Finding Arcadia Read online

  She puts her phone to sleep and tries lying on her other side, but her hip now rests on something uncomfortable. She shifts her coat pocket from beneath her and takes out the Swiss Army knife. If the Mistletoe Bride had one of these her tale might have ended differently. Reawakening her phone, she activates the torch and starts unscrewing the closet’s lock.

  6

  OXFORD

  The train rattles past small villages and lush green hillsides of the kind that almost justify the damp misery of an English winter. There are exceptions to the beauty—Slough, for example, on which a poet once invited friendly bombs to fall. That ode was penned before the Second World War, before the destruction of aerial bombing was well known. The writer, John Betjeman, later regretted its harshness. One should have the courage of one’s convictions.

  Oxford, towards which she travels, prepared for the Nazi onslaught by burying stained glass windows and other treasures in the hope that they might survive the coming air raids. Needlessly, it turned out, as Hitler had no intention of bombing his future capital. Parts of Slough, on the other hand, were flattened.

  During an earlier war that had also ravaged Europe, the mother of a soldier accosted a foppish young scholar of military age on the street in Oxford, asking why he was not also doing his bit to save civilisation. “Madam,” he is said to have replied, “I am what makes civilisation worth saving.”

  A garbled announcement presages the arrival at Oxford Station. She shoulders her bag and prepares to look for a taxi to the John Radcliffe Hospital where she was born.

  Earlier that morning they breakfasted at Marwell Hall, the same dour-faced man returning with something that resembled sausages and scrambled eggs, yet tasted like neither.

  Once, during a rare English snowstorm, the Priory School’s own kitchen staff had been unable to reach the grounds. She and some of the other students took it upon themselves to take over for breakfast, pulling together basic fare for the younger boys and girls. Scavenging for bacon to fry up, she stumbled into the meat locker to find boxes stamped with solid black letters: “Grade D Beef—for use in schools and prisons only”. The low quality of Marwell Hall’s fare suggests that zoos may have access to cuts of meat even further down the alphabet.

  Consenting to eat a piece of toast, she has said nothing of her night-time adventures. Once she removed the lock assembly, the door of the closet swung open easily. She reattached the lock casing, closed the door, and returned silently to bed. Harriet was still snoring, but the changed position of her slippers indicated that it probably was she who, innocently enough, closed the window against a draft.

  Over breakfast, Henry raised an eyebrow at her, confused by her text message—and by her reassurance that she had found her coat after all. As for the good Dr. Starr, he studiously avoided her gaze for most of the morning.

  Zookeepers then arrived to take the dozen students out for morning feeding, taking turns to throw shrimp to the flamingos and carrots to the tapirs. While offering bananas to the chimpanzees, Sebastian made the mistake of calling them apes. Dr. Starr pointed out that they were in fact monkeys, explaining that monkeys typically have a visible tail while apes do not. One of the boys wittily added that this meant it was more likely that Sebastian was an ape—though a full body examination might be required, just to be sure. In an extraordinary coincidence, the same boy later slipped on a banana peel and bruised his coccyx. If intentional, this was one of Sebastian’s more effective practical jokes. She must remember to compliment him.

  Then it was time to return to the Priory School. On the bus ride back, she received a text message from Lestrange:

  Whisky tested positive for flunitrazepam. How could you know that? Still looking for CCTV footage.

  Bitterness. But all she texted back was a winking emoji.

  When they reached the school and turned into the grounds it was almost time for lunch. Striding out to greet them, however, was the Acting Headmaster, Mr. Ormiston. To greet her, from his expression when their eyes met. And so, as the other students took their duffel bags back to the dormitory, she again found herself taking a walk with Mr. Ormiston across the quadrangle.

  “I need to talk to you about Mr. Pratt,” he said. No pleasantries, a slight hunching of his shoulders—the situation was beginning to cause him some measure of stress. “I asked Miss Bennett to tell me more about the last occasion on which she saw him, when he requested a file. He thought she could get him some kind of secondary file on students. Well, a secondary file on you at least.”

  Notes in the margin. Her own search for the secondary file six months earlier had been fruitless. Why would Mr. Pratt be asking for it?

  “Miss Bennett told him,” Mr. Ormiston continued, “quite rightly, that there was no such file. You’ve seen the files we do keep on our students, but I don’t know what ‘secondary file’ refers to. Occasionally in the margins Charles—the former Headmaster would write a note that made reference to a secondary document, but I always assumed that it was some kind of research project that he was doing on education. It might not have been a physical file at all—a computer file, for example.”

  They crossed the quadrangle, tracing a large arc that would return her to the dormitory building. She was not ready to tell him about breaking into Headmaster’s secret office in which the files had been stored. “Were these references to a secondary document common?” she said. “Did you see them in other student files? Or only in mine?”

  Mr. Ormiston stopped in mid-stride. “Now that you mention it, I don’t recall seeing it in any other student files.” He paused to take off his gold-rimmed glasses and clean them with a small cloth. An attempt to see more clearly, or an affectation to buy time? “Arcadia, I have as much of an interest in getting to the bottom of this as you do. If you know anything, if you suspect anything, you will tell me?”

  How much can she trust the Acting Headmaster? He is a good man, but was manipulated by Miss Alderman and is being manipulated now by Dr. Starr. A compromise: she can trust him, but not rely on him. At the time, she said nothing more than “I will,” as they parted ways at the entrance to the dormitory building.

  It was almost noon. Though she had a mathematics assignment that was due, after unpacking her small travel bag she opened Mother’s diary once more, almost at random, seeking—seeking what, exactly. Inspiration? Revelation?

  Comfort?

  30 May 2003—Am I doing something terrible? Bringing a child into the world, or accepting one into your home, is a responsibility. You have a duty to help her find a place in the world, to keep her safe but also to let her grow. To give her roots as well as wings.

  She has to trust you completely, to love you completely—the way I love her. But can she trust—should she trust me when I keep secrets from her about her birth, about her life? With Magnus it was easy because Ignatius and I were so grateful to have a child. We would have done almost anything. And eventually they seemed to give up on the testing with him.

  With Arky they want so much more. I swear there must be almost as much of her blood at JR as there is in her little body.

  The diary entries are oddly vague about names and places—is it possible that Mother was asked to record data but not evidence? Yet this is the second reference she has seen to “JR”. She flicks back to the earlier entry:

  6 January 2002—No more testing. Once a month I agreed to, but not on her birthday! This is getting ridiculous. She’s just a little girl. With Magnus a check-up every six months was all. Now JR would poke and prod her daily if I let them. I won’t allow it. I won’t!

  When she first read this, she assumed that JR was a person. The “let them” was odd, but might have been intended to mask the gender. Her mother was usually careful with language, however, and would never say “at JR” if it denoted a person. A place, then—or an institution.

  She was tempted to look up the possible acronyms on the Internet using her phone but resisted. Such conveniences make us lazy. In any case, it was in h
er head already: an institution and a person: the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

  Too many coincidences: Milton, Miss Alderman, and Dr. Starr all studied at Oxford. The ticket stub from the previous night’s drone pilot. And now confirmation in the diaries that Oxford University’s teaching hospital was involved. Enemy action, then?

  In her bag, the burner phone from Miss Alderman remained switched off. Who is this teenager and how dangerous can she be? Thus far she seems mostly interested in watching Arcadia, although the fake bomb did—as Magnus worked out—warn that she might be “coming soon”.

  She had no desire to ask permission to leave the school and would not have received it if she did. If she caught the 12:37 train, however, she could be back in time for dinner, her absence from class explained by… by food poisoning at the hands of the Marwell Hall chef.

  Tempted to tell Henry, she knew he would disapprove and probably try to dissuade her. Is it true that she acts like she needs no one else’s help? That doesn’t mean she is reckless. But sometimes it is easier to do things alone, relying only on the one person in the world you can depend upon completely: yourself. That lesson seemed to be confirmed when she did reach out to someone.

  Dearest Magnus, put off lunch with Mother to Sunday. The new Oxford professor is coming 4 tea. Seems he answers to “Don”! Arcadia

  Hardly her most inventive code, but she did not want to delay. Within seconds, Magnus replied—correctly working out that every fourth word contained the message that she was off to Oxford for (4) answers. Yet his reply did not even pretend to be encoded:

  Arcadia, that’s a very bad idea. Please allow me to handle this. M.

  She read the message twice before it struck her. “M.” She had thought his explanation for working out the code on the fake bomb had sounded overly simple, based on the presence of a period after the abbreviated sign-off. And here he himself was using the same punctuation.

  Happenstance? But then there was the phone call as she tried to disarm the fake bomb. Magnus had taken his coat, knowing that he would not return. Knowing more about the person who planted the bomb than he revealed.

  Coincidence?

  Blood is thicker than water, goes the cliché. As a physical property this is self-evidently true: the viscosity of blood is higher than pure water. The idiom has long been understood to mean that ties of kinship are stronger than ties of friendship, but what is water meant to signify here? She once read that there is an Arabic phrase, “blood is thicker than milk”, that means precisely the opposite: relationships forged in the blood of the battlefield are more enduring than familial ties.

  How much can she trust Magnus? Sibling rivalry is to be expected in any family, but Magnus was supportive when he needed to be. He would never do anything that might have endangered their parents or her. And yet.

  Putting the phone back in her bag, she walked along the edge of a building towards the staff parking lot. It was deserted, but to avoid being spotted by a security camera she had to crawl on all fours up to the gate. Reaching up, she inserted the master key and opened it far enough for her to slip through. The key. Footage from the camera would show the gate moving slightly but should not include the student scrambling across the gravel and behind a row of parked cars.

  Something about the key. Keeping low, she moved along the edge of the parking lot to the lane that led out to the tree-lined street.

  Magnus had left her the master key. Hidden in Chapel for at least five years, he also left a clue for her to find. Addressed to the “Heir Apparent”, he said he had high hopes she would find it. And yet.

  And yet Magnus left the Priory School two years before she started there; two years before girls were allowed even to enrol in the school. Had he lied about planting the key at school before he left, or lied about having intended for her to find it? On its own, she might not read so much into this, but combined with his behaviour around the fake bomb it raised questions about her brother’s motivations. Now he was trying to stop her going to Oxford to pursue the strongest lead they had on the people behind the attack on her parents. Their parents.

  She contemplated telephoning to confront him there and then, but the bus to the railway station was approaching. Hoisting her bag, she waved to the driver and jogged to meet it.

  The taxi pulls up at the John Radcliffe Hospital just after 1:30pm and she pays the driver in cash. Perhaps from habit, the driver has stopped at the emergency entrance, briefly blocking an ambulance. She shrugs an apology and proceeds around to the main entrance intended for those not in need of immediate medical care.

  An inquiry at reception directs her towards something called the Data Quality Department in another wing of the hospital. There she is pointed to a Subject Access Manager and, after half an hour of waiting while the bureaucrat finishes browsing through Internet sites on an outmoded computer, she is asked what she wants.

  “My birth records,” she replies.

  “Your birth certificate?” says the man. Unlikely to have dreamed as a child of being a subject access manager, clubbed fingers and a woollen vest fraying where he has tugged at it nervously indicate that he keeps the job because at—late fifties?—he has few options and needs the security. “Your parents should have a copy of that already, sweetheart.”

  Signs of irritation are unlikely to help, so she lets the patronising comment pass. If he wants to infantilise her, eyes wandering up and down her school uniform, that may be the most productive strategy to follow. Blinking more than lubrication of the cornea requires, she raises her voice a half-octave and lifts it still further at the end of each phrase as if every statement is a question. “Oh ha ha!” she tilts her head to look at his nametag. “Leo, is it? What a lovely name. Lion: roar! No, so what I need is the records of my actual birth, what happened with my Mum and stuff. Caesarean or, you know,” she leans forward conspiratorially, “vaginal. It’s for a school project.”

  “Medical records?” he repeats. “They’re really your mother’s medical records and so we’d need her consent. For that matter, if you’re a minor we would need a parent’s consent for you to see your own records. I’m not sure we’re going to be able to help you.”

  This is becoming tedious. She could try batting her eyelids but decides on a more direct approach. “Listen, Leo,” he flinches as her voice drops down to her normal tone. “They are my records. I’m sixteen years old and under the Data Protection Act I have the right to see my records, not least because in another one of the fine hospitals run by the NHS my mother is in a coma and I need to find out why. Now you can help me, or you can get back to googling whether your clubbed fingers are due to a heart or a lung problem. My guess is heart, but the cardiac ward here is pretty good, so you’re in luck.” He looks at her in alarm, but is still hesitating. She takes a gamble, looking him in the eye: “And if you don’t help me, I’ll have to tell your superiors that you’ve been downloading porn onto a hospital computer.”

  A pause, then she reverts to the ditzy teenager, voice returning to a grating lilt. “So, please Mr. Leo, I just need to see these records and I’ll be out of your hair. Or what’s left of it.”

  She hands over her NHS medical card and he dutifully enters her number into the computer before frowning.

  “Yes,” she says, predicting his response. “I’m adopted. So I’ll need you to get my original number and link it to my birth parents. The mother’s name is Euphemia Hebron.”

  “I, I can’t,” he says. “When the new number is granted the old one is sealed. No information about the birth parents is carried forward.”

  She is tempted to push him aside and look it up herself, but the system looks old enough to be idiosyncratic in its data management. “I just told you the birth mother’s name,” she says patiently. “Surely you haven’t had that many patients here with the name Euphemia Hebron?”

  He continues to waver. Time for another gamble, though a reasonable bet at this point.

  “I forget,” she says innoc
ently, voice elevating once more. “Is the punishment for possession of—shall we say, ‘images for the less than discerning gentleman’?—ten years in prison total, or ten years per image?” She winks at him and takes out her phone. “I guess there’s one way to find out.”

  Now visibly sweating, he says nothing but types as she spells out the name: “Hebron, Euphemia. Date of parturition should be 4 January 2000.”

  “Fine,” he mutters tersely as she leans around to look at the screen as a stream of information comes up. Clicking on an entry for January 2000 expands it to show a list of procedures and test results. “There,” he says. “VBAC—vaginal birth after C-section—4 Jan. 2000. Baby girl. Name later confirmed Arcadia Hebron. That’s you, I assume? So, are we done?”

  She is peering at the records. Something is not right. “Just one more favour, Leo. There’s an earlier record of a childbirth. February 1993. Pull up that information and I’ll leave you in peace.”

  He grunts and with a few clicks the records appear. C-section, 17 February 1993. Baby boy. Name later confirmed Magnus Hebron. “Are you happy now?”

  Not quite. “Leo, when did the John Radcliffe start keeping digital records?”

  He frowns again. “It would have been the late 1990s. I remember because that film Enemy of the State came out—” he catches himself. “The late 1990s. We might have a summary that has been keyed in later, but not full records.” Joining the dots. “Not like that 1993 entry.”

  “One very last favour, Leo. I promise. Your system can do a search by date as well as by patient. Can you pull up a list of all computerised records of births in the system in the year 1993?”

  Now he is starting to become interested in the mystery; the nervous sweat on his brow has been displaced by furrows of concentration. Various Boolean search operators are deployed to produce an answer to the query: one birth—Hebron, Euphemia. 17 February 1993. Baby boy. Name later confirmed Magnus Hebron.