they were on a wild-goose chase. The watch could be anywhere, if it was there at all. Who could trust an old man’s memory? Mr Grantham might have thought he’d thrown it up there, all those decades ago, but maybe he threw it somewhere else? Or maybe the watch didn’t exist at all?
A beam of light came near him, as he turned over a cardboard box full of clothes with his toe. A woman’s mouldy hat lay flattened beneath it, the ribbon around the crown a sort of pale yellow colour.
‘Where’s Alex?’ asked Chloe, the person behind the light. ‘I can’t find him.’
Jordy shone his torch around the attic, finding different shapes, but none of them belonging to Alex.
‘Alex?’ called Jordy. ‘Alex?’
No answer. Suddenly his torch caught some bright shining eyes that looked up at him balefully. Jordy jumped back, alarmed. Then a familiar sound came from the creature who owned the eyes.
‘Nelson! What are you doing up here? How did you get up those steps?’ He stroked the cat’s back then said, ‘Did Alex go down again, d’you think? Maybe he got bored?’
Chloe replied, ‘No, he’d have said something. One minute he was just here, to my left, and the next moment he’d vanished.’
‘Which way was he going?’
Jordy was suddenly afraid that his step-brother might have hit his head on a beam and was lying unconscious somewhere. Vivid tales of people with concussion had been his bedtime stories from his paramedic father. You needed to get someone with concussion to hospital as soon as possible. He didn’t want to alarm Chloe though, so he said, ‘Could be at the back there, in that patch of darkness. You go back down to the flat, I’ll have a look.’
‘No,’ she replied sharply. ‘I want to look too.’
Like seasoned aircraft pilots they did a square search of the attic to the edge of the floor boards. The unboarded part went out into the darkness. Jordy decided to go further, but had to tread on beams. One wrong step and his foot could go through the ceiling into the flat below. Chloe followed him. They had to concentrate on hopping from one rough beam to the next. Strangely enough, after a long spell of doing this athletic dance between beams, still having to crouch because of the rafters, they came to some more boarding.
Jordy stepped on to it with relief. His legs were beginning to ache.
‘Our attic must continue into next door’s attic,’ he called back to Chloe. ‘There can’t be any wall between the two houses up here.’ His torch light streaked into the darkness ahead.
Chloe came up alongside him. ‘Perhaps that’s how they built houses in those days.’
‘What days?’
‘When it was built – Victorian times.’
She shone her torch beam alongside Jordy’s, then called out, ‘Alex? Are you in there?’
A faint reply came to them, seemingly from a distant place, like a whisper on the still air.
‘Was that him?’ asked Jordy.
‘I don’t know. Let’s go on a bit.’
‘Could have been a bird or a bat or something.’
Chloe was scornful. ‘A bat? Bats don’t yell.’
‘Well, sounds might get distorted up here. There are all sorts of things like roofing insulation, tanks and water pipes and things. You hear all kinds of noises in the plumbing, don’t you? Anyway, aren’t we trespassing? I mean, we must have other people’s homes under our feet now. What if someone comes up and catches us? Won’t we get into a row?’
Chloe considered this. They were one house in a terraced row of houses. Without a doubt they had crossed over from their own home into someone else’s. Perhaps the whole row had just one attic between them, without any walls between. Did that make sense? She thought it did.
‘We need to find Alex,’ said Chloe logically. ‘He might be hurt.’
They moved on, more easily now there were boards under their feet. The deeper they went into the attic, the more the darkness seemed to close around them. Then suddenly they came upon an area where there was a skylight, but high above. When they took stock and stared at their surroundings, they found the edges of the attic had moved back and back, leaving a huge space between. Above them the roof itself went up to dizzying heights. In front and behind, there was no beginning and no end. They were still in that triangular shape of the inside of a roof, but the apex was somewhere high above their heads, while the lower angles on either