Edward and George Archer had been held in the clock tower of the Town Hall ever since their last attempt to take over. In the basement cells of the same old stone building were their Watchers, a band of cruel and brawny criminals who’d helped the twins to control Perfect.
Violet didn’t share Jack’s concern. Edward and George were locked up. Nurse Powick was still free but nobody thought she could get up to much on her own. The eye-plant beds, used as a security system throughout Town, were still in operation and William Archer checked the small screens in their control centre, the Brain, daily. The Brain was a small black box about the size of a garden shed, situated just by the Town Hall on Edward Street. It was filled with tiny monitors connected to every single eye plant in the town, recording everything they saw. For the first time in ages Town felt truly safe and Violet’s old nightmares had all but disappeared.
“He couldn’t help them escape even if he tried. Dad says nobody can get in or out of the Town Hall without being caught,” Boy stated.
“Well Tom got through Town before. The eyes didn’t see him then,” Anna replied. “He messed with their signals, remember?”
“Dad’s fixed that glitch!” Boy snapped, taking his copybook from Jack.
“Maybe Tom was visiting your mam, Boy,” Violet half whispered, careful again. “Maybe he wants his real family back?”
Boy glared straight at her as he shoved his book into his bag.
“I don’t think so,” he replied coldly. Without another word, he turned towards the school door and disappeared inside.
“I don’t think he wants to talk about his brother!” Anna was red-faced as she looked at the others.
“But shouldn’t we find out what Tom’s doing back here?” Violet asked the others. “Maybe he wants to be friends this time?”
“Why would he want to be friends? And anyway, even if he did, he doesn’t deserve it. Have you forgotten Macula died because of him?” Jack was angry.
“She didn’t. I was there, I saw it. Powick pushed Macula and she hit her head. Tom was really upset. He gave Boy back to you, Jack. Don’t you remember that?”
The older boy sighed. “Look, maybe we should just leave it alone. He’s Boy’s brother after all – it’s none of our business.”
“Unless he starts trouble again?” Anna insisted. “Shouldn’t we at least tell William that I saw him, just in case?”
“No,” Violet said, shaking her head. She didn’t want anybody to scare Tom off. She needed to talk to him first.
“Violet’s right,” Jack said as the bell for lessons rang. “We shouldn’t upset Boy or William if we don’t have to. If Tom appears again and starts to cause trouble, we’ll tell him then, but not before. Promise, Anna?”
The little girl nodded slowly as Jack stood up and brushed off his trousers before heading inside. The two girls followed behind in silence.
Violet had just settled at her desk when Mrs Moody stormed in, her red cardigan, crisp white shirt and blue skirt pristine. She pointed to the homework questions already chalked on the board and began calling people up to answer them. As Beatrice Prim, the most annoying girl in class, demonstrated her genius, Boy leaned across on his elbow and whispered.
“I know you, Violet. You’d better not be planning anything. Whatever Tom is doing here, just leave it alone. He’ll probably disappear again soon anyway.”
“I wasn’t planning anything!”
“You promise?” Boy stared straight at her.
She crossed her fingers behind her back and nodded. She’d seen Beatrice do the same thing before when a friend asked her to make a promise. Beatrice later said that crossing her fingers cancelled the agreement.
Violet didn’t like lying to Boy but was it really a lie when it was for his own good? She knew he needed his brother even if he didn’t know it yet. After all, family was everything – at least that’s what her mother said.
Violet was already packing her bag behind Mrs Moody’s back as the bell rang to signal the end of school; she was in a hurry. She told Boy she’d see him at Archer and Brown later as she’d forgotten something she needed to pick up at home.
She waited round the back of the school for the rush to die down, giving Boy enough time to get to the optician’s. When the bike shed was almost empty, she took her bicycle from its stand and pedalled carefully towards Forgotten Road.
Anna said she thought Tom went to the house they had used to get onto the rooftops, the one that gave them access to the wall they climbed down into Perfect so they could avoid the Watchers during the Archers’ reign. Violet wasn’t entirely sure she remembered exactly which house that was, but Anna had described it as “falling down” and since Town was slowly being renovated there weren’t many like that left.
She raced down Forgotten Road to where she thought the young girl meant. Checking that nobody was watching her, she slipped inside the run-down home.
The hallway was dark and full of rubbish which she had to trudge through to enter the room on her left. It looked like it might have been a sitting room once. Morsels of ornate floral wallpaper clung to walls that were also decorated with sweeping strokes of graffiti. A broken chandelier hung at an awkward angle from the ceiling, its bulbs either smashed or missing.
Violet didn’t recognize the place as somewhere she’d been before.
She climbed back across the hall over a tattered purple couch into what appeared to be a kitchen. The light-blue cupboards were missing handles and one of the doors hung off a single hinge; the stainless steel washboard was stained by a spill of white paint and the lino was ripped away in sections, revealing the grey concrete floor beneath. She stepped back out and mounted the first step of the stairs. The wood cracked under the flower-patterned, frayed and filthy carpet and her foot fell through, scraping the skin of her ankle. A little shaken and unsure what she was doing, Violet left the house without going upstairs.
“I knew you’d be here!” Anna laughed, swinging her legs from a bench on the other side of the street.
“What do you mean…?” Violet flushed, embarrassed. “Mam just asked me to…”
“It wasn’t that house anyway,” the little girl stated, jumping to her feet.
The small blonde figure marched ahead down the street, stopping at another derelict home. The three wonky storeys of this building looked more familiar, though the door was now replaced and a large sign reading DANGER, KEEP OUT was nailed to it.
Violet watched Anna disappear inside before following.
Anna closed the door behind them, blocking out most of the light. The place was dusky dark as if night were falling, the windows too caked in dirt to allow in the day. It took a few moments for Violet’s eyes to adjust.
“I knew you’d go looking for Tom!” Anna whispered. “Jack said we shouldn’t, you know.”
Violet ignored her as she took in the coarse brown carpet that covered the stairs. It brought her back to the first time she’d been here – the time Boy brought her onto the rooftops of Perfect. She walked into the sitting room on her left. An old armchair rested by the far wall. She collapsed back onto it and yelped as a stray spring dug into her back and a world of dust flooded her nostrils.
“Bet someone really old lived here,” the little girl said, poking her head in from the hall. “It’s really smelly. My friend lives with her granny and says that old people are smelly because they never wash!”
“No they’re not, Anna!” Violet corrected, struggling out of the sunken chair.
“Well that’s what my friend says and I believe her ’cause she lives with her granny who’s really, really old, like more than sixty, I think!”
Anna kept rambling as Violet picked her way through the room. The floor was covered with old cups and cutlery, bits of torn carpet, a bed head, a broken rusty wheelbarrow… She even kicked away a burst football as she pushed through the mess, still unsure what she was looking for.
“See, I told you an old person lived here!” Anna exclaimed, hold
ing something aloft.
Violet squinted through the darkness. The little girl had something long and thin in her grasp that she began to twirl round her head. It looked like a walking stick.
“Stop swinging it, Anna!” Violet ducked, just avoiding a slap as she tried to get near.
“It’s an old person’s stick!” She held the object out to Violet, who took hold of it. The stick was long and made mostly of highly polished wood. There was a silver cap at the bottom where it met the ground and the top was milky white, smooth and carved in the shape of a bulldog’s head. Just under the handle was a small gold engraved plaque: Dr Joseph Bohr.
Violet recognized the name from somewhere.
“A doctor,” Anna whispered. “I didn’t think they were smelly! I don’t know that name and Mam and me know nearly everyone in Town.”
“I don’t think he’s from Town…” Violet said absently, trying to place the name.
“I’ll ask Mam,” Anna announced. “She definitely knows everyone here!”
“It looks new” – Violet was thinking aloud – “not like the rest of the house. This can’t have been here that long. It’s still polished and shiny.”
“Well, nobody has lived here in ages,” Anna replied.
“Maybe it’s nothing,” Violet sighed, setting it down.
She continued her search, the name still tickling her memory.
Violet was looking for signs that Tom had been here, she realized. She didn’t know how it would help her, but maybe it’d point to something that might tell her where he was hiding. If she was going to bring his family back together, she’d have to talk to him first.
“Aren’t you going to take this? It’s evidence,” Anna said, picking the walking stick back up as Violet moved towards the stairs.
“Evidence of what? Anyway, it’s not ours, I don’t think we should. It looks valuable – maybe the man who lost it might come looking.”
“Or maybe he’s dead and the stick is haunted!” The little girl laughed, poking Violet with the metal end. “And it attacks everyone who enters this place!”
Violet laughed too. She knew why Anna had been an orphan in No-Man’s-Land – she had so much imagination the Watchers would never have been able to steal the whole thing.
She checked the rest of the house, Anna sticking tight to her heels. Increasing street sounds filtered inside as they walked back down the creaking stairs; people were leaving work.
“I better get home. Mam will be worried if she gets back before me.”
“Are you going to tell Boy?” Anna asked back out on the street.
“There’s nothing to tell!”
“So we weren’t looking for Tom?” The young girl smirked.
Violet blushed, the heat reddening her cheeks.
“No, definitely not.” She shook her head. “But don’t tell Boy anyway!”
“Okay, but only if you bring me on any more adventures where you’re not looking for Tom. You have to promise! I wasn’t allowed do anything when Edward Archer came back last time so you can’t leave me out of stuff any more. I’m not a little girl, I’m big now!”
“I’m not going on any adventures!” Violet turned back towards Rag Lane and her bike.
“Okay, but if you are you have to promise…” Anna panted, trotting behind her.
“I’m not!” Violet crossed her fingers again.
Why did everyone want her to promise things all of a sudden?
She pushed her bike up the lane to Archers’ Avenue, with Anna chattering all the while. Violet tuned in and out; the name on the walking stick was haunting her. She glanced up at the clock tower as they rounded onto Edward Street – the hands were almost at six. The pair waved goodbye and Violet pedalled furiously towards home, determined to pass Archer and Brown before her parents closed for the night.
She crunched up the gravel drive to their house just as the sun was setting. Dismounting her bike, she was parking it round the side when movement high up in a tree caught her eye.
A coal-black raven flapped its wings. A shiver danced across her shoulders.
“Tom,” she whispered, “are you here?”
Maybe she was going mad – there were loads of black birds about.
“I want to talk to you, Tom. I want to help you…”
Her words hung in the still air. Her heart thumped. There was a rustle in the bushes nearby and Violet jumped. Suddenly the bird launched from the branch above, disappearing into the fading blue sky.
Violet raced to the front door, sure someone was watching her.
If Tom was hanging around, what was he after? Did he just want his family, like she hoped and wanted to help him with? Or what if everything she and Macula thought was wrong? What if Boy’s twin really was bad?
What if, like Jack said, Tom was back to help the Archers escape? She sat down at the kitchen table, lost in thought. She wanted to tell her mam and dad, but something told her not to.
A key sounded in the door. As her parents walked inside Violet frantically pulled out her books so it didn’t look like she’d just gotten home.
“Where were you?” Rose asked, poking her head into the kitchen. “You didn’t come back to the shop!”
“I was here. I couldn’t find this and I needed it for my homework.” Violet grabbed a random book from the table and waved it around. “By the time I found it, it was too late to go back to the shop. I told Boy to tell you.”
“I’ll be expecting great reports from Mrs Moody with all the work you’re putting in.” Rose smiled, opening the fridge door to take out a bottle of milk.
Eugene switched on the kettle and sat down heavily at the kitchen table, pulling out the Tribune as was his habit.
“I thought once Robert Blot had stepped away from that paper, we’d see your father’s face again!” her mother teased as she sat down, placing a heap of files on the table in front of her.
“What’s that, Mam?” Violet indicated the pile.
“Just work, pet. There’s not enough hours in the day and I couldn’t stay on late when everyone had gone home. That building gives me the shivers sometimes. I know those Archers are locked up but I still feel their presence there,” Rose replied.
“It’s called Archer and Brown now, Rose, and that’s a lot of nonsense – you can’t feel a person in a building after they’re gone.”
“How come Boy says he can still feel his mam then, Dad?” Violet interrupted.
“That’s different, pet,” her father replied.
“Science can’t explain everything,” Rose continued. “Most of what science knows is based on theory, meaning questions are more important than anything. Questioning opens the mind, Eugene – as a scientist you should know that! Violet had a valid question. Who says we can’t feel someone after they’ve left a place?”
“Well maybe somebody should investigate that question, Rose.” Eugene frowned. “Might help find some of the world’s greatest minds! This all feels a little ominous to me…”
“What do you mean, Dad?” Violet asked, uneasy.
“Another scientist has been taken, pet. These are some of the greatest living men and women in the history of science. If somebody has kidnapped them, why? What do they want them for? The world feels just a little unsettled right now.”
“You’ve an imagination just like your daughter. I bet they’ll all turn up on holiday somewhere. They probably just forgot to tell anyone. Age does that to you!”
Violet’s dad set down the paper and poured himself a cup of UniTea .
The tea had been a creation of Edward and George Archer, though they’d called it Archers’ Tea. They developed their concoction using the Chameleon plant, which meant the tea tasted like anything the drinker wanted it to. This property had made it hugely popular in Perfect. Then the Archers had added a potion to the mixture, turning everyone in the town blind, allowing the twins to begin their plans to control the place. After Perfect fell, William Archer had twisted something bad into something
good – the blinding potion was removed, the product renamed and UniTea became a staple in everyone’s diet.
Violet leaned over the paper, her eyes drawn to a fuzzy picture of a young man in a white jacket. The photo was captioned “Dr Joseph Bohr, Hegel University, 1956 .”
She gasped. That’s where she’d heard the name before!
Is he one of the scientists, Dad?” she asked, a tingle shooting down her spine.
“Yes, pet. He was the first to go missing.” Eugene blew on his tea. “It’s a very confusing case. The missing scientists specialize in different areas of study – there is no link in their work! It seems to me all they have in common is that they worked at Hegel University at the same time and, of course, their friendship!”
“Exactly, they’re friends, Eugene! So maybe they’re all off enjoying a sunshine cruise together,” Rose interrupted with a giggle.
Violet’s parents continued to debate as she slipped quietly from the table and out into the hall, her heart pounding. She had to get away. She raced up the stairs and into her room.
Dr Joseph Bohr – the very name that was on the walking stick in the house on Forgotten Road! Did it belong to the scientist? Surely there couldn’t be many people with the exact same name? Could it just be chance? But if Joseph Bohr had been in Town recently, then why was he here and where had he gone?
Another thought struck her. Anna had seen Tom go into the same house – was he involved somehow?
Her head swam as she sat in her window seat looking out on the night.
Should she do something? Tell someone? But what and who, and did she really know anything? Maybe she could tell Boy – not about the birthday bit and reuniting his family, but about the missing scientist Joseph Bohr and the walking stick with his name on it and how it was found in the same house Anna had seen Tom go into.
Maybe it was all just one big coincidence…but what if it was something more and she did nothing?
Violet rose early the next morning. Her mind had come to a million conclusions overnight, meaning she’d hardly slept. Quietly, she dressed then slipped down the stairs and out the front door. The air was cold, a mist hanging low and thick over the dew-dropped grass.
The Battle for Perfect Page 3
