Chapter 1
Mum didn’t think I was on her side. Not at the start, and not for a long time.
That doesn’t mean she thought I wasn’t. It just means she didn’t know I was, or how passionately I was, and so it didn’t occur to her to think it.
I don’t blame her for that. I could easily have made it clear—maybe I should have, since trying to protect her from the truth was pointless and she ended up finding out anyway—but I chose not to.
Also, it’s just the way most people are: They don’t think or believe a thing unless they already know it, which is a shame.
Actually, it’s one of the biggest, most possibility-limiting shames humanity has to contend with, but that’s hardly Mum’s fault.
If she’d known from the beginning that I was on her side, and especially if she’d known what I’d be able to achieve once I put my mind to it, she could have spared herself a lot of suffering. She’d have been so much happier on the Day of the Policeman, for a start.
This is what happened in the conventional sense of the word happened: The bell rang.
Mum opened the door, and there he was—the policeman.
I heard a male voice followed by Mum’s but didn’t pay much attention.
I was in my room, letting Champ win a series of tug-of-war games with the knit carrot toy.
Even after he’d lolloped off downstairs to see who our visitor was, I didn’t start to listen deliberately.
I was a bit irritated that Champ had ditched me, and said something sarcastic like, “Right, great. Let’s race to the door.
This is Swaffham Tilney, after all, so it’s bound to be someone thrilling. ”
Then I heard Mum sounding worried and restrained, not at all her usual welcoming self.
And I noticed she wasn’t inviting the policeman in, which was odd because she normally tried to pull everyone into our house and give them treats and what she called “the full tour,” as if we lived in Buckingham Palace and not a converted hayloft that used to be a dilapidated outbuilding belonging to the Farmer (who’s actually the only person in Swaffham Tilney whose name I don’t know; he must have one, but everyone calls him the Farmer).
The policeman eventually tried to invite himself into the house, saying it might be easier to speak inside.
Mum said no, it wouldn’t be, not for her.
I couldn’t see her—I was on the upstairs landing by now, hovering at the window above the front door—but I could see the policeman standing on the pavement, shifting from foot to foot, looking as if he wasn’t enjoying himself, or perhaps he needed to go to the toilet.
He was young, with a long, oblong head that reminded me of the brush from the dustpan-and-brush set in our utility room cupboard—rectangular and bristly.
He had a way of speaking that made it sound as if he was leaning heavily on each word.
Then I heard him say horrible things that I knew were lies, one after another. Quickly, I ran through a truncated version of the meditation I learned with Mum in Abbots Langley, hoping it would have an instant calming effect:
Praise Ricky, Thank Ricky, Ricky loves me.
Praise Ricky, Thank Ricky, Ricky loves me.
I knew that wasn’t how inner-peace meditation ought to be done, but what about when an unforeseeable emergency happens and you need instant tranquility or else your heart will explode? That was how I felt. If you have to be calm first in order for a calming mantra to work, that’s a problem.
It didn’t work. And then Champ started to bark and I thought I might be sick, except there was nothing in me to throw up.
He’s normally quiet when people come to the house—usually the only thing that sets him off is when he hears dogs barking on television—but he could sense Mum was terrified, so he got scared too.
I didn’t blame him. What made it extra chilling was that Mum’s never frightened or sad.
She’s always cheerful. Only a week or so before the Day of the Policeman, I heard her tell Champ that, after listening to the latest episode of one of her two favorite podcasts, she’d finally realized her purpose in life at the age of fifty-three.
“Shall I tell you what it is, Champy?” she said.
“It’s Enjollification, with a capital E.
Do you know what that means? You don’t, do you?
No, you don’t. You’re a gorgeous boy, aren’t you? Yes, you are!”
While she hugged him and stroked the fuzzy hair under his chin, I worked out what Enjollification had to mean and felt pleased with myself when Mum confirmed it: “It means making people feel as jolly as possible, including me. I invented the word today, but it’s always been my purpose, and do you know what, Champy?
It’s so useful and…enlightening to know that about myself.
” By the time she’d finished explaining, I’d downgraded my achievement in guessing correctly—the meaning would have been obvious to anyone, probably—though not to our policeman visitor, who didn’t sound clever or perceptive.
He sounded like a “This is just the way it has to be” person.
(Anyone intelligent knows that nothing is ever just the way anything has to be.)
Mum had decided, understandably, that the policeman didn’t deserve to be Enjollified.
I glared down at the top of his head, beaming all my viciousness at the points I decided were his most vulnerable: those tiny pink patches between the light-brown bristles that sprouted from his skull.
I remember hoping I’d carry on feeling as savagely vengeful as I felt at that moment.
Believe me, it’s a less horrible emotion to grapple with than pure terror.
The current of vindictiveness running through me was proof that I had power, even though I could have done so much more in the moment.
I could have sent the policeman running from our home, screaming, never to return, but I was neither quick-thinking nor brave enough on 17 June.
Anyway, then he said it, as I’d known he would from the second I’d started to concentrate on what was going on.
He said the dreaded name—Gavey—and the inevitability of it felt like a double layer of something stifling wrapping around me, inescapable, as indoors as it was outdoors, as stitched into the earth of every flower bed and plant pot in Swaffham Tilney as it was blown into every cloud in the sky and dissolving into every drop of the water in the lode, the waterway by the path where Mum and Dad walk Champ—and spreading from there to all the other lodes in the surrounding fenland.
As I eavesdropped from the landing, trying to take in every word the policeman was saying, trying not to panic, I felt that sticky inevitability coating the walls and carpet and ceiling around me as well as every inch of what Dad likes to call “our special little corner of ancient England.”
The Gaveys.
Of course this disruption to an until-now-happy day in the life of the Lambert family turned out to have the Gaveys behind it.