The Unexpected Find

  For Mika

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  The Storm

  William

  Judy

  Stefan

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  About the author

  Copyright

  The Storm

  When the hurricane finally came, it came quite suddenly to the town where William lived. A few gusts of wind pushed leaves around on the pavements, and some big drops of rain pitter-pattered on the roofs of parked cars and bus shelters. But then there was a stillness. It was so still that it seemed odd – as though the wind was taking a great big deep breath.

  And then…

  It began.

  William

  The storm roared through the town like a crazed elephant, or a pack of mad wolves, or an invisible giant with a huge vacuum cleaner. Slates were ripped from roofs. Things flew away: washing, wheelie bins, bikes, garden furniture. Sheds were flipped on to their backs, doors were ripped off their hinges. It was exciting. But it was frightening too. People get hurt in storms like this.

  As night fell, William lay in bed listening to the storm. There were a lot of different noises: from the street came the rattling and flapping of anything not nailed down, and the howling of the wind as it screeched round corners and whistled through every narrow opening or archway and played mad music on gutters and drainpipes and chimneypots, each one a different note. There were indoor noises as well, as objects that never normally moved, moved. Window frames creaked and complained. The hatch in the ceiling that led up to the loft lifted an inch and fell back with a thump, giving William a start each time. The fireplace in his bedroom that had been plastered over years ago suddenly groaned as though some sorrowing prisoner was walled up in there.

  It was almost impossible to sleep, and William wasn’t good at sleeping at the best of times. Outside his window the wind wailed to be let in so that it could run howling through the house. In fury it rattled the windows and lashed the glass with rain.

  Quite close to where William lived was a park. It was called Canal Park after the old industrial canal that ran along one side of it, and here the storm did what storms do: it raged, putting every living thing to the test.

  Here I come, it roared. Now, let’s see what you are made of.

  Who has dug their roots deep, and worked a thousand slim fingers into the clay?

  Who can hold on and who will let go?

  Who is old and dry and tired?

  Who is supple enough to bend and bend and bend some more, and who will bend only so far before they break?

  There are only two ways to survive such a storm: be immensely strong, or be immensely weak. In the centre of the park, where a great ash stood, the almighty wind blew one final enormous blast and celebrated its greatest triumph before passing on, racing away to the northeast.

  Only a single eye saw the great ash fall.

  When silence fell at last, William got out of bed, went to the window and stood gazing out into the grey morning light. It was a strange light; the sun was coming up, lighting the overcast sky from underneath as it did. There were no shadows. It was like stage lighting – everything perfectly clear and not quite real.

  He hurried into his clothes, and sneaked downstairs and out of the house. It was so early that he saw just one other person – a tall figure wearing a wide-brimmed hat, walking with long strides in the opposite direction. As William passed on the other side of the street, the person raised his hat and called, “A very good morning to you.” Apart from that, only the faint sound of a car engine somewhere disturbed the stillness. The storm had washed the air clean, and swept the streets bare; leaves, rubbish and branches had swirled into piles in corners and against walls. A flowery tablecloth hung from a power line like droopy bunting after a giant party, thought William. It could have flown across the Irish Sea from Galway Bay. It could have come from Jamaica or Guadeloupe. Some poor lady was probably wandering about looking for it under the hibiscus bushes or among the pineapple plants. William tried to remember what pineapple plants looked like. Did they grow on the ground like cabbages? He wasn’t sure.

  He came to the pair of stone pillars that marked the entrance to Canal Park, and walked in. There was plenty of amazing destruction to look at – not just trees. Waste bins had been rolled along for hundreds of metres and come to a standstill in odd places, and one of the lamp posts that lined the canal towpath was bent almost in half. The canal itself was full of floating debris that should have been somewhere else: branches and crates – even a park bench was bobbing upside down in the water. But it was the storm’s final victim that William wanted to visit, and he walked straight to it, right to the middle of the park.

  The huge old ash had been the tallest tree there. Now it lay stretched on the grass: its vast crown looking like an entire forest, its trunk as long as two railway carriages and its enormous roots naked and pointing at the sky like monstrous fingers. There were leaves and twigs everywhere.

  William walked towards it, fascinated, and looked down into the crater that had been left when the roots were ripped from the earth. He saw grey clay, stones, sand, bits of root sticking up and, at the very bottom of the hole, something else – something smoother and darker in colour. William clambered into the hole and crouched down, getting very dirty in the process. He started to scrape away the hard-packed clay.

  It was an hour or so later that William walked back along the towpath. Putting his hand into the pocket of his anorak, he closed it around the thing he had found under the roots of the ash tree. There was still a lot of clay clinging to it, but by the weight of it he thought it must be made of metal, and he was sure of one thing: that ash tree must have been hundreds of years old, and anything lying right under its roots must be even older still. Of all the things in William’s collection, this was one of the most interesting.

  Judy

  If the storm was an elephant on land, it was another beast entirely on water. Inside the boat on which Judy lived, the wind had racketed around the boat and made it wrench and tug at its moorings like a nervous horse. The draught in the little stove had sometimes been so fierce that it threatened to drag glowing coals right up the chimney, only to spit them back a second later and spew enough smoke into the room to make Judy cough.

  It was a pretty thing, the narrowboat. Painted green, with windows and hatchways picked out in the brightest yellow. Pots of herbs in the well-deck – rosemary, basil, mint – and, in pride of place, a bay tree sat in a large wooden half-barrel. There was even room for a small folding garden chair. It all looked very homely. Once the boat would have housed a whole family, with children playing on the roof, washing strung on a line, and a bargeman puffing on a pipe in the stern as he navigated the locks and waterways of industrial England. But now only Judy and her dad lived here. Well, normally.

  Judy finished putting things to rights on deck and stepped back inside through the narrow stern door, and down the short ladder into their living space. To her left was the little cooker, the sink and the fitted cupboards that made up the
kitchen – except it was called the galley, because of being on a boat. Next came the living room, with a decent-sized table and a bench fixed on one wall and covered in cushions. On the other side were bookshelves and a cupboard, and between them stood an old iron stove, a proper one lined with firebricks that would burn wood or coal. Further down came the bunk beds, and opposite them the very small bathroom and a door that led out on to the well-deck at the front. Judy turned on the light, lit the gas stove and put on some water for tea, reminding herself to start the generator later and let it run for a few hours to charge the batteries.

  Judy made her tea and frowned. She had a little job to do, but she didn’t really want to do it. Still, she took a digestive biscuit from the cupboard above the sink and reached up to a shelf to take down some paper and a pen before sitting at the table. She thought for a moment, and, after a while, she started to write:

  Dear Mrs Knowles,

  I am sorry to say that I am away on business next Thursday, and will be unable to attend the parents’ meeting. But I trust you will keep me informed of Judy’s progress at school. She speaks highly of you, by the way!

  Yours,

  Reza Azad

  Judy studied the result. Despite herself, she was pleased with it. The trick was not to think too much – just let the writing flow from your hand. And she was really good at Dad’s signature now – and so she should be, she had practised it for a whole afternoon and written it out about a thousand times. But she thought the best bit was the last sentence. Mrs Knowles was only human; she wouldn’t pay attention to anything except the bit saying that Judy liked her.

  “Judy, you are a genius,” she said to herself.

  Judy sat back and stared out of the little window nestled into the opposite wall. She missed her dad, badly. He would have loved that storm if he had been here. She remembered the evening when she’d come home from school to see him sitting by the stove. He’d tried to act like he was fine, but she wasn’t having any of that. She had seen straight away that something was up. Her dad told her that he’d received a letter from his dearest friend, Rashid.

  “So?” she’d asked. Why was a letter such a bad thing?

  “Rashid is making his way to Europe, and he seems to have made it to Sweden. The letter was posted from there.”

  “Sweden? Then he’s safe?”

  “I hope so. But something doesn’t seem right. He should have called me by now. Rashid is not just any refugee, Judy – you know this. His work, his knowledge…”

  Judy never knew how to react when her dad started talking like this. It all sounded pretty unbelievable, but her father was no liar, she knew that much for sure. She watched as he spoke about Rashid probably travelling under a false name, perhaps being followed. She knew where the conversation was going. So when her dad finally said the actual words, it didn’t come as a surprise.

  “I shall go to Stockholm, and talk to some people. I have a friend or two at the university there. I shall find Rashid…”

  Dad had given her a questioning look.

  “Can I leave you on your own for a little while? Rashid is my oldest friend. I owe him more than I can say. If it were anyone else…”

  “It’s all right, Dad, I’ll be fine.”

  She had been on her own for a long time now. At the beginning she had enjoyed being completely independent for the first time in her life – going to bed when she liked, doing her own shopping and cooking, that kind of thing. Her father was the best person in the world, but sometimes he did still treat her like a child. So she had been glad of the chance to show him that he didn’t have to worry about her so very much all the time. And she had known it wouldn’t last for ever, so it was a sort-of holiday, really – a break from being told what to do.

  But it wasn’t a holiday any more. It had gone on too long. He had said a few weeks and it had turned into three months and eight days. She tried not to get in a state about it, tried not to imagine all sorts of bad stuff that might have gone wrong, but it wasn’t easy. The waiting, the not being able to tell anybody anything, the not having anybody to ask for help… It was too much for her and Judy didn’t really know what to do.

  Stefan

  After the storm fled from England, it swept out over the grey-green North Sea – wind against tide, wave crashing into wave – so that there was nowhere for the water to go but up, in geyser-spouts of spume that were whipped away as clouds of salt-laden spindrift. When the storm had had its fun, it threw itself across Kattegat at the coast of Scandinavia, and roared northwards to find some real forest to play with.

  Stefan Petterson was walking back from the river when the wind started. He’d had no luck fishing, and he’d lost one of his best lures. Stefan could hear that the wind was already freshening into a gale. It roared like a distant waterfall in the pine-tops far above his head. But down here the air was still, among the boulders covered with grey and yellow lichens, the bilberry plants and ferns that spread across the forest floor, the tiny spruce and pine, slowly building their strength for the time when their huge guardians would finally fall and they too would have their day. All was calm. A squirrel scrabbled up the arrow-straight red-brown trunk of a ninety-foot pine, stopped for a look, and scuttled out of sight. But when Stefan came up on to the road and into the open fields he felt the wind properly, and saw the birches thrashing their heads about to shake out the last of the autumn leaves. It was getting dark, and the heavy clouds above him were almost purple. No snow tonight, he thought. But soon. The whole countryside was waiting. A week or so ago two cranes had flown in wide circles high above the farm, calling. They had been joined by others. Then they formed a v-shaped skein, and were gone, crying their farewells.

  By the time Stefan had got home, dumped his gear in the shed, gone into the kitchen to steal a bun and gone back out to fill the wood basket and chop some kindling, the wind was blowing really hard. In the stand of pines behind the house, every tree was bent in a great arc along its whole length as though some mythical hero of old was stringing his bow for a wild hunt in the sky. The tarpaulin that covered the stack of next year’s wood was gone. He found it under a lilac bush and had an interesting time trying to get it back over the woodpile and tie it down while it flapped and struggled and generally misbehaved. He got cold. There was a chill in the rushing air that said winter was waiting in the wings. At last he could take the wood-basket, kick off his boots in the porch and go back into the kitchen. His grandmother was at the stove.

  “There’ll be some people losing their pensions tonight, Stefan. All winter playing pick-up sticks, and a shameless price for storm-felled timber when you do get it out.”

  “Hmm,” said Stefan. He had just nicked another cinnamon bun, still warm from the oven, and was biting into it.

  1

  The following morning William walked along the towpath on his way to school. About a hundred years ago the canal had been like a main road, and all the things that were made in the town’s mills and factories had been taken down to the coast in barges pulled by horses. But now the big barges were gone, and so were the horses. First had come better roads, and then lorries. And then the mills and factories had closed one after another. Nobody made anything in the town and the canal was soon full of rubbish and dead rats and a horrible smell. But then things improved. The council had had a big clean-up and had made Canal Park, which was long and not very wide but was a lovely place to stroll and feed the ducks. Now there were narrowboats moored along the towpath, many of them very well-cared-for and painted in cheerful colours.

  William couldn’t resist taking his find out of his pocket again and having another look. He stopped on the path, and was studying its rather odd shape so intensely that he didn’t notice the two boys coming towards him until it was too late.

  “Hey, it’s Weird William! What’ve you got there?” said one of the boys. He was the bigger and fatter of the two and his name was Tyler. William didn’t like being called Weird William, but a lot of the boys i
n the class above him at school called him that, so he wasn’t particularly surprised.

  “Nothing really,” said William, and put his find back into his pocket.

  “Nothing? It didn’t look like nothing to me,” said the other boy, whose name was Josh and was smaller and thinner than Tyler and about twice as clever, which wasn’t a very hard thing to be.

  Josh whispered something about William’s pocket to Tyler, who said nothing for a moment, before a light went on in his brain and he gave a screech of laughter.

  “I said it’s not anything,” said William, and tried to walk on past them. It was a mistake.

  “No, you don’t. We just want a look. I bet it’s something you’ve nicked. Maybe you’re not Weird William, maybe you’re Worthless William,” said Josh. Tyler thought this was pretty funny too. Josh grabbed hold of William’s arm and tried to wrench it loose from the pocket, but William held on with all his might, even as Josh shook him about like a rag. Then he lost his balance and fell. He kept a vice-like grip on his find, and because he couldn’t use his hand to break his fall, it was a hard one that just about knocked the breath out of him.

  After that things became confused.

  Josh was bending over him, still trying to shake his arm loose, when William heard a shout. He squinted up and saw a small stone bounce off Josh’s forehead. Then, in sort-of slow-motion, he saw the skin part and watched Josh’s expression change from a stupid grin to shock. Josh let him go, and slapped his hand to the place where the stone had struck. Red blood started to ooze between his fingers and run down the back of his hand.

  “Aargh!” said Josh, and sat down with a thump on the towpath.

  By now William was curled up in a ball, and he had his eyes tight shut. But he heard Tyler’s voice.

  “Josh, are you OK? What did he do?”

  Josh just whined and then William heard footsteps and a different voice, which spoke from right above him, saying “Are you all right?”