The Petitioners (19 page)

‘They’ll find out soon enough. When we don’t come back they’re going to send Declan to have a look. Or Mark. They probably won’t be stupid enough to get caught.’

It was too dark to be sure, but I thought he was probably rolling his eyes by this time. He should have known his insistence would just make me dig my heels in.

‘The only chance is for us all to stick together,’ he said.

I laughed. ‘What do you think, the six of us can overpower them?’

‘We’d have more of a chance,’ said Dan. ‘We aren’t really going to just sit here in this hut and – wait a minute!’

I tensed, not knowing what he was about to do. I just hoped it didn’t involve guns, or explosives of any kind, or anything too dangerous that could backfire on us in some hideous way. Emma would never forgive me if…

He raced past me and jumped up in the air, grabbing on to something further up the wall. A whole section of wooden panelling came down on both of us. So much for being safe in here, was my last thought before something hit me on the head.

If only it had knocked me unconscious, was my first thought when I realised it hadn’t.

Dan pulled me out of the wreckage. I would have resisted if I had had the strength.

‘It’s a hide!’ he said gleefully. ‘Those idiots have shut us up in a hide.’

‘A hide?’

‘At the edge of the loch. For bird-watching. Come on, we can get out now. They weren’t to know that panel flapped down so easily.’

I groaned, not entirely because I now had a lump on my head from where the wooden panel had flapped on to me. I could see there was a big hole at the front of the hut, and Dan had already started to crawl out through it. He was going to land in the water if…

He splashed down softly and turned back towards me, leaning over the ledge on which, maybe in more tranquil times, twitchers had kept their binoculars. ‘Hurry up, Dad. We’ve only got one chance… Not like that!’

I heaved myself up and over the ledge while he was still speaking, so his warning came a little too late. I landed face down in the water. I just hoped he wasn’t laughing at me as he dragged me to my feet. I didn’t need much of an excuse to clamber back into the cosiness of the hide and stay there until the world righted itself, which surely to goodness it could do better without my assistance.

We peered round the corner of the hut to see how the land lay.

The backs of Tanya Fairfax’s private army – if that’s what it was – were moving away from us in the direction of the house. If she were any kind of a tactician, she would have left a rear-guard, I mused. I was just about to communicate this to Dan when he pushed me back into the shadows and hissed, ‘Sssh!’ It wouldn’t have been so bad if one foot hadn’t landed in the water again.

‘What’s that?’ said a voice, too close for comfort.

‘A duck,’ said another. ‘Want me to zap it?’

‘No, let it be. We’d be in trouble for making a noise. Come on – let’s get caught up with the rest. I’m starting to see things in the shadows.’

‘She wanted us to stay back.’

‘Never mind. What she doesn’t see won’t hurt.’

‘I wouldn’t bank on that,’ said the second one. But his voice was receding, and when we peered out again, there were two shapes just about gaining ground on the mass of soldiers.

I didn’t think I would like to look out of a window in Balmoral and see an army – or even a regiment, if that’s what it called itself – advancing across the lawns. We didn’t even know who occupied the place at the moment, or which side Tanya had come down on – or would come down on in the future. I was glad, in spite of everything, to have some prior knowledge of the woman, even if it didn’t entirely inspire me with confidence. I didn’t think she was the type to shoot first and ask questions afterwards.

We crept out from our hiding place. I had a silly urge to walk on tiptoe, but it probably wouldn’t have made any difference on the soft ground. Dan led me back into the brambles, and we made our way as silently as we could back up the hill.

Mark was there all on his own, standing more or less where we had left him and the others.

‘They’ve gone,’ he said, unnecessarily.

‘Where to?’ I enquired, wondering just for a moment if Declan had talked the others into retreating up to Spittal of Glenshee after all.

‘Oh, they’ve gone down to the Castle,’ he said. ‘I said I’d wait here in case you came back.’

‘To the Castle?’

It seemed like the height of folly to head down to the Castle when it was about to come under siege from an army with unknown loyalties, but of course Declan had never had any fear of folly, and Fiona wasn’t much better.

‘Will?’ I enquired.

‘Yes, he’s gone with them. Something about people needing him.’

Mark stared at me. Was he waiting for me to tell him what to do? It seemed unlikely.

‘What do you think, Dad?’ said Dan unexpectedly.

He was staring at me too. For heaven’s sake, surely my own son knew how much I hated telling people what to do.

‘So much for sticking together,’ I muttered at last. ‘OK, we might as well go down the hill. But carefully. If we move along the edge of the undergrowth, but a bit behind the troops, we might get away with it.’

‘Why don’t we head the other way from them, round to the far side of the house?’ suggested Mark. ‘There’s bound to be other entrances somewhere about.’

‘Maybe they’ll split up though,’ I argued.

He shrugged. ‘Better wait and see.’

I didn’t think for a minute we would get away with anything, especially in the light of what the two men who had passed us near the hut had said about zapping the duck, but I knew Mark and Dan wouldn’t be content to stay on this benighted hillside for long, and it was better that we move in a considered, organised way than that they should fling themselves down the slope in a frantic dash to get away from me.

For the first time for a little while, I thought about Emma and Jen, and hoped they were really at the safe house Will had mentioned. It was disconcerting, after living through an era when everybody had been in touch with everybody else at the tap of a finger on keyboard or screen, to be so completely cut off from my own family.

We should all have stayed together somehow. I should have made more of an effort to ensure that.

I swatted the thought out of my mind as if it were one of the sub-tropical insects we had seen more and more often at Cramond over the past decade.

‘Just go slowly,’ I warned Dan. ‘If we go blundering about, somebody’s bound to see us. And remember, we don’t know enough to be sure whose side we want to be on – if any. Take it easy.’

‘Yeah, whatever,’ said Dan, but I noticed he went carefully down the hillside not far ahead of me, and didn’t gallop as I had been afraid he would. Maybe some of my innate caution had rubbed off on him after all.

‘He’s learning,’ said Mark, right behind me.

JENNIFER

We didn’t have to wait long for our chance.

There was a lot of noise in the room just beyond the sliding doors – no sound-proofing, I noted – and they suddenly opened again.

‘He’s awake!’ said one of the men, peering into the safe room from just outside.

‘Watch him,’ snapped the other. He grabbed the woman who wasn’t my mother and hustled her out. She didn’t protest at all. Maybe she was expecting this.

After the two of them had gone, Jeff moved towards the doors, and the other man barred his way. ‘Not you,’ he said.

‘It’s all right, I just wanted to…’ Jeff moved again, and the other man fell to the ground, as abruptly as if one of his legs had given way under him. I couldn’t see what Jeff had done. ‘Hurry along there,’ he said to me. ‘The effects won’t last more than a couple of minutes.’

He held out a hand to me and I took it gladly.

It seemed a bit too simple, and indeed it was. When we opened the door to the outer room, there were two more guards outside in the corridor. They were looking the other way, but one of them half-turned as if he had heard something, and then the one we had left on the safe room floor lumbered up behind us. We were surrounded. Jeff raised his hands to show he was unarmed, although I found that hard to believe.

‘We just want to see where you’re taking my mother,’ I said.

‘Ah – your mother?’ said one of them.

‘The woman who was in the safe room,’ I said.

They looked at each other and smiled.

‘You can’t go with her, dear,’ said one of them in a condescending tone. ‘She’s to go off to some high-level meeting up the stairs. You’ll see her later.’

Of course there had been laws against gender discrimination for decades, but nobody had ever managed to pass a law that would ensure men didn’t patronise women, though personally, although I was generally against violence. I would have favoured the death penalty for that particular offence.

‘Can we wait for her outside?’ I asked, widening my eyes to try and achieve a look of naivety – both sides could play at the condescension game, I decided. ‘Just outside the meeting room, I mean?’

I didn’t hear the crackle of a radio – the modern ones didn’t give themselves away like that – but suddenly one of the men was speaking to somebody else, and it sounded urgent.

‘Get a move on – we’re going round to the front of the house,’ he told the others after a brief conversation on some sort of invisible communications device. ‘There’s something going on. Now!’

They abandoned us in the corridor. The last we saw of them was their backs whisking out of sight through the next set of double swing doors.

We looked at each other.

‘What’s happened?’ I wondered aloud.

‘Never mind that – let’s make sure they don’t find us here when they get back. We’ve got to get to a staircase.’

He headed off in the opposite direction from the guards.

‘But we don’t know what’s along this way,’ I protested, working hard to keep up with him.

‘It’s about time we found out, then,’ he said over his shoulder.

We had arrived in a posher part of the place where there were huge fireplaces and long windows, and one room led into the next. It was impossible now to tell what the purposes of the rooms had been. They had probably had names like the Tweedy Sitting-Room or the Stag’s Head Gun Room at one time, but there was little sign of their original use at all, or of any subsequent use by the government, who now apparently owned the place. Considering the number of people who had entered the Castle, this part of it was oddly deserted. It was sad in a way, but I supposed it was symbolic of the triumph of democracy too, as opposed to the monarchy we used to have anyway. Jeff tried some of the closed doors we passed. They probably just led to the Outer Library, or the Large Porridge Room, or the Principal Ceilidh Room. It was a random search, and I thought it was unlikely to turn up anything useful. But then, we hadn’t meant to find Mum’s old adversary Brad McWhittle when we were wandering about the hospital. I began to try doors too, the ones that led off this corridor of interlinking rooms at the other side from the ones Jeff was trying.

In the end we did strike gold, or pay dirt, or whatever the expression is. I was getting bored with opening doors, and just wanted to get to the end of the place so that we could look for a way out. Only of course there was no way I would go anywhere without my mother. The real one, that is.

I managed to get a bit ahead of Jeff, who had got distracted by a little library we came to along the way. It held a few bookshelves that were still loaded with books. Not the leather-bound, dusty tomes you might have found in the traditional aristocratic collection, but some paperbacks from the middle of the twentieth century or thereabouts. There was an upper level you could reach by pulling a long library ladder across. He was eyeing this arrangement and, I thought, working out if it would take us anywhere useful, when he spotted something on one of the shelves.

I was in the middle of trying to open a door at the side of the little library that must surely lead to a spiral staircase that led to a turret room or something equally fascinating, when he said, ‘Look at this! A first edition Biggles!’

‘Biggles?’ Was it really a word? I didn’t want to demonstrate my complete ignorance by questioning him about it. Instead I turned my attention to the door, which was either locked or jammed.

Jeff came over and rattled the doorknob.

‘Why should this one be locked?’ he mused. ‘Stand back – if it’s important enough to lock, then we’d better break in.’

He barged at it, shoulder first, and it swung open.

‘Wow!’ I exclaimed.

There was indeed a staircase behind the door. It might even be a spiral one. Certainly it twisted back on itself within a few steps, and when I put my hand out to hold on to something, I felt the cold strength of stone instead of the panelling and tiles we had come across elsewhere. I just had to find out what was at the top.

‘Wait,’ said Jeff. ‘We don’t know what’s up there. Let me go first.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said, half over my shoulder. ‘There’s nobody here. And maybe we can see outside and find out what’s going on.’