Sentinel (6 page)

“
Five miles
?” Tabatha shrieked. “I’m surprised you didn’t catch your death of cold. Do you think he should see the doctor?”

“As long as you’re alright.” The officer continued to ignore her. Nicholas met the policeman’s gaze and saw that he was genuinely concerned. Perhaps it was the embarrassment of it all, or Tabatha’s persistent fussing, or the headache-inducing muddle the night had turned into, but the man’s pity made Nicholas feel even more pathetic.

“I’m fine,” he grunted, shoving his chair back. “Cheers for the ride.” He dumped the blanket on the table and trudged out of the kitchen.

Up in his room, everything looked as it should. The duvet was pushed down to the foot of the bed, his bed sheets crumpled where he’d slept earlier. Everything looked normal, and everything was normal – except for the fact that Nicholas had just walked miles into the middle of nowhere while unconscious. As far as he knew, he’d never sleepwalked before. And yet he’d surely just set some sort of sleepwalking record. How – and why?

Nicholas spent the whole night restlessly pondering the conundrum.

Sam arrived early in the morning. It was the day of the funeral, and Nicholas wished he could just sleep through it.

As Tabatha told Sam about Nicholas’s night-time saunter, the old man was his usual laidback self, just as Nicholas knew he would be. Sam had barely set foot in the front door that morning before Tabatha swooped on him to inform him of the night’s events. She told the story as theatrically as possible, replete with dramatic pauses and an impression of the burly officer. By the time Nicholas found them in the kitchen, Sam was wearing a polite but weary smile – he’d obviously spent the entire conversation nodding.

The old man shrugged the whole thing off with an amiable “we’ll have to furnish you with a bell if you’re going to start going on midnight wanders”, and Nicholas had been grateful for it.

Hours later, he was sitting in another church. The charcoal smudges under Nicholas’s eyes were even darker than ever.
They sort of complemented the occasion
, he thought gloomily. Dressed in a black suit and tie, he sat in the front pew of a pretty local church, Sam at his side. The last time he’d worn this suit it had been for a wedding. Now he was at a funeral. His parents’ funeral. There was an unpleasant symmetry in there somewhere.

He found it almost impossible to pay attention to what the priest was saying. Rain tapped at the church’s stained glass windows and the sound echoed through the melancholy environment. The service blurred into eternity.

After his sleepless night, Nicholas felt numb to everything, like he was wrapped up in that stuff they used to insulate houses. He’d been dreading this day, but now it was here it just felt strange. Like a part of a movie or a really bad soap opera. He’d seen a million funerals on TV before, but it was different to be in the middle of one.

And Nicholas really was in the middle of it. He felt all eyes on him – the poor boy whose young parents had been tragically snatched away from him. A band of Nicholas’s school friends were sitting somewhere near the back, but their presence only muddled things further. Nicholas had never seen their faces so serious. The sight of self-appointed class clown Charlie Walker looking so grey was almost crazier than the thought that his parents’ bodies were lying in boxes mere feet away.

Nicholas didn’t want to look at the coffins, but his eyes were drawn magnetically in their direction. They were surprisingly small, and the more he looked, the harder he found it to believe that his parents were lying in them. Cold. Unmoving. Silent. And they would never move again.

He almost wanted to lift the lids to make sure they really were in there. It was only the thought of what he might find inside that stopped him. What did his parents look like now? After the train wreck? What was even left of them? Nicholas shuddered and pushed the disturbing images from his head, fixing his gaze on the priest, who had said “Hallows” instead of “Hallow” at least twice now. Just another strange addition to the whole macabre circus.

When the service moved outside into the rainfall, Nicholas got a sense of just how many people had turned up to pay their respects. Half of them he didn’t recognise, but some he did – his parents’ friends mostly, all looking smarter in their Sunday best than he had ever seen them.

As the mourners congregated beside two freshly-dug pits in the cemetery grounds, Nicholas caught the eye of a scrawny woman whose hair had been scraped back into a tight bun. He knew her. Alice Gibbons, one of his mum’s livelier colleagues. From across the holes in the ground, Alice fixed Nicholas with such a despairing look of pity that the boy found himself doing the one thing he didn’t feel like doing. He smiled. There was just something about that wretched look that jolted a bizarre response out of him – one that both masked his true feelings and endeavoured to reassure the woman, somehow, that all of this was okay. He was okay. Couldn’t be better. He looked away before she could respond.

The coffins were lowered into the earth. It swallowed them expectantly and Nicholas sensed the beginning of a horrible finality. His parents were gone, and nothing would ever return them. The rain that pounded the graveyard streaked his face, mimicking the tears that he couldn’t shed here. Sam’s comforting hand on his shoulder couldn’t help.

In a towering oak that spread finger-like branches above them, a raven perched, hunched against the downpour.

When it was all over, Sam drove Nicholas and Tabatha back to the house. There was to be no wake – Sam had explained that it would have taken too much organising, but Nicholas knew that the convention had been skipped for his sake. He wasn’t entirely ungrateful for that – at least he wouldn’t have to face all of the people from the church who had looked at him with such cloying compassion.

At the house, a bleary-eyed Tabatha mumbled something about making a pot of tea before disappearing into the kitchen. Nicholas stood with Sam in the dim hallway.

“That went as well as can be expected,” Sam said, bobbing on his heels. “Quite a good turn-out, don’t you think?”

“They knew lots of people,” Nicholas said. He felt leaden inside. Heavy and empty at the same time. A used tin can.

“Indeed,” Sam said softly. He took a breath, as if mustering the strength to go on. “As we discussed, I have arranged for your departure tomorrow–”

“Tomorrow?!”

Tabatha had emerged from the kitchen, red-eyed with a scrunched up tissue in her hand. Apparently realising her outburst, Tabatha blushed and hastily added: “Meaning no disrespect, but we’ve only just had the funeral. You don’t think it’s a bit soon, Mr Wilkins?”

“I admit, things have been put on something of a fast track,” Sam mitigated. “But I feel that it would be for the best if Nicholas–” he turned to address the boy directly, “–the best for you if you were with your godmother as soon as possible. I’ve spoken with social services and they agreed, though it took some convincing that they didn’t need to come and see Nicholas. Luckily I know somebody there.”

Nicholas was grateful for that. He didn’t understand any of the legal stuff that happened in a situation like this, but he didn’t fancy having to sit and talk to an overly-friendly therapist about his feelings. He was quite happy keeping them to himself.

“Are you really sure that’s the best thing, Mr Wilkins?” Tabatha asked, stuffing the tissue up her sleeve.

“I do,” Sam persisted. “It is in the interest of all that Nicholas is given a chance to settle down after all this. I believe that Nicholas is most safe – by that of course I mean safe emotionally – with the people that his parents wished him to be with. Fresh surroundings will do him a world of good.”

“What do you think, Nicholas?” Tabatha asked, rubbing his arm.

“If it’s what Dad wanted...” Nicholas said. “I want to meet her, whoever she is.”

Whether he realised it or not, the mystery of this enigmatic and conspicuously absent godmother was the only thing keeping Nicholas going. He couldn’t understand all the secrecy, and he wanted to get to the bottom of whatever his parents had been up to when they died. It seemed like the most important thing in the world now. The only thing.

Tabatha nodded and wiped at her eyes. “I’ll go see how that tea is doing.”

“You’ll be going by bus,” Sam told Nicholas. “I have been led to believe that they are quite comfortable. I do regret, however, that I won’t be able to accompany you–”

“You won’t?” Nicholas was taken aback. “You’re not coming?” The thought that he would have to travel by himself hadn’t even crossed his mind. Suddenly he felt more alone than ever.

Sam ruffled the boy’s hair affectionately. “Oh lad, I am sorry. You know I would if I could.”

He would if he could. Now he thought of it, Nicholas couldn’t help wondering just what Sam got up to in his spare time – surely a man in his seventies should be taking life easy, playing chess in the park and scribbling poisonous letters to local newspapers about vandals and street gangs. Yet Sam seemed to spend his time constantly running around putting out fires all over Cambridge.

“Don’t fret,” Sam went on. “A good friend of mine is headed the same way, so he’ll be getting the bus with you. You’ll get on with Richard; he’s a thinker like you.” Sam checked his watch. “Is that really the time? I’m afraid I must be off. I’ll be back at nine a.m. sharp to take you to the bus station. Best have everything ready before then, eh? No playing on that x-cite all evening, or whatever it’s called.”

“Xbox.” Nicholas smiled despite himself. “I’ll be ready.”

“Take care, lad. Get some sleep.”

It was only when Sam had gone that Nicholas realised he’d forgotten to ask him about the strange wall in his parents’ bedroom.

*

The remainder of the day crawled torpidly by. Hostile clouds lingered in the sky while rain slicked the streets, reducing the snow to mulch. Nicholas despised being cooped up inside, hated the stale air and lying about the house with nothing to do. It gave him too much time to think.

When he could stand the drumming on his ceiling no more, the boy dragged on a grey hoodie and trudged out onto Midsummer Common. It wasn’t long before he was soaked through, but Nicholas didn’t care. Squelching across the sodden grass, he made his way towards the river, seeing that a number of Red Poll bullocks had been set out to graze on the grassy land. Confronted with the inclement conditions, the cows huddled under a tree, barely moving. Solid mud statues.

At the riverside, Nicholas stood alone and peered down into the cloudy water. Boats that had been moored on the other side rocked against one another, jostled by the current.

In this weather, the Common was a desolate place. Nicholas remembered a story that Sam had told him once about a murder committed here in the late 1800s. A sixteen-year-old girl called Emma Rolfe had met up with a local tailor, a man almost ten years her senior, who took her to a nearby green and slit her throat. After killing her, the wretched man returned to a pub in Fair Street to finish his drink. He was later hanged for his crime at Norwich Gaol.

Nicholas shivered. As the rain battered him, he found it easy to believe such a despicable thing could happen here. When he was a child, he’d marvelled at those macabre tales, thrilling in their bloody ability to chill; but the older he got the more unnerving he found them. Emma Rolfe surely hadn’t wanted to die; her fate had been decided for her by a savage drunk. His parents hadn’t wanted to die either, but that hadn’t stopped it happening. Like Miss Rolfe, their life stories would forever be defined by their deaths.

Nicholas sniffed, wiped at his nose. It felt strange to cry in the rain. The sky darkened and a drone of thunder threatened to tear the heavens in half. It was time to get back inside.

The boy turned, then stopped.

The herd of Red Polls had lined up in front of him, barring his way. They were unnervingly still, staring stupidly at him with goggly eyes that were both vacant and oddly sinister.

“What the–” Nicholas uttered. He knew cows were curious, but he’d never seen a herd brave a downpour like this just to get a closer look at somebody. He was rooted to the spot.

“Shoo!” he yelled.

The cows merely gawped at him. The rain drove into their tough hides and they must be freezing, but the animals didn’t seem to care. Hot breath steamed from their nostrils.

Nicholas considered for a moment, then began moving slowly towards them, one hand outstretched in front of him. The cows still refused to move. Every one of those lopsided alien eyes was fixed intently on him, as if the creatures were trying to read the boy’s thoughts. Or, Nicholas found himself thinking, wondering what his blood would taste like.

His heart pounding now, Nicholas pushed forward until he was mere feet away from the wall of hide and hoof. Through the mizzling air, the image of the creatures swam. Nicholas wiped at his face.

Then, quite remarkably, as his outstretched hand trembled inches away from the snout at the line-up’s centre, the creature began to back away. As if they’d choreographed the whole thing, the beasts parted, and fell clumsily to their knees. The way was suddenly clear.

Nicholas didn’t pause to ponder this new oddity. He beat his shoes into the wet ground and ran all the way home without looking back.

Later, Tabatha made them dinner, but Nicholas had no appetite. He put his plate in the sink and slunk off to his room.