CHERUB: The Fall - Robert Muchamore Page 0,46
and gone off to school, she pushed open the door of her room and began going through Anna’s stuff.
It was a pitifully brief search. Anna had stepped off the boat with nothing but the clothes she stood up in and had collected only a few items of clothing and knick-knacks in the weeks since she’d arrived in Britain.
Lauren flipped carefully through a collection of note books filled with Anna’s felt-tip drawings. She had a deliberate style, with thick black outlines carefully coloured in. Some pages were doodles, while others documented Anna’s attempts to learn English, with rows of tiny pictures and hand-drawn images with descriptions written in English and spelt out phonetically in the Russian alphabet beneath them.
After going through the desk drawers, Lauren climbed up the ladder to Anna’s bed. A tiny picture caught inside a plastic key fob had been taped to the bedpost. The photograph had water damage around its edges and showed Anna in a photo booth. She looked eight or nine years old and was propped on the leg of a very young-looking mother. On the woman’s other knee was a stern-faced baby, with straight dark hair and a dummy in its mouth.
Lauren had seen an enlargement of the picture amongst the paperwork she’d read on the drive down, but seeing this tiny fragment of Anna’s past still made her feel sad.
She began a careful inspection of Anna’s bed, first holding up the pillows and looking to see if anything had been slipped inside and then working her way around the edges of the mattress. Besides dust, crumbs and a grubby sock, Lauren found a bunch of papers with Anna’s writing on them.
The sheets had been torn from lined exercise books. They had no drawings on them, just neat lists written in Russian with a purple gel-ink pen. Each list started off the same. Point one was always keep identity secret, and point two, work hard in school and learn good English.
After that the lists diversified. Some lists continued sensibly:
?(3)?Get a well paid job.
?(4)?Find Georgy and bring him to Britain.
?(5)?Start my own business (Hairdressing or Car Dealer).
?(6)?Become rich and buy a nice house.
?(7)?Get married and have a boy and two girls.
While other lists were outpourings of Anna’s wildest fantasies:
?(3)?Go to loads of clubs in London.
?(4)?Make friends with rich and famous people.
?(5)?Marry a hunky football star and move to Barcelona.
?(6)?Find Georgy and buy him a house next to ours in Spain.
?(7)?Start my own airline with my husband’s money.
?(8)?After a difficult start, I become richest woman in the world.
?(9)?Pay men to go back home and kill everyone I hate. Slowly!!!
Some of Anna’s lists were funny, while others made Lauren sad. Lauren had never actually written out lists like this, but she occasionally did something similar when she couldn’t fall asleep, lying in bed and plotting out her future.
Anna’s lists were vague, but they still told Lauren a lot. First of all, the police psychologists suspected that Anna hadn’t spoken about her past because she was traumatised. But the lists made it clear that that she was deliberately keeping her identity a secret. Second, Anna only ever mentioned rescuing Georgy, who Lauren guessed was the toddler in the photograph. This meant that Anna’s mother was either dead, or had no contact with her daughter.
It wasn’t the kind of concrete information that Lauren would need to unearth the traffickers, but she’d made a start.
19. INSTRUCTORS
CHERUB’s training instructors worked from a tatty prefabricated hut outside the basic training compound. James rapped on the metal door.
‘Come in,’ Mr Pike shouted.
The room had threadbare carpet, a few shabby desks and was littered with dirty sportswear and damp towels. The tang of old sweat and body spray hung in the air.
Mr Pike sat at the head of a long table, with his deputies Mr Speaks and Mr Greaves along the sides. James was surprised to see that Mr Greaves had his camouflage trousers rolled up and his feet in a bowl of water.
‘Pull up a pew, James,’ Mr Pike said, as he pointed to an insulated jug in the middle of the table. ‘Coffee?’
James nodded as he sat down. He felt extremely odd seeing the three powerfully built instructors off duty. Normally you only had close encounters with these men when you were terrified or exhausted, yet here they were at the end of a day’s training looking like three middle-aged blokes who just wanted to go home and fall asleep in front of the TV.
As James took a mouthful of his coffee,