The White Fox (6 page)

“Linda,” Charles said, “if this is going to work, you have to trust Alex.”

“But he’s just … dangerous.”

“And so are you when you want to be.” He wheeled over to Linda and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. He smiled, though she did not return it. “He
has
had an unfortunate past, but give him a chance, won’t you?”

“Besides,” put in Gaby, “what’s the worst that can happen?”

No one answered her. Even with Vince gone, there was the implicit recognition of everyone in the room of just how bad things could get.

“Anyway, does anyone want a cup of tea?”

A shower of plaster cascaded down from a crack in the ceiling and landed in the open kettle.

Linda grimaced.

Jack had to walk to school on his own on Monday morning; Lucy had got a lift in. As he passed by her road and stepped onto the pavement bordering the orchard, he began wondering (or continued wondering, since nothing else had occupied his thoughts for the last twenty-four hours) about the significance of the phone call. Yeats, however good a poet he might have been, had lost all meaning for Jack since Saturday. He had spent the night lying awake, contemplating it, and Sunday had not been much better. Alex’s situation was something of an enigma.

He glanced at his watch. Through the scratched glass surface the hands pointed to eight thirty. He still had quite a bit of time before registration at nine and no one to talk to. Shouldering his bag, he turned into the orchard, slipping down the hill into the valley. He was hit by a wave of ultra-fresh scent, something so blissfully different to the synthetic clean of school and the orphanage and the routine industry of the rest of the town. The grass was soaked with dew under his feet, quickly seeping through to his too-large polyester school trousers. He made his way over to the rough-hewn dirt track that wound around the first few trees, past where he and Lucy had been sitting on Saturday night, and continued.

Yes, Alex’s predicament was extremely strange. Around eighteen months ago, he had just disappeared. There had been only a brief good-bye, just the casual “see you tomorrow” sort, and then he hadn’t come back. For a while speculation had been rife about what might have happened to him and not all amongst the younger generation. Alex, to those who had known him, had been a quiet, relaxed, collected sixth former, and although his grades weren’t fantastic, he had earned the respect of most of the staff and students.

When the gossip had almost died away completely, the head teacher reported that Alex had taken an extended leave of absence. This only told people that he wasn’t dead, and although the head teacher had been pestered constantly, she apparently didn’t know any more of the story than anyone else. It had surfaced a few weeks ago—from, according to Lucy, a fairly reliable source—that Alex was now boxed up in Apollo Hill. Jack had initially taken it to be someone’s idea of a funny joke and dismissed it immediately. He had forgotten about it completely until finding the business card.

Jack found a drier spot and sat down, leaning his schoolbag against the tree next to him. Breathing in slowly, he enjoyed the cool feel of the morning. A couple of birds called to one another somewhere over his head. The trees forming the edge of the wood were apple, their oval leaves brushing lightly against each other. The sky was a drab greyish white, but dark clouds sweeping across the horizon promised rain soon. For as long as he could remember, this was where he’d come whenever he wanted to get away—either from the teachers’ disapproval or the noise and bustle of the orphanage. Still, there was nothing like a Monday morning to set a damper on things.

Things
had
been different, he reflected, looking up at the basalt sky. He and Alex went way back, and Jack suspected that he was the only one who had the right inkling about what might have happened to Alex.

Alex had arrived at the orphanage when Jack was eight. To begin with, he was like Jack, an outcast, and that was how they’d got to know each other. At school, Alex, being several years older than Jack, would stick up for him in front of the other children, and that deterred bullying to some extent, even if it only meant they left Jack alone and made no effort to get to know him. Jack, being much more academic than Alex, would often help with his homework. It could have been more of a rivalry than a relationship, and they had had their rough moments, but the two of them had remained the closest of friends.

The other orphans treated both of them as outsiders, but where Alex found friends seemingly wherever he looked at school, Jack only encountered enmity. However, where someone else might have abandoned the less popular companion, Alex stayed as close to Jack as ever. That was the great thing about Alex; you could always count on him to make the right choices.

Yet there was something more than a simple orphan story. Most of them at the orphanage knew each other’s predicaments, and it was treated as normal to have had a house fire or a car crash. (There was even someone whose parents had been caught up in a roadside bomb whilst working for a charitable organization in the Middle East.) Alex’s story was never told, and Jack doubted whether any of the staff knew much more than he did. He had found anything that alluded to Alex’s history only once, when one of the orphans had succeeded in getting to him. All that had been known then was that he had not been an orphan from birth; his loss had been relatively recent and this was the latest in a string of care homes.

Something caught Jack’s attention out of the corner of his eye. He glanced to his left. Farther round the hill, the orange tape could be seen more clearly, and it looked as if the excavation had begun. A mound of sodden brown earth was piled next to the cordoned-off area, some slipping down the slope onto the grass.

More of the black-cloaked people were crowding around the area, looking down into whatever was being dug up. They were all hooded like the others, but by the movements of their heads, they appeared to be conversing quietly. Jack watched them for a moment and realized they seemed to be arguing. There was something a little unnerving about a group of people dressed in complete black in pure daylight. He had been to Camden Market only once and had found the alternative culture slightly intimidating, but this was different somehow. Again, he got the impression that his eyes were registering something his brain was telling him he didn’t want to see.

One of them straightened up and turned to look directly at him.

Jack turned away quickly. After a pause, he snatched another glance back. The figure was still gazing at him, and now more of them were staring in his direction. He was acutely aware that there was no one else in sight except him, not even any cars passing on the stretch of road above him. Standing and wiping grass from his trousers, he seized his schoolbag and clambered up the slope. They didn’t appear at all friendly, and he didn’t want to be around when they came looking for him.

“Who was he?” the woman hissed as they moved back under cover of the trees.

“Just some kid,” the man replied in his thuggish voice. “He won’t know what he saw.”

“You’re sure?” put in a third.

“He’d better be,” said a fourth disembodied voice close by, “or it’s his head on the line.”

The group stopped suddenly and stood back. They had only just avoided walking into another black-cloaked figure, sitting with one foot up on a tree stump. Under the thick tree cover, it was a lot darker. Other scatterings of colorless light here and there betrayed the time of day; all else was gnarled, grey trunks and scraggly grass.

“Archbishop, when can we do it?”

“Tonight.”

There was a sharp intake of breath all around, and more figures stepped out of the shadows.

“You’re sure we’re ready? Can it be done on such short notice?”

“If my source is correct, the Shard will be arriving today. If all goes to plan, and we have picked our hostage correctly”—he eyed one of the figures to his right—”we shall be gone before sunrise tomorrow. Not that there will be anything to leave behind, of course.”

There were some snorts of amusement around the circle.

“I’m glad,” said one of the women. “I can’t wait to get off this archaic dung heap.” She spat on the ground before her, the white bubbles saturating the fallen, bone-dry leaves.

“We all want to be on our way as soon as possible,” acknowledged the figure, “but we must proceed with the utmost caution. I don’t have to remind you what awaits us if we squander this opportunity.”

There was a slight rustle.

Instantly, all of them turned to the direction of the noise.

There was a pause. Then another movement in the trees.

At superhuman speed, the leading figure extended his arm and let loose a bolt of black lightning from his gloved fingertip.

Something tumbled from one of the trees onto the forest floor.

He glided over and rolled it with his boot. “Just a bird,” he said disdainfully. “Come. We will make camp on the hilltop.” He marched up the hill, followed one by one by the other black cloaks. The last one did a single sweep of the area, then followed.

Unseen by any of them, an ivory-white fox was lying inside a hollow tree trunk, its pearly tail squashed flat against the wood. The isabelline gleam that it usually held was dimmed to nothing, so that now it looked like a slightly strangely colored scavenger. Clawing at the end, it wriggled out of the organic tube and shook the leaves and dirt off its fur. Its tail bobbing with the movement, it stalked through the trees, beyond the tree line, and onto the edge of the orchard. As it passed the orange tape, it paused to gaze intently at the large stone circle that had been uncovered.

The tape fluttered noisily in the wind. There was a slight rustle, and a breeze whipped up, not out of the air but from the depths of the pit. The grass around the edge wilted and blackened.

The fox scarpered off down the hill.

Monday was terrible.

The storm had overtaken Jack on the way to school. Casting itself completely over the town, its arms curling around to embrace it, the clouds had broken loose. Hail had thundered down everywhere, and by the time he reached the reception, he was drenched from head to toe in freezing water. He had to sit through double maths, physics, and French before he could get cleaned up, and even then he couldn’t find a change of clothes. Lucy had had an away netball fixture all day, so he sat at the back on his own in his classes. He spent lunch by himself, sitting in the corner out of the way of the main crowds of full tables. No one even made an attempt to come over and talk to him. The afternoon was hardly better; the titanic struggle of double chemistry awaited him. By the end of it he was extremely downtrodden, still soaked, and very tired.

For once, he just wanted to get back to the orphanage as quickly as possible. He was considering skipping that evening’s detention, but he almost immediately decided against it. Making Dr. Orpheus angry once was about as wise as taunting a bleeding rhino. Making him angry twice was shooting it in the mouth with a harpoon gun. So, at four o’clock after an extremely dull media studies lesson on the analysis of a news article, he went up to the chemistry department and knocked on Dr. Orpheus’s office door.