The scuffling came again. I couldn’t work out what it might be. Someone searching for something?
I looked at my watch. Ten past eight. I reckoned I could be brave in daylight and so eased myself slowly, very slowly, up onto my elbows and got my knees underneath me. Taking tiny sips of breath, straining to listen, I got myself to my feet. I stepped over Sim and crept toward the kitchen door. The scuffling didn’t stop. What were they looking for? What was I going to say when they saw me?
I stayed close to the wall and poked my head through the empty doorway.
The dog spotted me and ran. It leaped onto the second-to-bottom step of the broken stairs, then bounded through the window. All I saw was a four-legged flash of mangy fur. I hurried over to the window. It was out there in the undergrowth watching me, backing away from me.
“It’s okay,” I said to it. “Hey, boy. It’s okay.”
It was a skinny, scruffy mutt—no doubt a full-on flea circus. But I grinned at it, called to it. Of course it didn’t come anywhere near me. It held its head down at a slight angle
and watched me from a safe distance. I was sure it was what we’d heard last night. Who knew, but maybe that girl’s-head football was its toy.
I sneaked back through to the first room where Kenny and Sim still slept, not wanting to wake them. I rummaged in my rucksack and found an apple from last night in the side pocket. Heading outside into the fresh morning air, I made my way round the back of the cottage. The dog was still there. Again I called to it. When I tossed the apple toward it, it turned to run—probably only used to being pelted by rocks. But the apple hit the leaves a good meter or so away from it.
It was wary but curious, and hungry. Without taking its eyes off me, it bent low and kind of crawled up to the apple, sniffed. I’m sure it would have preferred Pedigree Chum, but it devoured the apple in two chomps.
“That’s my breakfast, you know,” I told it.
It didn’t care.
It snuffled around in the undergrowth where the apple had been, searching for seconds. It looked up at me. But all I could do was hold out empty hands and shake my head. It didn’t bark a thank-you, didn’t come any closer to lick my hand. It trotted over to the wire fence and got down low on its belly as it squirted its skinny body through a gap at the bottom. I watched it wander off around the pond toward the dilapidated barn. It cocked its leg against the corner before disappearing out of view round the back.
I could have told Kenny and Sim about the dog, but I never did. Maybe it was a bit cruel not to tell them what the night’s noises probably were. Maybe. But knowing the two of them, they’d be happier making up their own minds anyway. I left them fast asleep as I took the map out of my rucksack.
I walked into the field from under the trees and the early sun was already warm. It was going to be another hot, muggy day. I headed for the whirligig and climbed into the same seat Kayleigh and I had sat in the night before. I opened the map and studied the route we’d already traveled. And the best way to go today.
Getting on for an hour later Sim appeared. I’d spent the time poring over the map, looking at all the places I hadn’t been, promising myself all the places I’d go. Sim walked across the field toward me, stretching and massaging his shoulder, looking as stiff and wooden as Pinocchio. I guessed a night on the hard floor had pushed his bones out of place.
“What you need on a floor like that is padding,” I told him, patting myself. I was relieved to see him smile. The argument last night hadn’t been settled, but it looked like we were going to get along this morning all the same. “Kenny still asleep?”
“Dead to the world.”
“It’s almost nine. If his girlfriend doesn’t turn up soon he’s gonna be upset when we have to leave without him saying his sweet goodbyes.”
Sim leaned on the frame of the seat I was in, pulled the map round so he could see it better. “So what’s the plan?”
“Wander back the way we came and hope we find the stop where we got off the bus last night. And hope another’s going to stop there today. Then just hope we have enough money for three tickets.”
“D’you think we do?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. What we haven’t got is money to get home again.”
Sim sighed. “I’ve been trying not to think about that. And how far to Ross if we want to walk?”
“Depends on where we are, exactly.” I pointed at the map. “I think we’re here somewhere.”
“So what’s that? Twenty-five, thirty miles?”
“Give or take.”
“A long way, then.”
“Long enough,” I admitted. “But you’ve walked that far before, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, when me and my dad used to still talk he’d take me hiking along the Pennine Way. We could walk twenty-five miles easy.”
“So it’s definitely doable in a day, we just have to set off as soon as we can.” I folded the map. “Maybe we should wake Kenny—at least get him up and ready. He must have got Kat’s number last night. He can call her.”
Sim was looking toward the gate and the road. “Is that her?”
Someone was climbing over the gate. I had to shield my eyes against the bright morning sun to see who it was and noticed the glowing long blond hair. “It’s Kayleigh.”
She ran toward us, stumbling in the long grass in her haste. Sim and I looked at each other—something was wrong. We hurried to meet her halfway.
She was out of breath and anxious, her face damp with sweat, shiny beneath her eyes. It was obvious she’d dressed in a rush too. “You’re on the telly,” she said.
That didn’t make sense. “What?”
“Aye, aye, on the news. You’ve stolen your pal’s ashes, they said. Ross—he’s dead, isn’t he? He killed himself, didn’t he? It’s on this morning’s news.”
Sim and I just stared at her, struck dumb.
“Everybody’s really worried. They said you might kill yourselves too. They said it’s a suicide pact you’ve got.”
It was getting more bizarre by the second. I had to physically take a step back, then ask,
“What?”
She was pale, maybe frightened. She tried to catch her breath. “They said your pal committed suicide, and that you’ve taken his ashes and might be wanting to commit suicide too.”
It was ludicrous. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. What did the people on television care about anything? I was amazed. Sim was angry.
“Ross didn’t kill himself,” he said, letting that anger show. “Whoever’s saying that needs their head sorted.”
Kayleigh was almost as flustered as us. “But it’s what they’re saying on the telly. They’re showing pictures of all three of you, and asking for anybody who’s seen you to call in. My brother says he’s going to phone them.”
“Who?”
“Calum.”
“But who’s he gonna phone?”
“The
police
. He’s going to say you’re here.”
And now I was moving. I was running. All I could think was we had to wake Kenny and get going. Nothing else mattered. They were going to try and stop us from getting to Ross. I didn’t want them to stop us. I refused to let them.
Sim was on my heels, Kayleigh too. We crashed through the trees and into Tramp’s Hotel. Kenny was still asleep with his head on my rucksack. I yanked it out from under him, jolting him awake.
Bleary-eyed and bewildered, he rubbed hard at his doughy face and looked around, trying to get his bearings.
“Come on,” I told him. “We’ve got to move. We’ve got to get going.”
He yawned. “I’m knackered.”
“Come on, Kenny, okay? No messing around. Remember that deep shit we’re in? It just got deeper. The police are after us.”
That woke him up.
“The police?”
Sim nodded. He was chewing on his bottom lip, clenching and unclenching his fists.
I thought Kenny was going to burst into tears. “I’ve got to get home,” he said. Jumping up but not quite knowing how or where to run.
“No. We’ve got to get to Ross,” I said.
Kenny looked at me like I was an alien. “No way, Blake. We’ve got to—”
“You can’t back out now, I’m not gonna let you. Sim’s not gonna let you either.” We both turned to Sim, and I realized I didn’t have a clue how he felt about how things were turning out, whether he wanted to keep going to Ross or thought it was time to go home to face our parents. “Sim? You agree with me, right? You think we should keep going, don’t you?”
He looked pained. “I don’t know.”
And the three of us stood there, not saying a word, not knowing what was coming next.
Would another day and night deepen the trouble even more? Undoubtedly. But that was only if it
could
get any deeper. And so what? Did I care about the trouble, about what my parents were going to say? I’d been grounded before, I could handle that. I’d had my allowance stopped for two months once, and I’d come through that okay. My parents and all their yelling and punishments didn’t scare me these days like they used to when I was eleven.
But the police getting involved … And DS Cropper …
Could he arrest us? Would Ross’s mum and dad press charges for theft or something?
But I also believed that what we were doing now was the most important thing any of us had ever done in our lives.
I’d forgotten Kayleigh was there. “You’re not really going to kill yourselves, are you?”
“Do we look stupid?” Sim snapped.
“You don’t have to be stupid to do it,” Kayleigh said. “This boy at our school—”
“No, we’re not,” I told her. “Of course not.”
“And Ross didn’t kill himself either,” Sim said. “Okay?”
Kayleigh backed away from him. “It’s just they said on the news that—”
Kenny looked like he might faint. “We’re on the
news
?”
“Listen, yes, I admit we’ve got Ross’s ashes,” I said to Kayleigh. “But because we want to give him a proper funeral. All this suicide rubbish just proves that his mum and dad and everybody else didn’t know him even half as well as we did. You’ve got to stop your brother from phoning the police.”
“It’s gone too far, Blake,” Kenny said.
“We’ve
gone too far. I’m telling you—”
“Tell me something I care about!” I shouted in his face. Then back to Kayleigh. “Try to talk to your brother. Please?”
“Would he do it for you?” she asked. “Your pal—Ross. Would he do the same for one of you?”
That was the easiest question in the world. “Yes.”
And the thought galvanized me. “Come on, Sim. You know it’s true.”
Sim seemed to brace himself, then nodded. “I guess so, yeah.”
“Kenny?”
Kenny squirmed.
“He’d do
exactly
the same, Kenny. You know he would. No matter what happened.”
Kenny grimaced, but nodded too. “Okay, okay, I know. But I don’t ever want to go home after this,” he said. “I’ll be the dead one then. My mum, she’ll … She really will.”
I felt better. We were moving again. We bundled up our stuff, pushed it into our rucksacks. Our T-shirts weren’t quite dry but we shoved them in all the same, burying the urn underneath. I patted Kenny’s back, told him it would be okay.
“Is Kat coming?” he asked Kayleigh.
I didn’t let her answer. “We can’t wait, Kenny.”
“You said I could see her before we went.”
“I’ve never known her to get out of bed before ten if she’s not forced to,” Kayleigh told him.
Kenny sagged. But Kayleigh scribbled Kat’s phone number on the back of his hand. It cheered him up a little. “Tell her how much I like her, will you?”
Kayleigh nodded.
“You were right, you know,” I said to her as I hefted my
rucksack up onto my shoulders. “Maybe if we’d just bothered to tell Ross how we felt we probably wouldn’t be having to do all this.”
“Are you still trying to get to Kirkcudbright?” she asked. “It’s a really long way to walk.”
“We’ll get a bus if we can. Do you know if there’s any?”
“We can’t get a bus,” Sim said. “Someone’s bound to recognize us if we’ve been on the telly.”
“But we’ve got to get there as quick as we can.” It felt like a race now. Them versus us. And they’d stop us the first chance they had. “We’ve got to get there before they realize that’s where we’re going.”
Kayleigh seemed to be thinking. “Can any of you ride a motorbike?”
The morning was already heating up. Blue, blue sky without a hint of cloud. Kayleigh lived in a renovated farmhouse just ten minutes’ walk from the field with Tramp’s Hotel. We ran there in five. A tree-lined and winding gravel driveway led from the road to the squat, whitewashed house, and to the adjoining stables with heavy padlocked doors. Kayleigh told us to stay hidden behind the trees while she snatched the keys.
Sim and I crouched down but Kenny couldn’t stop fidgeting. “Kat must live somewhere round here too,” he said. “There’s a village or something, isn’t there?”
“Keep your head down,” Sim hissed, tugging at the back of Kenny’s collar.
We waited. There was no way we could tell what was going on inside the house. Was her brother on the phone right that second? Had she been caught trying to sneak out with the keys? Were the police on their way?
Sim asked, “You reckon we can trust her?”
“She won’t grass us up,” I said, hoping it was true.
“But what about all this stuff with the news and the police? You don’t reckon it’s just her and her mates making it up? It’s all a bit far-fetched, isn’t it? It could just be their idea of a big joke.”
I knew what he meant. How come this had all got so out of hand? When had the world gone so mad? But then DS Cropper’s message was on my phone, wasn’t it? I’d heard it with my own ears.
“She seemed too worried and worked up for it just to be a joke,” I said. “And she knew nothing about Ross being dead anyway. The only way she could’ve known was if it really was on the telly about us.”
“My mum’s gonna kill me for being on the telly,” Kenny said.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I told him. “If everybody thinks we’ve got some kind of crazy suicide pact, maybe they’re just gonna be so pleased to see us and find out it’s not true that they’ll be completely overjoyed we’re still alive and instantly forgive us.”