Submersion (13 page)

‘Just how far have we come? How many miles?’ I asked him, but Jessie just smiled, dryly.
Nice try,
it said.

‘A long way,’ Jessie eventually admitted. ‘Far enough that I’ve just got about enough fuel to get us back, and much further than a twelve year-old girl could make on her own in just over three days.’

‘What if she wasn’t on her own?’ I asked, but Jessie just shrugged.
What ifs
headed up far too many of the directions we already found ourselves going in.
What ifs
were uncomfortably frequent, disorientating our progress at every turn.

‘I want to find her as much as you, but I saw nothing along the way,’ Jessie explained, ‘and it’s mainly greenery around here – you’d see if someone had disturbed it and I saw nothing. Further, why would she come this far? There’s nothing here.’

‘There’s that,’ I pointed out, nodding at the place I had first encountered three days before.

‘There’s nothing here she knew about,’ Jessie stressed, delving into the rucksack he brought along, pulling out the coffee flask. He handed me a cupful. ‘We’ve got a few choices.’

‘And what are those?’

‘Well, since we got this far, we could stay, work our way through some of this hoard and make some money…’

‘Or?’

‘Go back to where we started and check out the progress with that other matter.’

That other matter
referred to the item I had found at the train graveyard the previous day. An item I had reluctantly taken along to
someone who could help
us
, at Papa H’s referral.

We reached the Cadley residence late in the afternoon. The sky was suffocated with dull cloud, threatening rain and it mirrored our moods: Elinor was gone and the closest we had got to a trustworthy clue regarding her whereabouts had been left in the possession of a crazy old man who was rumoured – albeit not seriously – to be a wizard from the dark ages. Hope was now a limited luxury in our lives. I had visited Old Man Merlin immediately after my visit to Papa H’s the night before. Conscious not to entirely trust the old man, I still left no time in seeking out his help.

I’d not been inside the Cadley house before - previous encounters taking me only as far as the platform at the front, when I had chased up a missing Elinor. Waiting out the front, I had glimpsed a dark hallway, doors ahead and to the sides and the bottom steps of a steel staircase that I assumed spiraled up to the apex of the house. Knocking the night before, I’d been greeted with a
Come in, it’s not locked
from further within and found myself entering his cluttered, cramped lair for the first time. Walking past two rooms that appeared packed with old washing machines and refrigerators, carpeted with leads and snakes of plumbing tubes, I followed his voice to the rear of the house – to a workshop area populated with televisions. All were working and showing the same film, some in black and white, others in full colour.

‘You a
Star Wars
fan, Mr Jones?’ he said, with his back to me, whilst he fiddled with another piece of electrical equipment – a tiny transistor radio, in white plastic casing.

‘How did you know it was me?’

‘Saw you on the monitor,’ he explained, still engrossed in his activity. ‘You don’t think I’d let anyone in, do you? Only people I can trust.’

‘And you can trust me?’ I questioned, wondering how he could be certain.

‘Elinor trusts you, that’s good enough for me,’ he answered, finally pausing from his fiddly work and turning to face me. There was something vaguely familiar about him; something in him I recognised from another person, an old friend. ‘So, you’ve finally come about the rat?’

‘No,’ I replied, surprise in my voice, my musing instantly abandoned. It hadn’t occurred to me he’d been expecting me to call round about it. Maybe there was a message from Billy I’d missed. ‘No, I’ve come about something else. Something Papa Harold said you could help me with.’

‘To do with the girl?’ he asked, approaching me.

‘Yes,’ I said and took the item I had brought for him out of my pocket.

‘Ah, one of
those,
’ he said, smiling, his face flourishing with the same joy I had seen Papa H restrain. ‘Why don’t you strip off that gear and help yourself to coffee, whilst I see what I can do to get it working.’

‘You’ve got coffee?’ I asked, surprised. Everybody seemed to have coffee these days.

‘Get a supply from a good friend.’ Jessie, it had to be Jessie.

So, I stripped off the protective clothing and sipped at a cup of thick, gritty coffee – suspiciously as bitter as that served by my pal – whilst Old Man Merlin studied the small cassette player I had discovered in the denim bag at the train graveyard.

I hadn’t seen this particular model before, but Elinor did own a tape recorder – a bulky black machine, with a microphone on a lead that Jessie had given her. She’d amused most of us on many occasions, poking the microphone under our noses, as she pretended to interview us, like a news reporter, capturing our voices and snippets of our lives, making stories in her very own way.

A sequence of tuts, mutterings and shakes of his head suggested old Merlin was having little success with this other machine. He left the room numerous times, bringing with him a couple of pairs of ancient headphones and a little plastic tub of corroding batteries – similar to the tub that had served as the rat’s coffin. After a good hour, he finally addressed me again.

‘Could you leave it with me?’ he asked and I knew that my face instantly betrayed a reluctance. ‘I understand,’ he said, without another word from me. ‘You don’t know me from Adam, not really. But I’ve been good enough to trust you on the word of a twelve year-old girl, so maybe you can return that trust on a similar basis. We are good friends, Elinor and I. Billy, too. If you give me more time with this, I might be able to get it working. And it might provide a clue as to her whereabouts.’

‘Assuming it’s hers,’ I added.

‘Oh, it’s definitely hers,’ the old man confirmed, a chuckle in his voice. ‘Or it might be Billy’s. You see, it’s definitely one of mine. I don’t remember handing it over, but maybe I did. My memory is not what it was. But, one thing I know for certain – other than you, they are the only visitors I’ve had in this house for years. So, it was taken by – or given to – one of them. Leave it with me, then?’

I looked into that face again and, drawn in by his earnest words and that trace of familiarity I had glimpsed when first setting my eyes upon him, I nodded.

The next afternoon, I re-entered the house with my companion.

‘Ah, Jessie my lad, and how are we doing?’ old Merlin said, greeting Jessie with a solid handshake, his eyes glistening at the sight of my friend. Instantly, I knew the old man had lied when he’d said Elinor and Billy were his only recent visitors. This was confirmed when Jessie casually helped himself to coffee and cleared a space on an old chair, where he promptly sat. There was a comfortable familiarity between them, a warmth.

‘Did you have any joy?’ I asked, hiding my annoyance at the old man’s small deception – puzzled by its lack of necessity, too.

‘Yes and no!’ old Merlin exclaimed, seemingly thrilled by this result, as he disappeared further into the back of his warren-like house, returning moments later with the small stereo on a tray – dissected like a rabbit in a lab.

‘Looks like a definite
no,
’ I commented, my irritation rising further at the sight of the destroyed machine. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have trusted-.’

‘I couldn’t save the tape machine,’ the old man interrupted me, putting down the tray and retrieving something from his pocket – the cassette. ‘I did manage to get another old machine working, though. So, we can listen to the tape.’

‘Have you?’ I asked, and I instantly heard my voice flood with hope. Jessie came to his feet, his physical response to the news.

‘Yes,’ Merlin confessed, walking out of the room, taking to the stairs. ‘Come on,’ he told us. ‘This way.’

He took us up to the second floor and into a room that was sparsely furnished, in contrast to the wreckage of machines and parts that filled the ground floor. He beckoned us both to sit down in two stout arm chairs, whilst he unlocked one of two cabinets opposite.

‘I haven’t used the tape deck on this in years, haven’t had to,’ he said, pushing buttons, turning nobs. ‘I was never keen on the cassette format, so I didn’t bother to repair it. But, I worked on it today. Fiddled about. Cleaned the heads and wotnot. And by some miracle, got it working again. Are you both ready?’

I don’t know what I was expecting to hear. Elinor’s voice, I guess. Or the recording of a conversation between her and another – maybe Billy, maybe one of her interviewees. Or maybe the tape would be something they had devised; a play or a fake radio show. I’d overheard them doing that before. Another alternative didn’t occur to me – that it might be full of music. I don’t know why – maybe because it wasn’t what I was looking for. I was looking for a clue, for a trace of our lost girl, not 45 minutes of pop. But it held none of these.

‘It’s blank,’ Jessie said, the first to comment, after a minute or so of listening in silence.

‘Listen,’ the old man commanded, as if we had been doing something else in the quiet.

Jessie raised his eyebrows in my direction, but I kept a blank face. I was willing to keep going. To aid our lacking abilities, Old Man Merlin turned the volume up on his speakers, filling the room with the blank hiss of the tape, a white noise filling the room with its aural mist.
Listen,
he repeated, mouthing the word this time and something made me concentrate. Something in his insistence told me he had already played the tape. He
knew
there was something on it.

Jessie came to his feet, signaling his impatience and lack of faith that this would produce anything of value, but I reached out, pulling him back into place.

‘Stay, do as he says,’ I whispered and Jessie complied, sighing to convey his reluctance.

We listened to a further three minutes before we heard what Merlin had clearly heard before – breathing. Raspy breathing, close to wherever this had been recorded. Then, as we became accustomed to the hiss and the breathing, we tuned in on something else – voices in the background. Occasionally raised, the words were indecipherable, as were the voices.

After a few minutes, the recording was marked with a clear
click,
as if the recording was stopped, then another
click
as it started up again. This happened a dozen or so times. In total, there was over 40 minutes of recording, in many separate sections, the high level hiss accompanied by the raspy breathing and the muffled conversation on every occasion.

We sat in silence for several minutes once old Merlin stopped the tape.

‘Nothing on the other side?’ Jessie eventually asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘Could it be one of her silly interviews?’ I suggested, but Jessie shrugged.

‘We don’t even know it was her, not for certain we just think it might have been,’ he stressed.

‘He’s right, Tristan. We don’t know a thing yet.’ The old man paused, thinking for a minute, then spoke again. ‘Could you leave it with me, a bit longer? I could play about with it, see if I could separate out the sounds. Somewhere amongst all my…’ As Merlin searched for the word, Jessie mouthed
Junk
in my direction and grinned. ‘My belongings,’ he eventually chose, ‘I know I’ve got bits of old recording equipment. If I can get it working, might be in with a chance. Still, can’t promise it’ll prove anything.’

‘Please,’ I said, agreeing to the request. We had nothing to lose. ‘But can we keep this between us? No word to Agnes. I don’t want to raise hopes, and no word to the others because I-.’

‘Don’t know whether to trust them?’ the old man completed and I nodded, a little shame in the movement. ‘A wise move, and the girl must come first, mustn’t she?’

Over the next few weeks, Jessie and I continued to go out searching, though less and less frequently. We ventured no further and we saw nothing new. I went back to the spot in the train graveyard, in case she had returned, left further clues, but it was a false hope with no returns. We weren’t the only ones. Agnes’ Uncle Jimmy went out in his boat most days, not travelling far, but it was still an effort. And Ronan checked in regularly with old pals he knew in the authorities, but again nothing new was forthcoming.

‘Like we can trust the government for information,’ was Jessie’s cynical reaction, but I was still grateful for Ronan’s persistence, as was Agnes.

We checked in regularly at the Cadley residence, but old Merlin had little to update us.
I’m still working on it,
he’d report.
Working as fast as I can.
Some instinct told me this was another false lead, that the recording was probably nothing, even an accident, maybe, buttons pressed in error. So, my interest waned a little.

Had it not been for the incident with Billy, I might have returned to the tape sooner. But the corpse of the dog was a big distraction – it took me back to my original suspicions: that the bad, old times had returned and Elinor was caught up in that.