Of the three cool places I’d had lunch on the Longcross estate, the boathouse was the coolest.
It was a long wooden building on the lakeshore, with a kind of planked balcony on stilts that came right out over to the water. Inside there was no fire this time (obvs – not with all that wood about), but there was a bunch of little closed braziers all around the table, which made the place beautifully warm. The coolest thing about it – and this is where the boathouse smacked down the bothy from the huntin’ day and the folly from the shootin’ day – was that there were actual boats inside with us, rocking in the greenish water, reflecting in the candlelight.
Yes, I said candlelight. Because apart from the fact that there were – well – boats dining with us, everything else was just as if we were in some smart dining room. As ever there was the snowy white tablecloth, the crystal glasses, the rows of silver cutlery and the pyramids of fruit; green apples today, just the colour of the boathouse water. It was a magical setting.
I was so intrigued by the boathouse, and, if I’m honest, so hooked on fishing (sorry), that I almost forgot that I was about to meet Shafeen and Nel again, and that we had a plan to put into action. By now I was well and truly back in the de Warlencourt corner. I know this makes me look really bad, particularly when you hear about what came next, but really, you had to be in Henry’s company to understand the sheer charm of the guy.
I was sitting between Henry and Cookson – a Henry sandwich – and nowhere near Shafeen and Nel. They were way down the other end of the table, seated together. They both looked immaculate, but they both also looked tired. Nel was back in her own stuff, all slightly too bright and too tight. I was glad to see it. She suited the hell out of it. She was obviously wearing her ‘screw you’ to the Medievals clothes, just as I’d done last night when I’d worn my mum’s dress. Shafeen had on a cream shirt with a discreet green check and a moss-green waistcoat. His arm was now in a professional-looking sling – I guessed the ancient doctor had called again this morning. He was struggling, wrong-handed, with his soup. His longish layered hair was kind of a bit messy today – I guess grooming was difficult one-handed. But he looked handsome, and noble, what I called his Prince Caspian look, and I suddenly thought, irrelevantly, You’re beautiful too.
I was torn between happiness to see my new friends – for that was what I considered them now – and a desperate need to tell them to abort our plan. You see, I’d figured that if we went ahead we’d be alienated from this world forever, maybe even expelled from STAGS. It was like the secret door to the Longcross roof that I couldn’t find again without Henry, the way to Narnia, which, once closed, could never be opened again. If we turned back from the road we’d taken now, we could stay in Narnia forever. We could all go back to STAGS, and have a happy sixth-form experience in the comfort of our new friendship. I knew it would be hard to persuade them to give it up; Nel had been badly scared by the hounds. Shafeen, I guessed, was motivated less by the fact that he’d been shot than that his father had been humiliated in the same way. He was Prince Caspian for real, sworn to vanquish his father’s enemies. He had a whole family history to avenge.
The soup had been cleared away and the servants brought out the fish course. Staring up at me from the plate, with one dull eye, was a brown trout, his side slashed three times and neatly fitted with three slices of lemon. I looked at the fish, and the fish looked at me. ‘Is this …?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘It’s the one you caught.’
Now this was a novel experience for me. Because of the whole game-hanging, rotting-flesh thing of which Esme had so scornfully informed me, this was the only time we’d eaten what we’d actually killed. Now, I’m not a big fish eater; if I ever have it, it is in the form of the good old Captain Birdseye’s Fish Fingers or Filet-o-Fish from the golden arches. I certainly wasn’t in the habit of eating the full-on scales-and-tail type. I didn’t really know how to cut it up, but, by watching Henry, I sliced through the crispy skin and flaked off some of the pinkish flesh onto my fork. It was super-delicious, but I couldn’t really relax and savour my fishy victim. For one thing, I had no appetite, as I was so apprehensive about the afternoon and what would happen at the going down of the sun. For another, I couldn’t just sit back and let everyone else carry the conversation. If I was going to send a message to Shafeen and Nel, for once I had to shout the Medievals down and take the lead myself. I didn’t know how I was going to find the courage to begin, and then Henry did something which convinced me that I must.
Shafeen had been struggling with the fish in front of him, and Nel clearly had as little idea about how to tackle it as I had, so Henry got up from the table, walked round and crouched down beside Shafeen. As if he was some TV chef he deftly sliced the fish along the backbone, and flaked off the flesh from the two sides, leaving these neat little fillets on the plate, which Shafeen could fork up one-handed.
It was so beautifully done, so kindly and without fuss, that I was convinced, yet again, that Henry was one of the good guys. (I know, I know.) Surely he wouldn’t bother with the chivalry if he’d wanted us all dead? Surely the hangman doesn’t give the condemned man a leg up to the gibbet?
I had to let the others know we were in abort mode. ‘It’s a beautiful lake, Longmere,’ I said to Cookson, but loud enough for the whole table. ‘It reminds me of Loch Ness. I went there once with my dad.’
Dad and I had never been near Loch Ness – that is to say, Dad probably had, because he’s filmed pretty much everywhere, but I’d never even been to Scotland. Everything I know about Loch Ness came from watching The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, a film not known for its gritty realism.
Cookson swallowed his mouthful. ‘Really?’ he said in that way the upper classes use when they think you’re talking shit but are too polite to say so. ‘You think Longmere is like Loch Ness?’
‘Well, I mean in the way the mountains surround the water,’ I improvised desperately.
Cookson’s manners took a dive. ‘Like ninety-nine per cent of the lakes in the British Isles, you mean?’
‘No, I see what Greer means,’ said Henry, coming to my rescue as he walked back around the table. ‘Something about the surrounding mountains. Long Fell looks a little bit like Meall Fuar-mhonaidh in the right light.’
I had no idea what Henry’d said – he might as well have been talking Martian – but he was unwittingly helping me to get my point across. I just needed one of the Medievals to mention the most famous thing about Loch Ness. They were certainly smart enough to have heard of that.
‘I don’t know a thing about Loch Ness,’ said Esme. Then she shivered deliciously. ‘Except for the monster.’
There it was. I thanked the Medieval gods silently.
‘Oh, I do,’ enthused Charlotte. ‘Granny’s estate is near there. And I can tell you, all that monster stuff is nonsense.’
‘It’s belief either way,’ said Henry.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Charlotte.
‘Well,’ he said, forking up his own fish, ‘you either believe it exists, or you believe it doesn’t. There’s no proof either way.’ He turned to me, looking at me very directly in that way he had. ‘What do you believe, Greer?’
Just then I had the uncanny feeling that he knew exactly what we were really talking about. Did I believe he was a criminal, potentially a killer? Or not?
He watched me, and Shafeen and Nel watched me. The whole table watched me. ‘I believe,’ I said slowly, ‘that there is no monster.’
I looked straight at Shafeen and Nel. I felt bad for them, as if I was letting them down. But I couldn’t go ahead with what we’d planned. These were serious accusations. They would mean police, social services, the ruin of young lives.
I’m not sure if Nel got what I was trying to say. But Shafeen knew all right. ‘But there is proof,’ he almost shouted. Now everyone looked at him. ‘Proof of the monster, I mean. There have been sightings. Many, many sightings over decades. People have seen the evidence with their own eyes.’
‘Drunks.’ This, ironically was Piers. ‘Scotland’s full of ’em.’ His voice was thick with the wine.
‘Naff off, Piers,’ said Charlotte fondly, an insult I’ve genuinely never heard before.
Shafeen took no notice of this sideshow. He wasn’t done. ‘People have taken photographs. What about the famous Surgeon’s Photograph from the 1930s? The one that looks like a brontosaurus swimming – a big body and a little head on a long neck. That’s a photograph, Greer. Proof set down in black and white.’
Black and white. The same words as he used to me last night, about the game book. Proof set down in black and white.
‘In The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,’ I said, ‘the monster turned out to be a submarine.’
‘That’s fiction though,’ insisted Shafeen. ‘The guy who took the Surgeon’s Photograph was a gynaecologist. Scientists aren’t usually given to flights of fancy.’
‘It was a fake too though, wasn’t it?’ put in Lara in her bored voice. ‘I thought they proved it was doctored.’ I don’t think she noticed her pun. ‘The “monster” didn’t appear on the negative. Scientists may not be given to flights of fancy, it’s true, but they have been known to falsify data.’
You could always rely on the Medievals for a good conversation. Once again I’d been guilty of forgetting how clever they were. I suppose in a way they’d been well trained – their minds had been nurtured and tutored at great expense; they didn’t spend hours staring at screens and they’d been holding their own at table ever since they’d been allowed to stay up to dinner.
‘That’s true,’ said Cookson, taking up the thread. ‘You can make circumstantial evidence prove anything.’ Once again I got the feeling that the Medievals knew exactly what we Savages were talking about. It was as if Cookson was deliberately casting doubt on what we had found in the game books.
Now, at this point I should explain, as I wished I could’ve explained to Shafeen and Nel, that it wasn’t that I had lost my nerve. I still accepted that something was going on, and I was genuinely ready to tackle Henry about it. But I didn’t believe, in the light of day, that the Medievals were killers. Yes, they might be playing jokes, even playing dangerous games. There might even be initiation ceremonies, like you hear about at Ivy League schools in America, testing what lengths STAGS kids would go to for the opportunity to become a Medieval. But committing – or attempting – murder? I just couldn’t believe it.
Shafeen looked straight at me, his dark eyes pleading. ‘Just because no one’s seen the monster in action, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.’
‘You’re right,’ I said, trying to reassure him with my own eyes that I wasn’t about to drop the whole thing; I just wanted to go about it a different way. That’s a lot to say with your eyes, and I was sure he wasn’t getting it. But whatever Shafeen felt, I’d made up my mind I was going to take a bit of a left turn. When Henry and I were alone, I’d confront him with what the three of us knew and give him the chance, at least, to explain himself. I said to Shafeen, pointedly, ‘I just think the whole thing needs further investigation.’
‘That’s all very well,’ he said, ‘but the investigators should still take precautions. A dark lake, a monster. Poke around in those fathomless depths, they don’t know what they might find. They really don’t know what they’re dealing with.’
It was unmistakably a warning. And under the table I could feel, nudging against my foot, the rucksack that I’d packed so carefully and guarded so jealously.
I was pretty sure I wouldn’t need what was inside it. It seemed like an awful lot of trouble to use it, when I was now convinced I’d be in no danger from Henry that afternoon. We’d fish some more, we’d have dinner, and by tomorrow afternoon we’d all be back at STAGS. But in the end, more to stop Shafeen glaring at me than anything else, I excused myself to go to the toilet just as we’d planned. I went into the cubicle with a full rucksack, and came out with an empty one.