Campion's Choice

When the bell rang for the end of registration Tia and Jack trooped up to the front to talk to Clamp. The teacher spoke without looking up.

‘Everyone may be going mad about lights in the sky but the world hasn’t really changed. Take those things off your sweatshirts and hand them over to me.’

Jack unpinned the tiny knife and put it in the teacher’s huge hand. Tia, after pretending for a second to be surprised, reluctantly did the same but she said, ‘Can we have them back soon, Sir? They were a present.’

The man mountain smiled sweetly.

‘Come and find me at the end of the day.’

That was it, Clamp left, swinging his suitcase to beat a path through the heaving mass of pushing bodies. Once they were in the corridor Jack and Tia saw Liam up ahead near the Year Eight Area.

‘He thinks this is about the elephant,’ Jack whispered to her.

Tia’s friends were nearby in the corridor mewling like abandoned kittens and checking their phones. Tia smiled at them and they grew quiet. Jack looked around but Liam hadn’t waited. He was walking over to the lockers where Gidean was collecting things for the day.

‘Listen, there’s something…’ Liam began.

Gidean reached for a book and ignored the older boy.

Liam tried again.

‘Look, do you have five minutes to talk?’

Gidean’s locker door sprang open and hit Liam square in the face. The skin on metal sound was like bones being broken by a dinner gong. After dropping all his books on the floor Gidean’s cheeks turned chalky white.

There was an ‘ooooh’ sound in the corridor. Kids started to form a half-circle and the murmuring sound of ‘fight, fight, fight’ began to grow slowly.

‘I didn’t do that! You saw it. I was nowhere near it,’ Gidean protested feebly.

He, and his little band of supporters, was clearly frightened. They all began backing away. The corridor, full of kids, fell eerily silent.

‘No problem. My mistake,’ Liam said slowly.

He put up a hand to his face and brushed the end of his nose. It seemed to be fine: nothing mashed up or misshapen. With a shake of the head Liam turned his back on Gidean and began to leave the Year Eight Area. As he walked past Jack, he said quietly, ‘we have to talk, today. This is serious. I’ll text again.’

Gidean’s gang scrabbled on the floor to gather up the pile of scattered books.

‘Honest. It wasn’t me!’ Gidean shouted after Liam. The words fell on deaf ears. Liam had slipped away into the crowd.

At the end of second period Jack got the next text from Liam.

‘Breaktime. Art Dept. Bring Tia.’

Jack and Tia got there first and waited in the Art Studio. The walls were full of hideous portraits. Everywhere they looked multi-coloured faces leered down on them. It was the annual Year Eleven Exam Project.

‘Why is that policewoman snooping on us?’ Tia looked worried.

‘Snooping? I don’t call shooting at someone snooping!’ Jack exploded.

Liam appeared in the doorway between the mass of pictures. His first words were, ‘My dad’s been arrested.’

‘What? Why?’ Tia asked. She was beginning to look seriously frightened.

‘Assault on this Inspector Criel. They’ve arrested my dad.’

Jack sat down on the edge of a table and looked at the floor. All those garish heads and oddly shaped eyes, watching every move, made him feel paranoid.

‘Liam, what exactly happened at your house yesterday?’ he asked.

‘I told you. I saw Criel snooping around. When she wasn’t looking I checked inside her car. I saw all this stuff, some notes, a list of our names, bits cut out from the local newspaper, about the elephant.’

‘So how did your dad get involved?’ Tia asked.

Liam hesitated.

‘I told him a weirdo was spying on me. I didn’t know she was a cop! I genuinely thought she was a weirdo. Normal people don’t go around spying on kids! Dad went outside to talk to her. She pushed him. She started it. They argued a bit. Then Dad thumped her. He didn’t know that she was police. She didn’t wave a badge or anything.’

‘Does your dad normally go around hitting women?’ Tia asked.

‘No! Who told you that?’ Liam snapped.

Jack backed away and blurted out, ‘She tried to shoot me.’

‘What?’ Liam was amazed.

‘Inspector Criel. I have a picture of her. With a gun. It’s in my bag on my dad’s old phone,’ Jack said patting his rucksack.

The information seemed to stun the older boy. He wandered around the classroom shaking his head. Jack watched him.

Liam had a wide, strong face with bright blue eyes. His hair was an explosion, like a lion’s mane. It made him look taller and his broad shoulders made him look more like a man dressed up as a school kid. Jack wanted him to take charge. Liam finally began to speak.

‘This all started with the elephant. Something happened then,’ he said calmly but a buzz interrupted him and he glanced down at his phone. When he looked up again, his eyes were hard.

‘They’re keeping my dad in jail, over night. No bail.’

Jack had his hands stuffed into his pockets. His fingers touched the business card. Pulling it out he remembered Elvis in the garden.

‘Look, this may sound stupid, but let’s say this is all about the whole elephant in the room affair. There’s this guy called Elvis …’

‘Elvis? Seriously?’ Tia couldn’t believe it. Liam looked up and listened carefully. Jack carried on speaking.

‘He’s a young guy. He came round to my house last night. He wanted to talk about what happened. He said something about this group who are interested in weird stuff. The Order or something. He said they are coming to Cambridge today to look into the elephant.’

‘Elvis Carter?’ Liam asked.

That took Jack by surprise.

‘You know him?’

Liam shrugged and held out a hand for the business card. He gave it a quick glance and laughed.

‘Elvis Carter. I know him. He used to come to this school. He got bullied a lot. Mainly by my older brothers. He’s very smart. He’s the sort of kid who is so bright everyone thinks they’re crazy. His big thing is space. I thought he would be on a space mission by now.’

Liam handed the card back to Jack.

‘You think he’s genuine? I mean, it’s not like we can go to the police. Criel is the police,’ Jack said unhappily.

Liam seemed to consider the question for a moment before finally, slowly, nodding his head.

‘I would definitely trust him,’ he said simply.

‘You may trust him but why should we?’ Tia demanded.

A hundred self-portraits in the Art Room watched the trio as Liam’s face seemed to flicker through an assortment of expressions: unhappiness, anger, determination, coldness.

When he spoke his voice was flat and unemotional.

‘Look, my brothers and their gang used to beat up Elvis all the time. When my Mum found out, that was just before she left home, she went round to Elvis’ house and apologised. But, when she left us, my brothers started up again. Started beating up Elvis, stealing his stuff, making his life a misery. But one day, not long after I started at Redemere, Elvis came to find me. He had a letter from my mum to me. He could have torn that letter into tiny shreds and I wouldn’t have blamed him. He had every right to hate my family. But he delivered that letter. So I trust him.’

The door to the Art Room opened and Carl Harrington, the Junior Caretaker, came wandering in carrying a black plastic bin liner. He came to Liam and held out the bag.

‘You found it?’ Liam asked.

Carl spoke slowly, as if he were trying hard to remember the solution to a particularly difficult problem.

‘Yeah. It was where you said it would be, in the skip. It was chucked out wiv the other stuff from the air raid shelter.’

Liam opened the bag and took a quick look inside. He smiled before handing Carl a ten pound note.

‘Nice one,’ Carl grinned, pocketing the cash and shambling off. An oily rag, like a battered tail, hung from the back pocket of his dirty trousers.

The bell rang for the start of the next lesson.

‘Can you get in touch with Elvis and set up a meeting straight after school?’ Liam asked Jack.

‘I’ll do it now.’

Jack took out Elvis’ business card, punched in numbers and sent off a text. Tia looked unhappy and when she spoke there was an edge of panic to her words.

‘I can’t be late home tonight. I have stuff to do. I have to look after my brother and make the tea. Then there’s ironing. My homework. My piano practice. But Criel could be waiting. I don’t want to get shot!’ she said anxiously.

The words were hardly out when her gang of friends piled around the corner and stood outside the Art Studio. Before she knew it the girls surrounded her and dragged her back into the corridor. Jack watched them competing to tell her the latest gossip before they swept her off towards the dreaded Science class. Several girls kept glancing back and laughing. He could hear how they were all making jokes about Tia’s two ‘boyfriends’.

During the afternoon Jack exchanged texts with Elvis and Liam and made a plan. He didn’t have time to think. The day passed in a blur of panic. If he wasn’t looking at his old phone and trying to type in messages he was holding his breath and trying to hide the phone from teachers.

By the time they had arranged that Liam would get them out of school in a van, and would drive to Nance and Grampus’ house on the edge of Redemere where Elvis would be waiting with a lift, Jack felt tense in every part of his body. It must be like this if you’re a spy, he thought. You spend your whole life on edge.

There was a moment when he thought this whole thing was crazy. He thought he should just tell mum or Grampus and show them the film of Criel trying to kill him. But every time he tried to ring them there was no answer. He knew his mum had the big case, but where was Grampus?

He gave up. He would stick to the first plan and meet Elvis’ friends. And anyway, after that he could tell always his mum everything and let her sort things out.

School finished at four o’clock. Tia and Jack snuck into the empty school kitchen and hid behind a fridge. They waited. After a day of pizza and apple pie there was a strong smell of dough in the air.

‘I thought that you could wear this,’ Tia said, putting a hand into her bag and pulling out a knitted woollen hat.

Jack looked at it. It was brown with a red band zig zagging from front to back.

‘You need to hide your hair,’ she explained and he groaned as she reached up to pull the knitwear down around his ears.

A knock finally came and, when they opened the emergency exit, there was a white van, backed up close to the building with both rear doors wide open.

‘Get in,’ the driver shouted.

Jack and Tia jumped over the tailgate and someone slammed shut the doors.

Inside the back of the van it was dark and smelt of chemicals. There was an awkward moment when the van took them by surprise and lurched off. Tia stumbled into Jack’s arms. They clung together in the dark, dancing to try and keep their balance until a gruff voice from the front told them to, ‘sit down’.

‘Do you know where the Old Bakery is?’ Jack called.

‘Yeah,’ the driver growled.

Satisfied Jack tried to make himself comfortable and find a place that would avoid all further contact with Tia.

It was a short journey from the school. When the van stopped, Liam opened the back doors. He carried the black plastic bin bag and had changed out of his school uniform into a battered leather jacket with a grey hoody underneath. He looked like someone from an American rock group. As Jack was staring at the older boy a middle-aged man, wearing a vest and covered in tattoos, came jogging down the road. Liam threw the stranger the keys to the van.

‘Thanks, Jazy,’ he said. The tattooed tough climbed aboard the van, started the engine and moved off down the road.

It took a while for the idea to hit home and Tia got there first.

‘Did you just drive us here?’

‘Maybe,’ Liam shrugged and added, ‘I got another text from my brother. When my dad was arrested they said he was carrying a gun.’

‘What?’

An icy shiver of fear ran through Jack’s body. Maybe the rumours about Liam and his family were true.

‘They’re charging my dad with the attempted murder of that guy Phillips, the man who lives next door to you. Criel must have planted the gun on him.’

Tia stepped forward and touched the sleeve of his leather jacket.

‘Don’t worry. Jack has it all on film. He has the picture of Criel with the gun. Your dad will be just fine,’ she said.