Shiverton Hall, the Creeper (6 page)

‘That would have looked great with your pirate eyepatch,’ Arthur conceded.

‘I know you’re taking the mick,’ George replied, ‘but that earring would actually have looked incredible with my eyepatch.’

‘I thought it was a bit ridiculous, all of that “Paint with your gut, not with your eyes” rubbish,’ Arthur said.

‘I liked it,’ Jake said. ‘I never got art before, but it feels good to be able to just do what you want. Not have to worry about getting it wrong.’

‘Speaking of getting it wrong . . . Xanthe is going to be seething,’ Penny giggled. ‘A bag of cinder toffee says she’s already dobbed Cornwall in to Long-Pitt.’

George and Arthur returned to Garnons at the end of the day to find a thick envelope in each of their pigeonholes. George pulled his out and noted the spidery writing. ‘Long-Pitt,’ he groaned. ‘The Wednesday Afternoon Activities have obviously been allocated.’

Arthur braced himself. ‘Picking up dog poo for me, then.’

They tore open the envelopes.

‘Oh,’ George said, surprised. ‘I’m helping supervise the Grimstone Primary football team. I’m terrible at football!’

Arthur looked at his card curiously. ‘It says:
Generational Assistance
. And there’s a name:
Mrs Todd
. What’s this?’

George smiled. ‘Ah. Oldie wrangling.’

‘That makes even less sense,’ Arthur replied.

‘You help out an oldie from the village. As in, you’re given a Grimstone granny and you go and have tea with them and listen to their stories and get their shopping and things.’

‘Why don’t we swap?’ Arthur said. ‘I’m good at football and you’d love oldie wrangling. You love tea and stories.’

‘Would there be cake?’ George asked, tempted.

‘They’re old people! Of course there’ll be cake.’

‘OK, done,’ George said, swapping his card with Arthur’s.

Toynbee appeared from the library, his arms filled with a heap of history books, catching Arthur and George mid-swap.

‘Nice try,’ Toynbee said, ‘but I’m afraid Long-Pitt has forbidden trading. She has allocated every activity personally.’

‘Well, she hasn’t done a very good job of it,’ George replied sulkily.

‘Sometimes, Mr Grant, it is a good idea to do things that we are not good at. It is often then that we learn something about ourselves.’

‘I’ll learn how to get kicked in the shins by a bunch of eight-year-olds,’ George grumbled.

Toynbee peered at Arthur’s card. ‘Oh! Mrs Todd!’ he exclaimed. ‘Well, Arthur, it seems you’ve won the lottery. What luck! Do send her my regards. A wonderful woman, wonderful!’

With that, Toynbee wandered off, humming a jolly tune. Arthur and George looked at each other.

‘Looks like someone’s got a crush!’ George said. ‘Do you think you get extra credit for matchmaking?’

Chapter Five

When Wednesday afternoon came, the majority of the students in Arthur’s class were grumbling about the activities that they had been allocated. Penny had been signed up to the school newspaper – ‘If I have to write a story on late library books I’m going to kill myself’ – along with Xanthe, who had already filled a notebook with article ideas. Jake was painting the sets for the school play, supervised by Cornwall, and was looking forward to it more than he’d thought he would be. George was feeling even more glum now that he had discovered he would be coaching football with the Forge triplets.

‘You may never see me again,’ George said mournfully, as he and Arthur climbed on the rickety old school bus. ‘I’ll be mounted and put on the wall of the Forges’ hunting lodge.’

Arthur shushed George. Dan Forge was making his way towards them at the back of the bus, his brothers filing behind him.

Dan nodded at Arthur and said, through gritted teeth, ‘Hello, Arthur. Hope the new term is treating you well?’

Arthur blinked back at Dan; it took him a moment to find his voice. ‘Er . . . yes, thanks, Dan.’

‘Good-o,’ Dan replied, one of his eyes twitching with the effort of being civil. ‘Do you mind if we sit with you?’ he grunted.

‘No,’ Arthur said, convinced he was walking straight into a trap.

Dan’s gaze transferred to George. ‘Get out of my seat, then, cretin,’ he sneered.

‘I am so excited,’ Xanthe lisped, her ponytail bouncing behind her. She had gone for an unusually tame hairstyle that morning in order to look as much like a serious journalist as possible. ‘I’ve always wanted to work for a paper. Breaking stories, fighting corporations, getting the scoop!’

‘Steady on, Xanthe,’ Penny said. ‘
The Whisper
is hardly
The Times
, is it? I mean, they publish George’s cartoons, for a start. Do you remember the one he did last term about lasagne? It didn’t make any sense! He didn’t even spell lasagne right.’

‘True,’ Xanthe admitted darkly. ‘But things can change – there’s a new editor this term.’

The girls opened the door to the newspaper room, and froze on the threshold.

‘Oh no,’ Xanthe whispered.

Sitting behind the editor’s desk was Chukwudi Pike. The son of a billionaire newspaper magnate and a former Miss Nigeria, Chuk Pike was a sixth-former who made every girl in the school go completely soppy at twenty paces. There had been rumours that a girl in the third year had once fainted when he smiled at her in the dining hall. Penny could see why when he looked up at the girls and grinned. ‘You must be Penny and Xanthe,’ he said. ‘Take a seat.’

Penny stammered something incomprehensible and Xanthe, for some unknown reason, curtsied, and then stumbled to a chair.

The Whisper
’s headquarters consisted of a single, poky room at the top of the main school building. Past issues were pasted all over the walls, going back to the Sixties, with hard-hitting headlines such as:
BREAK TIME SLASHED BY FIVE MINUTES
and
STUDENT WINS THIRD PRIZE IN LOCAL POTTERY COMPETITION
. Penny and Xanthe tried not to stare too obviously at Chuk as they waited for the room to fill up with would-be journalists.

Once the last student had wandered in, Chuk stood up and surveyed his new staff: the selection did not look promising. Apart from Penny and Xanthe, there was a boy named Hilary, who already had his finger up his nose; a sixth-former called Freya, who was doodling on her hands with a pink felt-tip; a couple of sniggering boys, who were hitting each other with rulers; and a smattering of other disinterested students, who kept on glancing at their watches.

‘Right,’ Chuk said, ‘I know that since Long-Pitt insisted on allocating the WAAs this year, none of you have chosen to be here. I also realise that for the past . . . well,
ever
,
The Whisper
has been a pretty rubbish paper.’

A few of the students nodded in agreement.

‘Well, I’d like to change that. As some of you may know, my dad owns a couple of newspapers himself.’

One of the sniggering boys rolled his eyes at this.

‘And what he has taught me,’ Chuk continued, ‘is that there is always a story. I’m not interested in publishing articles about broken vending machines or stale toast rations.’

Chuk walked over to one of the yellowing front pages pinned to the wall and pointed to it. ‘September 1973,’ he said. ‘What does the headline say?’

Xanthe read it out, ‘
TEA LIMITED TO ONE CUP A DAY.
’

‘Right,’ Chuk sighed. ‘Do you know what else happened that month?’

The students shook their heads.

‘A kid went missing from the maze. Just disappeared.’ Chuk clicked his fingers. ‘Like that. And how about this one?’

Chuk moved to a paper on the other side of the room. ‘
COSTUMES IN SCHOOL
OLIVER
PRODUCTION “TOO REVEALING” SAYS VICAR.
May 1985.’

Penny giggled.

‘Do you know what else happened in May 1985?’ Chuk continued. ‘The school bus went missing on a trip to the Lake District. Vanished into thin air. And then turned up again a month later, only none of the kids on it could remember a single thing about where they’d been.’

Chuk now had the entire room rapt – even Hilary had taken his finger out of his nose.

‘What I’m saying is,’ Chuk said, ‘we need to be investigating this stuff. This is what should be going on the front page. A kid went missing in Grimstone over Christmas. What happened to him? The police have no idea. But I want to find out.’

Chuk turned to Penny and Xanthe and smiled. ‘How do you girls fancy a trip to Grimstone?’

Arthur looked at the address written on the paper in his hand. ‘Mrs Todd, Rose Cottage, Woodland Row, Grimstone.’ He had walked up and down Grimstone’s quaint, cobbled high street about a hundred times and had absolutely no clue where he was going.

He reluctantly opened the door to Aunt Bessie’s Sweet Shop. The little bell tinkled as he entered the fog of cigarillo smoke and sherbet dust that made up the atmosphere of Grimstone’s least child-friendly shop. Aunt Bessie stood, as always, behind the counter, sucking on a small, brown cigar, her bleached hair frazzling in all directions. She hadn’t bothered to take down the Christmas decorations – in fact, they might even have been from the Christmas before – and they hung limply from the ceiling, gently poking customers in the eye as they entered.

‘What do you want?’ Aunt Bessie barked.

‘I was just wondering, could you direct me to Rose Cottage?’ Arthur asked.

‘Do I look like a bloody map?’ Aunt Bessie sneered, revealing red lipstick all over her yellow teeth.

Arthur sighed. ‘Can I have some strawberry laces, then?’

‘That’s more like it,’ said Aunt Bessie as she aggressively shook some strawberry laces on to the scales.

‘Do you want bonbons too? We got lots of bonbons.’

‘No, I don’t really like bonbons, thanks,’ Arthur said.

Aunt Bessie glared at him.

‘Oh, all right, fine. Some bonbons, then, too,’ Arthur huffed.

‘Rose Cottage, was it?’ Aunt Bessie said, taking a long puff. ‘It’s up past the high street, just on the lane past the woods. Very hoity-toity, the owner is.’

Arthur rolled his eyes and passed Aunt Bessie a five-pound note.

‘I’ll keep the change, shall I?’ Aunt Bessie asked. ‘For my troubles.’

Arthur opened his mouth to protest that it was his pocket money for the whole week, but the look on Aunt Bessie’s face made him think better of it.

Arthur made his way up the lane through the woods. He hadn’t seen a single house for ten minutes and was now wondering whether Aunt Bessie had been winding him up. He was just about to turn around when he heard rock music being blasted from the path up ahead. Curious, he carried on, following the music as it grew louder and louder.

A little further up the path was a clearing and, within it, a tiny thatched cottage with a bright pink painted door. Around the rambling front garden, tall trees were filled with multi-coloured ribbons and wind chimes, and the lawn itself was covered in garden gnomes. On the little white gate was a plaque bearing the name
Rose Cottage
, and underneath was a handmade sign that read:
Get lost!

Arthur tentatively walked through the gate and rung the doorbell. There was no response, probably because the Rolling Stones were being played at a deafening volume inside. Arthur followed a gravel path around the cottage, peering in the windows, until he got to the kitchen and spotted an old lady with bright orange hair wearing a green, silk kimono, dancing along to the ancient record player.

She turned, saw Arthur and screamed. Arthur, in his surprise, screamed back. The old lady grabbed a frying pan from the drainer and threw open the window. ‘Who the blazes are you?’ she demanded, swiping at him with the frying pan.

‘Are . . . are you Mrs Todd?’ Arthur stammered.

‘Who’s asking?’

‘I’m Arthur,’ Arthur said. ‘I’m a student at Shiverton Hall. I’ll be coming to help you on Wednesday afternoons.’

‘Oh Lord,’ Mrs Todd groaned. ‘They’ve sent another one, have they? I keep telling them I don’t need any help.’ She eyed him up and sighed. ‘Well, I suppose you’d better come in then, Albert.’

Arthur sat in Mrs Todd’s shambolic sitting room, holding a chipped china teacup . He took in the broken piano, and the garish floral curtains, and the dying plants. The walls were filled with absolutely hideous portraits and Mrs Todd noticed Arthur looking at them.

‘Ghastly, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘My son does them. No talent whatsoever, poor boy, but one must be encouraging.’

‘They’re very –’ Arthur struggled to find something complimentary – ‘arresting.’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Todd said with half a smile. ‘So the school has sent you oldie-wrangling, then? Bad luck. Not much fun for a boy your age to have to spend his afternoons with an old bat like me.’

Arthur didn’t know how to respond.

‘How is Shiverton, then? Is Long-Pitt still the headmistress?’