Eye Spy (7 page)

When we got home that night, I noticed immediately that the atmosphere in the house had changed and the pall of gloom had lifted. There was no sign of Dad, but we could hear Nan moving around in the kitchen and singing along to her favourite golden oldies programme on the radio. If she was singing again, things must be improving.

When she saw us, Nan pointed silently, and we saw the light in the workshop window, twinkling away at the bottom of the garden. Nobody said anything, but we all heaved a collective sigh of relief. It looked as if things were back to normal.

“Now Ian's working again,” Nan said, as she put on her coat and picked up her handbag, “I feel I can safely go out and enjoy myself, so I've arranged to go to the cinema with Marjorie. There's a casserole for you all in the oven. See you later.”

At half past six I called Dad in from the workshop and Donna served up the casserole. We chatted as we ate, and Dad joined in from time to time. Although he was still quite preoccupied, he seemed in a good mood. After we'd finished eating, he stayed at the table, drawing diagrams on scraps of paper. We squinted over his shoulder at the squiggly lines. “What is it?” Donna asked.

“I'm making modifications to Hamish so he can identify smells,” Dad said. “It means he'll be able to detect drugs, just like a sniffer dog. It'll make him more marketable.”

Donna and I looked at each other. The moment had arrived. I took a deep breath and launched into the speech I'd prepared.

“At school today, a couple of people from a big company gave a talk about design and technology. They said they had a big research department and were looking for new ideas. They sounded like just the sort of people who'd be interested in Hamish.”

Dad didn't seem particularly enthusiastic. “I doubt it, Alex. It's a very specialised field. Very few companies in this country are geared up for this sort of modern technology.”

“That's just it, Dad!” said Donna eagerly. “They already make cameras and sensors, so surely they're ideal.”

She had his full attention now. He raised his eyebrows at her. “You think so, do you? And what's the name of this ‘ideal' company?”

“It's Holtech, Dad. They're a local company…” Donna's voice tailed off as she saw Dad's expression change.

“Holtech,” he said softly. “I see. And did you by any chance mention my robot to them?” He was standing up now, and glowering at Donna across the table.

I jumped to her defence. “Of course not, Dad. Not exactly…”

“You
promised
not to tell anyone! So much for family loyalty! How dare you interfere!” His voice rose in anger, and my stomach began to turn somersaults. Everything was going horribly wrong. We'd meant well, but somehow we'd only made things worse.

Donna leapt to her feet. She was as angry as he was now. “Don't you
want
to sell any of your inventions?” she shouted. “Don't you
want
to make some money? Or do you just want to be a loser all your life?”

Dad reached across the table and slapped her hard on the face.

There was a sudden silence as we both stared at him, horror-struck. He'd never laid a hand on either of us before. Then Donna pushed back her chair and dashed out of the room. I heard her feet pounding up the stairs and then the sound of her bedroom door slamming.

Dad sank back onto his chair. All his anger seemed to have drained away. He dropped his head into his hands. “Get out and leave me alone,” he muttered. “Go on – buzz off!”

As I went slowly upstairs, I realised my legs were shaking. I couldn't believe Dad had hit Donna. And
why
had he hit her? OK, she shouldn't have called him a loser, but it seemed to be our attempt to help him sell the robot that had really angered him. And why had our mention of Holtech sent him over the edge?

A few minutes later, when I looked out of my bedroom window, I saw Dad charging off down the road as if the Hound of the Baskervilles was after him.

After a while I knocked on Donna's door. She didn't reply. I pushed the door open and went in. She was lying on her bed, sobbing – great shuddering sobs that seemed to fill the room. I couldn't remember when I'd last seen her cry like that. I felt helpless. I didn't know what to say to comfort her, so I just sat next to her and held her hand tight until at last the tears subsided. Eventually she sat up, wiping her wet face on the pillow case.

“What was all that about?” she asked, and her voice trembled as she spoke. I shook my head. “Dunno. Perhaps he's just paranoid that they'll try and pinch his ideas. You know how secretive he is about everything.”

“He's mad. Does he think Holtech will send a spy around here to steal his precious robot?” Another tear rolled down her cheek and she brushed it impatiently away with her sleeve.

I had a sudden vision of a man in a balaclava creeping round the house, peering into cupboards and pulling out drawers. That reminded me how I'd been meaning to look for more information about our mother. Maybe I could use that as a way of distracting Donna and taking her mind off what had just happened. “Look,” I said. “I'm as fed up as you are with Dad's secrecy. But there's one thing he has no right to keep from us and that's the truth about our mother. It's as if both he and Nan are trying to pretend she never existed. Don't you think that's odd?”

Donna shrugged. “What does it matter?”

“Don't you
want
to find out about her?”

“Not really. She's dead, and nothing we do can bring her back. What's going on now is more important than what happened all those years ago.”

“But don't you see? It's what happened in the past that's made Dad the way he is now.
That's
why we have to find out! It might explain why everyone is so secretive about Annie.”

She thought about it for a minute, then shrugged. “I s'pose you're right.”

“You bet I am! And now, while both Nan and Dad are out, is the perfect time to see what we can find out about Annie. Come on, Donna, we'll never have a better chance to solve the mystery!”

And so we set about searching the house. It was difficult to know where to start. Our house is like a rabbit warren of small rooms, all at different levels where bits have been added on over the years. Nan told us it was once the gatekeeper's lodge to a manor house, but the manor house was pulled down years ago to make way for the new estate and Lea Green School. The house is full of all the stuff from Nan's life with Granddad, as well as all our belongings. We'd set ourselves a huge task.

In the end we decided to start by looking in all the cupboards. Granddad was a DIY fanatic, and there are loads of them built into nooks and crannies, in recesses and under the stairs. When I opened the door of the biggest cupboard, all sorts of things came tumbling out: old jigsaw puzzles, chipped flower vases, and unfinished pieces of knitting. We began to sort through the pile.

An hour later, we'd been through all the downstairs cupboards without finding anything remotely interesting. I still wasn't sure what we were looking for. Photos or letters, perhaps? A marriage certificate would be good; that would give our mother's surname before she married.

“What about that desk in the sitting room where Nan keeps all her papers?” Donna suggested. I felt a bit sneaky and underhand, looking through Nan's private papers, but we had a right to this information. After all, people who are adopted can apply for details of their birth mother once they reach eighteen. Annie was
our
birth mother, so really we were just doing the same thing, only a few years earlier.

Nan may not have turned out cupboards very often, but she certainly kept her papers in order. We pulled out the drawers and sat on the floor going through the contents. There were lots of bank statements and bills, all filed neatly in folders, but none of it was relevant. Where was all the personal stuff?

Then I noticed something strange. “Hey, Donna, look! This drawer is quite shallow, but the desk itself is much deeper…”

I plunged my arm into the hole where the drawer had been. As I had suspected, there was a space at the back, beyond the drawer runners, and there was something wedged into the space. It felt like a thick envelope. I pulled it out.

Just then, we became aware of noises in the kitchen. It had to be Nan returning early. We couldn't risk her finding us going through the desk. Donna hurriedly switched on the television while I forced the drawer back in place and dived for the sofa, where I'd thrown down my backpack when I came in from school. I just had time to shove the envelope inside it before Nan popped her head round the door.

“That was a waste of time. The new film was sold out, so we'll have to try another day. Have you two had your supper?”

“Yes, Nan.” I grabbed the backpack and made for the door. “I'm just going to do my homework. Come on, Donna. I need your help with my History essay.”

A few moments later we were sitting side by side on the bed in my room, looking at the fat brown envelope from the desk. “Of course, it may be nothing to do with Annie,” I said.

Donna picked up the envelope. “Well, we'll never find out if we don't look,” she pointed out, as she teased open the flap and pulled out a wodge of papers.

The papers were folded in half and held together with a rubber band. When I removed the band, we could see that what we had was one letter folded round a bunch of other letters. The paper they were written on was darker at the edges, as if it was quite old.

The letters were in Dad's untidy, sprawling writing. They were all addressed to Annie.

“Which one shall I start with?” Donna asked.

“Start with the earliest one.”

We checked the dates. The first one was written two months after we were born.

“That doesn't make sense!” I said slowly. “Not if she died when we were born. You don't write letters to dead people.”

We stared at each other in bewilderment, then Donna picked up the letter and began to read.

One sentence kept repeating over and over in my head:
I can't believe you left us all.
I gasped. “She didn't die. She walked out on him
–
on all of us!”

We stared at each other for a long time without speaking. When you've spent thirteen years believing your mother's dead, it's devastating to discover she might be out there somewhere, alive and well, doing the things that people do every day – just not doing them with you.

Donna was the first to recover. I think I was still in shock. She took Dad's letters and began to scan them quickly, pointing out phrases that seemed to confirm that Annie had indeed walked out on Dad. Lastly, she picked up the letter that had been wrapped round all the other ones, and began to read it. It was immediately obvious that this one was from our mother.

There were tears on Donna's face by the time she'd finished reading. “How terrible for Dad. He loved her so much. No wonder he's been strange ever since.” Then her expression hardened. “How could she do that, Alex? How could she abandon two newborn babies? She must be some kind of monster!”

I didn't reply, because lots of things were slotting into place in my head. I remembered Nan saying, after Pinstripe's visit, how Dad couldn't cope with rejection, and I began to see how being rejected by Annie all those years ago could make him wary of risking rejection again. Maybe that was why he wouldn't approach Holtech.

Donna said suddenly, “I can't think about this anymore tonight. I'm exhausted. All I want to do is crash out.” I felt just the same. It was as if all my emotions had been put through a cement mixer and were now hopelessly jumbled up, and I knew both of us needed some time to think.

We folded up the letters and put them back in the old envelope. I agreed to look after them until I got a chance to put them back where I'd found them. Then we both went to bed.

It's odd, isn't it, how sometimes, when your body's so tired that it can barely function, your brain refuses to let you sleep, and just goes round and round in endless circles, unable to switch itself off? I wanted so much to sleep, and yet, from the moment I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, I found myself tossing and turning as restlessly as Dad had done all those years ago after Annie left him. Now it was my turn to be angry. In fact, the more I thought about Annie abandoning us so she could get on with her career, the angrier I became. I was angry on Dad's behalf, too. As far as I knew, Dad had never even looked at another woman since. Had she broken his heart, or just destroyed his trust in women forever?

I was still awake at midnight when Dad returned. Through my open door I heard the murmur of voices. I wondered if he and Nan were discussing what had happened at supper. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me, and I padded downstairs in my bare feet. The kitchen door was ajar and I found that if I sat on the stairs, shielded by the banisters, I could just hear what they were saying.

“I shouldn't have hit her, Mum. I know I shouldn't,” Dad was saying. “But when she gets angry, she's Annie all over again. That's why I lost my temper with her. It brought back all the rows. She even looks like her, with all that dark wavy hair.”

“You have to tell them the truth, Ian. You owe it to them. They're not wee bairns anymore. They're growing up, and if you don't tell them, they'll find out some other way.”
Too right
, I thought.

I heard Dad groan. “I know, Mum, I know, but I've left it so long now. They'll probably never forgive me.”

There was silence for a moment, and then I heard a chair scraping as someone got up. That was when I fled back up the stairs, because I'd had enough confrontation for one day and I didn't want any more.

That night, when I finally fell asleep, I had a dream in which Donna and I were on top of a tower like the one on Em's tarot card. There was a high wind, and the door to the spiral staircase that led down to the ground had blown shut and we were trapped on the roof. The tower kept growing taller and taller, and as the ground got further away, I became so dizzy I had to close my eyes. When I opened them again, I was alone on the roof, and there was only one place Donna could have gone: over the edge…

After that, I lay awake most for of the night, afraid to fall asleep again in case I had another, even more terrifying dream.