The Messenger Bird

by Ruth Eastham

  As I turned round with the carton, there was someone standing in the doorway, and I got such a shock that I let out a yell, splattering milk all over.

  “For goodness’ sake, Nathan! Who did you think it was?” Mum wiped splashes of milk off her nurse’s uniform. She dumped her yellow leather work bag on the table and sloshed some water from the tap into the kettle.

  “Sorry.” I dabbed at the spilled milk on the table with a piece of kitchen roll. “You going into work today?”

  “I had some things to do first,” she said vaguely. “Read some legal stuff Mr Edwards sent…” Her voice trailed off. She fiddled with some papers in an agitated way. I saw a couple of envelopes with CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM stamped on them in red. A leaflet called HM Prison Service – Support for Families… She shoved them into her bag and zipped it closed. “Yes, then I’m on the rota for a Saturday shift.”

  We went into the front room and I stood by the window and checked my watch. When would Sasha and Josh be here? I wished they’d hurry up. Mum paced and sipped her tea. She was being strangely quiet.

  My mobile buzzed. Probably Sasha or Josh at last. I sat down on the settee and flipped open the cover. One text message. I clicked on the icon and nearly fell on the floor.

  07700900583

  This is lily.

  Contact me. We…

  I stared at the message with its ghost-green letters.

  Lily?

  Lily was texting me?

  I could hardly read the next bit, my hand was shaking that badly.

  … have to be careful. My

  number’s changed. Get in touch.

  “Who was that from?” Mum asked as I flipped the cover closed.

  “Er … just Josh,” I said. I took a big slurp from my mug.

  A thought rocked me. Could Lily Kenley be still alive? How old would that make her? I remembered her date of birth, pencilled in the front of her notebook – 1902 – and did the calculation fast. Over a hundred and ten! It was possible, but not very likely. Could the text be from another Lily? Could it be a wrong number?

  If Lily hadn’t sent it, who had? I remembered Josh’s outburst after he’d found the message: Who’s Lily? Why does she need help? We need to find her. The bugs could have picked that up nice and clear. Was whoever had sent it expecting me to text them back? There was no way I was doing that!

  I clicked on the radio and my fingers were still shaking as I turned the music up. “Is it all right if I go to Bletchley Park this morning?” I asked by Mum’s ear. “With Sasha and Josh? It’s for a class project.”

  Maybe Mum thought I shouldn’t be bothering with school projects and going off with friends and all that kind of stuff, not with how things were with Dad, but she just nodded and I took another big swig of tea. I rubbed my hand over my mouth, trying to push away the text message and the fear prickling over my skin. I looked at my watch again. Where were Sasha and Josh?

  “How did this get on the mantelpiece?”

  I could have died! Mum stood there with the photo of Lily in her hand. I remembered I’d gone and left it there, hadn’t I? Stupid or what?

  My teeth clenched as I thought about the bugs and I turned the radio up even more. They might know about the trail and about Bletchley Park, but I wasn’t going to let them find out any more about Lily. “Er, I found it in the attic library.” I was thinking fast. “It’s for the school project I told you about.”

  “Lily Kenley,” muttered Mum, reading the label. “Your dad did tell me once that Auntie Hilda mentioned her a few times. Let me think. What was it your dad said?” She sat down with the photo.

  “It’s OK, Mum,” I said. “Tell me later.”

  “That was it…” she went on. “Hilda didn’t know much because she was just a little girl at the time, but she said Lily stayed with them awhile.” She tapped the glass in an agitated way as she tried to remember the details. “Turn that music down, can’t you? I can’t hear myself think! That was it – Lily’s mum was dead, your dad said, killed in a London bombing. Brother too. Lily’s dad was posted somewhere, as a fireman or something.”

  Lily’s family all dead, all except her dad? Lily looked up at me from her photo on the kitchen table, her eyes pinning me, and I felt suddenly sad; really sad for her.

  But there was no time for Lily’s story now!

  “She boarded with them for a while,” went on Mum. “Kept herself to herself, I gathered. Anyway, Hilda told Dad that Lily read her bedtime stories, and played the piano for her, the same piece, over and over and over. Then one morning Lily was gone, and that was the last Hilda ever heard of her.”

  Hilda and her parents, I thought, they couldn’t have known about Lily’s message, then. Lily had hidden it too well for that.

  My mobile buzzed and I fumbled to read the message in case it was from Lily again. I nearly dropped the phone, my hands were that slippery with sweat.

  On way now with josh meet at stop. Sash

  I let my heart rate settle. Finally. “I need to meet Sasha and Josh,” I said to Mum, getting up. “See you later.”

  “Before you set off, Nathan.” Mum clicked off the radio and she held on to my arm and didn’t let go. Don’t mention Lily, I prayed. They’ll hear you. But I needn’t have worried about that. Something way worse was coming.

  Mum looked at me as if she didn’t know how to start. “Hannah knows already,” she said, “I told her last night. She stayed over at Gavin’s… Anyway … I wanted to tell you too, but… There’s been a bit more news.” She paused to wipe some hair from her face like she didn’t want to go on. It was going to be more bad news, it had to be. The skin on my face went tight.

  Mum’s words rattled out like bullets. “They’re going to formally charge your dad.” She gave a strange little laugh. “On Monday morning. Then they’ll transfer him out of the area, to a more secure unit further south. We’re not allowed to know where.” She gnawed at one of her nails and there was a speck of blood on her finger.

  I just stood there like a dummy. But today was Saturday! Monday was two days away. Two days! “But the solicitor said the situation was stable!” I blurted.

  “This is all just intimidation tactics,” Mum muttered angrily to herself. “They’ll be arresting me next!” She stroked my hair. “He’s innocent, Nathan,” she said. But was that a wobble I heard in her voice?

  I didn’t know what to say, so I hugged her and then grabbed my coat from the hallway and pulled on my hat and gloves. I left the house and checked up and down the deserted lane. I went as fast as I could on the soft snow heading for the bus stop. The trees leaned in from both sides of the road, their bare branches reaching towards me. I saw Sasha and Josh already waiting at the shelter and when I got there I perched on a plastic flip-down seat and stared hard at the timetable. I knew it by heart – the next bus was ten past eight – but I stared at it anyway, just so I could keep my face turned away from Sasha and Josh and I wouldn’t have to tell them anything about Monday, because there was no time for getting upset, only getting on with things. Getting to the end of the trail and finding Dad’s evidence.

  I hacked at the layer of ice with my toe and stared at the grey circles of chewing gum on the pavement while Sasha and Josh flung about their theories on what lion eagle meant.

  I knew I should have told them about Lily’s text, but I didn’t want to scare them. What had I got them messed up in?

  Sasha stood up and stuck out her arm. The half-empty bus stopped and we got on and went to sit at the back as it pulled away.

  I didn’t talk much on the journey, only to fill the two of them in on what Mum had said about Lily, and to tell them the stuff I’d found out about Coventry being bombed. I let them carry on discussing lion eagle and how we should aim straight for Hut 6, Lily’s old hut, when we got to Bletchley Park.

  “That’s if we ever get there,” Sasha said as the bus strained and juddered on the gritted road up the hill towards town.

  I cleared a circle on the st
eamed-up window with the elbow of my coat and watched the snowy fields and spindly trees go past. We got to the edge of Bletchley and I gazed out at the white pavements and the huddled-up houses. Sasha pressed the bell.

  We got off and walked quickly. I couldn’t stop thinking about the person in the garden last night and kept glancing behind. I started to have a horrible feeling that someone was following us.

  It was nothing I could put my finger on, just half-glimpsed movements reflected in the glass of a telephone box or a shop window as we hurried past, but when I looked back, the street was always deserted.

  There was still a way to go. What was I hoping to find when I got to Hut 6? What did lion eagle mean? I still had no idea.

  We went past a takeaway, past the Dead Duck pub. We walked past a funeral director’s with an old-fashioned black clock hanging outside; fanged teeth and fireworks on sale in a shop window; a noodle bar with bits of its shop sign come off so it said N dies.

  Heavy, strange-coloured clouds swirled in the sky like a storm was on its way, and an icy drizzle blew in my face. A page of a newspaper skittered across the tarmac and stuck against my foot before tumbling on. It had gone weirdly dark. A streetlamp flicked on over me so I had two shadows. A group of kids from school were messing about outside a newsagent’s and I recognized a boy from our year.

  “Hey! Gnat features!” he called over the noise of traffic. “Isn’t that your dad?” He jabbed a finger at the board outside. There was a headline in the crisscrossing diamond shapes and I paused in my walking to let the words sink in.

  TRAITOR! LOCAL MAN HELD

  My head felt like a lump of lead. Somehow I managed to shake it.

  “Yeah it is.” The boy darted forward and stood in front of me, his arms folded tightly. “He works at the Ministry of Defence, doesn’t he? I read he’s been selling army secrets to the enemy! Got our soldiers killed.”

  I stared at the pavement, at its bits of broken glass and cigarette stubs. I could feel the kids smothering me with bad looks.

  “Course it’s not him!” said Sasha, pulling at my arm. Her breath spiralled out in clouds. “Don’t listen to that idiot,” she said to me.

  We crossed the main road and headed along a side street, but I still felt I was being watched everywhere I went, and not just by corrupt staff. Now it was like everyone knew my secret. Your dad’s a traitor. Your dad’s a traitor. I felt eyes on me from every window and every street corner. He’s innocent, I repeated to myself. Innocent. A plane flew over and I slipped slightly on the pavement’s trodden-down snow.

  We got to the entrance of Bletchley Park. “Now remember,” I said sternly, “if anyone asks, it’s a school project, right?” Josh nodded with a serious look and we approached the gate.

  There was a security man reading a newspaper in a little booth, and I thought with a shudder how he looked a bit like one of those men who’d taken Dad away. “Watch yourselves, kids.” He stared at us and then pointed out the entrance. “It’s slippy underfoot.” When I glanced back, he was still watching us over the top of his paper.

  We walked through the car park and up to a building with ADMISSIONS on it. We went in to the main desk and Sasha got our tickets, because her mum always gave her lots of money, and then we craned over the fold-out map we’d been given, looking for Hut 6.

  Clusters of buildings spread over the whole site, crisscrossed with wide driveways and little paths. There was the lake and the mansion and the café and the post office, and loads of labels with Hut Number This and Hut Number That.

  “There it is!” Sasha tapped the map. “Let’s go!”

  We rushed out and along the drive, round one side of the lake where a couple of ducks stood gloomily on the ice. Some of the buildings we passed were all broken-looking; some of them had been done up. We passed a sign that said Hut 8: Alan Turing’s Hut.

  “This can’t be it!” I said as we stopped at a nearby hut.

  “It is,” said Josh, tapping a sign. “Hut 6,” he read. “Interpretation Centre: Intelligence and D-Day… Awaiting funds for restoration.”

  I stared at the long hut with the snow-speckled paint flaking along its plank walls like shed skin and its rusty metal gutters and drainpipes.

  “We can’t go in.” Sasha tried the door, then stood on tiptoe to look in through one of the few grubby windows that wasn’t boarded up. “It’s all empty anyway.”

  I peered through the pane. Rubble and rubbish and clods of plaster were strewn over the floor, and nails spilled out from big plastic tubs into spiky pools. A broken hammer, a crooked screwdriver, a rusty saw with half its teeth missing. There were damp stains on the walls, and grey mouldy patches, and old wires hanging like snakes from the ceiling. I tried to imagine Lily working in there. Anyone working in there. Seventy years gone by as if they’d never existed.

  “Lion eagle. Lion eagle,” I muttered. “Keep looking. You check the left side, Josh; I’ll do the right side. Sasha, you check the front and back walls.”

  Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  “Where shall we try next?” said Sasha, after twenty minutes of getting nowhere. I heard the edge of disappointment in her voice.

  I studied the guide map. This looking around all seemed way too random. “Maybe the mansion? It was the headquarters for all the Bletchley Park stuff, right?”

  We hurried along the gravel drive towards a huge house that looked like it was a row of fancy houses stuck together, with a green dome roof at one end and red brick walls, and all these tall windows and chimneys.

  A couple of blokes in paint-splattered overalls and hard hats were standing either side of the entrance drinking out of steaming cups and smoking. And there was a stream of foreign kids in green uniforms jostling with us to get in the big front door.

  We walked quickly through the rooms, keeping a lookout for any kind of lion or eagle. We stared up at the stained glass roof of something called the anteroom and looked through shelves of books in the library, but we weren’t finding anything.

  “What’s that music?” said Josh. Piano notes drifted through the house, a crackly old classical piece.

  “Der, der, der. Der, der, der. Der, der, der. Der, der, der,” Josh sang, mimicking the music. “That one? I can’t think.”

  We followed the sound. It was coming out of a part-opened door that said BALLROOM by it, but there was yellow and black tape tied across the entrance like it was a murder scene.

  NO ENTRY – DANGER – WORK IN PROGRESS said the tape.

  Beyond I could see a big room with a really high ceiling and posh lights like upside-down bells hanging on gold chains, and the walls were completely covered in wooden panels, and there was a tall painters’ stepladder planted in the middle and all this scaffolding up the walls and wooden planks to walk on. The floor was covered in sheets, and there were large pots of paint and trays with rollers scattered about.

  “Unfortunately the ballroom ceiling is being repainted at the moment,” came a voice. A woman was behind us with a guided tour group. “We’ve kept the music playing, though, to give you a feel for the place.” She lowered her voice and went all dramatic. “The story goes that one poor soul on recent late-night cleaning duty heard music playing in here, this very same piece! But when he went to switch the gramophone off, he saw it wasn’t turned on! He later found out it hadn’t worked in decades.” The crowd gave a small gasp, Josh too. The tour guide winked. “Needless to say, the ballroom didn’t get vacuumed that evening!” There was laughter as the group filed away.

  “Do you think that’s true?” said Josh, wide-eyed. “About the ballroom being haunted? I saw this programme once where there was a ghost and…”

  “Let’s try to get in,” I said. “Have a look around. The ballroom’s the only room we haven’t checked.”

  Sasha lifted the tape, about to duck under it.

  “Where d’you think you’re going?” There was a gruff voice behind us and two workmen stood there, looking really annoyed.

 
“My mum works here,” Sasha lied, “and…”

  “Not today, she doesn’t.”

  “But she told me to…”

  The voice got gruffer. “We’ll be finished by Monday, young lady.”

  I took another step forward. “If I could just…”

  The gruff one stood squarely in the doorway and folded his arms. “Ballroom opens Monday, I said. Come back and do your dancing then.”

  “Good one!” the other man laughed. Then they bobbed under the tape and banged the door shut on us.

  Monday. I couldn’t wait until Monday! I promised myself I was going to get in there somehow before then.

  “Forget the ballroom for now,” said Sasha, looking at the map. “How about we try the Exhibition Centre, Block B? It’s full of old stuff.”

  We ended up going out of the mansion as the same loud group of schoolkids were leaving, and got jostled through the door and into the cold air.

  We went back the way we’d come, past the lake and back into the building where we’d bought our tickets. There were some stairs near the entrance desk, and we walked down into a big room full of glass cases and displays.

  “Excellent!” said Josh, rushing over to a cabinet and peering in. “I thought of something – a lion, that’s the symbol of England, and the eagle was the symbol of the Third Reich. It might be something to do with that! Medals, maybe, or coats of arms.”

  “Keep looking!” I said, getting a bit hopeful, and we dashed about the display cases, staring into them.

  “Best not to run about in here. Take a lot of cleaning, those floors do.”

  I spun round and a man with a grey moustache was standing there. Percy, it said on his name badge. Bletchley Park Volunteer.

  “And careful near that Bombe,” he said.

  I backed away a step, but Josh grinned. “Not a bomb, Nathan – a Bombe!”

  I still didn’t get them.

  Percy chuckled and pointed at a sign over a big metal box-shape with all these coloured dials all over it. THE TURING BOMBE REBUILD PROJECT, the sign said, and I nodded with a slight laugh as I remembered being told about it on our school trip.