The Apothecary Page 0,31

were alone at the empty table where I had watched him stare down the lunch lady.

“We aren’t supposed to tell anyone!”

“Your father never said that. He said you had to keep the Pharmacopoeia safe from people who want it. And we need help to do that. We’re in over our heads.”

Benjamin scowled at the food on his tray and said nothing. Then a familiar, loud, long bell rang.

“Bomb drill!” called the lunch lady. “Everyone under the tables!”

“Again?” I said, looking around. People started to push back their benches.

“It’s so stupid,” Benjamin said, his shoulders set in opposition to the noise.

“It is,” I said. “But I don’t think this is the time to make a scene and get kept after school. Or have them try to call your father.”

“It’s ridiculous.”

“I’m getting under the table.”

“We’d be incinerated in an atomic bomb blast,” Benjamin said. “Instantly. We’d be ash by now.”

“I know,” I said. “Ash. Here I go.” I slid underneath.

Benjamin stayed in his seat, and I saw the lunch lady’s ankles in white cotton tights approach. “Benjamin?” she said. “Do I have to send you to the headmaster?”

I heard him sigh, and then he pushed back his bench and climbed under.

“Thank you, Mr Burrows,” she said, and her white-encased ankles moved on.

Benjamin crouched inches away from me under the table. “Happy?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “That was smart.”

When the drill ended, we climbed out again. Sarah Pennington was giggling about something with her friends. The other students climbed out from under their tables, laughing and talking.

Then I noticed a uniformed police officer and a man in a brown suit standing by the door, speaking to the lunch lady. She turned and pointed to us, and they crossed to our table.

“Benjamin Burrows and Jane Scott?” the man in the suit asked, standing behind me. He was tall, with his hat in his hand, and he had the wispy fair hair of a child or an old man. “I’m Detective Montclair, of the Metropolitan Police. This is Officer O’Nan. You’ll have to come with us, please.”

“Why?” Benjamin asked.

“Please,” the detective said.

“Are we under arrest?”

The detective glanced at Officer O’Nan, who was short and stocky, with bristly hair like a hedgehog. In that moment, Benjamin lunged towards the door.

“Run, Janie!” he said.

I scrambled up, taken by surprise, but the men were right behind me, and the detective grabbed my shoulders.

“Let go!” I cried.

Everyone in the lunchroom was staring at us now.

Benjamin reached the door at a run, but the lunch lady in her white uniform was standing in front of it with her arms crossed. The uniformed policeman tackled Benjamin, taking him sprawling.

Benjamin’s satchel, with the Pharmacopoeia in it, slid across the floor and stopped at Sergei Shiskin’s feet. I saw a look pass between Benjamin and Sergei, and Sergei quietly picked the bag up. He shouldered it as if it were his own, and I was impressed with how cool and collected he was.

Benjamin kicked and fought so that all the attention stayed on him, and the policemen didn’t seem to notice how he’d passed the satchel off. I tried to twist free, too, but the detective was strong, and they finally wrestled us both out the door, under the disapproving eye of the lunch lady. She looked as if she’d expected as much—as if resisting the bomb drill was bound to lead to police custody sooner or later.

A dark sedan was parked outside the building. “We haven’t done anything,” Benjamin protested as they dragged us to it.

“Then why are you struggling?” O’Nan asked.

“Because we haven’t done anything!”

They pushed us into the car. I looked out the window at the students who had spilled out of the school. Sarah Pennington watched with her friends, and Sergei stood quietly with the satchel. Officer O’Nan took the driver’s seat.

“Are you arresting us?” I asked as the car pulled away from the school.

“Not yet,” Detective Montclair said, turning from the passenger seat to smile at us. His wispy hair was askew from the struggle, and he had crooked teeth. “We just have some questions.”

“About what?”

“A man was stabbed to death last night at the Chelsea Physic Garden.”

“What?” Benjamin said. “We don’t know anything about that!”

I was in a panic. Someone must have seen us coming out of the garden. We needed to establish an alibi, but we couldn’t with the policemen listening.

We drove in silence through the London streets, away from St Beden’s and into neighbourhoods that seemed dirtier and more run-down, the bomb damage from the