.
This time
the crash dream had a different twist. It was all about Ivo Lincoln smashing his car up trying to rescue Mum from Eddy Fletcher and her scabby life on Farm Street. The savage scream of brakes jolted me awake. As the train rolled into the station I caught my reflection in the window: a weedy kid in a cheap, washed-out hoodie. Mum had been planning to get me a new one. We’d have gone round the shopping centre, just her and me, trying on stuff we couldn’t afford, having a laugh, pretending we were rich. That was never going to happen again. I felt totally lost. Mum’s death might have strung a temporary bridge between my life and the posh bubble that people like Ivo and the Professor lived in, but our worlds would always be about a hundred million miles apart.
CHAPTER 9
I got back to Saxted to hear that Norma Craig had moved into Elysium that morning, Doreen was cooking her dinner that night, and I had to deliver it. Doreen wasn’t sneering about Norma Craig’s dodgy past now. In fact, from the fuss she was making you’d have thought she’d been asked to cater a royal wedding. It wasn’t just the menu she was worried about. Oh, no. She was so petrified that I was going to ‘let the side down’ she made me have a shower while she shouted instructions through the bathroom door about what I had to say and do. How I’d got to stand up straight and look Norma in the eye and say yes Miss Craig, no Miss Craig, anything you say Miss Craig and take no notice if she was doddery and bad-tempered. And just in case Norma wanted to chat I had to keep to three safe topics: the weather, Doreen’s amazing cooking, and my best subjects at school.
She’d also been shopping. When I got out of the shower she was in my room laying out a disgusting blue shirt, striped tie, tweed jacket, grey trousers and brown lace-up shoes.
‘What’s all this?’ I said.
‘I’m not having anyone delivering my food looking like an oik.’
Thanks, Doreen. At least I don’t look like a whippet in a wig.
‘Come on get dressed, we’ve got to leave in ten minutes.’
That’s when I took my life in his hands, told her no way and threatened not to go. She backed down on the trousers and let me wear my black jeans. But I still had to wear the shirt, jacket and tie. A tie! And she wouldn’t budge on the shoes. I felt like a total freak.
