Attica (8 page)

Alex had gone to sit on a
pile of books to inspect his fingernails.

‘Now you’ve gone and mentioned it,’ he complained to Jordy, ‘I really want to bite them. I didn’t before.’

‘Mental reaction,’ said Jordy, joining him. ‘Now if I said “Liquorice Allsorts” what do you want to do now?’

‘Bite my fingernails.’

Chloe sat down next to her brother, then reached into her bag for the bottle of water she carried. On yanking it out she caught the photo album by a silken cord which hung from its spine. The album flew through the air and hit one of the cupboards, bursting open. The sepia-brown prints inside fell out, the glue of their photo corners long since having lost its stickiness. They floated to the floor like autumn leaves to gather at the feet of the children. Alex laughed and kicked them, to see them raised in a cloud again, and settle once more. Some of them fell face down, others on their backs. Suddenly Chloe darted forward and picked one up, reading the words written on the reverse of the photo.

‘Lance-Corporal John Grantham
,’ she cried. ‘Look!’

She turned the photograph over and there, not plain to see but since they knew who it was they could recognise him, was a very young unsmiling Mr Grantham. He was wearing a peaked cap and was in uniform, proudly displaying a single stripe on the sleeve. He was sort of half-sitting, looking slightly over one shoulder. The uniform looked unsullied and the photo, Chloe guessed, had been taken before he left England for the war in foreign places.

They picked up some of the other photos and began poring over them. A great many of them were of people Chloe did not recognise: older people in very old-fashioned boots, suits and shapeless frocks. Some of them were of Mr Grantham. There were several of him standing with a pretty young woman in a polka-dot frock. They guessed this was Susan. She looked happy, being helped over a stile in a meadow by a grinning John Grantham in baggy trousers and sleeveless jumper with zig-zag stripes. There was a dog there too, a mongrel by the looks of the startled beast, caught playfully grabbing a trouser turnup.

Jordy was looking
puzzled.

‘What?’ asked Chloe. ‘Come on, tell.’

‘Well,’ he said, looking at the photo he was holding, ‘it’s all a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’

Chloe shrugged.

They were interrupted by a yell from Alex, which sounded very much like a cry of triumph.

‘What about this then, eh?’ he said. He waved something whitish, a piece of paper. ‘What about this!’

CHAPTER 5

Quest for the Golden Bureau

Alex had found a letter, still
sealed in its envelope, tucked between the pages of the album. He looked at the date where it had been franked.

‘The stamp must be rare. This letter’s from the nineteen forties.’

Chloe said, ‘That doesn’t automatically make it valuable. Depends on how many were printed, doesn’t it? Let me see.’

Chloe took the letter and studied the stamp, but she was no expert and had no more idea than her brother. However, one thing struck her as strange about the stamp. On it and around it were several different frank marks. It had been franked in three different countries. By the look of it the letter had never been opened. The address on the front was L/Cpl J. Grantham, Stalag 21, Scheinfeld, Germany. Turning it over she saw scrawled on the back: Addressee not found – returned to sender.

‘This is a letter to Mr Grantham,’ she said wonderingly. ‘Look how yellow the paper is.’

‘Never mind the paper, what about the stamp?’ asked Alex impatiently. ‘Is it valuable, sis?’

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘What’s a Stalag?’

‘Prisoner-of-war camp in Germany,’ replied Jordy promptly. ‘The trouble with you is you don’t watch war films.
Stalag 17
. There’s this officer in it, who escapes—’

‘Please,’ groaned
Chloe. ‘When you go on about war films or Westerns you never stop. The point is, this letter is in Susan’s album. She must have written to Mr Grantham after he was captured by the Germans, but he never got the letter. Maybe he moved camps or something, but it was sent back, probably through the Red Cross in Switzerland. Maybe when she got this back unopened she thought he was dead.’

‘I bet the stamp’s worth a lot,’ said Alex.

Jordy snatched the letter from Chloe and to her horror he tore it open and took out two sheets of writing paper.

‘Jordy! You can’t do that,’ she cried, reaching for it.

‘Why not?’

‘You might have damaged the stamp,’ said Alex, equally incensed with Jordy. ‘Just ripping it open like that.’

Jordy ignored his step-brother. ‘Clo,’ he said, ‘this letter is something like sixty years old and it would have stayed here for another sixty if we hadn’t found it. We’ll give it to Mr Grantham if and when we get out of here, but it may contain some clues to finding the watch. You never know. I’m willing to try everything and anything to find my way back, aren’t you?’

Chloe saw the sense in Jordy’s general argument.

‘Leave no stone unturned,’ stated Jordy, ‘that’s my motto.’

‘Or rather no letter unopened,’ muttered Alex. ‘Well, go on, read it then. See what it says.’

Jordy started reading it silently, but after a few lines he handed it to Chloe.

‘Here, you’d better read it. It’s a bit too mushy for me. Girls read these things better than boys.’

Chloe took the letter and, despite
her feelings about the invasion of Mr Grantham’s privacy, read it out in a quiet, moving voice. The written words spoke of the writer’s deep love for her fiancé John, saying she would rather die than hurt him. But the fact was her elderly mother was very ill and needed a lot of medical care which was expensive. Susan pleaded with John to forgive her, but circumstances had forced her to marry an older man, a wealthy grocer, and they would all three be moving to Scotland. She ended the letter with the words, ‘you know me, John, Im not so romantic as some people. Not so’s it would mean me losing my mum. Life is hard and I have to be pratical and see to her no matter how it hurts me and does things to me. Arthur has found her a nursing home in a place where the air is good for her lungs and away from the bombs. Hes going to pay for her keep and buy us a cotage near to it. Hes a good man, though you will probably not think it and hate him.’ The letter ended with more protestations, with a short description of the true state of her heart, and with several calls for forgiveness. Then it bluntly asked him to forget her and find another more worthy of his love. ‘It wont be the same with Arthur but he cares for me and I cant do nothing else really. You do see what Im saying John? Please dont hate me for ever.’

Many of the words in the letter were blotched, no doubt by tears. Susan had been weeping when she wrote it.

Chloe blinked away the moisture in her own eyes after reading the letter, though deep down she wondered how Mr Grantham could possibly fall in love with someone whose grammar and spelling were so atrocious. But that was just Chloe. The love of
her
life would have to be perfect, but that didn’t mean others necessarily needed to have the same standards.

‘Well,’ said an obviously
unimpressed Jordy, ‘she certainly dumped him all right, didn’t she?’

Alex asked in a solemn voice, ‘Is there an
exact
date on the letter? It might help with the stamp, you see. The franking’s a bit smudged.’

‘You two have no souls,’ complained Chloe, folding the letter and handing it back to Alex.

‘Oh, come on, Clo,’ cried Jordy. ‘It was half a century ago.’

‘Love is eternal.’

‘Yuk!’ said Alex, stuffing the letter in his jeans pocket. ‘Anyway, why’d she marry this other bloke to pay for her mother’s doctors? National Health’s free.’

‘There was no such thing then,’ Chloe said. ‘No National Health. You had to pay for medical treatment in those days.’

Chloe turned from her brothers and gathered up the photos, putting them in her bag. Then the three sat down to talk of their plans. There was a massive mountain of weapons in front of them, which was going to be difficult to cross. Jordy suggested that one of them – he meant himself – should do ‘a reccy’ first, before all three of them went any further.

‘I’ll go and see how hard it’s going to be. You two stay here in the village and wait for me.’ He scanned the distance. ‘Shouldn’t take too long. I’ll be back before you know it.’

‘I don’t like us splitting up,’ stated Chloe emphatically. ‘Anything could happen.’

‘We’re not splitting up. I’m just going to scout ahead. Look, it makes sense for you to stay here, near to food and water. There’s some old hydro-whatsit beds at the back of the village and their supply tank is nearby. You’ll be fine until I get back.’

‘We’ll be fine,’ said Alex, ‘but what about you?’

Jordy let out a hollow
laugh. ‘Oh, don’t you worry about me – I’ll be all right.’

He took Chloe’s water bottle and some food. Then he set out before there could be any more arguments. They watched him go, until he had climbed the mound of footstools. Once, an antique stool slid from under his heel and he almost went flying downwards. Another time he stepped on a satin-covered affair and his foot went right through it, making him scrape his knee. But eventually he reached the top of the hill where he turned and waved, to show them he was all right.

‘We ought to pick up the next set of binoculars we find,’ murmured Alex. ‘They’d be useful.’

The two remaining children spent a desultory morning, mooching about, doing nothing in particular. Evening finally came, the light fading from the skylight windows above. The yellowed boards of the attic stretched out behind them: the mountain stood square and daunting before them. There was no sign of Jordy. They could see his tracks in the dust: clear footprints leading into the foothills.

‘He said he’d be back quickly,’ Chloe stated to her brother. ‘Where is he?’

‘Got held up, I suppose.’

‘By what?’

Neither of them wanted to guess.

In the middle of the night, Chloe was wakened by a sound. She leapt to her feet and shone the torch. There, trapped in its beam was a bat, hanging from a nearby rafter. There was a pile of rags near it which Chloe did not recall having seen before. However, to her astonishment the bat seemed to speak to her in clear English.

‘There’s a map, you know.’

‘What?’ whispered Chloe, anxious not
to wake Alex and scare him half to death with talking bats. ‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s a map of this place. It’ll have whatever it is you’re looking for. If you give me
your
treasure map I’ll tell you where it is.’

Chloe was puzzled.

‘I haven’t got a treasure map.’

‘Yes you have, in your pocket. I seen you take it out. You’re always looking at it.’

Chloe put her hand into her jeans pocket and found her list of favourite books. The sleepiness left her and her head began to clear. She realised that with a map there was a chance of discovering a place of watches. It was the best chance they had of finding Mr Grantham’s watch. And here was a creature who knew where there was a map of Attica.

‘Oh – oh,
this
map?’

‘We could swop. I’m always – I mean, my master is always – trading things for things. It’s how we get what we want.
You
want to find something. I can tell. And I want … well, never mind what I want. You haven’t got any, I can see. But you might know where other things are which can be swopped for the things that I – no, that my master – wants.’

‘I’m sure we could trade,’ said Chloe, who had been taught by an elderly aunt how to drive a bargain. ‘You tell me where the map is, and I’ll give you
my
map.’

The bat hummed to itself for a while, then spoke again.

‘I tell you what, lady. You give me
your
map and if it’s treasure, then I’ll tell you where my chart is.’

‘Chart?’

‘Chart, map, it doesn’t matter what you call it. You need charts to cross the seas. You need maps to cross the deserts. Chart-cum-map is what you want.’

‘Seas and deserts? Is the
attic really that big?’ Chloe’s heart sank for a moment.

‘Really, really. Big and dreary!’

However, once she had absorbed the information – considered it was probably correct, for why would the bat lie? – Chloe remained firm. ‘My list – my map – only when you tell me where to find yours.’

The bat hummed louder now, in an annoyed fashion, but Chloe was not afraid. When adversity calls, people either crumple or they find courage within themselves to rise above it. Chloe was definitely of the latter kind. Hope surged within her soul and filled her every vein and muscle. She told herself that to fall on the floor and cry was nothing short of pathetic. To stand up and look adversity in the eye, show it you were not made of clay, was the only way to survive.

‘Listen, bat, or whatever you are, you have the choice. Tell me where to find the chart–map or get lost. And don’t think of lying to me. I’ll know whether you’re telling the truth or not. My grandmother was a witch. She passed on some of her skills to me.’

‘A witch?’ chirped the bat in a higher tone. ‘A proper witch?’

‘As proper as you’ll ever meet,’ fibbed Chloe.

There followed a short period in which the bat seemed to have a conversation with itself in low inaudible tones. Alex flopped on to his back and started snoring. Chloe carefully turned him on to his side again so the air stopped whistling out of his nose and mouth. Finally the bat called to her again and told her it was a deal.

‘The map,’ it said, ‘is to be found beyond the Jagged Mountain, in a writing bureau of lacquered gold of a most exquisite oriental design. However, the bureau is in the hands of ancient ink imps,’ added the bat with a sinister note entering its voice. ‘These imps, who live in the ink wells stored in the writing bureaux, are naturally very antagonistic towards humans. They have made weapons of pens with sharp brass nibs. The inks the imps come from were made in China a thousand years ago by sorcerers who dealt in magical texts. They are inks of many colours. The clerks of those old enchanters used them to draw maps of secret regions such as Xanadu, to sketch pictures of individual demons and devils, and to record their recipes of spells in characters unknown outside the books of the damned.’