The Impossible Boy Read online

  Edgar nodded. ‘Of course.’ He had worked for the Secret Service for nearly twenty years and knew there was scarcely a single foul deed they would not commit in the pursuit of Britain’s interests.

  The man rose to his feet and walked around to the front of the desk. The desk being the size it was, this took a good ten seconds. He held out his hands graciously to Edgar.

  ‘Thank you so much for coming here today with the message. I do appreciate your taking the trouble. I’m so sorry I was snippy with you earlier.’ He shook Edgar warmly by the hand, clasping his other hand tightly over Edgar’s.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Edgar. ‘We’re both just doing our jobs.’ He felt a sudden sharp pricking in the back of his hand. He snatched it out of the man’s grip. There was a red dot on the back of his hand. Blood.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said the man. Edgar saw he was holding a small, stubby syringe in the hand he had clasped over his. ‘A sedative. And rather a powerful one too.’

  ‘Whuh . . .?’ Edgar’s vision suddenly began to blur.

  ‘You see,’ said the man, ‘the thing is, you saw the message. And the fewer people who see it, the better for Britain. Thankfully though, the sedative now entering your system will erase all memory of your visit here today.’

  ‘Whuh . . .?’ said Edgar again. His mouth wasn’t working terribly well. Or his limbs. He sank slowly to his knees.

  ‘In fact, I’m afraid that, as we can take no chances with the security of the message, to be on the safe side I had to give you a dose of the sedative so strong that it will erase your memory of the entire last – oooh – twenty-five, thirty years, I should think.’

  ‘Thirty years?’ mumbled Edgar. His lips were numb. The floor suddenly looked like a very comfortable place. He lay on it, cradling his head in his hands.

  ‘I believe you mentioned you were married?’ said the man.

  Edgar nodded dumbly. He tried to mouth the word ‘Charlotte’.

  ‘Splendid! Complete amnesia is the perfect way to put the sparkle back into your relationship! All those years of arguments and nagging swept away in an instant. You’ll be able to get to know each other all over again. I’m really most jealous!’

  Edgar did not reply because he was no longer conscious.

  The man returned to his thronelike chair and pressed a button on the armrest. A second small hatch opened on the vast surface of the desk and a tiny telephone no bigger than a playing card slid upwards. The keypad of the phone bore only a single digit – 1. He gently pressed the number with a finger and held the tiny phone to his ear. There was a muted ringing tone.

  ‘Hello?’ said a voice.

  ‘Good afternoon!’ said the man cheerfully. He eyed Edgar’s unconscious form. ‘I wonder if you might send a cleaner over to the office? It appears to be somewhat . . . er . . . untidy.’

  ‘Certainly, sir. Be about five minutes.’

  ‘Thank you!’ said Sir Orville McIntyre. ‘You really are most terribly kind.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAS CHASE

  Gabby pressed herself flat against the wall, feeling the rough brickwork scrape against the back of her head. She checked her watch. School was due to finish in just under three minutes.

  This time she wouldn’t lose him.

  The previous afternoon, she and Barney had met up in a quiet corner of the playground during break time to discuss the strange magical abilities of Chas Hinton.

  ‘You’ve got to admit, mate,’ said Gabby, removing her small, round glasses and cleaning them with the edge of her jumper, ‘that trick with the doves was pretty darn cool. I can’t begin to imagine how he does it. And the way he works the audience! He’s so charming, isn’t he? I can see why everyone likes him.’

  ‘In other words, he’s a show-off who knows a few magic tricks,’ said Barney, rolling his eyes. ‘Biiiiiiiig deal! Hardly impossible, though, is it?’

  Gabby smiled and slotted her glasses back on to her nose. ‘What about him walking on water, then? If that’s a trick, I wouldn’t mind learning it. It would make going on holiday to France a lot cheaper if you could hike there!’

  Barney wrinkled his nose. ‘We’ve only got Laura’s word for that, haven’t we? She might have made a mistake. Or she could be lying.’

  ‘Why on Earth would she want to lie about Chas walking on water?’

  Barney shrugged. ‘People do the weirdest things to get attention, don’t they? Back in Kent an old lady on our street used to tell everyone that elves were stealing her tea bags. She was on the local TV news saying she’d stayed up one night to take a photo of them doing it but she’d put her thumb over the camera lens by mistake and none of the pictures came out. She was talking rubbish, obviously, but it got her on the telly, didn’t it? Maybe it’s the same with Laura.’

  ‘She hardly seems the type to invent stuff,’ said Gabby, ‘and she’s a pretty popular girl herself – it’s not like she’s short of attention.’

  ‘We need to find out more about Chas,’ said Barney. ‘I don’t know where he’s from, what his folks do. Anything about his life outside school. Discovering that might give us some clue.’

  ‘I’ll ask around,’ said Gabby. ‘Someone might know something.’

  ‘And I’m going to follow him home tonight. See where he lives. We’re in the same general science class for last lesson today.’

  ‘You could always just, you know, ask him where he’s from,’ said Gabby with a teasing smile. ‘Engage him in conversation. It’s a pretty good way to find out stuff about people, believe it or not.’

  Barney shook his head. ‘I don’t want him to know we’re investigating him. He might try to mislead us. I know everyone thinks he’s ace but there’s something about him I don’t like. I don’t trust him.’

  Gabby widened her eyes in mock-terror. ‘Oh no! Take care following him then, mate! Do you want me to come along and act as your bodyguard in case things turn ugly?’

  ‘Ha flipping ha,’ said Barney in a flat voice. ‘Don’t worry about me, Gabs. I reckon I’m pretty good at following people without being noticed. You’ll see.’

  When the bell rang at three-thirty that afternoon at the end of the general science lesson, Barney calmly put his things back in his schoolbag, keeping one eye firmly on Chas Hinton, who was sitting a couple of desks in front of him. Chas slid from his seat, pulled on his coat and headed for the door. Barney followed silently.

  Chas rounded a corner, moving against the flow of bodies streaming towards the main entrance, and slipped into the school hall. Barney could see him clearly through the window in one of the hall’s wide double-doors. He was walking towards the centre of the empty hall. Interesting . . .

  ‘See you at football practice on Thursday night, Barney?’

  It was a boy called Rob Yellowwood, a tall kid with red hair and a freckly nose.

  ‘What?’ said Barney. ‘Oh yeah, sure. Sorry, mate. Can’t talk now. Need to be somewhere. See you Thursday.’ He waved absently at Rob and quickly sidled up to the double-doors leading into the hall. He peered inside.

  It was completely empty.

  Frowning, Barney pulled open the door and stepped inside, his footsteps echoing on the wooden floor. His eyes darted around the empty hall, his heart sinking lower with every step. He checked behind the headmaster’s lectern, behind the piano; he checked every inch of floor, every corner of the room. There were no other exits. Nowhere to hide.

  It had happened. He had, in that briefest of moments, lost Chas. It was impossible. But he had managed it. And now Gabby was going to know just how rubbish at investigating he was . . .

  ‘Don’t worry about it, mate,’ Gabby laughed later that evening when he phoned to tell her about his investigative blunder. ‘I’m sure even Sherlock Holmes had an off day.’

  Next day, though, was different. Gabby was prepared. She had a plan. And as Barney was away from school on his LifeSkillz placement, she was also on her own and would have no one else to blame if she messed up
.

  LifeSkillz was a scheme dreamed up by Mr Steele, the deputy head at Blue Hills High, to get pupils involved in their local community and give them a glimpse of life outside the classroom. Mr Steele himself had come up with the name ‘LifeSkillz’ – he was very keen on the ‘z’; kids liked words with ‘z’s in them, apparently – and for two afternoons a week the kids (or as Mr Steele put it, ‘the kidz’) in Barney’s year were assigned to people, places and institutions in Blue Hills that needed a little assistance. Some kids got to help out at The Blue Hills Weekly Chronicle, some at the local radio station. Barney, however, had been assigned to help out an elderly couple who lived near the school, something, if he was honest, he wasn’t too happy about.

  Faking an optician’s appointment, Gabby had left her final lesson of the day twenty minutes early. She used this time to slip into the girls’ toilets and change into a different coat and a curly blonde wig she had bought the previous year for a fancy dress party (she had gone as Marilyn Monroe but everyone had assumed she was Lady Gaga, much to her annoyance). She removed her glasses and put in her emergency contact lenses. The tiny slivers of plastic felt weird and uncomfortable in her eyes but she knew any disguise she donned would be useless if she was still wearing her usual glasses. An old baseball cap pulled down low over her face completed the outfit.

  That morning, Laura had told her which classroom Chas would be in for his final lesson of the day – class LO5 (the LO stood for Lower Block, a long single-storey building that was the oldest in the school). Laura had also told her that kids in her and Chas’s form were not doing their LifeSkillz activities until next term so he should definitely be in school today. Gabby had a sudden vision of Chas on LifeSkillz working on the checkout in a supermarket and making customers’ groceries vanish as they trundled along the conveyor belt. She stifled a giggle.

  The school bell rang. Gabby tensed. From within the building erupted the happy shouts and laughter that signalled the end of the school day, followed by the weary voices of teachers calling for calm. Chairs scraped against the floor. Fire doors squeaked and slammed. Muffled footsteps echoed down corridors. And then, like cola from a well-shaken can, a stream of kids burst through the door of the Lower Block and exploded into the playground, yelling, running, pulling on their coats, all with a single happy thought – home.

  Chas was one of the first kids out. He waved at another boy and sauntered towards the school gate. Gabby followed, moving through the crowd at a leisurely pace, keeping her distance.

  Watching Chas move through the school gates, Gabby pushed forwards and, pulling down the peak of her cap further still, she followed.

  Town was clogged with traffic. Cars and buses were bunched up against one another like impatient cattle, engines grumbling and exhausts coughing out streams of smelly white clouds. Gabby slid into the doorway of a shop and peeped around at Chas. He was standing outside a specialist hi-fi shop a few doors down, gazing in at various pieces of unidentifiable matte black audio equipment. What is it about boys and hi-fi stuff? she wondered. Could anyone really tell the difference between a CD player that cost thirty pounds and one that cost three thousand pounds?

  Then a thought struck her.

  She remembered reading somewhere that a lot of the specialist props that magicians used in their tricks were actually extremely expensive pieces of high technology. An apparently simple bit of conjuring involving, for instance, some vanishing sponge balls might actually utilise cutting-edge materials and techniques developed by big electronics corporations or even NASA to achieve its effects. Perhaps Chas was somehow using the science of sound to influence people’s minds and this was why he was so interested in state-of-the-art audio equipment? Could sounds of a certain frequency interfere with a person’s brainwaves and make them hallucinate that they’d seen miraculous feats? It seemed doubtful, she thought – impossible even – but that was what Geek Inc. was all about, wasn’t it? Maybe if she could see which bits of audio gear Chas was looking at that might give her some clue? She stepped out of the doorway, her eyes fixed on Chas . . .

  ‘Ooof!’

  The old lady in the fur coat slammed into Gabby with the force of a rugby fullback. The two of them tumbled to the ground in a jumble of limbs. Gabby leaped to her feet, half dazed, gabbling frantic apologies, and attempted to help her up.

  ‘Keep away!’ bellowed the old lady, waving her umbrella at Gabby. She was a squat, white-haired creature with a sour little mouth and fierce glasses. The skin sagging from her neck reminded Gabby of an old tortoise she once owned. ‘You won’t get my purse, you little thug!’

  ‘I’m not a thug,’ objected Gabby, one eye on Chas and trying to keep her voice down. The last thing she needed now was to attract his attention. ‘I’m just a girl. I’m so sorry. Here, let me help you . . . Yowch!’ The old lady’s umbrella slashed through the air like a sword. Gabby snatched back her stinging hand. ‘Hey! That really hurt! I was only trying to help you up!’

  ‘Only trying to help yourself to my pension, more like!’ squawked the old lady, struggling to her feet. ‘Help!’ she screeched. ‘Police! I’m being mugged! This is a hate crime! Old people have rights too, you know!’

  ‘I’m not mugging you!’ hissed Gabby. ‘I swear! Please stop shouting! There’s really nothing to be afraid of.’ She almost put her hand over the old lady’s mouth but thankfully thought better of it. Instead, she put her arm around her shoulder and guided her gently into the doorway of the shop out of view of the rest of the street.

  ‘Listen to me,’ said Gabby, speaking very slowly and clearly. ‘It was just an accident, that’s all. And you’re OK, aren’t you? You’re not actually hurt in any way.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said the old lady curtly, ‘I am hurt. You’ve broken my leg.’

  ‘Broken your leg?’ hissed Gabby through clenched teeth. ‘You’re standing up! You wouldn’t be doing that if your leg was broken.’ She could feel the anger rising inside herself like steam in a kettle. Why was she standing here arguing with this potty old woman when she had a mission to carry out?

  ‘Well, it certainly feels broken,’ insisted the old lady, rubbing her leg. ‘Or at the very least badly bruised. Either way I shall be doing my best to ensure that you are put behind bars for many, many years for the wicked crime you have committed today. And listen to me when I’m telling you off, won’t you? Stop gawping into the distance! What are you looking for? Your manners?’

  ‘Hmm?’ muttered Gabby absently, as she tried to peer over the old lady’s shoulder. She was pretty sure Chas was still there . . .

  A woman emerged from the shop. She was squat like the old lady, burly, with short hair dyed a very bright shade of red. She eyed Gabby, her face stony. ‘What’s going on ’ere, Mum?’ she asked the old lady in a gruff voice.

  ‘This young tearaway has just assaulted me and tried to rob me blind! Pin her down while I fetch the police.’

  The woman with the red hair rolled her eyes at Gabby. ‘Sorry, love,’ she said. ‘Mum gets a bit confused sometimes. She doesn’t mean any harm by it, really.’ She took the old lady by the arm and led her away. ‘Come on, Mum. Let’s go to the OK Café for a cuppa.’

  ‘Ooh, yes,’ cooed the old lady. ‘That would be lovely!’

  Mother and daughter strolled away arm-in-arm, serene. Gabby shook her head slowly. The old lady suddenly looked back at Gabby and thrust a bony little finger in her direction. ‘I’m watching you, thug!’ she rasped. And then they vanished around the corner.

  Gabby leaned against the shop door and breathed a colossal sigh. When her temper had subsided and her breathing returned to its normal rate, she peeped around the doorway once more, expecting to find Chas had vanished.

  But Chas was still there outside the hi-fi shop, absorbed in his window shopping. After a moment he thrust his hands into his coat pockets and set off up the street. Gabby waited for him to get a safe distance ahead and stepped out of the doorway.

  The street was
dotted with shoppers trudging along, plastic carrier bags dangling from their hands. Dusk was fast approaching. The colours of the town were draining away to a uniform slate grey. Chas trotted over a zebra crossing, head down, apparently lost in his thoughts. She watched as he rounded the corner into a narrow passageway separating two blocks of shops. Her heart began to beat faster. She knew there was only a high fence at the end of the alley – it was a dead end. Moving quickly, stepping with care to prevent her footsteps from making too much noise, she scurried after him. Pressing herself flat against the wall beside the mouth of the passageway, she peeked around the corner. What she saw made her jaw drop.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LIFESKILLZ (WITH A ‘Z’)

  The shoe was full of spoons.

  Barney picked them out one by one. Eight, nine, ten . . . ten spoons. He gathered them together and checked the other shoe. In it he found a single house sparrow. The greyish-brown bird seemed somewhat perplexed and alarmed. With great care, he took the sparrow in one hand, feeling the warmth and fragility of this tiny scrap of life, and opened the hall window, taking care not to knock over a tall plaster statuette of a horse standing on the windowsill. He tried to imagine what thoughts were running through the sparrow’s mind. A shoe is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the natural habitat of a bird, nor is the interior of a human house, even if the bird in question is called a house sparrow. The creature had, he realised, been plunged into a completely alien world. Its senses would be bombarding its mind with questions it was in no position to answer. In other words, it was probably well freaking out. He unclasped his fingers. The sparrow didn’t hang about and zoomed straight into the waiting branches of a tall tree in the garden. It looked back at Barney, as if memorising his face in case it was one day called upon to pick him out of a police identity parade.