Other Alice (30 page)

‘We were looking for a story written by someone called Dorothy Grimes,’ I said. ‘I thought it was here. But we must have made a mistake.’

Ramblebrook’s eyebrows crouched over his hooked nose. ‘Grimes . . . Grimes . . . why do I know that name?’ He trailed off, his expression
changing, becoming grave and then a little frightened. ‘Yes. I know the one.’

‘Then why couldn’t we find it?’ Gypsy asked, unmoving. ‘We searched a box in that room. According to how you’ve organised them, it should have been in
there.’

Ramblebrook nodded, stroking his chin. ‘My dear, if you know about that story, then you must know that I’m not supposed to have it. For that reason, it’s kept
somewhere . . . a little safer.’ His eyes darted over each of us. ‘May I ask why you want it?’

For a moment, no one answered. I took the tissue away from my mouth. It had finally stopped bleeding. ‘We think she’s looking for it. We wanted to get to it before she
did.’

‘Looking for it?’ Alarm crept into his voice. ‘How can she be when she’s been locked up for life?’

‘We’ve got reason to believe she’s escaped,’ said Gypsy. ‘And we need her to do something for us. The story is our bargaining chip.’

‘You mean blackmail?’

Piper shrugged. ‘Same thing.’

‘I see,’ said Ramblebrook. He adjusted his glasses. ‘If that’s the case, then I think the best thing I can do is get rid of it before anyone comes to any harm.’ He
paused. ‘You
do
know who Dorothy Grimes is, don’t you? You must have read about the awful things she’s capable of? You don’t want to
get mixed up with her.’

‘We don’t have a choice,’ I said. ‘Please – you said you wished you’d helped someone once. That’s what we’re trying to do now. Let us have the
story.’

Ramblebrook chewed his lip. ‘Are you sure you want to read it? It’s dark. Disturbing. In fact, it’d probably give you nightmares.’

‘Please,’ I repeated. ‘Someone’s life depends on this.’

He stared at us a little longer, then finally nodded. ‘Very well. Follow me.’

He led the way to the room at the back, the one through which Tabitha had got in. He stopped by the darkened doorway. One by one we joined him outside. I hung back, suddenly on edge.

‘This room is empty.’

‘It isn’t.’ He pushed the door wider, pointing.

There in a dark alcove were several boxes, plus a large safe. They were so well tucked in that I’d missed them the first time I’d looked.

He flipped the light switch, before realising that there was no fitting, just a tangle of wires hanging from the ceiling. ‘Bother,’ he muttered. ‘That should’ve been
fixed.’

He walked towards the safe, his shoes clipping the bare floorboards, and dug into his pocket, removing a set of keys. ‘It’s kept in the safe, for obvious reasons.’

We filed into the room and stood by him in silence as he fumbled with the keys. ‘You can take it downstairs and read it . . . if I can ever find the key. I need some
light . . .’ He shuffled back to the door, still fumbling.

Piper had gone ahead of us and was kneeling by the safe, his fingers on a large dial. ‘Hang on.’ He stood, his voice sharp. ‘Why would you need a key for a
combination—?’

The door slammed shut and the key turned, locking us inside the dark room, with Ramblebrook on the other side of the door.

‘. . . .ock,’ Piper finished, and kicked the safe with all his might.

Gypsy ran to the door and pounded it with her fists. ‘What are you doing? Let us out!’ She turned to Piper, speaking urgently. ‘Piper, your flute. Could you play something?
Make
him open the door?’

‘I could if I still had it, but I dropped it back in the other room when I fell.’ Piper booted the safe again, then turned his back to the wall, his head in his hands. ‘I
can’t believe I fell for such a simple trick,’ he fumed. ‘I
knew
I should have waited outside.’ He limped to the door, rattling it.
‘Open this door before I kick it down!’

‘I doubt you’ve tried kicking down a door of solid wood before,’ Ramblebrook hissed on the other side. ‘It’d take you most of the night. Now you tell me exactly how
you know about that story, because, as far as I was aware, there were only two people in the world who knew it was here, one being me and the other being the person I got it from.’

I went to the door and stood next to Gypsy. ‘Do you mean Dr Rosemary?’

There was silence. Then, ‘How on earth would
you
know about Dr Rosemary? Who are you children? Who sent you? You’re not coming out until I get
answers!’

‘You want answers?’ I shouted, losing my temper. ‘Well, you won’t like them.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ramblebrook said, sounding rattled now.

‘I know things about you, Ramblebrook. I know how you’ve stolen lots of these stories for your museum, and the reason it all started.’ I slid my rucksack off my shoulders and
unzipped it, reaching for the section of the notebook I’d had from the start.

‘What are you doing?’ Gypsy mouthed.

‘Bluffing,’ I whispered. ‘There’s a chance I might be able to get him to let us out.’ I leafed through the pages and found what I was looking for: a name. It meant
nothing to me, but everything to Ramblebrook.

‘Don’t lie,’ he blustered. ‘No one knows that! Only me.’

‘You started to collect unfinished stories because you felt guilty,’ I said. I tried to keep the nervous squeak out of my voice. ‘About what happened to Georgie
Squitch.’

A strangled sound came from the other side of the door. ‘How . . . ? Who told you that name? Who . . . ?’

‘Someone who knows a lot about you,’ I said. ‘And Georgie Squitch. And how you blamed yourself for . . . what happened to him.’ I held my breath, waiting
and afraid. I
didn’t
know what had happened. Alice hadn’t revealed that, but, if I could convince Ramblebrook that I knew, perhaps he might be
persuaded to let us go.

Another gasping noise came from Ramblebrook. I realised he was sobbing. ‘Who else knew?’ he babbled. ‘All these years . . . I thought I was the only
one. . . . . . .ried to tell someone once. My mother. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bear to see the disappointment on her face, to have her know that
about me.’

I looked at Gypsy in dismay. Her expression had softened now. Whatever he might have done, Ramblebrook’s distress was difficult to listen to. Only Piper looked unmoved.

‘No one else has to know,’ I said. ‘Just let us go and we won’t say anything.’

He appeared not to have heard, weeping softly on the other side of the door. ‘If only I’d opened the gate,’ he muttered, sniffing. ‘If only I’d been brave and not a
coward. He could have been saved.’

I scanned the story again with difficulty. The light was so faint it was hard to read. I searched for some clue, something in Alice’s writing that would get him to talk more, but found
nothing. I stayed silent, but to Ramblebrook it must have sounded like an accusation.

‘I had no choice,’ he said, defensive. ‘Anyone else in school would have done the same.’

‘Would they?’ I asked.

‘Everyone knew he was being bullied. No one did a thing. They were too scared it would make them targets, too.’ He’d stopped crying now and spoke more quickly. ‘I
can’t have been the only person who was in their garden that evening. I can’t have been the
only
person who heard them chasing him down the
alley.’

‘But you could have saved him,’ I pressed, remembering some mention of a gate. ‘You could have let him in.’

‘Everything could have been so different,’ Ramblebrook murmured. ‘If only I’d let him in and got him away from them. Or if I’d at least gone into the alley and
delayed them, just by a few seconds . . .’ He faltered. ‘If . . . if the train at the end of my street hadn’t been going past just as they chased him
on to the track. All those “ifs”.’

I closed my eyes. Georgie Squitch had been chased into the path of a train, and Ramblebrook had lived with the guilt of knowing he could have been saved . . . if only Ramblebrook
had been brave enough to open his gate and offer Georgie an escape.

‘They’d emptied his bag out in the alley,’ Ramblebrook continued shakily. His voice was far away now, as if he were lost in his memories. ‘Thrown his belongings around. I
picked them all up after they’d gone. That’s how I found his stories, dozens of them in his school books. I stayed up half the night reading them; brilliant, they were. And then there
was the unfinished one. I was desperate to know what happened next. I decided then and there I was going to be Squitchey’s friend, no matter what.’ He hiccuped. ‘But, of course,
it was already too late for that. I found out at school the next day that he’d been killed. Him . . . and the two cretins chasing him. So you see? It wasn’t just one life
but three I could have saved.’

‘You can still save a life now,’ I said. ‘Help us! Give us the story and let us go.’ I pressed my ear against the door, trying to get some clue as to what
Ramblebrook’s next move might be. All I could hear was his breathing, fast and panicked.

‘Who else knows what I did?’ he demanded. ‘Who told you this?’

Gypsy’s eyes were wide. She shook her head, warning me to say no more. I nodded. I already knew that Ramblebrook wouldn’t be able to handle the truth. He was so eaten up with the
guilt of what he had done that there was no way I could tell him about Alice, even if it was to try and make him see that she had written everything for him. The discovery would crush him and
possibly put us in worse danger. There was no telling how he might react or lash out.

‘I . . . I can’t tell you,’ I said finally. ‘But we know you didn’t mean for it to happen. It was an accident, a horrible accident. Whoever was
chasing Georgie was to blame.
They
were the ones who made it happen.’

‘Yes, they made it happen.’ Ramblebrook’s voice was faint. ‘But I let them. Sometimes doing nothing is the worst thing of all. That’s why I have to think carefully
about what to do next with you.’

I stared at Gypsy and Piper, stricken with fear, as Ramblebrook’s footsteps shuffled away from the door. The stairs creaked as he went down them.

‘He’s
keeping
us here?’ I mumbled. ‘But he can’t . . .’

‘He’s keeping us for now,’ Piper said, glowering. ‘He knows he’s gotta let us out sooner or later, but at the moment we’re stuck.’

‘Piper’s right,’ Gypsy said quietly. ‘The only way we’re getting out of here any time soon is if we can escape.’

I turned. She had opened the window and was leaning out, her breath puffing in the cold air.

‘How far down is it?’ I asked.

‘Too far to jump without breaking any bones.’

‘What about the roof below, that the cat climbed on to?’

Piper joined us at the window. ‘No, the roof’s unstable. There were tiles slipping even when the cat walked over it. If one of us tried it, the whole thing would cave in. We could be
killed.’

‘Wonder what happened to Tabitha?’ said Gypsy. ‘Did you see her at all after you came upstairs?’

‘No. She went into this room and I stood at the front window. I never saw or heard nothing from her after that.’

‘Maybe she got out when Ramblebrook came back,’ I said. ‘She could have gone back to Ramone for help.’

Piper looked unconvinced. ‘Or she could’ve just saved her own skin.’

‘We need another idea.’ I scanned the room desperately. ‘Something that would force Ramblebrook to open the door.’ My eyes rested on the safe. ‘Perhaps
there’s money or valuables in there. If we could get into it and start throwing the money out of the window, he’d come in to try and stop us and we could overpower him.’

‘Bingo.’ Piper’s eyes glinted. ‘Well done, kid!’

Gypsy eyed the safe doubtfully. ‘How are we meant to get into it? We can’t possibly guess the combination.’

‘Forget the safe.’ Piper grabbed the topmost box from the pile in the alcove. ‘We’ve got something Ramblebrook values above everything else.’ He put the box on the
floor, pulling it open. The musty smell of old paper hit my nose.

‘Stories,’ I whispered.

Piper pulled out a handful of papers.

‘Ramblebrook!’ he bellowed. ‘You’d better get up here and open this door!’

‘What are you going to do with them?’ I asked.

Piper began heaping the stories on the hearth. ‘Whatever it takes.’ He nodded to the other boxes. ‘Help me empty these.’

Gypsy shifted the next box and I took the one after, staggering under its weight. It slid out of my grasp as I went to put it down, landing on its side. In the dim light, I could just see a
single letter printed on its side:
W
. I began pulling the stories out in handfuls. Some typed, some handwritten. Some just a page or two, others that were
much longer novels but a few chapters incomplete.

Had Alice thought of every single one of these stories? It seemed impossible. There were just too many, even in these few boxes. And it wasn’t just me thinking it.

‘Alice came up with all these?’ Gypsy asked. ‘How? Just . . . how? It’s enough to drive someone mad.’

‘Maybe that’s why all this happened,’ I said, my voice shaky. ‘Maybe that’s exactly what happened.’ I thought of my storytelling sister asleep on the boat and
my eyes suddenly stung with tears.

Piper took out the book of matches.

I stared at him in alarm.

‘Ramblebrook!’ he called again. ‘If you wanna save your stories, you’d better get up here!’

‘You’re really going to burn them?’ I asked.

His eyes gleamed triumphantly. ‘I will if he don’t let us out, but I’m betting he’s gonna open that door pretty soon.’

Gypsy pressed her ear against the door. ‘He’s coming.’

Piper stuffed the pages into the grate, a match held at the ready. I stared at it, almost longingly. It was so cold in the room. My gaze drifted over the stories I’d pulled out and
scattered over the floor. So many stories, so many names. All these imaginary people . . .

. . . .nd one very
real
one.

I sat up straighter, staring at a folder that had slid almost into my lap. With shaking fingers, I picked it up. There was no mistaking the name written at the top.