CHERUB: The Fall - Robert Muchamore Page 0,72

his entire life: school reports from Year One onwards, a summary of his performance in basic training written by Mr Large, mission reports, punishment reports. There were surveillance photographs of Lauren’s dad – Ron – a coroner’s report on his mother’s death – ‘massive cardiac failure caused by interaction of alcohol and anti-inflammatory medicine, secondary cause obesity’ – and even details of his mum’s safety deposit box. It was a tantalising chance to know what people had said about him, but it would take hours to plough through it all and James had to focus on Ewart’s investigation.

The stack was thirty centimetres high and certainly gave the impression that Ewart was being thorough. As he flipped through, James found reports on Boris and Isla, including pictures of them when they were younger and their bloody remains in the Aero City morgue. Isla had been shot in the face and James only recognised her by her evening dress and watch.

The other thing that kept coming up was the name of Lord Hilton, chairman of Hilton Aerospace and a major business partner of Denis Obidin. Hilton appeared on the television every so often, and James remembered the face, not because he was interested in the aerospace industry but because Hilton had a single bushy eyebrow that stretched from one side of his head to the other. It was a cartoonist’s delight.

The contents of the next folder hit James like a slap: blurry black and white images printed on glossy paper. The stills were from Denis Obidin’s office and showed him being murdered by Isla and Boris. It was clearly taken from the CIA footage that he’d seen in Aero City.

The following pages showed more stills, some of them annotated with handwritten notes, whilst others were huge pixelated enlargements of tiny sections of a particular frame. The last page was a fax message:

Ewart,

I’ve spent hours going through these images. I’ve checked shadow details, made enlargements and broken the video down frame by frame looking for glitches. I have also compared facial images and mechanical details such as stride pattern and mannerisms with surveillance videos of Boris and Isla taken inside MI5 headquarters.

The state of modern computer graphics technology makes it impossible to guarantee that any video footage is real, but if this is a fake or has been staged by actors and retouched it has been produced to a higher standard than anything we are capable of.

For the purposes of your investigation, I think you should consider this footage 100% genuine.

Rod Harper

Metropolitan Police, photo and video forensic department.

James looked at the send date and saw that Ewart had received the fax more than a week earlier, but he’d told James that he was still trying to get hold of the video less than two days ago.

‘Two-faced son of a …’ James muttered.

He felt sick. CHERUB wasn’t just an organisation James worked for. It was his home, it was all his friends, it was his school – basically his entire life. Confronted with the reality that Ewart had lied to him, James realised that Kerry had been right: he hadn’t truly believed Mr Pike’s conspiracy theory and had just come here to nose around and see what Ewart was up to.

James’ hands trembled as he flipped frantically through more papers. There were thousands of sheets, probably hundreds of thousands of words, and he wouldn’t be able to read them if he stayed up all night. He figured he could just skim through and read the basics, but then what?

Ewart was married to the chairman and as much as James liked Zara, he wasn’t sure that he could trust her to take his side over her own husband. She might even be in on Ewart’s scheme, whatever it turned out to be.

That left the ethics committee, but its members were designed to be independent. They didn’t live on campus and they were all outsiders: lawyers, retired policemen and the like. Even if James approached one, what was to say that Ewart wouldn’t talk his way out of it?

James realised that his only realistic option was to calm down, digest as much as he could, photocopy some of the most interesting paperwork and then bring it to Mr Pike, or maybe Meryl.

There was a knock at the door.

James jolted with fright and a stack of papers cascaded out of his lap on to the carpet. This was a disaster. If the person at the door came in, it would be blindingly obvious that he’d been snooping.

He