To be honest, I don’t remember much about what happened after that.
Nel told me that I collapsed in the water and Shafeen had to wade in and fish me out, only just catching me before I slipped over the lip of the falls myself. He’d picked me up and carried me to the Land Rover, which was parked on the packhorse bridge. I have a vague memory of being in his arms, but it was far from romantic. I was numb with cold and shock and actually thought I could still die.
Apparently it was Nel who drove the Land Rover back to Longcross in the dark. I don’t remember that either. Nor do I remember Shafeen and Nel dressing me in enough of their clothes to conceal the wetsuit and carrying me shivering into the house, or the servants swarming around me and fetching me a dressing gown and blankets and wrapping me up in front of the roaring Great Hall fire, or the same ancient family doctor coming to check me over.
I do remember, though, the Medievals trooping back in, much later, and the unmistakable flare of surprise in their eyes when they saw me alive. I remember the smooth lies they told, one for each of them:
‘Oh my God, we’ve been so worried about you …’
‘Don’t you remember falling in? We were all trying to fish you out …’
‘Then you just slipped under Henry’s boat and disappeared …’
‘We thought you’d drowned …’
‘We’ve been out looking for you ever since …’
I could quite believe they’d been looking for me, but not to save me, that was for sure.
Then, a little later, I remember Cookson being the first person to say, Where’s Henry? And Shafeen looking at me and very slightly shaking his head.
And a couple of them going back out to find him, and Lara coming back and saying, Hen’s not home yet.
Then Perfect going out to look for him.
Then the police.
Then the hours in front of the Great Hall fire, hours of sipping hot drinks in a white towelling bathrobe, hours of answering questions with lies, and hours of waiting for the results of a torch-lit police search with growing dread for the news we knew would come, before I was finally able to escape and go up to bed.
When I crept into Lowther I didn’t switch on the lights. The police cars still crowding in the drive outside illuminated the room every other second with their eerie blue lights. I sat on the bed, exhausted, and Jeffrey looked down at me, his blue-lit expression oddly sympathetic. His eyes seemed softer, his nose rounder, his antlers less pointed. He looked downcast, defeated. ‘Yes, you understand,’ I said to him, wearily. ‘Aidan’s stag escaped because he was invisible, but you never quite got the trick of it, did you? And neither did I. All term I kept my head down, never tried to stand out. But I wasn’t quite invisible enough. I thought I was just being myself. But being myself was to be different, and that was enough to put me in Henry’s sights. Better to turn yourself into a mini-Medieval, be exactly like them or be separated from the herd and hunted down.’ But Nel had tried that approach and it didn’t work; she hadn’t quite got it right. And Shafeen was always different, by being another race; he might as well have been another species.
Suddenly I couldn’t be in there, just me and Jeffrey. I needed them now: my friends, my new friends. I left Lowther and padded along the passageway to Raby, Shafeen’s room. I knocked softly and opened the door. Nel was already there, sitting on the window seat with Shafeen. She’d obviously felt the same way. We didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. Nothing to do but watch and wait. I joined them and we all looked down.
They brought Henry’s body back at midnight. I saw the stretcher being transferred from the back of the shooting brake to the waiting ambulance. But you could see that it was too late for any medical attention. In films, you see, if someone’s still alive, whatever state they’re in, they leave the face uncovered – obvs – so the person can breathe. Henry’s body was covered from head to foot. We all watched as the stretcher slid into the ambulance. The doors were slammed, someone signed a form on a clipboard, and the ambulance drove away. We watched it till it was out of sight. A young man was dead, and however evil he undoubtedly was, and however much his death might have prevented countless injuries and even other deaths, he was still someone’s son.
I was the first to speak. ‘We are murderers,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Shafeen gently, but firmly. ‘It was a suicide.’
‘We should have gone back for him,’ I said. ‘We should have gone to find him. What if he was still alive? What if we could have saved him?’ The fact that I’d been barely conscious after his fall didn’t blunt my guilt.
Nel said, ‘How? We couldn’t have got back down the falls. You know. It was hard enough for you climbing up. And no one could have survived that fall, from that height.’
I knew that to be true – I’d known when I was climbing that, if I’d fallen, I would have been finished.
‘Plus,’ said Shafeen, ‘we had to get you back. If I hadn’t fished you out, you’d have gone over the falls too. And if we hadn’t got you back to Longcross, you’d have died of hypothermia.’ He must have heard how it sounded. ‘I’m not calling myself a hero. I’m just stating a fact.’
‘And,’ said Nel, ‘Henry wanted to go. He jumped.’
‘Yes, but we made him do it,’ I persisted. ‘We put the noose around his neck. We threatened him with worldwide humiliation at the hands of the very technology he despised. Social media, the police, the press. He couldn’t handle that.’ I turned to Nel. ‘You aren’t really going to upload his confession, are you?’
‘Not now,’ said Nel. And I knew what she meant. Not now he’s dead.
Shafeen closed the heavy curtains against the blue lights and we all collapsed onto his bed in our pyjamas. There was nothing weird – it was like we were all five years old. Nel got out the Saros 7S and we all looked at it where it sat on her palm. In its silver heart lived the technology that had saved me. It had been an integral part of our plan. That miraculous, powerful, friendly little device had turned a 2D Ordnance Survey map on the estate room wall into a 3D digital image of Longmere and its surrounding terrain. It had taken a unique thermal image map of my body and tracked my position every minute of the day when I’d been fishing with Henry, so I was never alone, and Shafeen and Nel knew where I was at all times. It had night-sight capability so Nel was able to film Henry and me at the head of the waterfall even without the light of the torch. It had talked to its mother satellite, uploading to the Saros Orbit every shred of evidence we needed against Henry de Warlencourt, from the photos of the game books to the video of his confession. And now I just felt like I wanted to switch off; and it could help me do that too. I knew exactly what we all needed.
We all crowded round the phone and watched YouTube into the early hours until we fell asleep right there in Shafeen’s room. We watched all the crap on the Internet, from piano-playing cats, to skater fails to bottle flips. We watched ‘try not to laugh’ challenges, mannequin challenges and 24-hour challenges. We watched Vines of people dabbing and animals sneezing, and tons of memes. The brash music and stupid electronic sounds bounced off the damask wallpaper, the garish lights and colours reflected off the heavy silk curtains of the bed that Elizabeth I had slept in. Strange though it might seem, since we were filling his ancient medieval house with Savage rubbish, it was our elegy for Henry.
We let the world in.
In the morning, before we went back to our own rooms, we had a decision to make.
‘What do we do?’ I didn’t need to explain. I meant, Do we show the video to the police?
‘We keep quiet,’ said Shafeen. ‘The huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ is over – it can’t continue without Henry at Longcross. No point heaping disgrace on the family just to make ourselves feel better. His dad’s obviously a shit, but his mum might be OK. She’s lost her son – we should let her have her dignity. Let’s keep quiet about the footage, unless someone tries to connect us with his death. At the moment, they don’t even know that we were with him when he died. If they work that out, then we’ve got the evidence to show that he took his own life.’
But they never did work it out. The policeman who spoke to me, an inspector with an accent almost as posh as Henry’s – treated me very gently, almost as if he was sorry to have to interview me at all. I said I’d fallen over the side of Henry’s boat and swum to the shore, and I hadn’t seen Henry after that.
‘I suppose he went to look for me, and it was dark, and …’
Suddenly, totally without warning, I started to cry. I didn’t even have to fake it. I suppose after the shock it was just hitting me what had happened.
The inspector cleared his throat in the way that posh people communicate they are uncomfortable. He patted my hand awkwardly. ‘You mustn’t feel responsible,’ he said in his bluff, stiff-upper-lip way.
But I did.
I was responsible.
At the end of just a morning of questioning, we were allowed to return to school. The remaining Medievals waited for Lord and Lady de Warlencourt, who were driving up from London, while a police officer drove Shafeen, Nel and me back in a squad car. I was just glad it wasn’t Perfect. If he knew what we’d done to his beloved master, he’d have driven us off the road.
For the second time I endured the journey between STAGS and Longcross in silence, but this time I was glad of it.