Frozen in Time (14 page)

‘Fair enough,’ nodded Freddy. ‘But we’ll catch up soon. You see if we don’t!’

‘It’ll have to be soon—we haven’t got much time, you know.’

‘Before what?’ Freddy screwed up his foil and threw it expertly at Polly’s head.

‘Before you go to school. We go back next week. And if you’re going to get signed on to all the registers and everything, you’ll have to be coming with us.’

‘Well, it’s not as if we’ve never been to school before!’ said Freddy. ‘I mean—how different can it be? You still get masters, I dare say? You don’t get taught by robots or anything?’

‘Teachers, not masters,’ corrected Ben. ‘And to be honest, some of them are about as human as robots …’

‘All right then. Teachers. And desks and blackboards and chalk …?’

‘Tables,
white
boards and markers … oh, and interactive screens, smartboards, Powerpoint, internet access, computers … and so on.’

Freddy and Polly, now on their ginger cake, glanced at each other and back at Ben.

‘You’ll have to have some lessons in all this stuff,’ he said, looking at Rachel, who nodded. ‘I mean, even if we do pretend you’ve been off living in a hippy commune all your lives, you have to know about
some
of this stuff. You just
have
to.’

‘The internet’s amazing. You can learn about anything on it,’ said Rachel. ‘And get almost anything from it. We might even be able to find you a Miss Rosebud, Polly—on eBay, maybe. Uncle J might let us use one of his computers.’

‘What’s eBay?’ asked Polly, cuddling Bess close to her.

‘Oh, it’s a thing on the net where people buy and sell stuff.’

Polly looked blank. ‘On the net?’

‘Yeah—a website. Sorry, you won’t know anything about websites, of course.’

‘Well, my father’s study was a dreadful web site,’ said Polly, stroking Bessie’s ears. ‘I used to have to tidy it up, because Mrs M wasn’t allowed in there. The duster would get
covered
in webs because he wouldn’t let me in for weeks sometimes, when he was really in the thick of some research. I can’t abide cobwebs in corners. It’s really poor. When I’m a housewife I’ll never let cobwebs build up in my home.’

‘No—no—quite right too,’ muttered Rachel. She didn’t have the first idea how to explain the internet to Polly. She thought she’d leave that to Ben.

Ben lay back in the grass and watched the clouds passing overhead. His brain hurt just trying to
think
about all the stuff Freddy and Polly needed to understand. He flopped his forearm over his eyes and tried not to panic. He pictured all the kids in his year— sneery Jim Lewis and obnoxious Roly O’Neal. The Pincer twins with their habit of doing wrist burns to anyone they’d just met and beefy Lorraine Kingsley, who smoked like a chimney in the girls’ toilets and had once head-butted a teacher. He thought of all these glorious examples of 2009 youth waiting to meet Freddy and Polly, and shuddered.

‘We’ll get some magazines and newspapers and stuff, and some batteries for the radio,’ he said, from under his arm. ‘And see if Uncle J can mend the telly and get the satellite dish back up—and for the next week you’re going to have to learn everything you can. If you can’t do that and you turn up at Amhill Secondary like you are now—well, we might just as w-well put you back in your sleeping chambers, b-because, trust me, your life won’t be worth living!’

Freddy rolled onto his front and sank his teeth into his apple. ‘Benedict, old chum,’ he said. ‘You worry too much.’

Ben exhaled and thought maybe Freddy was right.

‘Honestly,’ said Freddy. ‘We’ll be right as rain and gay as ninepence! You’ll see.’

The deepest vaults of the Kremlin storehouses were as bad as anyone’s cellars. It fell to a young intern to sort them out late that spring. He re-labelled and re-shelved boxes and boxes of documents from another time, before
glasnost
, before the welcoming of McDonald’s into Russia’s capital city, from long before he had even been born. If he’d had the time to rummage through them, they might have been fascinating, but there were far too many. They were to be catalogued and sorted, that was all.

At the end of his second day of housekeeping, Ivan paused in his work. Lying alone on one of the highest metal shelves was a white oblong envelope. On it were the intriguing words: ‘To be opened only by the Leader of the Soviet Union in 2007’.

Ivan put down his pen and clipboard and flipped the envelope thoughtfully. He’d always wanted to deliver something to the president.

They found Uncle Jerome in the front garden as they all skidded to a halt by the gate later that afternoon. He was up the chestnut tree and gave them a shout of excitement as they got off their bikes.

‘Look! It’s still here! Well … what’s left of it. Not working, obviously.’ And he reached down from a low branch which he’d been balancing on (a paint-spattered stepladder was set up below it) and in his hand was a rusty box, about the size of a small shoebox. A lichen-encrusted circle at the front had once been a glass lens and a metre or two of kinked and ivy-clad wire trailed from the back of it. ‘This was the camera!’ shouted Uncle Jerome, his voice high with excitement and altitude. Climbing a tree was not something they’d ever seen him do.

‘Do get down, JJ, before you break your neck!’ laughed Freddy. He was quite cheeky, really, thought Ben—but then he
was
Uncle J’s uncle. It still made Ben’s brain bend to think of it.

Uncle Jerome handed Ben the camera and came carefully down the stepladder. His eyes were glittery; dark lines underneath them. It was entirely possible he had not slept at all since yesterday. They had seen him like this before, when his work in the attic got very exciting.

‘You need to eat,’ said Rachel. ‘I bet you haven’t had anything at all, have you?’

‘What? Oh, nonsense. Don’t worry about that,’ said Uncle Jerome. ‘Time enough, time enough. I want to talk some more about what happened on Wednesday the sixth of June. I have one or two leads to follow up.’

‘Well, you can do it over some cake and tea,’ said Polly, firmly, arriving at Rachel’s side. ‘You’ll make much more sense of it all then.’

‘What leads? What have you found out?’ asked Freddy, clearly not remotely worried about how undernourished Uncle Jerome was.

‘Well,’ said Uncle Jerome, taking back the camera and turning it lovingly in his hands. ‘That man—the one Polly spotted on the film, walking by just before the car came that afternoon. I’ve studied him on freeze frame. I couldn’t believe it at first—but now I really think I know who he is.’

‘You do?’ breathed Polly. ‘Who? Who could it be?’

‘Well, if I’m right, it’s very good news, because he’s still alive. And he knows a lot about the investigation into your father’s disappearance. On the other hand, talking to him could be trouble.’

‘Who? Who?’ squeaked Polly, sounding like an anxious owl.

‘Percival Shaw,’ came the reply. But it didn’t come from Uncle Jerome’s mouth. Uncle Jerome’s mouth was wide and his eyes were blinking in shock through his glasses. The voice came from behind them all. They spun around and there, leaning on the gate as he so often did, was old Percy.

Normally old Percy just stared away at the trees behind the house, his rheumy eyes distant and his face impassive, as inscrutable as an ancient Japanese warrior. Today, his eyes were fixed on Polly and Freddy, his elderly teeth gnawing on his lower lip and his head shaking in amazement. ‘It is you. It
is,
isn’t it? I saw you this morning and I thought I’d gone senile. But no … here you are. Frederick and Pauline Emerson. Maybe I
am
senile. Maybe I’m in a bathchair now, down at Sunset Mansions where the old folk get put out to pasture …’

Uncle Jerome stopped his gaping, strode across to the gate and grasped Percy’s arm. ‘No—no, Percy. It’s real. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I always say? He didn’t do it! He didn’t! And now we have proof. Well … sort of. I mean … nobody’s ever going to believe it, I suppose. But yes … this is Pauline and Freddy. The professor managed to suspend them— cryonically—truly! They’ve been frozen for fifty-three years! Can you believe it?’

Ben felt very uneasy. He could see Freddy and Polly did too, and Rachel was raising her eyebrows at him urgently. What should they do? Percy was still staring at the sixty-six-year-old boy and his sixty-fiveyear-old little sister.

‘Tea,’ said Polly, suddenly. ‘Everyone come inside and we’ll have a pot of tea.’

‘For fifty-three years I’ve not been able to get the Emerson case out of my head,’ said Percy, formerly Detective Inspector Percival Shaw of the North Hampshire Constabulary. ‘For fifty-three years I’ve known that it didn’t add up. None of it made sense. It’s needled and needled away at me—all my career I wanted to crack it. And even when I retired … well, it just wouldn’t let go of me.’ He picked up his teacup and sipped at the hot brown brew, his eyes continually roaming from the brother to the sister, and back again.

‘Uncle J,’ said Ben, quietly. ‘What now? What if he goes and tells people? What if—you know—the authorities and all that come along? They’ll take Freddy and Polly away for testing and stuff and we might never see them again.’

‘Is that why you keep coming up to the house and leaning on the gate?’ Rachel asked Percy.

‘Well, this always
was
my constitutional—walking up to the wood on the hill,’ said Percy. ‘Kept me fit. I didn’t think anything of it. But in the summer of 1956 that changed—for ever. You see, I was the last one to see the house before—before the suspected murders were reported. They even had
me
down as a suspect for a while—but not for long. I met Clara up along the track, you see. We were courting. She was my alibi—and her brother John. And anyway, we all knew, in the force, that it was fishy. Suspect. Nothing run of the mill—all very hush hush. It never sounded right. Never rang true. A cracked bell—that’s what it was. Never rang true.’

‘But don’t you see!’ Uncle Jerome, stuffing down a bit of ginger cake left over from the picnic, sprayed crumbs across the table as he began to get agitated again. ‘Don’t you see—
you
might be the key! You were the last person to pass on the security camera. You may have seen something—you see, there was a car. A car that came along only seconds later. You may well have looked back over your shoulder and seen it. Did you? Can you remember?’

Percy screwed up his face and ran an age-spotted hand through his thinning grey hair. ‘It’s too long ago now,’ he said. ‘Some things I remember better than last week … but …’ He looked hard at Uncle Jerome and shook his head. ‘Truth be told, Jerome, I don’t even know if I’m here right now, or gone ga-ga, down at Sunset Mansions, after all. How can this be, eh? How can these two
be
?’

‘I’ll have to take him down—show him the film,’ said Uncle Jerome.

Freddy was on his feet instantly. ‘No! You promised. Absolutely not!’

‘But if he sees the film, he may remember. This could make all the difference!’

‘Father said we must
never
let anyone else in. It’s top secret. I won’t hear of it, I tell you!’

Polly touched his arm. Her eyes were full of hope. ‘Freddy, it might be the only way to find Father. Let him see the film! Please! What good is it to us now, keeping everything secret, if we can’t get Father back?’

Freddy stared at her for a long time, biting his lip. Then he sat back down and sighed. ‘We have to make him promise—
really
promise. He can’t go around blabbing about it. That won’t do.’