Agent 21: Reloaded: Book 2 (2 page)

What is it with everyone today
? she thought to herself.
Why can’t they just leave me alone
?

She looked up to see a tall man so skinny that she briefly wondered when he had last eaten. His hair was shaved but his chin wasn’t – he had a good three or four days’ stubble – and he wore jeans that looked too big for him and a shapeless white T-shirt. The most noticeable thing about him, though, was the patch over his right eye. It was attached to his head by a thin piece of black cord and reminded Ellie of a pirate’s outfit she’d had in her dressing-up box when she was very small.

The stranger was staring at her and Ellie felt uncomfortable. She took a slurp of her Diet Coke and stood up, but the stranger wasn’t having it. ‘Sit down,’ he said under his breath. He dug his bony fingertips into Ellie’s shoulder and pushed her down into her plastic seat.

‘Hey!’ Ellie gasped. ‘Get off me – that hurt!’ She looked over to where her schoolmates were sitting. None of them had noticed what was going on and she almost shouted out to them. But something stopped her. A photograph.

The man with the eye patch had dropped it onto
the table. It landed at an angle to Ellie and one corner blotted up the puddle of spilled milkshake. It wasn’t a very good picture. It looked like it had been taken from a distance, then enlarged and cropped. As a result it was grainy and slightly out of focus. It showed a young man with unruly hair and a serious face. He was wearing a hooded top and his face was somehow leaner – somehow
older
– than when Ellie had seen him last.

Which had been just a few hours before he’d disappeared.

The skinny man with the eye patch was sitting opposite her now. His hands were palm down on the dirty table and his good eye managed to look straight through her. It wasn’t a nice sensation.

Silence.

Ellie stared at the photograph. The skinny man stared at Ellie.

‘You know this boy?’

His accent was foreign. Spanish, maybe? Ellie wasn’t very good at languages.

She couldn’t stop looking at the photograph. ‘Of course I know him,’ she said. She dragged her eyes away. ‘Who
are
you?’

The man didn’t answer immediately. He picked up the photograph and hid it inside his coat before staring at Ellie again.

‘Where is he?’

‘What do you mean?’ Ellie whispered. Was this some kind of horrible joke?

‘I don’t like it,’ the man replied quietly, ‘when people pretend they don’t understand me.’

‘I wasn’t—’

‘My question was very simple. Where is he?’

For the second time that day, Ellie felt the tears coming and she was angry with herself because of it. Who
was
this man? What
right
did he have to ask her questions like that.

She stood up. ‘He’s in the same place he’s been for the last eighteen months,’ she hissed. ‘All Hallows Church. And
you
… you should be ashamed of yourself.’

But if the stranger did feel any shame, he didn’t show it. As Ellie stormed away from the table towards the exit, she looked over her shoulder to see him sitting there, quite calmly, watching her leave. There was something about him that made her flesh prickle. She couldn’t wait to get away from him. To get home, where she could lock her bedroom door firmly behind her.

It had started to snow outside. Ellie didn’t care. She ran through the wintry night all the way back to number 63 Acacia Drive.

* * *

In Burger King, the man with the eye patch sat quite still, his palms still face down on the table. He was breathing very slowly and the veins on either side of his Adam’s apple were pulsing. He didn’t look pleased.

‘Would you like a French fry? They’re a little salty, but quite delicious.’

The man with the patch looked round. Standing a metre behind him he saw a much older man with shoulder-length grey hair, penetrating green eyes and a pronounced stoop. He popped a chip into his mouth, munched it thoughtfully and offered the paper carton containing the remainder.

‘Go away, old man.’

But the old man didn’t go away. He pointed at the seat Ellie had vacated. ‘Do you mind? My legs aren’t what they used to be.’ He sat down without waiting for permission and smiled broadly.

The smile was not returned.

‘Bartholomew’s the name. Very pleased to meet you. Sweet girl, that. Be a shame if anything happened to her. A great shame. Are you sure you won’t have one?’

No reply. No movement.

‘Still,’ the older man continued, ‘I’m sure that won’t happen. That family’s had more than its fair share of bad luck.’ His smile grew broader. ‘I couldn’t help noticing that you showed the young lady a
photograph.’ He popped another chip into his mouth. ‘Would you care to share it with me?’

The skinny man stood up rather suddenly. ‘You should be careful, Mr Bartholomew, who you interfere with.’

‘Oh, you needn’t worry about that. I’m a very careful person.’

The one-eyed man turned his back on the newcomer and marched straight for the exit. He stopped at the door and looked back towards the old man, before smiling an unpleasant smile. Very slowly he raised the forefinger of his right hand up to his neck and made a slicing movement. Then he opened the door and walked out into the darkness and the snow.

Mr Bartholomew watched him go. For a full minute after the skinny man had left the restaurant he barely moved, other than to wipe his salty fingers with a paper napkin. Then he too stood up. The stoop in his back had disappeared. If his legs truly weren’t as good as they used to be, he must have been quite an athlete in his youth, because now he walked out of Burger King with the gait of a man half his age.

It was half-past two in the morning. Ellie stared at the red glow of her alarm clock as she lay in bed. There was no way she could sleep. Her mind was full of the
man with the eye patch and of the picture he had shown her.

Full of questions.

Full of fear.

How had he known to find her in Burger King? She hadn’t even planned to go there. Which meant he
must
have been following her. And where did he get that picture of Zak?
When
did he get it? Ellie’s cousin looked older than he ever had when he was alive, but that was impossible, wasn’t it? She shivered as she lay there, and not just because she was cold.

Five to three. Absolute silence. Ellie crept out of bed and got dressed. Thick socks. Jeans. Two jumpers. Gloves. A woollen hat. A few minutes later she was tiptoeing downstairs, holding her breath and praying that her mum and dad wouldn’t wake up.

In the dining room at the bottom of the stairs, she jumped. There was a noise. A mechanical whirring sound. Ellie swallowed hard, then realized what it was. Her parents had bought a cuckoo clock just a couple of weeks ago. They were delighted with it, and cooed with pleasure every time the little bird emerged from its cubbyhole and tweeted the time. ‘Look, Ellie!’ they kept saying, talking to her like she was a little kid. ‘The cuckoo!’ They hadn’t seemed to notice that she was a bit old to be excited by babyish things like that.

The cuckoo cheeped now. Three times. Three
o’clock. It returned to its cubbyhole with another whirr.

Ellie left the house through the back door because she knew it would make less noise than the front when she opened and closed it. Two minutes later she was stomping to the end of Acacia Drive, her footprints the only ones in the thick layer of snow that had fallen that night.

What on earth was she doing? She didn’t even know. She’d never left the house in the middle of the night before. Her mum and dad would go nuts. Somehow, though, her feet knew which way to take her.

It started to blizzard as she walked along Camden Road. There were hardly any cars outside at this time of night. A bus edged down the road, but it moved slower than Ellie because of the snow. On the other side of the road she saw two policemen, the collars of their bright yellow jackets turned up against the cold. Ellie pulled her woollen hat further down over her ears and walked a bit more quickly.

It was ten minutes before she reached All Hallows and by now the snow was falling heavier than ever. Only the inside of the porch remained uncovered. She could barely see ten metres ahead of her and the spire of the church was lost in the snowy darkness. But Ellie could have found her way blindfolded. She walked
round the side of the church and into the graveyard at the back.

The tombstones all had ten centimetres of virgin snow settled on the top. There was a muffled silence all around. A rustling to her left and she saw the glinting eyes of an urban fox. It stared bravely at her for a few seconds and quickly scampered away, leaving a trail of tiny footprints. Ellie walked on, her feet crunching as she disturbed the new snow, weaving her way through the tombstones towards the oak tree that she knew so well.

She was fifty metres from the church – about halfway to the oak tree – when she stopped.

All of a sudden, hers were not the only footprints. Ellie bent down to examine the tracks. She could just make out, she thought, three different sets of prints. Human prints, this time. They were all heading in the direction she wanted to go. Towards the oak tree.

Towards Zak.

She kept very still. In the distance, muffled because of the snow, she could hear voices. And was that the flash of a torch?

Ellie squinted up ahead but she could see nothing through the blizzard or the darkness. She wanted to hide, but her tracks in the snow were a dead giveaway. They would lead anyone to her and something told her that would be a very bad thing. She looked
around, feeling stuck, and it was only after thirty seconds that the idea came to her.

Walking backwards wasn’t easy. She needed to insert her feet exactly into the footprints she’d already made and it was difficult to keep her balance. It took two minutes to get back to the front of the church, where she was able to jump across into the sheltered porch where there was no snow. It was very dark here and there were two deep benches along either side of the porch. She hid underneath the right-hand one, her back against the wall, her right arm and right leg pressed against the cold stone, and waited.

She didn’t have to wait long.

Ellie couldn’t see the men, but she could hear them as they approached. They spoke in low voices and in a language she couldn’t understand, but which immediately put her in mind of the accented man in Burger King. They were right outside the porch now. Any second and they’d be gone—

‘Ah-
choo!
’ Ellie’s sneeze took her by surprise.

‘
Shhhh!
’ The men fell silent.

Ellie heard the crunching of feet in the snow. The sound of shoes on stone. In the darkness she could only just see a pair of legs walking into the porch. Her eyes followed the legs further up. She saw a hand hanging by the figure’s side. And in the hand … it looked like a gun.

She lay as still as a statue, holding her breath.
Go away!
she begged silently.
Get away from me!
But the figure didn’t go away. There was no movement in the porch for thirty seconds. No sound.

A voice from outside. ‘
Que es
?’

No reply. The figure turned round but didn’t leave. Ellie felt another sneeze coming. Someone had told her once that if you pressed your tongue very hard against the roof of your mouth, you could stop yourself sneezing. She tried it. Seconds later the sensation went away.

And so did the legs, moving slowly away from the porch and out of view.

‘
Vamos
,’ a voice said. The footsteps crunched away into nothingness.

Ellie barely dared emerge from her hiding place. When, after ten minutes of silence, she finally found the courage, the cold had seeped into her bones. It was hard to move quickly. A little voice told her she should go straight home, but deep down she knew that wasn’t happening. She retraced her steps and a minute later the hulking form of the oak tree came into view through the blizzard. And under the oak tree, Zak’s grave.

She could tell something was wrong even from a distance. It wasn’t just that the snow had been disturbed around the grave. There was now a mound
of earth piled up to one side. The blizzard was settling lightly on it, but as Ellie approached she could see that this was fresh soil.

Newly dug.

Her senses screamed at her to run but her limbs refused to obey. She walked towards the grave like she was in a dream, unable to turn back. Ten seconds later she was staring at the full horror of it.

The hole in the ground was more than a metre deep. Ellie couldn’t see the bottom because it was too dark. She
could
see, however, a coffin lid, all hacked and splintered. It was lying on the side of the hole opposite the soil and had clearly been prised away. There was a dreadful smell, like meat that had gone past its sell-by date. It made Ellie want to retch but she managed not to. She just stood there and stared into the darkness of the grave, her breath and her body trembling.

And after two minutes of staring, she removed her mobile phone from her pocket.

It was nothing fancy, this phone – an old Nokia that had been cool once, but wasn’t any more. A bit like Ellie herself. Weird, the difference a year could make. But the phone would serve its purpose tonight. She pressed a button at random and the screen lit up. Ellie kneeled down, stretched out her arm and held her improvised torch into the grave. Immediately she wished she hadn’t.

She’d never seen a dead body before, let alone a corpse that had been mouldering for months. She had never seen the way the lips rotted away to reveal bare teeth, the eyelids to reveal the remains of the eyes in their sockets. She had never seen the paper-thin remnants of skin on the face, or the lazy movement of a fat worm on the forehead, disturbed by the light.

Ellie jumped with fright. And as she jumped, she dropped her phone. It fell into the grave and a couple of seconds later the light went out of its own accord. Ellie wasn’t there to see it happen, though. She was already running, back through the graveyard, past the church, up Camden Road and into Acacia Drive, slipping in the snow, sobbing, and with tears burning down her face. The house was still silent as she made her trembling, terrified way back upstairs, undressed and hid beneath the warmth and safety of her duvet.