At one point in the evening, Fisher slithered up. ‘The Beast of Middlebeck, eh?’ He winked. I managed not to vomit up one of Kiko’s delicious sushi rolls. ‘But, of course, an intelligent young woman like yourself wouldn’t be bothered about nonsense like that, would she?’
A prickle ran up my spine. I felt a lot more bothered by Fisher turning up uninvited to my party and breathing alcohol fumes in my face.
‘You don’t seem the type to get spooked when in the woods alone, wondering what’s hiding behind every tree. Who or what is following you home.’
‘Excuse me.’ I took a step away. ‘I’m going to talk to someone else now.’
He snickered.
I turned around. ‘You underestimate me if you think kids mucking about could drive me away from my grandmother’s home.’
Fisher’s eyes narrowed. Flabby lips still curled in a smirk. ‘Kids? Are you sure about that? My offer’s dropped by five grand, by the way.’
I left him and his slimy grin to it.
The next day, despite being so knackered I felt full of sand right up to my eyeballs; as soon as I got up I headed to the attic.
Rummaging around in a sweltering hot, filthy attic, the only light an old camping lamp, was not a pleasant way to spend a day.
Disintegrating bin bags full of mildewed clothes and bedding, boxes rotten and mouldy, the contents a black, stinking mush. Animal droppings, a bird skeleton, spiders running for their lives every time I moved anything. It was all heading straight to the skip pile. Until I found a metal box, about one by two feet, rusted and bent with age. When I brought it into the light for closer inspection, I could see what appeared to be a hardback notebook through a corroded crack.
The box was locked, of course. But I had about a thousand hairgrips. However, after spending thirty minutes scanning videos on amateur lock-picking, I discovered the keyhole was so full of rust I couldn’t get the pin in properly.
I tried banging, stamping, throwing the box down the stairs and prising it open with a screwdriver. Nothing was going to get that box open save a blowtorch – which would destroy the contents – or perhaps a tiny saw, one of the only objects on planet earth not found in the Hoard so far.
I left it on the kitchen worktop, making a mental note to ask either Jamie or Mack if they could help, whichever one of them I saw first. It might well be nothing, anyway. A book of accounts, or my mum’s maths homework.
In the meantime, I had leftover party food to eat and my good deed for the day to complete. The Camerons had given me a laptop as a birthday present. And no matter how many times Ellen tsked that it was only small, cheap, and nothing worth crying about, I felt as though they’d given me a window to the world.
Fortified with a plate of mini-quiches and a huge dollop of dip on one side, I fired it up, clicking impatiently through to the Internet.
Four hours, one accidental snooze with my face plastered on the keyboard, a dangerous number of canapés for any one woman to consume and a million hits of the delete key later, I had finished.
Without a scanner it looked disappointingly rough – the laptop camera was okay but the comic pages were obviously photographs – however, the Squash Harris website was up and running.
I started the publicity campaign by emailing Kiko and Sarah a link, with a note saying I thought their kids might like it, and why not leave a comment if they did. And then I couldn’t think of anything else, so, too tired to bother climbing the stairs, I rolled up in a blanket on the sofa and conked out before I could worry about where all those attic spiders had run to.
* * *
The first thing I did when I woke up, after trying to get blood back into my right leg, was to check the website. No comments. None at lunchtime, or that evening after a day of hauling decomposing bags and boxes of gunk down two flights of stairs into the garden. I spent the rest of the evening researching how to get traffic onto websites until my eyes were too blurry to read the screen any more.
By Monday morning there werestillno comments.
I barrelled up to Kiko in the playground, giving the tiniest nod to ‘hello’ before launching straight into it: ‘Did you read the comic?’
‘Pardon?’
‘The link I sent you. Squash Harris.’
‘Squash what?’
Hannah threw her stuffed rabbit out of the pushchair and into a puddle. I waited for Kiko to retrieve it, shoving it into a carrier bag while Hannah wailed in protest.
‘Never mind.’ I turned and started to trudge away.
‘Wait!’ Kiko skidded up next to me with the pushchair. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve been sort of distracted.’
‘You seemed a little twitchy at the barbeque. I thought it was because Adam was there.’
