Johnny Mackintosh and the Spirit of London (6 page)

Three girls walked down the steps in the late afternoon sunshine with a boy in tow. Each of the girls wore the same uniform—a pink knee-length gingham checked dress and a panama hat with blue edging. The boy wore tailored shorts, a white shirt with striped tie and a straw boater. The particular girl Johnny was watching had long blond hair, tied into bunches either side of her face by blue ribbons. She was clutching a leather satchel to her chest. All four children sat down toward the bottom of the steps near a statue of a man in a helmet pointing upward toward the skies. It looked like a war memorial. They were talking, but there was no sound with the picture.

“Kovac—zoom out slowly,” said Johnny.

After several days of searching, the computer said it was a 99.9997% match and Johnny agreed this must be Clara. He still wasn't sure who Clara was, but he was working on that too. At least now he should be able to find out where she was. The picture from the CCTV camera he'd hacked was slowly becoming wider and wider, until Clara and her friends were just dots in the middle. Finally, on the left edge, he saw a set of gates with a sign beside them.

“Kovac—stop—pan left—stop—zoom in and center.”

“Kovac—capture image—save as Clara school sign.”

The image froze on the display and Johnny took in the
details. In large ornate white letters painted on a black background were the words “Proteus Institute for the Gifted.” Beneath in smaller plainer type it read “Strictly No Admittance Without Appointment.” Was it too much to ask them to write an address somewhere? Or a URL? Johnny rolled over onto his back. Most of the school team had come out to the park for a last kickaround before the cup final. They'd finished nearly an hour earlier and it was beginning to get dark. Johnny had hoped one of the other boys would ask him back for tea, but nobody did and even if he'd been allowed visitors he didn't think they'd fancy Mr. Wilkins's cooking. So the other boys had all gone off leaving him lying underneath his favorite conker tree with Bentley beside him.

Almost every time Johnny had been anywhere near the computer room that week he'd found himself face to face with Mr. Wilkins who “just happened” to be coming out of the kitchen. It looked as though it would be impossible to find out more about Clara or the signal—but then he'd had a brainwave. He'd converted his handheld games console into a mobile terminal that linked to Kovac remotely. He didn't know why he hadn't done it earlier. A boy holding one of those and sometimes talking to it was far less likely to be noticed than a boy who spent so much time pretending to do homework on a PC. Besides, grownups didn't seem to know the first thing about computer games and whether or not you sometimes had to speak to play them.

Johnny balanced the screen on the grass while doing various web searches for “Proteus Institute,” but nothing came up that looked at all promising. Finally giving up, he switched the tiny display back to the CCTV feed. Now there were only the two girls on the steps and a large off-road car with tinted windows was parked in front of them. A man in a black suit was shutting the passenger door. Johnny couldn't see if Clara was inside and
wished now he'd watched the footage more closely. The man walked round the car to the driver's door and opened it. He was about to get inside when something distracted him. He touched his ear, stopped and looked around. For a second it was as though he was staring straight out of the screen, but before Johnny could get a good look at him the display dissolved into static.

“Kovac—restore picture,” he yelled at the games console.

“Camera malfunction,” replied the computer. “Picture unavailable.”

“Kovac—switch to nearest alternative camera feed,” said Johnny. He might be able to pick up the car on a nearby CCTV camera.

“No alternative available. All cameras within grid 35151385 malfunctioning,” said Kovac with no emotion whatsoever, as though this was an everyday occurrence.

“All of them? No!” Why now of all times? “Kovac—display grid reference,” he said to the console and then sat bolt upright as he found himself looking at a map of the southwest of England. “No way!” gasped Johnny, while Bentley growled beside him.

It had been a week since Johnny's visit to St. Catharine's and, incredibly, in that time Kovac had found two more possible extraterrestrial signals. The first happened during football practice after school on Tuesday. He'd come back into the changing rooms to find the handheld flashing in his sports bag. He presumed it was a false alarm as he'd only just made the mobile link, but that evening Spencer Mitchell created a series of diversions around Halader House so Johnny had at least an hour and a half to debug his program and check the connection properly. He'd crept into the computer room, turned Kovac on
and what he saw had astonished him. There was another genuine signal—it seemed to come to a halt in earth orbit, which of course meant it could be human, but the original vector implied it came from behind the moon. Again it was all so fast that he couldn't get an exact fix, but something very strange seemed to be happening.

That was confirmed when the alarm went off during double biology on Thursday morning. Mr. Jennings was telling the class about Mendel breeding peas and wasn't at all happy to be interrupted by the beeping from Johnny's schoolbag. The words, “Mackintosh—see me after school,” were the last thing Johnny wanted to hear when he was desperate to get back to Barnard Way to study this third signal, but as the rest of the lesson unfolded he concocted a plan. When it came to half-past three and the dreaded summons—Dave Spedding was sure he'd get detention—what Johnny actually came away with was a whole lot of equipment and instructions for an experiment he could perform at the children's home.

Johnny didn't want to get into any more trouble so he'd asked Mrs. Irvine for permission to use the room next to her office to set everything up. The manager claimed she used to be a bit of a scientist herself, and had been only too happy to help. They put all the apparatus together, before Mrs. Irvine called a halt because of a meeting with Mr. Wilkins. It was the chance Johnny wanted—with the cook out of the way he snuck into the computer room to make use of the full-sized screen. Again Kovac could offer only a partial answer. Frustrated, Johnny had gone downstairs into the common room. Some of the older kids were watching a really dull film about a pirate radio station. Johnny was about to leave to take Bentley out for a walk when something he saw gave him the inspiration he needed—“triangulation.” He now had three partial signals. By combining them he might get a proper fix. He ran back down the corridor and
had to stifle a yell of excitement as the results came together. The signals combined at a point about 36,000 km above the Earth. Johnny knew 36,000 km was a special distance—it was called “geocentric orbit”—where weather or communications satellites were positioned because from there they could stay over the same point on the Earth's surface all of the time. Incredibly the point on the Earth's surface directly below where Johnny's signal was coming from was exactly the same point on the map that he was staring at now as he lay in the grass. It was directly above Clara's school.

Something flashed in Johnny's eye, breaking his concentration. He looked around, but the park was deserted apart from some dog walkers with a couple of terriers in the far corner. Bentley growled again. Johnny looked back at the map on the screen of his handheld. He noted a small town called Yarnton Hill was closest to its center. There it was again—another flash. A black four-by-four was parked over by the main gates, and the light seemed to have come from there. Was someone watching him through binoculars? It seemed stupid, but Mrs. Irvine did say a journalist had been on the phone. Johnny pretended to look back at his console, but was watching when it happened a third time. There was no mistaking it—why couldn't they leave him alone? He got up and tucked the locket swinging from his neck back inside his T-shirt. “Come on, Bents,” he said to his dog who was already on his feet, facing toward the park gates. “Let's get out of here.” Instead of walking the main entrance where they'd come in, Johnny pulled Bentley around and marched in the opposite direction, to the little cut-through that ran along the side of some new houses on the edge of the park. When they reached the alleyway a man was standing halfway along, reading a newspaper. Johnny hesitated but then carried
on. He didn't want to go back past the black car and he did have Bentley with him after all. But that didn't stop his heart beating a little faster. He carried on into the cut-through and as he drew close the man lowered his newspaper.

“Hello, Johnny,” he said.

Johnny stopped. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“Call me a friend of the family,” the man replied. “Your
real
family. I used to know your father.” He held out his right hand to Johnny who took it warily. Johnny was desperate to find out more about his dad, but he knew to be careful. Though his childhood memories were all good, his dad was still a convicted murderer. If this man really was his father's friend, he could be dangerous. No sooner had they started shaking when the man pulled Johnny toward him, spinning him round in an armlock and grabbing hold of his hair. Johnny felt a sharp pain, but then the man screamed and let go. As Johnny stumbled away, he turned to see the man holding a tuft of Johnny's hair, as he fell backward with Bentley's teeth clamped to his leg.

“Get him off. Get him off me,” pleaded the man on the tarmac. Shaken, Johnny picked up the end of Bentley's lead. “He's hurting me,” moaned the man.

“Bentley, let go,” said Johnny slowly, holding the lead taut. “Guard.” Reluctantly, Bentley released the man's leg from his jaws. “If I give the code word he'll kill you,” said Johnny, knowing there was no such word and Bentley would do nothing of the sort anyway. He hadn't realized, though, that the Old English sheepdog could look quite so fierce, and was glad that he did. Bentley growled above the man as if to make the point.

The man's wallet had fallen onto the tarmac when Bentley knocked him over. Johnny picked it up and opened it.

“G … give that here,” stammered the man.

Johnny took out a business card and read aloud. “Colin Watchorn, Journalist,
Evening Post
.”

“Why can't you people leave me alone?” Johnny asked, as he threw the wallet back to him.

“Bet you'd like that wouldn't you? Just forget what you're capable of. Only I know who you are—I know what you are,” said the man, as he edged slowly away from Bentley and raised himself into a sitting position against the wall of the alley.

“What do you mean?” said Johnny. “I was a baby. It's not my fault what happened.”

“You could say ‘like father, like son,'” said the man, gingerly getting to his feet while watching Bentley very carefully. “But in your case I expect you're more like your mother, and that frightens me, Johnny.”

“Why? What about her? What about me?” Johnny said uncertainly. When it came to it he knew very little about his family.

“You really don't know, do you?” said the man. “You don't know who you are.” He sounded genuinely surprised.

“So why don't you tell me?” said Johnny, confident of Bentley's protection but nervous about the way the conversation was going.

“Why don't you take a DNA test, little boy?” said the man. “That's what I'm going to do with this.” Triumphantly he held up his closed fist that contained the tuft of Johnny's blond hair. “Then I can prove it. Everyone will know.”

The man turned and made a run for it down the alley into the park. Bentley would have followed but Johnny held on to the lead. “It's OK, boy,” he said. “Let him go. Let's get home.” Johnny had a very good reason to get home. He had no idea what the reporter was talking about, but for the last three days the office next door to Mrs. Irvine's had become his new laboratory. While he'd pretended it was something to do with his biology homework, in fact the equipment he'd borrowed from school was already doing a DNA test.