Chapter 19 #2
It struck him that Lillian had done the same sort of thing with him, from time to time.
Even now, he could remember what she’d said when he and Hannah finally got together: ‘So you’re .
. . what? Her tenth boyfriend this year?
I wouldn’t bank on being the one she sticks with, darling.
You hardly suit, and it seems she has endless options .
. .’ It had sounded like concern, but even at the time it had hurt – like she was pressing her fingertips into an already painful bruise.
‘There was no point in saying anything,’ Hannah told him now.
‘You had enough issues with her as it was.’ This simple statement of fact was another reminder of how well Hannah knew him.
How uniquely placed she was to empathise with the responsibility he’d always felt for keeping the peace at home.
‘Anyway, I wasn’t scared of her,’ Hannah went on.
‘There were actually moments when I enjoyed how mad she got at not being able to get a rise out of me.’
‘That I can believe,’ Jude said. He found himself raising his pint glass towards her in salute.
‘Being ballsy didn’t help much in the end,’ Hannah said absent-mindedly, picking up her own drink again.
‘What d’you mean by that?’
‘Nothing. Never mind,’ she said firmly – like she’d stepped too far over a line she hadn’t meant to cross, and was now keen to stand safely behind it again.
She pulled her phone from her pocket, then swiped at the screen.
‘Text from Ed,’ she explained. ‘Next task’s starting, apparently, but we can take the drinks with us. ’
Jude looked around, surprised to discover that he and Hannah were the last people in the tent. It seemed they’d both lost track of time, and neither of them had noticed everyone else leaving.
When they arrived at the old farmhouse – their destination for the day’s second and final challenge – Joe was stood in the doorway, tapping the face of his watch. ‘What kept you?’ he asked, one eyebrow arched, the question bland yet somehow accusatory.
‘Period emergency,’ Hannah lied, without missing a beat. ‘Happy to tell you all about my desperate dash for a giant tampon if you want to hear—’
‘Oh, fuck no,’ Joe said, his composure suddenly shot.
Jude had forgotten how squeamish his brother was about blood, but Hannah hadn’t.
Watching her best him, which happened with impressive frequency, never got old.
God, she was cool. He felt like he was fifteen again for a moment; condemned to worship at the shrine of her sassiness, and not a bit mad about it.
‘You’re in this room,’ Joe said, slightly recovered after a short walk down the main hallway of the building. He pointed to a door on his left. ‘You’ll find a clock on the wall that will start ticking down from sixty minutes when the challenge begins.’
‘And the challenge is . . .?’ Hannah asked.
‘To escape, of course. First team out wins. The answer to the final clue will be the combination that unlocks the door. As soon as you punch it in, the timer will stop. Ready?’
‘Born ready,’ Jude said, far more confident about tackling a room full of puzzles than he’d been about clay-pigeon shooting.
Joe opened the door for them and, without thinking, Jude took Hannah by the hand and led her inside. His brother closed the door, but not before Jude saw his face light up with a smile that – for once – appeared entirely sincere.
The room was large and square, with a fireplace in the centre of one wall. Above it was a large digital clock, the number display set at 60:00. This was an old writing room, or maybe an office, Jude thought. It was furnished with a sofa, a bookcase, a desk and several chairs.
He and Hannah were surrounded by a range of random objects they’d have to examine in search of solutions to whatever questions and riddles they faced. Bizarrely, some of the stuff in here was the sort you’d usually find in a school: old textbooks, pencil cases, sticky notes, ring binders . . .
‘Where do we start?’ Hannah wondered aloud.
‘Good question – and well worth asking before the clock starts winding down,’ Jude said. ‘I wonder if there were some initial instructions we missed . . .’
‘There’s a piece of paper on the mantelpiece,’ Hannah said, striding over to pick it up. She held it aloft so they could look at it together, and within seconds they’d both begun laughing.
The theme of the game was ‘escape from after-school detention’ – something Jude had never had to do himself, but which Joe, Ed and Hannah had probably all wished was possible at some point.
There were five puzzles to solve, each connected to a different school subject.
The room they were in, Jude guessed, was supposed to be a head teacher’s office.
At that moment, a bell sounded and the clock above the mantelpiece lit up. Over some sort of tannoy system, a voice intoned: ‘Assemble the pieces to begin the next chapter.’
‘That’s not much to go on,’ Hannah griped.
‘No,’ Jude agreed. ‘I guess we should start searching for anything that looks like it comes from a jigsaw.’
They scoured the room for puzzle pieces but came up with nothing.
When three full minutes had disappeared off the clock, Hannah murmured .
. . ‘Why “begin the next chapter”? Do you think this could have something to do with books?’ She was clutching what looked like a torn-off corner from the page of a novel.
‘Oh my god, you are brilliant,’ Jude said. ‘I bet there are more scraps like this. What about in the fireplace? In the desk drawers? On the window ledge?’ Between them, and in less than a minute, they’d found four more chunks of text.
They laid them out on the surface of the desk, aware they still had some missing but keen to try and solve the clue as soon as possible.
Three of their five paper fragments connected together: a long, horizontal piece and two square-ish ones.
Joined up, they roughly formed the shape of a number seven.
‘Ay me! For aught that I could ever read . . .’ Jude said, his eyes focused on the top scrap. He cast his gaze over the others and read the remaining words in order: ‘hear by tale or history . . . love never did run smooth’.
‘Is that Shakespeare? It sounds like it is,’ Hannah said.
Jude rushed over to the bookcase. ‘Bollocks. This whole thing is full of Shakespeare plays.’ He began pulling books off the shelves and opening them at random. ‘Have you any idea which play that quote’s from?’
Hannah groaned. After a pause, she repeated, then managed to complete the line from memory: ‘The course of true love never did run smooth! I’m sure that’s from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ she said. ‘We did it in year nine. Does that sound right?’
Jude reached for the play, which was on the very top shelf of the bookcase.
‘Yes!’ he cried. ‘Amazing work.’ Inside the dusty cover of the book was their next clue.