The Power of Five Oblivion (3 page)

“Not just me, I’m afraid. They’ve called a Council meeting. They’re going to talk to the boy and decide what to do with him – and they want you there.”

“At the Council?”

“Yes. You don’t need to be scared. We just need to know the truth about what happened.”

“What will they do to him?” George asked.

“That depends on where he came from and what he was hoping to do. If he was sent to spy on us…” She left the sentence unfinished.

“I want to come,” said George. “I don’t think Holly should go on her own.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible, George. Rita will come as Holly’s guardian. And I’ll be there, so you don’t need to worry.”

“When is the Council meeting?” I asked. I expected it to be the following morning or maybe in the early evening, after work.

“They’re already there,” Miss Keyland replied. “They’re waiting for you now.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rita and John exchange a look. It was as if they’d just heard very bad news. People very rarely went out at night … and certainly not without the light of a full moon. It was only now that I saw how serious this was.

“Well, we’d better go then,” Rita said.

And that was it. She stood up. And we went.

THREE

They were waiting for us inside the church, arranged in a semicircle, up near the altar with the cross and the stained-glass window showing the apostles St Peter and St Andrew fishing – although it was pretty much blank against the night sky. More candles and a couple of oil lamps had been lit so I could clearly see all the people who were waiting for me. I can’t say any of them smiled as I came in, but even so I relaxed a little. They might call themselves the Council with a capital C but these were men and women I had known all my life. At the end of the day, I hadn’t really done anything wrong. They weren’t going to hurt me.

The vicar, Reverend Johnstone, was the first one I saw, with that long face he always pulled before one of his endless sermons. Mike Dolan and Simon Reade were next to him, enjoying their moment of glory. Then came Mr and Mrs Flint, a solid, ordinary couple in their fifties. They had the house at the bottom of the hill, overlooking the river, and although they had lost both their children, they always tried to be positive. Miss Keyland took her place next to them, sitting beside Sir Ian Ingram, universally known as “I. I.” (though not to his face), the chairman of the Council and the oldest, wisest, most serious man in the village. Nobody knew why he had been knighted. Indeed, we only had his say-so that he ever had been. But nobody would have dreamt of arguing. When I say that his word was law, I mean it quite literally. He had once been a barrister and he had set down in writing a lot of the laws by which we now lived.

Jamie Tyler was sitting with his back to me, facing the altar. He was slumped in a chair; not tied to it, but looking too exhausted to move. He turned round as I came in and I saw that his face had been cleaned up and that someone had put a bandage on his forehead. They had also taken his shirt, and if he’d asked me when he’d get it back, I would have told him not to bother waiting. Once it had been washed, it would make a nice present for someone’s teenage son because it was almost brand new and still had its colour and all of its buttons. He would just have to make do with the ill-fitting and worn-out T-shirt with HEINZ 57 written on the front – which was what he had been given in its place.

Our eyes met and for just a second I felt him trying to tell me something. I wanted to look away but somehow I found my gaze locked in place. George often did something quite similar at the dinner table – somehow signal to me not to repeat something he’d said or avoid telling Rita what we’d been up to during the day. But with Jamie it was much more than that. It was as if I could hear his voice whispering to me, right up against my ear.

Don’t say anything…

It was the weirdest sensation I’d ever had, and as I sat down next to him (not good – two chairs facing the Council, two of us being accused) I had to work hard to persuade myself that I’d just imagined it, that he hadn’t just trespassed inside my head. Examining him now, he looked so ordinary, so innocent. And yet I was beginning to realize that he was anything but.

Rita took her place in one of the pews, meaning that she was watching, rather than part of the Council. The session began.

To start with, Reade and Dolan gave their version of what had happened, each of them trying to outdo the other in being the centre of attention so that they ended up saying everything twice. They had seen me, they had asked me what I was doing, they had realized I was lying, they had come back and found me with the boy. Although they tried to dress it up and make it worse than it really was, that was about the sum of it.

Sir Ian glared at me. “Why did you not raise the alarm the moment you saw the boy?” he asked.

“I was going to,” I said. “But I didn’t have a chance.”

“You lied to Mr Dolan and to Mr Reade.”

“I don’t know why I did that.” It was certainly the truth. I must have been out of my mind. “I suppose it was because he was hurt.”

“The safety of the village, our entire survival, rests on a single premise. We don’t let anyone know we are here. We protect ourselves from the outside world – with force if need be. If this boy came and went and told others what we have here, it could all be over for us. Do you understand that? And yet you were prepared to let that happen.”

“He didn’t look like a spy,” I said. My mouth had gone dry and I felt wretched.

Sir Ian turned his attention to Jamie. “Your name is Jamie Tyler,” he said. “Yes, sir.”

“Where have you come from?”

“I’ve already told you.” Jamie’s voice had changed since I had found him an hour or two ago. It had lost the edge of panic. He sounded more assured. “I can’t remember what happened to me. I woke up in the wood and someone had hit me on the head. There was a lot of blood. I didn’t know which way to go so I just sort of stumbled forward and then I came upon this village. I was scared of being seen so I hid behind the church. That was where Holly found me.”

He was lying. He hadn’t told them about the door – or about the typhoon and Hong Kong … all the things he had told me. I was going to say something but there he was again, inside my head.

Please…

“How did you get past the watchtowers?” the vicar asked.

“I didn’t see any watchtowers, sir. I didn’t see anything until I reached the village and I didn’t mean to come here. It was just where I arrived.”

“And where had you come from?” Sir Ian repeated his question.

Jamie touched the bandage around his head. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that, sir. I don’t remember. All I know is that I woke up in the forest. I guess I must have been dumped there.”

“He’s lying,” Reade said.

“Nobody could have got past the watchtowers,” Dolan agreed.

“Give us an hour alone with him,” Reade continued. “We’ll make him remember where he came from.”

“We’re not hurting children.” I forget if it was Mr or Mrs Flint who said that, but both of them looked outraged. He and his wife looked very similar. They always agreed with each other.

“Is this what he told you?” Sir Ian had turned back to me.

This was the moment of truth. I was the only person in the church who knew for certain that Jamie was making everything up. He certainly hadn’t had amnesia when he met me and even if he had been lying then, it was a different story from the one he was telling now. All my instincts were screaming at me to separate myself from him, to stand up and accuse him. But for some reason I couldn’t do it. I had no idea who he was. I had barely spoken to him. But still I found myself speaking on his behalf. “He was very confused,” I said. “He didn’t make a lot of sense. He certainly didn’t know where he was.” All of which was true, sort of. It just wasn’t completely true.

Sir Ian examined Jamie. “You have an American accent,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“But that’s not possible. You couldn’t possibly have come from America. Do you have any memories of being in a plane or a ship?”

“Sir, I wish I could help you. But I don’t remember anything.”

Sir Ian turned to his deputy. “Anne?”

Miss Keyland drew herself up in the way I had often seen her do in class. She had put her glasses on, but she was looking over them, not through them. “If the boy can’t help us, then we’re going to have to decide among ourselves what we’re going to do with him,” she said. “What are the choices? We know how we’ve dealt with intruders in the past.”

“He’s a child,” Reverend Johnstone said, making the same point as the Flints.

“He’s at least fifteen,” Dolan countered. “And he knew what he was doing, coming here.”

“We could give him a home and make him one of us,” Miss Keyland went on. “We would have to watch him, of course. He wouldn’t be allowed outside the perimeter. In normal circumstances, given his age, that is what I would recommend. But these are not normal circumstances, are they, Sir Ian?”

“Unfortunately not.”

Sir Ian produced a large white envelope. Even the sight of it seemed to send a collective shudder among the members of the Council and I wondered what on earth it could be about and why it was relevant now. They all knew what was inside, even before he opened the envelope and took out a photograph. He flipped it round so that Jamie could see it – and so I saw it too. There were actually five photographs on a single sheet, the faces of four boys and a girl. And written underneath:

REWARD. £100,000 FOR INFORMATION
LEADING TO THE ARREST OF ANY OF THESE
FIVE CHILDREN. CALLS WILL BE TREATED IN
THE STRICTEST CONFIDENCE. CONTACT THE
POLICE ON 999 AT ANY TIME
.

Jamie’s face was one of them. No. I did a double-take. His face was actually
two
of them. There must have been some sort of mistake at the printers because two of the pictures were duplicates, one next to the other. Then I remembered. Before he’d contracted his fake amnesia, Jamie had talked to me about a brother. It must have been a twin brother. But who were the others? And how – and when – had the photographs arrived in the village? There hadn’t been a mail delivery for as long as I could remember. And anyway, nobody used money any more. A hundred thousand pounds was worthless. It could be a million pounds and it would make no difference. I suddenly wished I was in my bed. I didn’t understand any of this.

“This is not the boy in the photograph,” Mrs Flint said.

“It’s him,” Dolan snapped.

“It can’t be. The photograph was taken ten years ago and look at him! He hasn’t grown up at all!”

“It’s still him. It’s identical.”

“If the police are looking for him, they should be informed,” Reade said, although I had no idea how he was going to manage that either. What was he going to do? Send them a carrier pigeon? “They can work out why he looks the same.”

“What will we do with the reward money?” Mr Flint asked.

“The reward may have changed,” Reade said. “It could be food. Machinery. Seeds. It could be anything we want…”

“The reward is not the issue,” Sir Ian cut in. “If the police are looking for the boy it’s our duty to inform them. I propose that’s what we do. We call the police and keep the boy in custody until they arrive. Shall we put it to the vote?”

Reade and Dolan raised their hands straight away. “I agree,” Dolan said.

Mr Flint shook his head. “I’m not so sure…” he began. “Do we really want to get involved with the police – or with anyone outside the village?” He looked at Mrs Flint, who nodded her agreement. That was three for, two against.

“I think we should consider the issue further,” the vicar muttered. That was typical of him. He never did anything in a hurry. He was the sort of man who could hum and haw for twenty minutes at a christening before he announced the name. “Yes,” he agreed with himself. “We need to think about it more.”

Three all. Miss Keyland had the casting vote. I saw her deliberating. She didn’t look happy. But as it happened, she never got a chance to speak.

“You need your heads examined if you’re going to call the police…”

The voice came from the back of the church. I twisted round to see who it was, noticing at the same time that all the members of the Council had reacted with outrage. Reade and Dolan were already on their feet. Miss Keyland was shocked, Sir Ian furious.

A figure moved out of the darkness.

It was the Traveller. Who else could it have been? And now I’m going to have to stop for a moment to tell you about him, the one man who had arrived in the village during my lifetime, the only outsider who’d been allowed to stay.

He had come seven years before, when I was eight, travelling down the river on a houseboat pulled by a black-and-white cross-shire horse. That makes him sound like some sort of gypsy, and he might well have been, but there was something more to him that he always kept concealed. He was about forty with dark, intelligent eyes that refused to meet your own and he had a habit of never being quite where you expected him to be. In many ways he reminded me of an actor. I had seen pictures of performers in the time of Shakespeare and he had that same look, the same confidence. He had the right voice for it too. When he spoke, you wanted to listen.

There were some who said he’d been in government, others said the army or the air force, but nobody knew for sure. He had come down the river on that houseboat of his –
Lady Jane
was its name – and of course he had been pulled out and arrested the moment he showed his face. Half the village wanted to expel him and the other half weren’t a great deal more welcoming. There were plenty who would have liked to have strung him up from a tree in case he told anyone about us, how many of us there were, how many supplies we had. But the Traveller had used that voice of his to talk his way out of trouble. He had talked to the whole village and after that they had put it to the vote and decided to take him in.

How had he done it? Well, first of all there were all the supplies on the boat – the food and the medicine which he could have hidden upriver but which he chose instead to share. He even had a dozen bottles of whisky, which made him a lot of friends. And then there was his horse, which was put to work for a while but which quickly ended up providing fresh meat for most of the population. I don’t like horse myself. It’s tough and chewy and has a nasty smell – but after an almost non-stop diet of vegetables and herbs, anything with a bone in it is to be welcomed. The Traveller gave the village everything he had except his name. That he kept to himself. He moored his boat about a quarter of a mile down the river and lived there on his own. He never came to Assemblies. On the other hand, he was a good craftsman and helped mend the roofs that had been damaged in the storms of the winter before. Almost single-handedly, he rebuilt the wall at the bottom of the pig field. It had been in a state of collapse for years. People still didn’t trust him completely, but he kept himself to himself and made no enemies and so they let him stay.