The Citadel and the Wolves (10 page)

“Did they find it?”

I shook my head.

Wendy smirked. “Jade-”

The smile vanished from her face quickly however when I poked her in the ribs with the blunt end of my elbow. The other missed it.

Mum saw Nick Lighthouse to the door.

“Thanks for your time and the nice cup of tea, Mrs Robinson,” said Nick Lighthouse. “You’ve been very helpful. You’ll be reading all about it on the front page of the South London in Friday’s weekly issue.”

I’ll bet, I thought.

When he turned, he winked at us. Wendy giggled. I ignored him.

I moved the curtains in the living room. He drove away in a maroon or red car. I couldn’t tell in the dark. Something about Nick Lighthouse, the South London Herald crime reporter, continued to puzzle me.

“Jade, what was that all about?” asked Wendy.

I turned away from the window. “What?”

She looked annoyed. “The elbow in the ribs.”

“Nick Lighthouse wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t what, dear?” questioned mum as she picked up the empty cups.

“A newspaper reporter, Mum,” I answered.

Wendy remained sceptical however. “And how would you know, Jade?”

“He wore black, polished shoes like the other two earlier.”

Wendy laughed.

I continued, “Although Nick Lighthouse asked lots of questions, he didn’t write anything down. The reporter from the
Science First
journal did when he interviewed daddy for the article. Nick Lighthouse didn’t show us his press card either. He was a policeman. I’m sure of it.”

I had cast doubt in their minds. They knew that I was right, and I was because the story never appeared in the paper.

Although it was very late, Wendy and I didn’t go to bed. We stayed up. We were all worried sick. Dad still hadn’t returned. When would they release him? Why were they holding him? He hadn’t done anything wrong, except tell the truth. They were afraid of the truth. Mum did the right thing and got in touch with our solicitors. We waited anxiously by the phone. It didn’t ring.

Mum was in the kitchen making another cup of cocoa or something. Wendy had gone up earlier. I lay on the settee in the sitting room. I vowed to stay awake till daddy returned home. Although I was tired, I wasn’t going to fall asleep.

I heard someone put the key in the front door and excited voices in the hall. I was dreaming. Someone covered me with a blanket. I smiled in my sleep. Everything was going to be all right now.

5. DOCTOR MARGARET FROST

I’d lots of things on my mind that day. I think it was a Wednesday.

As I turned the corner into Hubbard Road, (off the top of Auckland Hill) a cul-de-sac in West Norwood, riding on my silver electric scooter, which sounded like an electric milk float, I got stuck behind a real one, trundling in front of me. He had a full load on his float. He had obviously just left the depot starting his rounds. But I was in no mood to be held up by an ancient milk float. I was a young lady in a hurry this morning, so I impatiently flicked on my electric horn, which I’d fitted a few days earlier. It’s an accessory that I bought from a specialist dealer
(Scooter Mad)
in Croydon, the shopping centre in South London, the week before last. I like fitting extras to my electric scooter. It personalises it. It’s me. It’s Jade Robinson.

“MOVE IT, BUSTER!”

My electric horn blared out across the quiet, residential street. He looked around startled nearly hitting a parked vehicle. ZOOTWOSOME! He pulled in by 36. He glared at me as I swept by elegantly on my electric scooter. I smiled briefly behind my dark glasses.

When Mr Patel discovered that I’d got an electric scooter for my 14
^th
birthday, he asked me to deliver prescriptions to his elderly customers who were housebound. I didn’t mind. It got me out of the shop. Besides, I love riding my Electro Scoot MK2, and he gave me a rise of 25 euros in my salary to reflect my new duties and extra responsibilities.

I pulled in outside 54, a big, detached tumbledown place, which had been built at the turn of the last century. It looked it too. I opened my saddlebag and took out a prescription for a Mrs Perrin. As I walked up the front path with the prescription in my hand, a curtain moved in a downstairs window. Silver-haired Mrs Perrin, a petite lady, came to the door leaning on her walking stick. I gave her the prescription.

“Would you like to come in for some tea, my dear?” she offered with a warm smile.

I suddenly felt awkward. I’d not expected this. “I’m a bit late. I-”

“I’ve made some nice salmon and cucumber sandwiches and cup cakes,” revealed Mrs Perrin.

Salmon and cucumber sandwiches and cup cakes? My mouth watered. I was starving. I got up late and missed breakfast this morning, just a rushed cup of tea and a slice of cold toast.

“I’ll just lock my scooter, Mrs Perrin.” I didn’t want some little thief riding off with it. I’d track him down to the ends of the earth. Then I’d keep his brain pickled in a jar by my bed. HAHA!

As I sat in her huge kitchen, which was bigger than our sitting room at home, later demolishing the salmon and cucumber sandwiches and the cup cakes that I washed down with a cup of very sweet tea, Mrs Perrin, a lonely widow, talked about her life. She was in the war. I was astonished because I’d never met anyone before who had been in the war. She remembered the London Blitz as a little girl. That was a scary time of great conflict and dying in the first half of the twentieth century.

As I returned to the shop on my electric scooter, I began to reflect on some things.

It’s almost late March 2016 now. Christmas and the New Year have come and gone without a fanfare of trumpets to remember them by. Term tends to exhaust Wendy and I mentally, so the long, Christmas break was more than welcome by us. Although we had a cold spell before Christmas when everybody said that it was going to be another bad winter like the last one, we had a rather mild, wet winter down here in the South East. Most of the bad weather had passed us by thankfully. The North and Scotland got most of our bad weather with snowfalls and floods.

On the home front, Wendy has finally got her way. She’s now dating Kevin Willis on a regular basis, which suits me just fine because it keeps him out of my hair. The only problem is he calls around twice a week, so I have to endure their constant snogging in front of the TV while I’m trying to watch one of my favourite programmes or a cartoon. It can be a distraction. I go upstairs to my room sometimes to watch my portable, which was a Christmas present from mum. How long will it last? Only God knows. Then again, maybe he doesn’t.

Tessa had a litter of five babies. She’s doing very well. We were a bit concerned that she might kill them because it was her first. She didn’t. She’s behaving like the perfect mother fussing over them.

No one mentions the comet in our house now after the incident before Christmas on my 14
^th
birthday that seems like a bad dream. Daddy hasn’t been the same since. He has sold his telescope. He keeps the attic locked. He hasn’t been up there for months. I do understand why. He has to think of his family and a career first. I’m the same. I don’t talk about the comet at school after my warning from Miss Sourpuss-Mrs Sweet, the child-eating alien from the lost planet. I’ve got to think of the future too. I still want to be a scientist on the International Space Platform. The dream remains the same, though it might change next week. I also like the idea of training to be a science teacher like daddy, but it’s very hard work. And do I want to spend the rest of my life at school? Still, I’m only 14 at the moment, so I’ve got plenty of time to decide my future. I rarely see Mr Whitehouse these days. He was moved to another department. He was gagged too. But were we all burying our heads in the sand hoping it would go away? An incident later that morning changed everything.

When daddy sounded his horn, I flew down the stairs with my schoolbooks in my hand. I kissed mum at the door as I hurried to join the others who were waiting for me impatiently because I was late. I had a few last minute things to do on my computer. Dad opened the front, passenger door for me from his side. As I climbed into the Jeep, I turned and waved to mum who remained at the door. My science book slipped out of my lap at that moment. My eyes widened with mild horror when it fell open on the page where I’d made all the recent drawings and calculations. I bit my lip when daddy picked it up. He glanced at the drawings and calculations briefly before he returned the school exercise book to me. Although he didn’t say a word, I knew what he was thinking. Oh, DROKK! I thought. VENUS PEBBLES too!

“Seat belt!” he barked.

I murmured timidly. As I pulled on my seat belt, he let out the clutch, swinging out of the drive gingerly.

We drove in silence.

Wendy and I crossed the school quadrangle with our schoolbooks.

“Dad was a bit quiet this morning,” commented Wendy.

“Yeah.”

“I wonder what’s wrong.”

When I shrugged my shoulders, I lied.

Then Kevin Willis spotted us. I frowned when he snogged my beautiful sister briefly before we walked in together.

It was a quiet morning in class that drifted.

I was alone. I spent my free period in the school library catching up on outstanding homework and a letter to my American friend, Debbie Shultz; however, I couldn’t get the morning out of my mind. I took out my science book. I opened it, flicking over a page or two before I found the drawings and calculations again. I checked the figures mentally. I’d not made a mistake. They were correct. I bit my lip when I remembered the earlier incident.

Tea was an uncomfortable affair for me that evening. Daddy didn’t say much during tea. I caught mum once or twice watching me with a dark look on her face, making me feel guilty about something. What had daddy told her? Wendy seemed oblivious of anything wrong. She had other things on her mind. When Tommy spilled his drink, mum snapped at him. She doesn’t usually. She’s normally a very patient person. Was I to blame?

Afterwards, Kevin Willis arrived. I vanished upstairs to catch up on some history homework.

I sat at my desk, which was a birthday present from the year before last, with the portable on mute control. I glanced at it here and there. Coronation Street was on ITV. Half the regular cast had been wiped out by a terrorist attack the week before in the Rovers Return. The characters left are trying to come to terms with this awful tragedy. Personally, I think that it’s quite funny. Perhaps aliens will abduct the rest. It was too much hassle to change channels, even with the remote, which was within reach. I opened the textbook on a page, ‘the Rise and fall of the Roman Empire,’ but my mind wasn’t in it, and I knew why.

Someone tapped on the door.

“It’s open,” I answered, hoping that it wasn’t Tommy being a nuisance again. He was up late again.

Daddy put his head around the door. “Busy?”

“History homework, Dad.”

“How are things with you at school, Jade?” quizzed daddy who remained by the door awkwardly.

“They’re just fine, Dad.”

“No problems with maths or science?”

“Not when I’ve got a scientist for a dad.”

I got a smile out of him.

We were discussing my schoolwork. We were skirting around the real issue. Daddy hadn’t come up to my room to talk about school or homework. He had something else on his mind, and I knew what it was.

“Jade, I-”

I opened my desk drawer and took out my science book. I gave it to him. His eyebrows knitted into a frown as he studied my drawings, checking my figures mentally.

He looked up. “These figures of yours, how accurate are they, Jade?”

“I based them on the last known position of the comet, using your own figures and calculations, allowing for a margin of error of 0.8 per cent before I fed the data into my own computer, Dad.”

He tapped the page. “And this is what your computer threw back at you, Jade?”

I nodded.

“Come with me, Jade,” he said sternly.

I was a bit worried for a moment. Daddy sounded like a schoolteacher. He is of course. I tend to forget that sometimes.

“We’re fortunate that it is a clear night tonight, and an ideal opportunity,” he said.

His remarks intrigued me.

I followed daddy up into the attic. He turned on the red light which flickered briefly. What did he have in mind? When he unlocked the big cupboard that stood in the corner, I was curious. I was astounded when he uncovered his telescope.

“But I thought-”

“I’d sold it?”

I nodded.

He chuckled. “You should know me better by now, Jade.”

It was the first time that I’d heard him laugh in a long while, and it was wonderful. The sparkle had returned to his eyes. My father had returned from the wilderness.

I helped him carry the heavy telescope to the skylight. As he set it up, I opened the skylight.

“Lights, Jade.”

I obeyed and turned out the main light.

Using my computer figures and drawings, he found her again in the night sky.

“Jade, take a look at this,” instructed daddy after some minutes of observing the rogue comet through his telescope.

I peered through the telescope. She was like a bright star in the dark heavens. It was like seeing an old friend again, and she was. Icarus 9 was alive and kicking. As I studied her for some minutes, something began to puzzle me. What was it now? Something was wrong. Christ! I knew what it was now. She had grown bigger!

Daddy, who remained calm, lit his pipe. “You noticed it too?”

It baffled me because it was totally unexpected. “Yes, but what does it mean, Dad?”

“An error maybe,” answered daddy, the scientist. “I wish I had a bigger telescope. Then perhaps we could really see what’s going on out there. It’s a bit frustrating. Something has changed but what?”

“Atmospheric refraction?” I speculated.

“Maybe…or something else that we are not aware of; something we should have anticipated.”

One thing hadn’t changed; the path and direction of the comet. She remained on a direct collision course with earth.

As I undressed for bed, my mind was full of confusing thoughts. I remained apprehensive yet excited too. The comet was back. It had never gone away of course. I set the alarm before I slid beneath the covers. I slipped into a light sleep despite all of the unanswered questions that filled my head. I was tired. It had been a long day. I was falling down a dark tunnel.