Itchcraft (32 page)

Roshanna Wing stopped. She knocked softly on the door, and Itch held his breath. Hearing nothing from inside, Wing knocked louder.

Itch shut his eyes tightly.
Please don’t be there . . . Please be nice . . . Please be dead . . . Please . . .

‘Yes. Come in.’

And Itch went cold.

He had known all along that Flowerdew would be inside, but hearing his mannered, sneering voice again left him numb with shock. His legs turned to lead, his stomach to water.

Wing pushed the door open. If anything, the room was gloomier than the corridor. Muttering, ‘Wait here,’ Wing disappeared inside.

As Itch’s eyes adjusted, he saw a soft silvery light, diffused around the room. He heard muted conversation, then Wing appeared in the doorway. She dismissed her men with a wave of her hand, then pulled Itch inside. He stared wildly around the room, his heart racing, his throat dry. He thought he saw movement in the corner, and turned.

‘Stand facing me, Lofte.’ Flowerdew’s voice was matter-of-fact, bordering on the casual.

‘I would if I could see you,’ said Itch, trying to match his offhand tone.

‘I would if I could see you . . . sir,’ said Flowerdew softly. There was silence in the room, and Itch again sensed movement.

‘Say it, boy!’ Some of Flowerdew’s nonchalance was slipping.

‘No,’ said Itch. ‘I’m not playing your pathetic games.’ More movement, this time accompanied by a strangled sound.

‘Chloe? Is that you?’ Itch called, his head darting first one way, then another, trying to peer into the shadows. He was answered by three muffled voices, each from a different corner of the room.

‘Jack . . .? Lucy . . .?’ More smothered voices, the nearest just a few metres away, and he stepped towards it.

‘Stay where you are!’ shouted Flowerdew, but Itch took no notice.

‘I will hurt them if you do not stop.’ The sudden venom in Flowerdew’s voice stopped Itch in his tracks. He froze, but could now make out the shape of someone struggling to free themselves.

‘Put the lights on!’ shouted Itch. ‘Show me what’s happening!’

‘I prefer things dark actually,’ said Flowerdew, ‘and that’s your fault. As so many things are. But I will show you what you need to see.’

And around the edges of the room, soft lighting faded up. Itch stared in horror from corner to corner; from Chloe, to Jack, to Lucy. Each was gagged and held in place by a large black weighted belt strapped around the waist. They were all trying to pull themselves free, but the belts were holding them fast.

Chloe stared at Itch, her exhausted eyes wide with fear.

Jack stopped struggling when Itch looked at her; she saw how shocked he was by her sickly face and filthy clothes.

Lucy’s eyes never moved from Flowerdew, her stare one of cold fury.

‘I’m sorry,’ Itch said quietly, and Flowerdew emerged from behind his computer screen that had kept him hidden from Itch’s view. He moved slowly, as if in pain, and held onto a desk for support. Then he straightened, his head catching some of the light from the recessed lamps in the floor.

Itch stepped back, unable to suppress an involuntary gasp. At first he thought Flowerdew was wearing a leather mask – protection for the burns he had suffered in the fire at the Fitzherbert School. Then he realized that it wasn’t a mask; it was his face. Maybe he’d had skin grafts, maybe they hadn’t worked, maybe he was still receiving treatment . . . but the effect was terrifying. One side of his face was relatively normal, though the skin was red and blotchy and his chin unshaven. But the other appeared to be held together with stretched hide, patches of skin pulled tight over his features and stitched down. His right eye was half closed, the lid bloated and raw. And his ear – the one Itch had skewered with a steel tube in their fight at ISIS – was shrivelled. He had lost his curly white hair too; in its place was patchy grey stubble.

Itch couldn’t help himself. ‘Looking good, sir. A big improvement,’ he said.

Flowerdew stopped, one hand on his desk for support. ‘You may say what you wish, Lofte, it is of no matter to me. I shall kill you shortly and that will be the end of it.’ Further muffled cries came from Chloe’s corner; he ignored her. ‘However, a brief chat might be fun. I have been wondering what to say for some time; I shall savour the moment.’

‘I’m not interested in your speeches, Flowerdew. Not interested in your reasons, not interested in your justifications. Save your breath.’ Itch hoped that the trembling of his legs wasn’t visible, and fought to control them.

‘Oh, I don’t have to justify anything to anyone!’ One half of Flowerdew’s face smiled. ‘
I’m
in charge now. Greencorps is
my
company, this is
my
office. I run everything from this ship, and no one knows where I am or what I am doing. The capable Roshanna Wing is far more presentable than I, so she is the public face of the new, friendlier Greencorps. Telling all about the murky dealings of the oil industry, who now really, really regret how they treated me in the past. They can watch my success from their prison cells.’

Flowerdew made his way over to what Itch now realized was a porthole; tiny lights had appeared and were slowly sliding in and out of sight. A moment ago it had been pitch black; now, with the ship moving, Flowerdew watched the changing view.

‘I realize you have no idea where you are, Lofte, so I shall tell you. We are leaving the island of El Hiero off the coast of Africa – the Western Sahara, to be precise. It was an old Greencorps watering hole. I still have friends here, and it has been the perfect place to hide while waiting for you.’

‘You don’t have friends,’ said Itch. ‘You have people who are scared of you.’

Flowerdew continued to stare out of the porthole. ‘It amounts to the same thing,’ he said. ‘And when you actually run a company, you’d be surprised how many people are scared of you.’

‘I don’t think I would, actually,’ said Itch quietly.

‘Your destruction of the 126 was an act of extraordinary scientific vandalism,’ said Flowerdew, ‘though I admit that your knowledge of neutron bombardment was . . . surprising.’

Itch was on the verge of telling him that it was Lucy’s knowledge, not his, but realized it would change nothing. It might put her in even more danger. He remained silent.

‘But you left me with this face, Lofte. And every time I look in a mirror, I find myself thinking of you.’ Itch wasn’t sure whether Flowerdew was still looking out of the porthole or at his own reflection. The man turned to face him again. ‘And every time I thought of you, I thought of this . . .’ He waved his hands around the room. ‘You see, I have had my revenge on Revere and Van Den Hauwe. I am in the process of having my revenge on the oil industry. And now I shall have my revenge on
you
.’ He looked at Lucy, Jack and Chloe in turn. ‘All of you.’ Chloe and Lucy tensed against their restraints, but the large black belts held them firm.

‘Your face is your own fault, and you know it,’ shouted Itch. ‘You’d killed Shivvi and were about to kill Jack. The dust explosion and fire was the only way to stop you. You’re greedy – you burned. It’s that simple. Your revenge failed last time and it will fail again.’

Flowerdew nodded. ‘Yes, I tried before, of course. My little parcel missed its mark in your case, though I got lucky with that idiot teacher of yours. A small triumph really.’ Itch swore at Flowerdew, who smirked lopsidedly, the burned side of his face hardly moving. ‘Watkins had it coming, the ludicrous academy had it coming – and the boss at ISIS too. Everyone who helped you paid the price.’

‘Not everyone,’ said Itch. ‘Thomas Oakes helped us blast the 126 into oblivion . . . but you gave him a job.’

One of Flowerdew’s eyebrows raised. ‘You have worked out more than I expected. It was your demolition of the 126 that gave me the idea – I should thank you. After I acquired Greencorps, I realized that a new strategy was required. We needed more than oil if we were to keep our grip on the energy market. A South African contact – the one you fried in the fire at the school, incidentally – had told me how many mines were becoming available at the right price, and so we bought aggressively. To increase the price of the gold we now owned, destabilizing the euro was an obvious tactic. It has done a pretty good job of destabilizing itself, of course, but I thought we could just
help
a little. When everyone gets scared, they buy gold. And I’m quite good at making people scared. With my new rare earth mines in South Africa, I had access to the europium I needed to contaminate the bank notes. And with one of ISIS’s top scientists working for me, everything was possible.’

Dad lost the mine to you?
Itch thought. He glanced at Chloe, but her eyes were closed; she hadn’t reacted. It was all making sense now . . . The riots were Greencorps riots, because every time the value of the euro dived, the value of their new gold mines rocketed.

‘I knew the man who suggested using europium as a security feature in the euro,’ continued Flowerdew, starting to pace around the room. ‘He was very drunk by the time he told me. He thought it was hilarious. I didn’t think much about it till recently.’

‘Sorry to interrupt and all that,’ said Itch, ‘but why are you telling me this, Flowerdew? You must have people who you pay to listen to you—’

‘I’m showing off, Lofte!’ shouted Flowerdew. ‘Why do you think? I’m a scientist, for God’s sake. I’m proving to you that I have won, you have lost and why. If you hadn’t been so arrogant, you might not be standing here, humiliated. So listen up.’ He paused, then, as if finding his place again, continued. ‘The europium in the euro is luminescent under ultraviolet light; if I could damage the europium in some way, the notes would show up as fake. My first thought was to blast the euros with neutrons, converting the europium to gadolinium – hence Oakes’s usefulness.’

‘But europium absorbs neutrons,’ said Itch. ‘I could have told you that. You always were a crap teacher.’

Flowerdew stopped a metre from Lucy and closed his eyes, then took a deep breath as though inhaling Itch’s barb.

So Itch tried another. ‘I’ve done some work on this – maybe you should have too. The 126 mostly turned into 63, so europium is, officially, the element that says to the world:
Flowerdew sucks
. It’s therefore my new all-time favourite element in the Periodic Table and—’

Flowerdew whipped his stick into Lucy’s ribs. Her eyes went wide with shock and pain. She would have howled if her gag hadn’t been so tight, but the guttural sob told Itch everything he needed to know.

‘Stop! Stop!’ he cried. ‘I’m sorry! Please don’t!’

Across the room, Jack and Chloe were straining against their belts again; Jack stared at Itch and desperately shook her head.

Flowerdew walked over to her and raised his stick. Jack shrank away as much as she could. His stare followed her down. ‘I’m happy to hit all of you in turn if your idiot cousin tries that again,’ he hissed.

Jack stopped shaking her head and started nodding.

‘I get it! OK!’ shouted Itch. He took a few steps towards Lucy, but Flowerdew raised his cane again and he backed off. She was biting her lip and her eyes were full of tears, but she nodded reassurance to Itch.

‘So . . .’ he began, desperate to distract Flowerdew. ‘Blasting the europium didn’t work?’
Please just talk . . . Please don’t hit
.

To his relief, Flowerdew began his pacing again. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Oakes tried it on a sample and it didn’t work; europium absorbed all the neutrons. We concluded that the neutron bombardment was not going to work. Then . . .’ He smiled his crooked smile again. ‘Then I had a brain wave.’

‘Picric acid?’ said Itch, interested in spite of everything.

‘Precisely!’ said Flowerdew, and for a second they were teacher and pupil again. ‘And it gave us another way in. It gave us a note that would either burn, or register as a fake. Or both!’ His walking had picked up speed, and Itch knew that Flowerdew was enjoying this. ‘The inks that are used in the euros are made by causing a solution containing europium to react with an alkaline solution made from the molecules that wrap themselves round the metal and protect it – they also absorb the ultraviolet light and transfer the energy to the europium. This is crucial: it ensures that the europium will actually be able to glow as expected. We took one of these complexes and placed it in picric acid. And
bingo!
We got a naked europium, wrapped mostly in water. Which killed the fluorescence. The inks we provided looked the same as the original, but they turned a proper note into one that would register as a fake.’

‘Then the paper dries,’ said Itch quietly, ‘the acid is unstable, and the note is ready to catch fire.’

‘Exactly! Add this to the already miserable Spanish economy, bribe some of the low paid Royal Mint staff to look the other way, and we have action!’ He bounced his cane off the ground and caught it again. ‘By God it was good.’

‘You whomped that sucker,’ said Itch quietly, and Flowerdew stared at him.

‘Of course . . . Thomas Oakes. His favourite phrase. Or it was. He served his purpose.’

‘You got rid of him too?’

‘He became unhappy. It is of no matter . . .’ Flowerdew leaned on his cane as if exhausted. He bent over, breathing heavily; he seemed weaker, older, more tired, and Itch wondered if he should jump him.

When they had fought before, in the tunnel at the ISIS labs, he had badly hurt a weakened Flowerdew.
Maybe I could do it again?
he thought.
But if it goes wrong, Chloe, Jack or Lucy would pay the price
. Itch hesitated. Then, behind him, he heard the door open and knew he’d missed his chance.

‘Yes, Roshanna, just in time,’ said Flowerdew weakly. ‘Is the radar fixed?’

‘Not yet,’ she said.

‘No matter. It’s about to get interesting . . .’

Itch turned to see Wing standing silently by the door, another large black belt hanging from her arm.
That one’s for me
, he thought. It swung slightly as the ship swayed; it looked stiff and heavy.

What is in that thing?
As far as Itch could see, there was a series of stitched panels, an adjustable strap and a brass lock. Were they weights? He noticed Wing’s gaze alight on Lucy, Jack and Chloe, then settle on him. The brief thrill of the science talk had disappeared; the cold despair settled on him again.