STAGS 5, page 3
Henry shrugged elaborately but didn’t seem to mind me burning him.
‘We just have to hope he’s not bought from this seller before,’ said Ty to the screen, ignoring us.
‘Why?’
‘Because if you buy repeatedly from somewhere like Amazon, your browser remembers your address. It’s only for new places you have to input it. Never mind – we’re golden. He’s typing it in.’
We leaned over her as the precious information appeared word by word:
Flat 8, Drumpellier Street
Blackhill
GLASGOW
G33 1BX
‘Bingo,’ Ty said softly, and sat back.
‘OK,’ said Nel, eyes shining. ‘We’ve got an address. What do we do now?’
‘We go and see him,’ said Henry. ‘Glasgow’s on the way to Skye.’
‘It is?’ I said. My Scottish geography was sketchy at best.
‘Yes. You go up the west coast – Glasgow, Glencoe, Skye.’
‘But how do I get out of going on the “coaches”?’ I waved the embossed card at him. ‘That’s what The Invitation tells me to do.’
‘It tells you something else too.’ He pointed with his little finger, and the golden nugget of his signet ring gleamed softly in the candlelight. ‘It says RSVP. So you should just RSVP – by letter of course –’
‘– of course –’ I mocked him gently.
‘– and say that you accept the kind invitation, but you’ll be making your own way there.’
‘Is that …’ I searched for the words, ‘the done thing?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Henry. ‘It’s quite commonplace, particularly for an August invitation when one might be summering at several great houses in one season.’
‘Like you do,’ muttered Ty under her breath.
‘It just means that your host doesn’t have to lay on transport,’ said Henry, as if she hadn’t spoken.
‘I don’t know where to write to,’ I protested.
‘But I do,’ said Henry. ‘And I don’t need a … personal computer, or whatever you call it.’ He tapped his head. ‘Mine’s in here.’ He took out an old-fashioned pocketbook and pencil and wrote down the address. The directions appeared on the page in his flourishing handwriting; the Medieval version of Ratio’s address appearing on the screen in Savage bits and pixels.
Henry gave me the piece of paper. It said, in his now-familiar script:
The Hon. Lord Peregrine de Warlencourt
Castle MacLeod
Dunvegan
Isle of Skye
SCOTLAND
It was quite a different address to the mysterious Ratio’s. ‘Write to my uncle here,’ said Henry, ‘and say you’ll be making your own way, but will arrive on 30th July. We’ll leave here tomorrow, be in Glasgow by the afternoon to meet this Ratio character and go on to Skye on Thursday.’
‘We?’ I queried.
‘You and me,’ said Henry.
‘And me,’ said Shafeen. He was looking daggers at Henry again, and was clearly not going to be left behind while Henry and I went on a romantic Highland sojourn.
‘And me,’ said Ty. ‘I’m not missing the chance to meet Ratio at last.’
‘What about you, Nathaniel?’ said Nel. The name, far too familiar for a headmaster, slipped out.
But he didn’t seem to mind. ‘I have a school to run,’ he smiled. ‘But if you want to go, I’ll come up at the weekend and find you.’ He looked around at the rest of us, suddenly serious again. ‘If this is truly the last act in the STAGS drama, someone from the FOXES should be there.’
‘That’s settled then,’ said Shafeen, setting his chin with determination. ‘We’ll all go.’
Ty sat forward suddenly and began typing again.
‘What are you doing now?’ I asked.
‘I’m just adding a delivery instruction to Ratio’s order.’
‘Why?’
She smiled a secret smile. ‘You’ll see.’
Abbot Ridley turned to Nel. ‘Ye’ll take the High Road and I’ll take the Low Road,’ he said fondly, ‘And I’ll be in Scotland before ye.’
He was quoting from something, but as the Abbot always did that, I ignored him. I had bigger things to think about than literary flirting.
We had a plan.
5
On the day before the end of term Shafeen, Nel, Ty, Henry and I took the train from Alnwick to Glasgow.
I left STAGS without a backward glance – for one thing I was now, once again, afraid of the place, and for another, we’d be back for the Surroyal Ball at the end of August.
We travelled to Edinburgh Waverley and changed to Glasgow Central. We’d all decided to wear our own clothes, instead of looking like some weird cult, so in Henry’s case that meant an immaculately cut Savile Row tweed suit and in everyone else’s case jeans and T-shirts. The journey was odd but guardedly friendly – we all chatted for a bit, then there was another interesting division of Medieval and Savage. Shafeen, Nel and Ty went on their phones. Henry read a book, which seemed to be, of all things, about St Albans. I mostly looked out of the window and watched the gorgeous summer scenery roll past, as Northumberland turned into Scotland.
At Glasgow Central station we queued for a taxi, which took us through a grand and grey Victorian city centre to Blackhill, where dark, towering tenement buildings blocked out the light. The pavements were crammed with plastic bins full to bursting, and scrawny cats ran between our legs as loud music sounded from open windows. It was quite the contrast to the genteel STAGS. ‘We’re not in Kansas any more,’ I remarked, as I had once at Longcross.
We found Drumpellier Street and Ty rang the bell for flats 7–15. The intercom crackled into life and a distorted female voice said, ‘Hello?’
Without hesitation Ty leaned into the doorway. ‘Hermes delivery,’ she said.
After a second of silence the door gave a deafening buzz and clicked open. We all looked at Ty admiringly, and we walked into a hallway that had a sticky carpet and an odd smell. Dark patches of damp stained the walls and piles of post littered the floor. To my surprise Ty stopped to sort through it and picked up a square brown box. It had some Japanese characters on the front. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘The Funko POP! figure Ratio ordered,’ she said triumphantly. ‘I added a delivery instruction to leave it in the hallway. I thought it might be our golden ticket inside.’
My admiration for Ty grew as she led us all up the stairs, over an obstacle course of bikes and pushchairs, to Number 8. She rang the bell and the door opened a suspicious crack. A pair of dark eyes looked us up and down. ‘You’re not from Hermes,’ said the voice we’d heard on the intercom.
‘No,’ said Ty, ‘but we do have a package for Ratio. We’re friends of his.’
The door opened a little more. A woman stood there – dark-haired and slight, in a tracksuit and slippers, with a face you could tell used to be beautiful but was now lined and worn.
‘Well, I know that’s not true,’ she said, smiling a little sadly. ‘My son doesn’t have any friends. Not In Real Life, anyway.’ She had a soft Scottish accent, which was very attractive.
‘Madam,’ said Henry, piling on the de Warlencourt charm. ‘You don’t know us, but –’
Her reaction to him was startling. She took a step backwards and placed a hand on her heart as if afraid. The beauty that she still possessed sort of shone through from somewhere and she spoke as if in a dream. ‘I believe I could almost put a name to you. You must be Rollo de Warlencourt’s son.’
‘Yes,’ he said, visibly astonished. ‘How did you …?’
Now she took two steps forward and held out the hand that had covered her heart, almost as if she was about to touch Henry’s face. ‘You’re very like your father.’
Now Shafeen stepped forward, almost impatiently. ‘Do you know where Ratio is?’
The sad smile returned. ‘Always the same answer to that,’ she said. ‘In his room.’ She opened the door all the way. ‘You’d better come in.’
The flat was very small and very shabby. Paint was peeling from stained walls, and the sofa was threadbare. A tiny and ancient telly was showing Cash in the Attic. I wondered what Henry thought of these living conditions – I’d bet he’d never been in a home this small in his life. The woman led us through the room – which took all of two seconds – and knocked on a connecting door. The door had a sign on it featuring a skull wearing a German stormtrooper helmet. The wording said: Achtung! Nazi Zombies!
The woman knocked on the door but there was no reply. ‘He never hears,’ she said fondly. ‘Just go in.’
We filed into the room, which was bigger than the rest of the house. Someone in a top-of-the-range gaming chair – one of those with speakers in the headrest – was facing away from us playing Valorant across three massive flat-screen computer monitors. The someone wasn’t wearing headphones and the sound was at full blast – clearly he hadn’t heard us come in, so that gave us a chance to look at the room.
I could see why he never left it. It was quite different to the other room. It was clean and sleek – cluttered but achingly modern, a nerd-paradise tech palace. Framed Marvel posters covered three walls, a shelf groaned under the weight of an army of Funko POP! figures, from Batman to his naughty descendant Deadpool. A luminous fish tank hummed calmly in the corner, with rainbow-coloured iridescent fishes flicking back and forth – the only natural things in the room except for a carefully trimmed bonsai tree. The fourth wall was covered in photographs connected by red strings, just like you see in films like Kiss the Girls, when some maverick detective is trying to solve a heinous crime.
But the most remarkable thing about the room was its occupant. After finishing a round in which he’d blown away all his opponents, he spun around in his chair like a Bond baddie and regarded us.
He looked at us in turn. ‘Tyeesha Morgan. Greer MacDonald. Chanel Ashton. Shafeen Jadeja.’ He was going to say it. He said it. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’
It was the classic supervillain greeting, but he didn’t look all that villainous. Even though he didn’t get up – not for this Savage all that bobbing up and down when ladies entered the room – we could see that he was bigger than any of us; he had that stretched look of the very tall. He was wearing ripped jeans and a T-shirt with a fox on it and the words ‘OH, FOR FOX SAKE’. He looked older than us too by a few years – maybe he was twenty-three or so; somewhere in between us and Abbot Ridley. He resembled Sick Boy from Trainspotting, with his soft Scottish accent, handsome face and cropped hair. Most bits of his face were pierced, including his nose, lip and ears. In one ear he had a distinctive antler earring, not delicate and dangly but one of those that goes right through your earlobe and makes the hole really big. One arm was entirely covered in a sleeve tattoo, which seemed to be some sort of hunting scene of a deer in a forest. His fingernails were painted black, and his eyes were a rather startling blue. They reminded me of someone else who I couldn’t quite place. But the most notable thing about him was his hair colour – it was Joker-green, as if Astroturf was growing out of his head, and it suited him admirably.
Ratio looked up at Henry. ‘And Henry de Warlencourt. I certainly wasn’t expecting you.’
‘He’s on our side now,’ said Ty. ‘He saved my life.’
‘Aye,’ said Ratio. ‘I know.’ He directed a rather attractive smile at Ty. ‘I suppose that was you logging my keystrokes the other night, was it?’
She smiled back. ‘Guilty.’
‘Did you use Hypervisor or Kernel?’ he asked.
‘Kernel,’ said Ty. ‘A root-access device driver.’
‘Thought so,’ said our new friend. ‘I knew what you were up to, but I let it play out.’
‘Why?’ said Ty.
‘I thought it was time we met,’ said Ratio candidly. ‘We’re in the endgame now.’
The way he said that gave me a chill – it sounded so final. Hopefully not for me.
‘Did you really go to STAGS?’ I asked.
‘Yup,’ he said. ‘For a while.’
‘No offence,’ said Shafeen, ‘but how did you possibly afford it?’
Ratio didn’t look offended. ‘Someone paid. A benefactor.’
Nel was impressed. ‘Must have been a very kind person.’
Ratio laughed a bitter laugh. ‘I doubt if he’s ever been described that way. It was Rollo de Warlencourt.’
We all registered shock. Henry walked right up to him, so he was actually between the splayed-out bejeaned legs, and addressed him directly for the first time. ‘My father paid for you to go to STAGS?’
Ratio looked up at him, unmoved and insolent. ‘Yup,’ he said again.
‘How come?’
‘It was guilt money. My mum worked at Longcross Hall in the nineties. Lorna Rennie, a young Scottish girl, a long way from home, no family around her, no protection. She was a sitting duck.’
I glanced at Shafeen. This was just like the story of Ina, the kitchen maid from County Durham who had befriended his father Aadhish when he’d been at Longcross. That had been in the sixties, but this story from thirty years later sounded depressingly familiar. ‘What happened to her?’ I said, with a sense of unease.
‘What d’ye think happened to her?’ he said, suddenly very Scots, eyes suddenly very blue. ‘She was the prey for Rollo’s little Hunger Games. She ended up being hunted, and terrorised, and almost broken.’ He spat the words. ‘But we’re a hardy clan, the Rennies. My mother survived, and she had the balls to turn the situation to her advantage. She decided to blackmail your father –’ this to Henry – ‘and make sure her young son got some of what he had. And it would have worked too, if I hadn’t fucked it up.’
Henry flinched at the swear word. ‘And how did you manage to do that?’
Blue eyes met blue eyes. ‘I pissed it away deliberately,’ said Ratio, precisely. ‘Smuggled my laptop into STAGS and logged on to the noughties equivalent of Pornhub. Made sure I got caught, made sure I got kicked out.’ He shifted his angular shoulders in the gaming chair. ‘I didn’t want to take anything from your father. I decided to do something more useful with my life than being pampered at some privileged school.’
‘Which was?’
‘Go to a Glasgow comprehensive. Get my Highers. Get a first-class computer science degree. And dedicate my life to taking down your father and the rest of the Order of the Stag, for what they did to my mother.’ He looked at Shafeen. ‘And your father, Aadhish.’ Then Ty. ‘And your great-uncle, Leon.’ Then me. ‘And Gemma Delaney. And all the other poor saps who were treated like electric bunnies at a greyhound race.’
Nel was walking round the room looking at the hardware. ‘You’ve got a lot of kit here. How d’you make a living?’
‘YouTube,’ he said briefly. ‘You can make good money gaming online. My channel has millions of subscribers. One day I’m going to get my mum a house, make up for all the shit she got from the de Warlencourts. And,’ he said, ‘I do a bit of cyber-surveillance as a side-hustle. For big companies. Governments. That’s why it’s quite good to have a name like Ratio. No one believes it’s my real name.’
‘And it is?’ Nel said in surprise.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Christened and everything.’
I looked at all the pictures on the wall, connected by the CSI red thread. ‘The cyber-surveillance – is that how you got all these?’
‘Yup,’ he said, a syllable that was obviously his catchphrase.
Henry looked at the CSI wall more closely. ‘These are all of Longcross,’ he said in a voice of outrage.
I joined him at the wall. There was the hunt from above, gathering at the Trip to Jerusalem. There was Longwood, and Longmere, and Longcross church. There was the hall from above, all those silvery leaded roof tiles, where Henry had kissed me the one and only time. ‘How did you get these pictures?’ spluttered Longcross’s Lord himself. ‘This is trespassing.’
‘No,’ said Ratio coolly. ‘Your family may own a lot, but they don’t own the air above our heads.’
‘But it’s a total violation of privacy.’
‘I hardly think,’ said Ratio dangerously, ‘that your family are in a position to talk about violation.’
Ty was looking at the pictures too. ‘It’s like you have eyes in the sky,’ she said, just as she’d done in the Crypt of STAGS chapel.
‘I do,’ said Ratio. Finally, he rose from his chair, towering over us. He walked to a black Peli case in the corner and tapped in a code on a keypad. The lid popped open to reveal a sleek black machine, about the size of a laptop, nestling in black foam. It was neat, and constructed on flowing aerodynamic lines, with four rotary blades like a quartet of mini helicopters. Ratio lifted the thing out, closed the lid of the case with his elbow and laid the thing tenderly on the top.
‘Meet the HAWK,’ he said.
6
Henry peered at the strange tech creature. ‘What on earth is that?’
‘A drone,’ said Ratio. ‘It’s called the HAWK. The Hovering Airborne Wing Kite. Especially designed for surveillance.’
Henry narrowed his eyes. ‘By whom?’
‘Me,’ Ratio said simply. ‘I made it. It’s a quadcopter with a high-definition camera, which records high-quality 4K video. Three-axis camera gimbals give it perfect 3D aerial coverage. I developed bespoke noise-cancelling technology, so it doesn’t spook wildlife too much, and I’ve built in collision avoidance – you can key in customisable flight-pathing options. The whole thing’s controlled by my iPhone.’
Henry looked at him as if he was speaking another tongue – but instead of one of those ancient dead languages with which Henry was so familiar, this was an entirely new, modern jargon.
‘It’s simple,’ said Ratio. ‘You need to take the HAWK with you. That way you can keep an eye on Greer at all times.’ It was odd to be spoken of by someone who clearly felt like they’d known you for years when you didn’t know them at all. Ratio patted the drone as if it was a living thing, and addressed me directly. ‘The HAWK has ‘box acquisition’ which means, in simple terms, that it draws a box around you and follows you wherever you go. This one takes into account your biometrics and your unique heat signature too, which means it won’t lose you as long as you’re outdoors. But it can’t track you in a vehicle.’ He turned to the rest of his guests. ‘The only way to expose this cult is to shine a light on it. You record the Order of the Stag chasing Greer at the Red Hunt. And you share it with the world.’
