Malice Read online

  ‘You’ve got a bit heavier,’ I said, pointing to him. He looked quite plump.

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘It’s my layers. I’m wearing all my clothes. Saves packing them.’

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ I asked, adding hastily, ‘I mean, it’s great to see you. But what are you doing in the secret passage?’

  ‘What are you doing attacking me with high tackles? Secret passage? I thought this was a regular doorway. I was trying to get upstairs.’

  We burst out laughing, the three of us shaking with relieved tension and hilarity while Repro glowered in the middle.

  ‘How did you get into the house?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘There was a very convenient lock on the front door, through which I was able to effect entry,’ Repro said, in a snooty voice.

  ‘You mean you picked the lock,’ said Boges.

  I took Repro’s arm and then hugged him. ‘It’s so good to see you, Repro,’ I said. But a thought struck me. ‘You mean the entrance to the secret passage was open?’

  ‘Of course it was. Even I can’t walk through walls!’

  ‘I didn’t open it,’ said Boges.

  ‘Me neither,’ added Ryan.

  I knew I hadn’t.

  ‘Well, someone’s been here, during the night,’ Boges said, ‘before Repro blundered in.’

  ‘Excuse me, I don’t blunder,’ Repro corrected. ‘I’m very nimble on my feet, thank you.’

  ‘OK, twinkle toes,’ I said, ‘how about a hot chocolate?’

  4:31 am

  We sat around the rebuilt fire, and between the three of us, brought Repro up to speed on what had been going on at Perdita and what we’d discovered so far. We discussed who might have been snooping in the secret passage.

  ‘It must be someone who knows the house,’ I said. ‘Someone who knows the history of this place.’ I thought of Harriet immediately, but dismissed the idea. Why would she be poking around in here?

  As if reading my mind, Boges said, ‘Harriet seems to know more than she’s saying. It’s possible she knows about the secret passage.’

  ‘But why on earth would she be creeping around in there in the middle of the night?’ I asked.

  ‘Same reason as anybody else,’ said Ryan, ‘to discover the secret of Perdita—that’s why. If she found the treasure, her money problems would be solved.’

  I told Repro about Harriet and her dried-up farm, then about the mansion on the northern headland, the woman with the spiky hair and the security guard with the Doberman.

  ‘Interesting that Curly was able to just walk straight into that house, without knocking. The Doberman didn’t go for him, did it?’ Boges pointed out.

  ‘Hell hounds,’ said Repro. ‘Had a run-in once with one of those.’ Repro took it all in, demolishing a packet of chocolate biscuits and drinking several cups of tea in quick succession.

  ‘So how did you know where we were?’ I asked.

  ‘Cal called me from flight school. He thought you might need a hand down here. I couldn’t come earlier because I’ve been—err—taking a break from society for a while. Doing some meditation.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been to a retreat? A health spa, perhaps?’ asked Ryan.

  ‘More like a strict health farm,’ said Repro. ‘I overlooked a few fines from the constabulary.’

  ‘How many?’ Boges asked.

  ‘Not quite sure,’ said Repro cagily. ‘More than a few. And the constabulary took a dim view. All I did was camp in some places they didn’t think I should be in and I failed “to move along when required”. I wasn’t doing any harm.’

  ‘But why were you camping out?’ I asked, puzzled. ‘You’ve got a beautiful house of your own now. And what about your mum?’

  ‘I have a gypsy soul, my girl,’ said Repro grandly. ‘And I miss my underground home—all those exciting tunnels, my underground lake, my plans for my Underland Wonderland resort. My mum wants me to join the local bowling club. Wear those white bowling trousers and jumpers, and a canvas hat,’ he shuddered. ‘My house is very nice, and I don’t mean to be ungrateful to you and young Cal, but it’s just not me. Everyone knows where I live now. I even get mail!’

  ‘Mail! How terrible!’ I joked.

  Repro didn’t miss a beat. ‘So I followed my gypsy soul.’

  ‘And that led you where, exactly?’ asked Boges.

  ‘Various places,’ he said vaguely, ‘which in turn led to the non-payment of a number of fines. I could either pay up or spend a week at one of Her Majesty’s correctional institutions. I chose to be detained,’ Repro said,

  ‘You mean you were in jail?’ said Ryan.

  Repro sniffed and refused to answer, instead looking around for more chocolate biscuits.

  ‘I’m going back to bed,’ I announced. ‘Repro, that big armchair near the fire is very comfortable. I’ll bring you a rug. We’ll work out a plan in the morning. And there’s something I want to show you, too.’

  10:40 am

  After a breakfast of toast and eggs, we cleared away and found that Repro had worked out a lot of the jigsaw puzzle on the floor during the early hours of the morning. Now we could see that it was shaping up to be some kind of building surrounded by gardens.

  From the folder in my bag, I pulled out the strange and menacing newspaper clipping I’d been sent weeks ago, passing it to Repro.

  ‘What do you make of this, Repro?’ I asked. He studied it, his shrewd, bright eyes scanning the typed script and the two scribbled words, ‘the Drowner … 30 days’.

  Eventually, he handed it back to me, shaking his head. ‘Can’t help you with that, Winter. Where did it come from?’

  I told him. ‘I’m not sure whether it’s a threat, or a warning. Either way, it’s completely useless, until we know who the Drowner is.’

  ‘Sounds like a person,’ said Repro, ‘and someone I wouldn’t like to meet—especially near water,’ said Repro.

  ‘Plenty of that around here,’ said Ryan. ‘Actually, we’ve been thinking all this time that it came from someone in the city, but maybe it’s a threat from somebody here who knows about the Perdita file and this house. It might be just another attempt to frighten us away. There are only four days left until the deadline—surely if it was something dangerous, we’d know by now.’

  ‘It all started with this,’ I said, picking up the Perdita file.

  Repro flicked through it. ‘And what’s this?’ he asked, noticing the envelope stuck at the back and taking out the paper with the strange drawing.

  ‘We don’t know,’ I said. ‘We all thought it looked a bit like a ghost,’ I pointed out the strange shapes. ‘But now I’m inclined to think it’s just a scribble.’

  Repro peered more closely at the old piece of paper, scrutinising it thoroughly.

  ‘Mmm,’ he muttered. ‘It reminds me of something. Something I saw a magician do. If you look closely, you can see fold lines in the paper—I don’t mean all the wrinkled, crumpled bits—I mean these straight lines here, where it’s been folded and unfolded a lot.’ With a few deft movements, Repro folded the paper a couple of times and something happened. The lines now connected up, creating one shape.

  ‘That’s amazing!’ I said. ‘Now it looks more like a piece of coral, with branches on it. Somebody wanted to hide this drawing,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  Another one of Perdita’s secrets was staring us in the face, taunting us.

  ‘Coral, you said?’ said Repro, with the beginning of a grin. ‘Did I ever tell you that I lived in some speleological structures for a while?’

  ‘Some whats?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘He means caves,’ said Boges, puncturing Repro’s overblown language.

  ‘Yes, well,’ I said, ‘you’ve lived in some very unusual places. But why are you telling us this now?’

  ‘There must be caves around here, that’s why. This reminds me of a cave system.’

  ‘The sea caves!’ I cried. ‘That’s what it is! It’s a diagram of the layout
of the caves!’

  Boges grabbed the diagram from Repro. ‘Yes! The caves that Curly is looking for! And he doesn’t know the way in—but we do!’

  The thrill of discovery bubbled through my veins. We’d unlocked another of Perdita’s secrets.

  ‘And look,’ Boges added, ‘we were looking at it upside down before. That’s not an M—it’s a W.’

  ‘Windraker!’ I yelled. ‘Is that where the Windraker is lying? That’s what Curly and his boss want! But we’re going to get there first!’ I was jumping out of my skin with excitement. I couldn’t wait to start exploring the cave system.

  ‘I doubt it, Winter,’ Boges said, shaking his head. ‘No ship could fit in through the narrow entry to the caves.’

  ‘Hang on! What’s a Windraker?’ asked Repro, looking bewildered. ‘Have I missed something?’

  We quickly filled Repro in on everything we’d heard about the shipwreck that lay somewhere in Deception Bay.

  ‘Whatever is hidden in the caves,’ Boges said, ‘it must be very important. Otherwise why would someone hide it with that fancy folding paper trick? And whatever it is, it’s hidden right at the very back of the furthest and biggest cave.’

  Sea caves system

  1:26 pm

  One by one, the three of us squeezed through the narrow cleft hidden by the overhang of the cliff, carrying our gear. Repro had chosen to stay behind, allegedly to guard Perdita from any further intruders.

  Boges had helped Ryan make waterproof lights by sealing our torches in tall airtight jam jars with ropes attached to them.

  ‘They’ll float, too,’ Ryan said, ‘so we won’t lose them. I’ll get proper waterproof lights just as soon as I can.’

  It was cold inside the cave and the water swirled underneath the rocky ledge. Chinks of light shone like tiny spotlights onto the roiling water. I angled my jar torch hanging from my neck to light up the back of the cave and revealed the three smaller tunnels leading down into unknown darkness. Boges had the folded diagram protected in a plastic sheet. ‘Whatever we’re looking for,’ he said, jabbing at the diagram in the torchlight, ‘is right at the back of the far cave, through that middle tunnel. Who’s game enough to go first?’

  ‘Me!’ Ryan and I yelled together, then laughed, the sound of which echoed through the underground caverns. I jumped in, Ryan right behind me and Boges bringing up the rear. The water was freezing and deeper than I expected, and I couldn’t touch the bottom. I squealed and again the sound bounced around the walls of the caves.

  Away from the boulder-blocked main entrance, it was very dark and only the beams from our jar lights penetrated, illuminating the rocky walls and making the low ceilings of the middle tunnel glisten. It was easy swimming. Small crabs scuttled up the walls and shiny black sea snails clustered in groups. One day, I thought, we would explore the whole system.

  The current was stronger where the water was being forced into the narrower channel, pushing us through until we came up into the middle cave. Our torches bobbed along on the currents in their watertight jars, throwing light onto starfish and tiny sea creatures. We swam through and into a wide cave, assisted by the current.

  ‘Oh, wow!’ I said, as I trod water and directed my light around a round cavern the size of a tennis court. The boys came splashing in behind me and the domed roof lit up with their extra lights. The ceiling dripped with stalactites of strange sea plants and pale crustaceans scurried into their hiding places.

  We found that the cold water was only fractionally warmer than the freezing air of the cavern. I looked across at Boges and Ryan, their teeth chattering in their heads just like mine. My fingertips ached with the cold.

  We searched all around the alcove marked with the W, and although I hadn’t really been expecting to find a shipwreck just sitting in the cave, it seemed like there was nothing there at all, except the sea creatures.

  We turned our attention to the stunning roof of the cavern and I gasped as we all saw it together. We focused our lights on something wedged firmly into a cavity high up on the back wall of the alcove, right up near the ceiling. We swam closer, peering up to try to see what it was.

  ‘It looks like an old cashbox—you know, those old metal boxes with locks that people used to keep money in,’ said Boges.

  ‘Looks like it’s been pushed into a crevice. If Captain Greenlowe put that in position a hundred years ago and it’s still there,’ I said, ‘my bet is that it’s very firmly wedged in.’ In spite of the freezing water, and my chattering teeth, thrilling excitement was coursing through my blood. Everything we’d done so far had worked towards this exhilarating moment. I realised I was kicking my legs underwater in crazy excitement, like a little kid. There was something else too, above the crevice where the metal box was wedged—it looked like someone had carved a square into the rock that formed the roof of this huge cave.

  ‘There’s no way we can get up there,’ said Ryan, who had been swimming around, trying to find a way to approach the wall. ‘It’s way out of our reach. You’d have to be Spiderman to get up there.’

  ‘There’s got to be a way. How else did Captain Greenlowe manage to get it up there in the first place?’ I asked. The frustration was crushing. We’ll never find out the truth, I thought, my spirits dampened.

  12:02 pm

  Brain churning desperately, I directed my torch light around the walls of the cave, trying to find some handhold, some way to get up to where the box was wedged.

  That’s when I noticed a very clear high water mark, about a metre beneath the crevice holding the tantalising box.

  ‘Of course!’ I cried, swinging my torch light all around the circular walls of the big cavern. ‘We just have to come here at high tide! We’ll probably have to swim underwater through the tunnel to get into this big cave. That way, when we surface, we’ll be really close to the crevice. I bet if we bring the right tools, we’ll be able to dislodge that box!’

  ‘Totally! That’s perfect, Winter!’ said Boges. ‘I just wonder if we can do it in one breath? I guess we can only try.’

  ‘Although there’s still a gap between the high tide mark and the box,’ Ryan added. ‘I wonder how someone got it up there? Maybe we need to wait for a really strong tide to get close enough.’

  ‘We can do that,’ I agreed. We took a few more minutes to explore the big cave but I could tell the boys were as eager as I was to plan our second visit to uncover this underwater secret as soon as possible.

  DAY 28

  3 days to go …

  Perdita

  8:33 am

  Next morning, we were busy working out our next adventure to the sea caves system. The old house was buzzing with excitement and I had stunned Repro by grabbing him and dancing with him around the room.

  Boges had searched online for the high tide information and had downloaded a chart for the next few days.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘that’s sorted. We’ll wait for a day with bigger swells, then go in at high tide, surface nice and close to where that box is wedged, and work on it until we free it. Then we bring it home and see what we’ve got. I can hardly wait!’

  ‘It might be full of gold,’ said Ryan, ‘or jewels.’

  ‘Could be,’ said Boges. ‘I bet it’s more likely to be a treasure map.’

  ‘But Boges,’ I said, worried now, ‘if it’s a map, wouldn’t it be rotted by now?’

  ‘The old charts were all on vellum—like the Ormond Riddle. Vellum lasts for ages. And the metal box is above the high tide mark.’

  ‘If it’s the map leading to the Windraker,’ said Ryan, jigging with excitement, ‘we’ll be able to find the shipwreck!’

  A noise outside the front door made all of us swing round.

  ‘What was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Someone’s here! I can hear them running away. Come on!’ said Ryan racing outside.

  We fanned out in all different directions, but I soon slowed, and then stopped. I noticed that the others had too. It was no use. T
he spy had escaped.

  ‘He could have heard everything about the sea caves and the Windraker,’ said Boges.

  ‘What if it’s a she, not a he?’ Ryan asked. ‘I’m just saying it’s possible.’

  I remained silent. I really didn’t want to think of Harriet as someone who snooped around, eavesdropping. If she turned out to be an enemy, I’d be hurt as well as angry. ‘We’ve still got the advantage of knowing how to get into the sea caves,’ I said. ‘No-one else knows that and they don’t know exactly where the metal box is. It’s going to take anyone else a while to work all that out. We’re still ahead of the game. And anyway, we can’t go until the tide is right.’

  ‘There’s something else I want to do,’ said Boges. ‘I’m launching Skyshadow over that mansion so we can keep an eye on movements along the coast,’ Boges said, bringing out his new device.

  We crowded round to see what Boges had made. He’d adapted a novelty seagull toy to house a mini camera. Both the tiny motor and the camera were powered by battery. ‘This will send back a live feed to my computer for at least two hours,’ he explained. ‘We might get an idea of what’s going on there and a better look at punk woman.’

  ‘Skyshadow?’ Repro asked. ‘I could use something like that.’ Repro was keen to come with us as we went to the edge of the cliff to watch the launch. The bird took off beautifully, propeller spinning invisibly and soared up and away while Boges steered it with the remote joystick.

  A few moments later, and it was indistinguishable—just another bird almost out of sight like the dozens of others that swirled around the beach.

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ said Boges, ‘and keep an eye on that house.’

  ‘Come on, guys,’ I said to Ryan and Repro, ‘we’re running out of food. Let’s go into town and ask a few more questions. Boges, can I borrow your truck? I drive better than you anyway,’ I laughed.

  Abercrombie Village

  10:42 am

  I headed into the village with Repro—Ryan had decided to stay back and continue clearing out more of the grove.