LITMIR.BIZ

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said Mum.

      “That’ll be the day!” said Ann. “He’d rather lend me his cut-off fingers!”

      But Martin did, entirely unexpectedly, make a brotherly appearance in her room next morning. “You look awful,” he said. “Like a Guy made of putty.” He followed this compliment up by dropping Walkman and tapes on her bed and leaving for school at once. Ann was quite touched.

      That day she lay and listened to the only three tapes she could bear – Martin’s taste in music matched his love of dinosaurs – and kept an eye on Hexwood Farm merely for something to look at. Young Harrison appeared once, much as usual, except that he bought a great deal of bread. Could it be, Ann wondered, that he was really having to feed a vanload of men still inside there? She did not believe this. By now, she had decided, in a bored, gloomy, virusish way, that her exciting theory about gangsters was just silly romancing. The whole world was grey – the virus had probably got into the universe – and even the daffodils in front of the house opposite looked bleak and dull to her.

      Someone who looked like a Lord Mayor walked across the road in her mirror.

      A Lord Mayor? Ann tore the earphones off and sat up for a closer look. Appa-dappa-dappa-dah, went the music in a tinny whisper. She clicked it off impatiently. A Lord Mayor with a suitcase, hurrying towards the peeling black gate of Hexwood Farm, in a way that was – well – sort of doubtful but determined too. Like someone going to the dentist, Ann thought. And was it a coincidence that the Lord Mayor had appeared just in that early-afternoon lull, when there was never anyone much about in Wood Street? Did Lord Mayors wear green velvet gowns? Or such very pointed boots? But there was definitely a gold chain round the man’s neck. Was he going to the farm to ransom someone who had been kidnapped – with bundles of money in that suitcase?

      She watched the man halt in front of the gate. If there was some kind of opening mechanism, it was clearly not going to work this time. After standing there an impatient moment or so, the robed man put out a fist and knocked. Ann could hear the distant, hollow little thumps even through her closed window. But nobody answered the knocking. The man stepped back in a frustrated way. He called out. Ann heard, as distant as the knocking, a high tenor voice calling, but she could not hear the words. When that did no good either, the man put down his suitcase and glanced round the nearly deserted street, to make sure no one was looking.

      Ah-haha! Ann thought. Little do you know I have my trusty mirror!

      She saw the man’s face quite clearly, narrow and important, with lines of worry and impatience. It was no one she knew. She saw him take up the ornament hanging on his chest from the gold chain and advance on the gate with it as if he were going to use the ornament as a key. And the gate opened, silently and smoothly, just as it had done for the van, when the ornament was nowhere near it. The Lord Mayor was really surprised. Ann saw him start back, and then look at his ornament wonderingly. Then he picked up his suitcase and hurried importantly inside. The gate swung shut behind him. And, just like the van, that was the last Ann saw of him.

      This time it could have been because the virus suddenly got worse. For the next day or so, Ann was so ill that she was in no state to watch anything, in the mirror or out of it. She sweated and tossed and slept – nasty short sleeps with feverish dreams – and woke feeling limp and horrible and hot.

      Be glad, the Prisoner told her. He had been a sort of doctor before he was put in prison. The disease is coming to a head.

      You could have fooled me! Ann told him. I think they kidnapped the Lord Mayor too. That place is a Bermuda triangle. And I’m not better. I’m WORSE.

      Mum seemed to share the Prisoner’s opinion, to Ann’s annoyance. “Fever’s broken at last,” Mum said. “Won’t be long now before you’re well. Thank goodness!”

      “Only another hundred years!” Ann groaned.

      And the night that followed did indeed seem about a century long. Ann kept having dreams where she ran away across a vast grassy park, scarcely able to move her legs for terror of the Something that stalked behind. Or worse dreams where she was shut in a labyrinth made of mother-of-pearl – in those dreams she thought she was trapped in her own eardrum – and the pearl walls gave rainbow reflections of the same Something softly sliding after her. The worst of this dream was that Ann was terrified of the Something catching her, but equally terrified in case the Something missed her in the curving maze. There was blood on the pearly floor of her eardrum. Ann woke with a jump, wet all over, to find it was getting light at last.

      Dawn was yellow outside and reflecting yellow in her mirror. But what seemed to have woken her was not the dreams but the sound of a solitary car. Not so unusual, Ann thought fretfully. Some of the deliveries to the shops happened awfully early. Yet it was quite clear to her that this car was not a delivery. It was important. She pulled a soggy pillow weakly under her head so that she could watch it in the mirror.

      The car came whispering down Wood Street with its headlights blazing, as if the driver had not realised it was dawn now, and crept to a cautious sort of stop in the bay opposite the launderette. For a moment it stayed that way, headlights on and engine running. Ann had a feeling that the dark heads she could see leaning together inside it were considering what to do. Were they police? It was a big grey expensive car, more a businessman’s car than a police car. Unless they were very high-up police, of course.

      The engine stopped and the headlights snapped off. Doors opened. Very high-up, Ann thought, as three men climbed out One was wealthy businessman all over, rather wide from good living, with not a crisp hair out of place. He was wearing one of those wealthy macs that never look creased, over a smart suit. The second man was shorter and plumper, and decidedly shabby, in a green tweed suit that did not fit him. The trousers were too long and the sleeves too narrow, and he had a long knitted scarf trailing from his neck. An informer, Ann thought He had a scared, peevish look, as if he had not wanted the other two to bring him along. The other man was tall and thin, and he was quite as oddly dressed as the informer, in a three-quarter-length little camelhair coat that must have been at least forty years old. Yet he wore it like a king.

      When he strolled over to the middle of the road to get a full view of Hexwood Farm, he moved in a curious lolling, powerful way that took Ann’s eyes with him. He had hair the same camelhair colour as his coat. She watched him stand there, long legs apart, hands in pockets, staring at the gate, and she scarcely noticed the other two men come up to him. She kept trying to see the tall man’s face. But she never did see it clearly because they went quickly over to the gate then, with the businessman striding ahead.

      Here, it was just like the Lord Mayor. The businessman stopped short, dismayed, as if he had confidently expected the gate to open mechanically for him. When it simply stayed shut, his face turned down to the small informer-man, and this one bustled forward. He did something – tapped out a code? – but Ann could not see what. The gate still did not open. This made the small man angry. He raised a fist as if he was going to hit the gate. At this, the tall man in the camel coat seemed to feel they had waited long enough. He strolled forward, put the informer-man gently but firmly out of the way, and simply went on strolling towards the gate. At the point where it looked as if he would crash into the peeling black boards, the gate swung open, sharply and quickly for him. Ann had a feeling that the stones of the wall would have done that too if the man had wanted it so.

      The three went inside and the gate shut after them.

      Ann could not rid herself of the feeling that she had just seen the most important thing yet. She expected them to come out quite soon, probably with Harrison under arrest. But she fell asleep still waiting.

      

      Much later that morning there was a violent hailstorm. It woke Ann, and she woke completely well again. For a moment, she lay and stared at thick streams of ice running down the window, melting in new, bright sunlight. She felt so well that it stunned her.

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