STAGS 5, page 21
‘But they are racing against time. There’s not one single genuine detective on the island. But there will be soon. This morning, at some point, the real police will arrive, and the coroner too. They probably got off this very boat, travelling the other way.’
‘How did they know to come?’ said Ty.
‘Oh, we called them. Once Louis died, and then his father, we couldn’t not report that. We had to involve the authorities. But we already have enough evidence to build our case.’
‘And what will the FOXES do now?’ asked Shafeen with obvious concern. ‘The ones playing the police inspector and all the officers?’
‘Leave the castle before the real police arrive, change their clothes so they look like tourists. We’ll all meet in a day or two on the mainland and build a rock-solid portfolio of evidence to take to my friends at Scotland Yard. Ratio – I’ll need that footage as soon as possible.’
‘I’ll be back home by this evening,’ said Ratio. ‘You’ll have it by the end of the day.’
I looked down the line of people leaning on the rail. My dear, dear friends: some old, some new. It felt like things were breaking up – not just Shafeen and me, but the whole group. Ty echoed my thoughts. ‘Will we even see each other again?’ she said. ‘You guys have left STAGS and are heading to uni. And I guess the Surroyal Ball won’t be happening now …’
‘Oh, I think it should,’ said Nathaniel very definitely, ‘and for a very good reason. The kids who are at STAGS now are the next generation who will be ruling this country. Captains of industry, politicians, the great and the good in every area of society. They need to know what the cult that runs the school has done. The evidence we’ve gathered will secure a good number of convictions of the old guard – the grown-ups, if you will, and the leaders of the Order. But the case may take a while to come to trial, and we want to stop this thing at source – with the young. We have a chance to turn them onto the right path.’
‘So what are you thinking?’ asked Henry.
‘As far as the governors are concerned, I’m still the headmaster of STAGS,’ said Nathaniel. ‘I haven’t yet given my notice. I am still nominally in charge of the ball. I could, in my valedictory address, tell the students exactly what has been going on.’
Maybe it was because I could see the ruins of Armadale Castle across the silver strait, where I’d treated Henry to a night at the movies; maybe it was because we were heading back to Glasgow where it had first occurred to me that film was the key to this whole thing. Whatever the reason, I had a sudden notion. ‘Why don’t we show them?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Henry.
‘We show them,’ I repeated. ‘We show them the drone footage. Everyone. All the students. We show them exactly what happened to you, Ratio, so they can no longer turn away.’ We needed something much more high tech than my screening to Henry. I turned to the man in the know. ‘We’d need cinematic resolution, pin-sharp sound, a big-screen look. But projected onto a wall. Is that possible?’
‘Perfectly.’ Ratio perked up at the thought of his beloved tech, blue eyes shining. His green hair was riffling in the sea breeze, showing about an inch of blond roots. ‘You’ll need a Barco projector – a good one, high spec. You could even do some projection mapping – that would be really cool.’
‘But is it a plug-and-play thing?’ asked Ty.
‘Yes. I’ll edit the footage like a film. Why?’
She clasped his arm fondly. ‘Because you want to be at the ball, don’t you? I want you to be there. You should be there.’
He looked at Nathaniel. ‘Am I even invited?’
‘Invited?’ laughed Nathaniel. ‘You’re the guest of honour. And you are, strictly speaking, an alumnus of the school.’
‘Jesus. I’ve never been to anything like that.’ I could see him processing it – that after so long being an observer, on the outside looking in, he was now going to be a VIP. ‘See how the other half live, eh?’ He looked at Henry, in an almost friendly fashion. I thought then, if he was going to be the Earl of Longcross, he’d better get used to fancy balls, but I didn’t say anything out loud, as the others didn’t yet know.
Then Henry spoke up. ‘Can I make a special request?’ He sounded humbler than I’d ever heard him.
‘After the help you’ve given us?’ said Nathaniel. ‘I should think you can.’
‘It’s about a special guest of my own. You were talking about alumni. Would you let me invite another former pupil?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Nathaniel.
‘I’d like to invite a girl called Gemma Delaney.’
The guilt about what he’d done to Gemma was obviously really playing on Henry’s mind. He didn’t just want to pay for his crimes with a prison sentence – he wanted to apologise to Gemma in person. I said, gently, ‘But, Henry, Gemma will never accept an invitation from you. Not again.’
‘I know.’ For the first time since I’d known him, he looked at me almost pleadingly. ‘But she would accept one from you.’
38
And so it was to end where it all began.
St Aidan the Great School.
Aka STAGS.
The taxi dropped me at the gates, the gates where I’d first stood as a scholarship applicant, over two years ago now.
I remembered, like it was a scene in a movie, the first time I’d clapped eyes on the school. It was when I’d come here for my interview. It had been one of those sunny midwinter days, all glittering frosty fields and long, low shadows. Dad had driven me through the gates and up this long driveway through lush green grounds in his ten-year-old Mini Cooper. And at the end of the drive we’d got out and just stared and stared at this beautiful, vast medieval manor house, with a sort of moat and a little bridge to the entrance. It didn’t look, then or now, at all like the headquarters of a disturbing cult, which is what it actually was. The only clue, if I’d been looking for it, might have been the pair of antlers over the great door.
The weather was different this time. There were no frosty fields or long shadows. It had been a glorious late-August day, and it was a beautifully warm summer’s evening, which was a good thing because I was actually wearing a pretty lightweight dress. A very special dress indeed. It was the one my mother had made especially for me, one of the only things she had ever given me. The dress was perfection – silver-grey, strapless, with thousands of tiny jet-black beads swirling and clustering down the front like a murmuration of starlings. My mother might not have been much of a mother, but she sure as hell could make a dress, and I respected her for that. There was a lot of work in it, every bead sewn on by hand. Every time I wore it I thought that she must have loved me a little, to make this dress for me, and the thought gave me courage. I raised my chin a fraction and walked under the antlered gates, to the Surroyal Ball.
The school itself looked different. It too was dressed up for a party. The gates were woven with flowers and unlit torches lined the drive and the drawbridge, ready to be kindled when darkness came. Flags and banners of the five houses – the yellow of Honorius, the blue of Bede, the silver of Lightfoot, the green of Oswald and the purple of Paulinus – streamed and flapped from the gatehouse. I took a deep breath. The one thing I had to do tonight – the one thing – was make sure I wasn’t alone with Henry. But, of course, no sooner had I walked through the gates than I heard a car pull up behind me and Henry was getting out of one of the Longcross Estate Land Rovers, looking incredible. I tried to ignore how great he looked in white tie and tails; no one wore this very British uniform of the privileged like him. He was carrying a large basket in his right hand. Regina, hooded and chirruping gratefully to be out of the car, shifted inside.
‘She your date?’ I said, by way of a greeting. I had to keep things trivial, because things between us were just too serious. He looked me up and down appreciatively. ‘I was rather hoping that you would be my partner. Especially looking like that.’
I eyed him sternly. ‘I’m here with Shafeen.’
He looked about him, comically. ‘Where is he?’
‘He’ll be here,’ I said, with a confidence I didn’t feel. In fact, things were far from back to normal, but we’d been working on it over the past weeks. Shafeen had gone back to India, so we’d had several unsatisfactory FaceTimes and phone calls hampered by different time zones, but we were working on our relationship, slowly building trust again, and he’d promised to be back to take me to the Surroyal Ball.
The other Peel Tower Rebels had scattered to the four winds since Lammas too. I’d been in Manchester with my dad, enjoying a bit of normality for once and watching a buttload of films with him. Nel had gone home to her bougie mansion in Cheshire. Henry had gone to Longcross Lodge, to oversee the nearly completed rebuilding of the hall after the fire. Ty had been at Ratio’s in Glasgow, and I knew that Nathaniel had been there for a time too, collating all the data from the HAWK and the dossier of evidence on the Order of the Stag that Ratio had been collecting for the last few years. Then Nathaniel had taken the whole lot to his contact at Scotland Yard, and according to Nel arrests were imminent. It was inevitable that the net was closing on Henry, and I wondered how many nights of freedom he had left.
‘Well, look,’ said Henry as though he had read my mind, ‘since we may not have another moment together like this, will you help me do something?’
‘I suppose,’ I said warily.
‘Nothing untoward,’ he said. ‘It’s just that you’ve been hawking and you can help me with Regina. I’m going to let her rake away.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Free her. Return her to the wild.’
I felt a lump gather in my throat. It seemed so, so … final, and a strange foreshadowing of all the other endings to come. ‘Will she survive?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘All that stooping to the lure has a function, you know. It mimics hunting in the wild. And you saw her take a gull on the Dunvegan cliffs. She’ll be fine.’
‘Why didn’t you free her on Skye?’
He hesitated. ‘You’ll laugh.’
‘Try me.’
He sighed a little. ‘I want her to be under the same skies as me. If you’re incarcerated, you’re usually tried in your county and put in a facility close to your home. If I’m in Frankland Prison in Durham, I might be able to look out of my barred windows and see Regina flying free.’
I’d never felt less like laughing in my life. ‘OK.’
He checked his watch – this was typical Henry; he was the only person our age I knew who used a watch. Everyone else used phones. ‘We’re a bit early. The welcome reception is in the Honorius Quad at seven. Let’s find somewhere away from everyone to let her go. The water meadows should do it.’
We walked down by the river to the flat meadows beyond the playing fields. Despite their name, the water meadows had been drained centuries ago and reclaimed by wildflowers and bees. I helped Henry extract Regina from her basket, and she settled herself happily on his gauntlet. Henry unhooded her and let her take in her surroundings. Then we walked a little so he could have a few last moments with her. With the hawk on his wrist and those ancient buildings in the background beyond the evening summer haze, I felt, as I had before, so Medieval I could burst.
‘Let’s wait for a sparrow or something to fly her at. That’ll start her off,’ said Henry breezily. But then he stroked her breast feathers one last time and said, in a very different voice, ‘Goodbye, old girl.’
In the next moment, a songbird, disturbed by our footsteps, burst from the meadow grass and fluttered skywards. Henry flung Regina off his wrist in pursuit, and she was away, speeding into the infinite blue like a bullet. He watched, eyes as blue as the sky, as she became a dot, then disappeared. He blinked once, stooped and collected the basket. ‘That’s that then,’ he said briskly. ‘Come on.’
But that wasn’t that. We’d barely gone the length of a field when we became aware of a presence. Regina, bored of the chase, was following us. She was fluttering from tree to gatepost to drystone wall, never letting her beloved master out of her sight. She obviously thought this was some sort of game and was going to play it to the last. It was heartbreaking. Henry studiously ignored her, but I could see how much it cost him. ‘She’ll clear off eventually,’ he said. ‘Once we go into the ball. There will be too many people, too much noise.’ This sounded offhand, even callous, but his tone was in complete opposition to his words. If I hadn’t known that Shafeen would materialise the instant I touched Henry, I would have squeezed his hand. For the first time since I’d known him, he seemed perilously near to tears.
As he’d guessed, once we were inside the precincts of the school we lost sight of Regina. And as we walked the familiar grounds I forgot the hawk. There were too many memories crowding her out. To our left, Lightfoot House, where I’d received the original Invitation to Longcross. In the distance, the swimming pool, which I’d pounded up and down every morning, in unwitting preparation for my fishin’ ordeal in Longmere. Next to that, the De Warlencourt Playhouse, where I’d put on The Isle of Dogs, been hanged by the neck in a noose and been tried for manslaughter by the Dark Order of the Grand Stag. And to our right the chapel, where I’d first realised that the Old Abbot was the Grand Master of a cult that centred on this very school, and underneath it the Crypt where we’d finally plotted to bring the Order down. So many dark memories – and now it was time to let the light in and make an ending. Henry and I walked through Honorius House to the White Quad.
39
The big square space, surrounded on four sides by beautiful medieval buildings, was crowded with girls in bright ballgowns and guys in white tie and tails.
White-clad staff moved around with trays of champagne and fruit punch, and the friars, in their ceremonial white habits, chatted with the leavers, who were destined for Oxbridge, St Andrews or Durham. A string quartet, parked unobtrusively in one corner, played genteel chamber music. The Jerusalem tree, the enormous cedar that was supposed to have been grown from a seed which the crusader Conrad de Warlencourt brought back from the Holy Land, provided shade from the low evening sun.
And underneath it stood Shafeen.
He was on his phone, and I thought then what a Savage he had become since I’d first known him. A guy on a phone – especially a guy in white tie and tails on a phone – was an odd sight in the middle of this ancient quad. Time was when having a phone out in the open at STAGS would be an offence that would get you expelled, just like Ratio had been.
I turned to Henry, but he hadn’t noticed Shafeen. His blue eyes were scanning the crowd anxiously. ‘She’s not here.’
‘Who?’ I asked, thinking for a moment he meant Regina.
‘Gemma Delaney.’ He seemed agitated. ‘Why didn’t she come?’
‘It was always a long shot,’ I said. ‘Maybe the school didn’t have the right address. Or maybe she just couldn’t face coming back here. It wasn’t exactly a happy place for her.’
‘I just wanted … I wanted to see her before I go.’
‘Wait, you’re not planning to do a Cinderella, are you?’ I said, suddenly worried. ‘You are going to stick around to see the projection?’
‘Yes, of course. I want to see this thing through to the end.’
I looked at him. ‘Couldn’t you do some sort of deal? I mean, you helped us bring everyone to trial. Can’t you get …’ I searched for the phrase I’d heard in mafia movies. ‘Immunity from prosecution?’
‘Don’t you see?’ he said, raising his eyes to mine. ‘I don’t want that. I deserve what’s coming to me, for what I did to Gemma, and I’ll take my punishment.’
‘Well, if that’s how you feel about it.’ It came out harsher than I meant, and I took a little nervous breath, as I was about to deal him another blow. ‘Probably best if we don’t arrive together,’ I said, feeling utterly shit.
I didn’t need to explain; Henry stood back at once. ‘Of course,’ he said, giving me this courteous little bow. I walked ahead, feeling like a total bitch. He’d lost Regina and now I was abandoning him – but I knew if I walked into the Surroyal Ball on Henry de Warlencourt’s arm, Shafeen would do his nut.
As it turned out, I got right up to Shafeen before he noticed me, so intent was he on his phone. ‘Playing Candy Crush?’ I said lightly. I wasn’t at all sure how to greet him after all this time – were we still boyfriend and girlfriend? – so as usual I took refuge in a joke.
Shafeen looked up from the screen. At least he smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m flying the HAWK. We thought it was a good idea to film the evening.’
‘A film within a film,’ I said. ‘Very meta. Didn’t Ratio want to do it?’
‘He’s busy sorting out the projection. Besides, he gave the drone to me.’
‘He gave you the HAWK?’
‘Yes. Said I’d saved his life with it on Lammas Eve, and he wanted me to have it. So I got my drone licence and took it out to India. Got some amazing shots of the Aravalli Hills. We thought that tonight it would be good to have some footage of the students’ reaction to the projection. It’s an insurance policy too – no one can plead deniability later.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘No one can say they haven’t seen it,’ he explained. He waved his arm in a sweeping gesture at all the privileged kids crowding the quad. ‘All these golden lads and girls, no one can deny after today that they are aware of the full extent of the Order’s cruelty and criminality. I’m just doing a quick test, plotting the flight path, before tonight.’
He lowered the phone and looked at me properly for the first time. ‘You look amazing.’
‘Right back atcha.’ It was true. He was in what I called his Prince Caspian mode and looked just the way I’d seen him at Longcross Hall the very first time, when I’d realised that I was not the only misfit to be invited to their little Hunger Game. Now we almost seemed as much strangers as we were then; he was back to being an unknown quantity, as if we had gone full circle. Did he even want to get back together? And the bigger question: did I? We had one of those awkward, bumpy hugs where you’re not sure whether to go in for the kiss or not and ended up clashing cheekbones. Then, luckily, Nel bounded up like some beautiful golden Labrador and hugged both of us at once with no awkwardness at all. In her presence we were able to chat about the last month – what we’d been doing, how everyone’s parents were; comforting small talk, leaving the bigger things unsaid. After a bit Shafeen excused himself to go and land the drone.
