Mariam had heard that you could find most things on the internet, if you knew where to look.  Time to find out if that was true.

She had a couple of hours between the end of her seminar and the start of her shift, and she’d decided to spend it in the library, getting whatever she could out of those damn computers.  Shaun Pinder Oakmen.  Shaun Mandeville Oakmen.  She typed in the terms and she combed through the results, trying to see what led where.  And she couldn’t relax, not for one second, no matter how much her muscles ached with the tension.  She was still on edge from last night.

Mariam hadn’t minded Natalie coming through the door with a triumphant shout of, “Boom!  Look who I found!”  She’d texted ahead, so they’d all known she was bringing Alex.  That wasn’t a problem.

No, the problem had come an hour later, after Alex sat them around the kitchen table and explained everything.  Mariam, after having been calm for quite a while, was suddenly compelled to get to her feet and rip him to shreds.

“So, to recap,” she’d told Alex, “Your friends get injured by a bomb.  Then, a little while later, you find out that your old bomb-throwing pals are in town and stalking us.  But instead of telling us about this and letting us do what we could with that information, you piss off to hide in Brighton for two weeks.”

Alex sighed.  “Mariam, I’m…”

“While leaving us a cryptic message on the laundry room wall, where we may or may not have ever seen it.  Sorry, I forgot about that.  That was your big insurance policy, was it?”

Alex waited a second or two to check that she’d finished, then said, “You’re right.  I didn’t handle this at all well.  I’m sorry.”

“Why, though?  Why did any of that seem like a good idea?”

“Because I was underestimating you.  And underestimating Shaun, too.  I thought that if I let sleeping dogs lie…”

“You thought that we were a bunch of stupid kids who shouldn’t bother our silly little heads about grown-up things.”

She’d intended that to needle and provoke him, but he just carried on looking sad.  “I suppose I must have.  Not that I ever thought any of you were stupid, but…”  His face twisted a little.  “You aren’t much older than I was when I first met Pinder.  And I wanted to keep you as far away from him as possible.”

“You could have done that by tellingme how you knew he was bad news.  Instead of just dropping hints that maybe he put that first guy up to it.”

Alex nodded.  “I should have trusted you.”  He looked around.  “I should have trusted all of you.  I’m sorry.”

After that, the argument had more or less petered out, because there was only so much energy you could muster to yell at someone who just apologised and agreed with everything you said.  It didn’t help that none of the others had backed her up.  She’d thought she could at least count on Isaac taking her side.

Well, fine.  She’d knuckle down and do her research, and see if that made her teeth stop grinding.

It took a while before she got anything, but eventually she found an article in some local paper from May 2004- by Alex’s account, not long after he’d left.  Self-improvement group raise £2000 for town hall.  They were still calling themselves The Rhymers then, but Mariam definitely thought she recognised a couple of people in the photo.  “Every little helps”- (l-r) Joy Wellington, Charity Stobart, Shaun Pinder, Bradley Simmons.

 “Enjoying yourself?” said a voice by Mariam’s ear.  She knew it was Adrian before she even turned around.  Even if she hadn’t recognised his voice, the ham and onions on his breath was unmistakable.

He was standing by the next computer as if he was about to sit down and use it, but he was leaning over Mariam as if that wasn’t going to happen for another few minutes.  His hair looked even more of a mess than usual- you could have hidden a badger in some of those tangles.  “Looking up anything interesting?”  He smiled, catching his lower lip between his teeth, as if he was assessing what was on her screen and finding it to be below his standards.

“Nothing much,” said Mariam.  Her first instinct had been to cover up the screen, but why?  She’d already reported the Oakmen to the police.  If she was looking for more information on them, it wasn’t exactly a state secret.  “What are you up to?”  She’d almost said, What do you want?, but then she’d decided not to pick a fight before the working day had even started.

“Been reading a forum.”  He swung himself down onto the seat instead of just crouching like a normal person, and logged onto the computer in front of him.  “There’s an ex-policeman posting about all the things he used to see in his work.”

“Right,” said Mariam, and turned back to the screen.  That woman in the photo- the skinny one with the glasses and the sticky-out teeth- she’d definitely introduced herself as ‘Jo’ at the meeting, right?  But the caption called her ‘Joy’ instead.  Easy mistake to make, Mariam supposed.

“Like, one time he had to find some kids who’d got lost in the woods…”  Adrian breathed in sharply and shook his head, still smiling.  “They found two of them under a bridge.  It turned out they’d got hold of some berries that made them cough out blood and die.  They were only a few yards away from the main road.”  He shook his head again, tutting.  “That should give you some idea of it.”

“Mm,” said Mariam.  She’d typed Jo Wellington into the search bar.  She didn’t know if she’d have any luck- if the paper had screwed up her first name, then it might have screwed up her last name as well- but it was as good a place to start as any.

The third result had a picture next to it.  She had her hair down, but it was definitely her.  Appeal for information: Joelle “Jo” Wellington.

“But the thing about that story is, there was actually a third kid, and he survived.  They found him wandering in the woods a little while later.  He said he’d tried to stop the other two from eating the berries, but they just told him to mind his own business.  And he realised that he had to go on ahead, to save himself.”  Here came that tutting noise again.  “And the policeman said that the dead kids’ parents, they tried to make out that he’d done something wrong, leaving his friends behind.  But the policeman- the one who started the thread- he said the kid had done the right thing.  And all the other police agreed.  ‘Cause the sad truth is, there isn’t always a nice answer.  Sometimes you have to do hard things.”

The article was from 2001.  The parents of missing schoolgirl Joelle Wellington have appealed to anyone with information on their daughter’s whereabouts to come forward.  Joelle, 15, who is known to her friends and family as “Jo,” failed to return home from an after-school club on Friday.  Friends have described her as…

So, she’d be twenty now.  And for all Mariam knew, she’d been in touch with her parents since this, and put their minds at rest.  Still… definitely worth bringing up with the police.  They’d been given a case number on Tuesday- Mariam would just ring the non-emergency line and ask.

 She could smell Adrian’s breath again.  He made that tutting sound right in her ear.  “2001?  Yeah, she’s dead.  They’re deluding themselves if they think otherwise.”

“Could be,” said Mariam, logging off, “Listen, I’ll see you at work, OK?  I just need to make a pho…”

“The world’s a lot uglier than people like to tell themselves,” said Adrian, “You can take that to the bank.”

“Sure,” said Mariam.  She picked up her stuff and went out to use her phone.

“It doesn’t just go away if you don’t think about it!” Adrian called after her.

*

Mariam was inside the house with the green blinds.  They’d all been summoned there this afternoon to discuss “the plan.”  Whatever that was.

Russel, a big guy with a square head, was standing by the fireplace, pontificating.  “I bet you didn’t know I was on telly back in the Eighties.”

“Were you?” asked Isaac, probably just because he was the one Russel had been looking at when he said it.

“I was!”  Russel laughed.  “God’s honest truth!  Ask your Mum and Dad about Traffic Lights.  They’ll remember.  I was rubbing shoulders with all the greats.  But, you know, it’s all fake.  It’s all acting with them.  I realised that early on and got out.”

Mariam out her drink down.  She was trying not to touch the table- it felt weirdly weirdly sticky.  Natalie and Peps had shared a few details of their own visit to the green blinds house, but they’d left out the stickiness, and the smell in the background, like something sweet that had just started to go off.  There was also the way that all the surfaces gleamed, as if they’d been laminated.  The table, the chairs, the mantelpiece- all of it.  On sunny days, it must have been enough to make you go blind.

Just to her left, Alex was watching Russel curiously, as if he was studying him.  Mariam had brought up the Jo thing with him, and if she’d ever got back in touch with her parents, he hadn’t heard about it.  He hadn’t known that she’d been so young or that she’d had people out looking for her, but he hadn’t been very surprised to hear it, either.  “Denny and I were both still in school when Shaun recruited us,” he’d told her, “Though we were a year or two older.”  That had almost sent Mariam into another tirade about why he hadn’t reported Shaun to every legal authority he could find, but she’d bitten her tongue and stopped herself.  No use having the same argument two days in a row.  What was done was done.

Russel was still banging on about his TV career.  “I think I managed to maintain my character throughout it all, but some of them…  Disgusting people.  Disgusting people.”  He looked out of the window for a moment, then turned back to Isaac.  “So, the plan.  What I had in mind was, you, me and him” – he nodded towards Alex, without looking at him- “take turns standing watch.  Standing guard.”  He pointed outside.  “That tree just outside your front drive?  Perfect hiding spot.  One of us stands there with an old wooden cricket bat from ten ‘til six.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Alex.

 Russel turned and stared at him in disbelief, as if it was Remembrance Day and he’d just burped in the middle of the two minutes’ silence.

Before Russel or Alex could say anything, Natalie spoke up.  “Wouldn’t it make more sense for all five of us to take turns?”

Mariam gave her a look.

“I didn’t say it was a good idea!” Natalie protested, “I just didn’t think it was fair to make the boys do all the work!”

Russel ignored this.  “And what exactly do you not approve of?” he asked Alex, pronouncing each word carefully as if he was desperately trying to hold his temper steady.

In Mariam’s opinion, Alex did a much better job of getting that impression across, just by raising his voice and lowering his brows a tiny amount.  “I just don’t think it will help.  Shaun Pinder doesn’t usually go for direct, physical violence.  He prefers to…”

“So I’m lying, am I?” Russel suddenly roared, sweeping his arms through the air, “I didn’t see them light those torches?  They weren’t trying to burn your house down?”

“I’m sure they were!  But…”

“And if they come around and start threatening those girls?  That’ll be OK, will it?”

Mariam heard herself speak before she’d even decided to.  “For fuck’s sake, they’ve already threatened us!  They’ve already done more than that!”  She stood up, avoiding the sticky table.  “They set a bomb in the park and it nearly blew us up!  You can’t stop bombs from going off by hitting them with a cricket bat!”

Russel turned to her.  “Oh!  Oh!  And if…”  But Mariam didn’t hear the rest of it, because she was already out of the door.

She didn’t even know what had made her get so angry so quickly.  Leftover anger at Alex from last night?  Maybe, but Alex was the one Russel had been yelling at!  If anything, she should have wanted to join in!

Mariam crossed the road towards Pallas House… then turned around, hearing voices behind her.  Natalie and Isaac were running towards her, trying to catch up.  She wondered why Alex and Peps hadn’t come.  Maybe they’d needed someone to stay and distract Russel.

The three of them met up on the corner, just by the tree Russel had mentioned.  As soon as he got close enough to whisper, Isaac shook his head and said, “What.  A weirdo.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Mariam.  The oily way he’d said “those girls.”  The way he’d acted like he had the solution to all their problems when all he’d come up with was take a bat and hit things with it.  The fact that she hadn’t even wanted to spend her afternoon in his weird, sticky living room, but oh no, he knew best.

“I don’t think I even know how to hold a cricket bat,” said Isaac, trying to make her laugh.  It didn’t work.  She felt too churned-up for that.

Natalie gave Mariam a little smile.  “Sorry.  I shouldn’t have encouraged him.”

“Ha.  You had a point.”  Mariam put her hands in her pockets for warmth.  “We can probably swing a cricket bat better than he can.”

Across the road, there was a bit of noise outside the house with the green blinds.  Russel stood in the doorway, making outraged noises, while Alex and Peps talked him down and gradually inched towards the pavement.  So they had stayed behind to distract him.  Mariam smiled.

She watched as they finally managed to wave away the last of Russel’s and-another-things and escape.  Alex waved to Mariam and the others as he and Peps jogged towards them.  Mariam didn’t know if it was Alex’s self-control that was preventing him from breaking into a terrified run, or just his dodgy leg.

As soon as the five of them were together, Mariam made an announcement.  “We are never going into that house again.  The man’s a lunatic.”

She didn’t get any disagreements.  It occurred to Mariam that this was the second time in a fortnight that they’d collectively stormed out of a building after their host started talking nonsense.  Probably best not to make a habit of it.  They did still have to sit through lectures, after all.

Russel had been right about one thing (exactly one thing)- they needed to be more proactive about protecting themselves from Shaun Pinder.  And, possibly, protecting other people.  Getting them banned from the university grounds had been a good start.  “Alex, we’re going to the police tomorrow morning, right?  About the Jo thing?”

“Absolutely,” said Alex.

 “Well, after that, can you try and put together a list of all the people you remember from when you lived with them?” She frowned. “Current members, former members…  I want to see if we come across any other big secrets like Jo’s.”  It was more than that- if they’d brainwashed Alex, Denny and Jo while they were still in school, then they’d probably targeted a lot of other vulnerable people.  Maybe some of them had family that could be tracked down.

*

Jo was still upstairs, snuffling, but Shaun had called a house meeting anyway.  He’d given himself half an hour to decide how to play this, and by now he had a couple of ideas.

He’d half-expected the police to show up again.  He hadn’t expected them to ask for Jo, especially not by her full name.  She’d been signing herself Jo Pinder for the last couple of years, just to avoid that.  Anyway, the police had taken her down to the station and made her account for the last five years, and now they had to worry about the possibility that her parents would be in touch.

“It was Alex and his friends, wasn’t it?” asked Debbie, her eyes flashing with fire.  There were six of them in the conservatory.  Everyone except for Maya, who was in the next room, playing a video for her kids, and Jo herself.  “They dug up all the dirt they could, and they found something they could use against us.  They’ve basically told her abusers where she is.”

Shaun remembered Jo’s parents- two whiny, unimaginative trolls skulking around their shabby council house like rats in a sewer.  Definitely not the kind of people they wanted around.  “It… seems quite likely, yes.”

“But Jo was Alex’s friend!” Wade protested.  He was a blond, broad-shouldered man who looked as if he’d have been at home on a Viking longboat, but this had horrified him practically to tears.  “I remember when he was here- they liked each other!  They used to play cards together!”  Wade looked around the room.  “How could he treat her like this?  What’s he getting out of it?”

Debbie spat.  “He’s just fucking vile, simple as that.  And to think we took him in when he needed us.”

I took him in, thought Shaun, Not you.  You weren’t even here yet.

“But who the fuck do they think they are?” asked Greg (who’d been Shaun’s second when he’d first introduced himself to Mariam), “Do other people not matter to them anymore?  Is that how he’s got them thinking?”

“That’s how he’s got them thinking,” confirmed Debbie, “It’s messed.  Up.”

Bradley thumped his fist on the table.  “You know what?  No more pussy-footing around.  We mix up a bucket of chlorine and household bleach, and pipe it through their letterbox.  Gas them like the vermin they are.”

An odd silence descended.  No-one contradicted Bradley, but they all seemed to edge away from him.

“We’re all going to have to face it one of these days!” insisted Bradley, “It’s the only language they understand!”

Shaun was going to have to do something about Bradley.  If he was going to go around talking about gassing people to death and waving torches at their houses (“I was just trying to scare them!”), then he could do it without the Oakmen’s protection.  The police were bothering them enough without being able to trace something like that to them.  “Not now,” he told Bradley, “I have a different plan.  I’ve been in touch with some other Berrylands students, and it turns out Alex and his friends are not popular.”

“Surprise, surprise,” muttered Debbie.

“And there’s something else.”  Shaun nodded towards Viv Fontaine, the only person in the room who hadn’t spoken yet.  She was a hunched little thing with buck-teeth and an unflattering bob.  “While Viv was on campus, she managed to pick up a copy of the university paper.  Viv, can you read us what you found?”

This was the important thing.  If you looked hard enough, you’d always find a weakness.  Everyone had a chink in their armour.  With Alex, it had been his mummy issues.  With Mariam it was the way she’d pissed off her co-workers without even realising it.  And then there was this.

Viv stood up, looked around the room, and clutched the paper to her chest.  “It’s called ‘The Bell,’” she said in her mushy, lisping drawl.  She opened it up, folded it back, and began to read.  “On the Trail of Kelpie and Silkie, by Rosalyn Pepper.”