An Island of Our Own

by Sally Nicholls

  “Hmm.” Jen sounded doubtful. “The thing is, for image-recognition software to work, there need to be other images to compare the pictures to. I mean—” She brought up my blog and tapped the photograph of Auntie Irene’s living-room wall. “If the internet was full of pictures of your aunt’s living room, I’m sure it would be pretty easy to identify this one. But it’s not going to be, is it? And the same with these beaches and stuff. It’s not like they’re Blackpool Pier.” She scrolled down to the grey little beach. “Look at this. It’s just a bit of coast. It’s going to be a pretty remote bit too if your aunt buried treasure there, isn’t it? And even if there are pictures of this place online, there must be hundreds of beaches that look a bit like this.”

  “I suppose so.” I leant over her chair so I could see the picture. I’d stared at the photographs so often, I bet I could have picked those rocks out of a rock line-up.

  “It’s a shame your aunt didn’t have a digital camera,” Jen said. “There are all sorts of things you can do with a digital photo. You can look up the metadata, for example – that’s often got the latitude and longitude in there. But—”

  “Oooh!” I said. “Ooh, Jen!” Because Auntie Irene did have a digital camera. In fact, she had several. She loved technology. She was the first person I knew to get a smartphone. Mum told me she’d only found out what a digital camera was when Aunt Irene showed up with one.

  That evening, when we got home, I called Jo. “Do you know where your mum kept her digital photos?”

  “Not sure,” said Jo. “Why?”

  “It’s about us finding the rest of the treasure,” I said. “Yours and ours. I was thinking, if I could see the digital copies of the photos she gave me, it might help tell us where they were taken. Metadata and stuff,” I said airily. “You know.”

  “I don’t know for sure,” said Jo. “But I did take her laptop for Noah. Don’t tell Dad. I was so annoyed – with Mum for making everything so complicated and with him for not sticking up for us. The boys wanted a laptop, and it’s not as though he was ever going to use it. It won’t be much use to you, though – all her files are password-protected.”

  I smiled, although Jo couldn’t see that, of course. It was my special, I am a computer genius and so is my brother so let me get the mission codes for you smile. Passwords? Ha!

  “Passwords,” I said, “will not be a problem.”

  CHILD HACKER SOLVES CASE. POLICE MARVEL.

  Jo came round with the computer after school on Monday. I’d meant to meet her on the doorstep as usual, because the flat’s always such a mess, but I was upstairs trying to actually do some English homework, and Davy buzzed the intercom before I could get down. She didn’t say anything, but the kitchen smelt of slightly rotten milk and wet carpet from the overflowing dishwasher and the bin was overflowing in a disgusting sort of way, and there was a stain on the hall carpet, where Davy had spilt honey that morning and no one had bothered to clean it up, and I could see the unhappy way her face tightened.

  “Are you all right, Holly?” she said, her head making small, anxious twitches. “Looking after Davy on your own? I feel like I ought to help more than I do, but it’s so difficult, with the business, and the boys—”

  “We’re fine,” I said. I was beginning to see what Jonathan meant about asking too much of people. I liked being taken out for cake, and getting new video games for Christmas, and Auntie Irene’s laptop, which she said I didn’t need to worry about giving back, actually, and I didn’t want to ruin that by asking for help.

  “If there’s anything I can do,” she said awkwardly.

  Adopt us, I wanted to say. Let us come and live in your nice house, and Davy go to your childminder, and Jonathan go to university, and everything be like it was when Mum was alive.

  But I didn’t, of course. You can’t just ask people to adopt you. Not even nice ones.

  Auntie Irene’s laptop was stupidly easy to hack into. I just unattached the hard drive and plugged it into Jonathan’s laptop. It whirred for a bit, and then all the files Auntie Irene had saved onto it flashed up on screen. Easy.

  “Now what?” said Davy, who was watching with interest.

  “Now I need to find her pictures. If they’re on here. Which they might not be.”

  I was pretty worried about this, actually. Auntie Irene certainly wasn’t the sort of person who would leave important information lying around. Would she just leave the pictures on her laptop? Wouldn’t she make copies of them and hide them… somewhere?

  I spent the afternoon looking through all her files. Files and files of pictures. Baby pictures of Jo. Holiday pictures. There were even a couple of pictures of us, at family parties.

  Then there were folders and folders of really boring pictures. Landscapes. People in suits. Pictures of the inside of engines, and circuit-board designs. Folders and folders of machine parts, all neatly labelled.

  Auntie Irene was weird.

  I looked through every picture on her computer. Nothing. I ran a search for all the sorts of image files I knew and found a whole lot that weren’t saved under pictures, but none of them were the pictures in Auntie Irene’s album.

  I called Jen. She was at work, but she answered anyway.

  “I can’t find them,” I wailed.

  Jen sighed. “She might not have kept copies,” she said gently.

  But I was in no mood for gentleness. “There’s no way she wouldn’t,” I said. “She was super-organized. She wouldn’t just have one photo album that might get lost down the back of the sofa. She’d have that information in loads of places. Where else might she have put it? Where would she have hid them? Her phone? The internet?”

  “Anywhere,” said Jen. “Her knicker drawer?” Which wasn’t helpful.

  I told her so. I could hear her smiling at me down the phone.

  “Maybe some sort of online file storage?” she suggested.

  “How would I know if she had?” I said.

  “I dunno. Look in her history?”

  I felt really weird going through Auntie Irene’s internet history. Like I was watching her undress or something. I wondered if I was going to discover loads of dark secrets. But I didn’t. I hadn’t heard of most of the websites she used to visit, apart from the obvious ones like Google, or Waitrose, or the BBC news website.

  “What should I be looking for?” I asked Jen.

  “Well, there are lots of file-sharing websites,” Jen said. “Look for something that describes itself as a cloud, or file storage or file sharing or backup or something.”

  I kept looking. And then.

  “I found it! Online file sharing and backup software! This is it!”

  “So click through,” said Jen.

  I did. The link went straight through to the login page. The login page had two boxes for username and password. And both the boxes had that little line of stars which meant that you’d asked the website to store your password for you. I clicked on the button that said Log in.

  And there I was.

  There was a whole page of different files, with names that were mostly numbers. And some folders. And one folder called Briefcases.

  I opened the folder.

  And there they were.

  All five pictures.

  “Jen!” I squealed. “Jen, they’re here! I found them! What do I do now?”

  “Click on a picture!” said Jen. I clicked on the first picture, the Polynesian one. Pale blue sea the colour of hotel swimming pools, and hope, and money. Pale, clean sand. A blue sky with no worries in it. “And look in… properties, I think?”

  I right-clicked the picture, and then clicked on Properties. A dialogue box came up with three tags. I clicked on Metadata.

  The Metadata tab was this list of information about Auntie Irene’s photographs. Most of them were really boring stuff like Aperture Value and Expos
ure Length. Some of the spaces where properties should have been were blank. But there, about halfway down, was a space marked Location.

  “There’s a number!” I said. “But what does it mean?”

  “It’s the latitude and longitude,” said Jen. “Hang on, there must be a website that tells you where that is. Let me have a look.” There was a pause. “OK. Got one. Type ‘latitude and longitude’ into Google and click on the first link. There’s a space at the bottom where you can type in the coordinates.”

  I did as she said. The map page came up with a picture of a piece of coastline, with one of those little pointer things stuck onto it. It could have been anywhere. I zoomed out, trying to find a picture that was small enough to see where it was.

  “Norfolk Island! That’s right! That’s where Jo said it was! Polynesia!”

  “Polynesia,” said Jen. She laughed. “Well, good luck with that one, Holly.”

  Yeah, yeah. But…

  I clicked back onto the tab with the metadata.

  “Here!” I said to Jen. “Under Date/Time! It says this picture was taken four years ago. Well, Jo saw the jewellery two years ago, so she can’t have hidden it here. We just need to look at the date the photo was taken, and I bet we’ll be able to rule loads of them out!”

  Jonathan would have told me not to get so excited before anything had actually happened. But Jen sounded as thrilled as I was. “Go on, then!” she said. “Get looking. . .”

  I opened the other pictures. The dates were all different. Auntie Irene’s living room was the oldest one. Then the Norfolk Island picture. Then the railway siding. That one was three years old. If we’d known that at the time, we could have saved ourselves a journey.

  There were only two pictures that had been taken in the last two years. One was the messy office. The other was the one of the little beach. Grey rocks, grey sea, grey sky and long grass and heavy clouds.

  The messy office was in a building called Conway Place. It was in London, near Angel. From the photograph, it looked like a big old five-storey house. I told Jen the postcode, and we both put it into Google. The postcode came up with the websites of lots of different companies who had offices there.

  “This office could belong to any of these people!” I said. “This place is huge! Do we have to check every office?”

  “Nope,” said Jen. “Put ‘Irene Kennet, Conway Place’ into Google. First hit.”

  I did as she told me. The first hit was the website of a company called Inspired Solutions. They’d apparently designed a new type of wire. Their website said they were a small, dynamic organization with big ambitions! There was a whole lot of guff about their wire, which sounded dead boring, and then at the bottom, it said, With many thanks to our sponsors and supporters, and there was a long list of people, including Auntie Irene.

  “There you go,” said Jen. “What about this beach?”

  I copied the latitude and longitude into the latitude and longitude website and waited. It came up with an aerial photograph of some patchwork fields in various shades of green and yellow and brown, some tiny toy houses, a rocky coastline, blue sea. I zoomed out.

  “Papa Westray – it’s another island!”

  Jen laughed. “Did your aunt like islands?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I do. I love them! Islands are my favourite thing!”

  Jen laughed again. “Where is this island, then?” she said.

  I zoomed out again. The picture shrank and shrank. Westray. Orkney. Scotland.

  “It’s in Scotland! Right at the top of Scotland!” I gave a little bounce in my seat. “We could go to both those places! We really, really could!”

  SIZWE’S MUM

  I decided, on reflection, not to tell Jonathan about the office. Breaking into someone else’s workplace and stealing their briefcase was the sort of thing that would only worry him. Far better to deal with this problem myself. Sizwe and Neema, I decided, were much better accomplices.

  I told them all about it at break time the next day.

  “OK,” said Neema. “Cool. What are you going to do? Go to the office and ask if your auntie left any briefcases lying around?”

  “I dunno,” I said. I’d been thinking about this. “Won’t they just say no? I mean, even if they were hiding Auntie Irene’s briefcase for her – they were hiding it, weren’t they? They aren’t going to give it to us. Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t just go and ask. He’d disguise himself as a workman and spend all day tapping the walls pretending he was looking for dry rot until he’d found the secret hiding place. And Lord Peter would send one of his ninja typists in to suss the place out after everyone had gone home. I think that’s what we ought to do. But you have to be a grown-up to disguise yourself – it doesn’t work if you’re a kid.”

  (Lord Peter Wimsey was another old-fashioned detective I liked. He was like Sherlock Holmes, but posher and funnier. He had this typing agency full of respectable-looking old ladies, who he’d secretly trained in lock-picking and surveillance and asking questions, and whenever he had a mission like this one, he’d send one of them in, in disguise.)

  Neema and Sizwe had never heard of Lord Peter and his undercover typists, though (they’d only heard of Sherlock Holmes because of Benedict Cumberbatch), so I had to explain.

  I was halfway through my explanation when Sizwe started bouncing up and down and waving his hands about. “I know!” he said. “I know what we’ve got to do! I’ve got the perfect plan!”

  “What?” I said, but Sizwe had already taken his phone out and was looking up the phone number of Inspired Solutions. He made flappy “shh” motions at me.

  Then he dialled. “Hullo?… Hullo, yes, I’m doing a school project on cleaners. Like, do businesses use big cleaning firms, or hire people themselves, or what?… Yeah, it’s business studies… Oh, OK… Yeah, could you give me the name of the company, please? I’m supposed to do a graph… Yeah, no problem… OK. Thanks! Bye.” He put down the phone and grinned at me. “I’m good,” he said. “Tell me I’m good.”

  “You’re baffling,” I said. “Are you going to pretend to be a cleaner?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m going to get my mum to pretend to be a cleaner. Well, not pretend. Actually be. And then I’m going to go with her – that’s totally allowed, I used to do that all the time when I was little. ” He caught Neema’s puzzled expression. “My mum runs a cleaning firm,” he explained. “And, see, look, I asked the lady on the phone who their cleaners are. It’s this firm called Speedy Brooms. And my mum knows them! Well, she knows the lady who runs them. I bet she could persuade them to let her go in and do the cleaning instead of whoever it is who’s supposed to do it. They do that – take over each other’s shifts when people go on holiday and stuff. And I could come too! And then we’d find out what’s what.”

  THE OFFICE

  The next day, I took our broom-handle metal detector to school and gave it to Sizwe. The other kids thought we were crazy.

  “What’s that for?” Kali said.

  “We’s gonna catch us a wabbit!” said Sizwe.

  “Huh?” said Kali.

  Sizwe tapped his nose mysteriously.

  Sizwe called me up that evening. “OK,” he said. “So Mum and I went in, and it’s totally the right office. I mean, it looked exactly like that picture. I took a photo to prove it – I’ll send it over when I’m off the phone.”

  (He did. He was right. The office in his photograph did look like the one Auntie Irene had given me.)

  “So,” Sizwe went on, “we went up, and I had the metal detector like you said, only it was pretty useless because loads of stuff in an office is made of metal, isn’t it? I mean, even the tables were, so it just detected everything, and then a cross man in a suit told me to shut it up, so I had to. But I found a nice lady called Sue who worked in admin, and I asked her about your Auntie Iren
e, and they said she used to work there, but hadn’t for years. Six years ago, she left, they said.”

  “Yeah, but she must have been back,” I said. “That photograph was taken two years ago.”

  “I know,” said Sizwe. “Stop interrupting, woman. I told them that. Well, I didn’t. I said I thought my friend’s auntie had been back since then, and had she? And Sue said yes, she had, she’d come back a couple of times to do consulting work. But she’d definitely retired, because last time she came, she’d taken all her stuff with her. So I said, what stuff? And she said – guess what she said?”

  “A briefcase!”

  “Yes! And I said, oh, had you been keeping a briefcase hidden for her then? All casual, and Sherlock Holmes-like. And she laughed a bit and said, oh yeah, Irene had left all sorts of stuff clogging up their safe. So I went and had a look. It was just an ordinary safe, only it was sort of built into the wall. It looked really properly ancient. Sue said nobody knew what the combination was, but the lock did turn, which is weird when you think about it, isn’t it? I mean, you’d expect a really ancient safe with a really ancient lock that hadn’t been opened in years to sort of be rusted shut, wouldn’t you? So I think she fixed the safe, or found the combination, or got a locksmith in to sort it out, or something, while she worked there. And that that’s where the briefcase was!”

  “But it’s gone,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Sizwe. “But that’s good, isn’t it? That means the jewellery can’t have been hidden in that briefcase. Because one of those photographs must be of the place where she hid the jewellery, mustn’t it? Otherwise what would be the point of giving them to you? And if there isn’t a briefcase in that office any more, then that can’t have been the photograph you wanted, can it? So now you know where the jewellery is. Don’t you? It’s in Orkney. It’s the only place left it could be.”