CHERUB: The Fall - Robert Muchamore Page 0,85
Nazareth and Madeline Cowell.’
‘So Madeline is a person who’d have known what Lord Hilton was up to?’
‘Oh god yes,’ McLoud said. ‘She worked alongside him for thirty years. Every appointment, every business trip. He looked after her too. I can remember a shareholders’ meeting where someone asked Lord Hilton why his personal assistant earned more than some of the directors. Hilton stood up, pulled on his braces and boomed across the hall: Because Madeline Cowell is a bloody sight more useful than any of my directors.
‘She was a real tough old bird. You wouldn’t believe the number of times I had to call her over the years, grovelling for a quote, or an interview with Lord Hilton – or Freddie Hilton as he was known back then. I bought her perfume and chocolates every Christmas, but it never did me any good.’
As Ewart laughed, James spotted a large silver Audi pulling up a few doors down the road.
‘Anyway,’ McLoud said, ‘I’ve dug out some old notebooks and photocopied some contact details for you. And I understand that you’ve set up a meeting with this Sarah Thomas?’
‘Indeed,’ Ewart replied. ‘I’ve already put together a theory on what Hilton is up to, but I haven’t got a smoking gun. To be honest, the evidence I have is pretty feeble.’
‘You want to get your facts straight,’ McLoud warned. ‘Little people like you and me get chewed up and spat out by the Hiltons of this world. They’ve even been known to disappear clean off the face of the earth.’
‘Sarah Thomas says she has some documents that Cowell told her to give only to you if anything happened to her. She sounded nervous. I told her a little white lie and said that you were retired, but that I’d taken over your old job. Thomas wouldn’t let me know where she lives and only gave me her mobile phone number. We’re meeting for lunch today and she was at pains to tell me that the restaurant would be packed out and that she didn’t have much money so I’d have to pay!’
‘Sounds interesting,’ McLoud said.
‘It could be interesting,’ Ewart laughed. ‘But knowing my luck she’ll turn out to be an escaped mental patient.’
Back outside, James and Dana watched a redhead emerge from the Audi. She was in her twenties, dressed in jeans and a baggy jumper. There was something about the way she looked around that made her seem suspicious; or at least suspicious to someone who’d undergone espionage training.
Realising that two people sitting in a car doing nothing might seem odd, Dana unfurled a map as James turned the speaker volume down slightly.
‘Dodgy?’ James asked.
‘Certainly looks it,’ Dana said, as she tried to look without making it seem like she was looking.
They watched as the young woman stopped at the end of McLoud’s driveway. After another furtive glance and a look towards the front of the house, she crouched down by the back end of Ewart’s car.
‘Holy crap,’ James mumbled, as the woman took a small black object from beneath the folds of her jumper. She reached under the Lexus and attached the device magnetically inside the wheel arch. After another glance around, she dashed back towards the Audi. The driver pulled away the instant she closed the passenger door.
James and Dana looked away as the big car accelerated past them.
‘Do you think it’s a bomb?’
James shook his head. ‘Bomb would be bigger and you’d put it under the driver’s seat, not at the back. It must be a tracking device.’
‘So someone’s after Ewart. Maybe someone else has got wind that he’s up to something.’
‘Maybe,’ James said. ‘Or, it could be that Ewart is conducting an honest investigation and Sebastian Hilton has someone keeping an eye on him. In which case we’re wrong about Ewart, we’ve stolen secret documents and a car from CHERUB campus and we’re up to our necks in the smelly brown stuff.’
Dana grimaced. ‘I wish this wasn’t so bloody complicated.’
‘I guess we could drive back to campus,’ James said. ‘We’d get busted for nicking the car …’
‘No,’ Dana said definitively, like she’d just thought of something. ‘If Ewart is honest and someone is following him he could be in danger. If Ewart is dishonest and someone else is on to him then …’
‘Well that would be good news, I guess,’ James shrugged. ‘I mean, they can hardly chuck us out of CHERUB for suspecting the truth.’
‘But we’ve broken every rule in the book.’
Back inside the house, Ewart was thanking