We all waited a good five minutes before we dared speak.
I rolled onto my back and breathed out a soft whooooo of relief. Shafeen raised himself up on his elbow, hair flopping in his eyes. Nel sat up and tapped the Saros to make the torch come back on. ‘Sheesh!’ she said shakily. ‘D’you think he saw us?’
Privately I was almost sure he had; how could he not have done when he’d looked right at me? But if he had seen us, why would he just leave us and go? Not wanting to spook Nel, I said, ‘Apparently not.’
‘What do you think he was doing? Was he looking for us?’
It certainly felt that way, but, again, I didn’t want to freak her out. ‘For all we know, it’s what he does every night. Patrols the place, making sure everything’s as it should be. Maybe that’s his headkeeper thing.’
‘Well, he’s gone for now,’ said Shafeen, raking his hair back from his face. ‘So what do we do about this?’ He was still clutching the game book from the 1960s. ‘It’s a good start, but we need more.’
I hauled myself to a sitting position. ‘He’s right, you know,’ I said to Nel. ‘It’s what they call “circumstantial evidence”. Watch any courtroom movie. We need more. We have to catch them at it.’
Shafeen carefully rested his chin on the closed book. ‘The thing is, there’s only one more opportunity to do that. And that’s when we go fishin’. So, Greer, it’s down to you. Tomorrow, if we stay, it’s your turn. You do know that, don’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Huntin’ shootin’ fishin’. Nel got hunted. I got shot. Tomorrow, it’s you. So you have to decide what you want to do.’ He got to his feet. ‘They invited us because we are misfits. We are upstarts, all at a school where we don’t belong. We are to be kept down, to be frightened so much that we won’t get ideas above our station in future. We might even be culled, to restore the natural order. Look at all these books.’ He waved his arm back along the shelves, embracing centuries of books in the gesture. ‘Nel and I were lucky. How many haven’t been? How many kids over the centuries, before forensics, and DNA, and all that CSI stuff, have been killed? Even in this century, how many accidents have been covered up, because the de Warlencourts still live this feudal life where they own every tenant on their land and every servant in their house? The little lordlings want their fun, and no one’s powerful enough to stop them. Until now.’ He turned to Nel. ‘You and I have been prey already. It’s too late for us to trap Henry. It’s up to Greer now.’ He turned to me. ‘If you’re willing, it’s you who will have to catch him in the act.’
I thought of Gemma Delaney, of Nel, and of Shafeen. But most of all, weirdly, I thought of poor Aadhish Jadeja. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ I said.
Shafeen breathed out. ‘Then we need a plan.’
‘It would help if we knew where we were going fishing,’ said Nel.
‘Well, that’s easy,’ said Shafeen. ‘It must be the lake where we were the other day.’
‘The lake where the stag stood at bay?’ I asked.
‘That’s the one. It’s on Longcross land so it belongs to Henry. Even the Medievals wouldn’t dare to try anything on a public lake. I think it’s north-west of here, but I’m not really sure.’
‘There’s a room with this huge map all over one wall. Just down the passageway.’
‘That’ll be the estate room. Come on. It would be good to know the lay of the land.’ Shafeen still had the game book from the 1960s in his hands.
‘Aren’t you going to put that back?’ Nel asked.
‘No way,’ he said. ‘This one’s coming with me.’ I couldn’t tell if he wanted to have, finally, a long chat about things with his dad, or if he thought the book was somehow shameful, and didn’t want the evidence of his dad’s defeat to remain at Longcross.
‘Won’t they notice?’ I asked. There was a gap in the long shelf of books like a missing tooth, so Shafeen went along the shelf moving all the books a tiny bit until the gap was closed.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Good as new. They won’t notice unless they’re really looking. Come on. And let’s be really quiet. That mastodon might still be hanging around.’
Nel tapped off the torch, and we crept down the passageway as I counted the doors – I was pretty sure the map room, as I thought of it, had been at the end of the same passageway the library was on. But things look pretty different when you’re swanning down a passageway channelling Elizabeth Bennet, feeling pretty sure that you are the lord of the manor’s girlfriend, to when you’re stumbling along in the dark, plotting to bring the same lord of the manor down, while his tame heavy is prowling around with a gun. I took a guess and pulled the other two into a doorway.
Nel tapped on the torch again, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It was the room I remembered, with the walnut desk and the antique globe and one wall covered with an old-looking but detailed Ordnance Survey map of every inch of the Longcross estate. I went right up to it, looking at the incredible detail in the powerful white circle of light thrown by the Saros’s torch. I traced the house with my finger – the house I’d looked over, and loved, only this morning. Then I let my finger travel to where we’d been huntin’ and where we’d been shootin’. And then, in the next valley, I let my finger rest over a long, irregular oval.
The lake.
There were letters written across it, spaced out because the lake was so big. ‘L-O-N-G-M-E-R-E,’ I spelled out. ‘Longmere.’ The lake was enclosed at one end, and at the other flowed into a little stream with jagged lines drawn above it. Nel moved the phone closer. ‘Conrad’s Force,’ she read.
Shafeen said, ‘It’s pronounced “foss”. It’ll be a waterfall.’
‘No doubt named after the famous Conrad de Warlencourt, top knight, thief of the True Cross and all-round scumbag.’ My tone was flippant but I don’t think anyone was fooled; my voice sounded pretty shaky. My eyes travelled back to the lake as if pulled there, and we all stood in silence looking at the long, dark smudge.
I knew what Shafeen was thinking. Then he said it out loud. ‘Can you swim, Greer?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I used to swim for my school. My old school, obviously. Not STAGS.’
I was a good swimmer; actually I’d been one of the best at Bewley, but I’d never tried out for any teams at STAGS, sure there must be lots of baby Olympians who’d been paddling up and down their own vast swimming pools since they were in swim nappies, so I’d never bothered. But, in an environment with no phones and no friends, I had spent quite a few lonely hours thrashing up and down the state-of-the-art pool at school, and now I was glad I had.
‘Good,’ said Shafeen. ‘Because the chances are that before tomorrow is over you’ll be making a close acquaintance with that lake.’
‘Unless they just shoot me,’ I said, thinking of Perfect and the gun.
‘No,’ said Shafeen. ‘It’s fishin’, remember? Their own rules are the only ones they follow. And they won’t just drown you either. It’s the chase they crave.’
‘But we can’t just let Greer be bait.’ Nel turned to me. ‘I don’t want you to go through what I went through,’ she said. ‘We need a plan.’
So, by the light of the Saros 7S – which, thanks to Nel’s dad, had been designed with a battery lasting seven days – we made one.
It must have been 2 a.m. when we left the estate room, ready, we hoped, for the next day.
We dropped Nel back at Cheviot and Shafeen walked me to my room. It was risky but Shafeen, as I was discovering, was the only real gentleman of the party.
At the door he turned to go, hesitated and turned back. ‘You asked me why I came to Longcross,’ he said. ‘I came to protect someone. But it’s not Nel. I came because I wasn’t going to let them get you. And I won’t.’
I swallowed. Did he like me in that way, in the way I’d thought Henry liked me? What he said gave me a warm feeling but I couldn’t process it just now. I was too afraid of tomorrow and what it might bring. I just hoped he was as good as his word. I opened the door to Lowther, but just before I went inside his voice stopped me.
‘And in case you’re wondering,’ he said awkwardly, ‘you are beautiful. That’s the one truth Henry told.’