The Danger Game Read online

‘As a substitute?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How many’s in the squad?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘So it’s pretty unlikely that I’d have to play.’

  ‘Highly unlikely.’

  I nodded. There was no doubt it made sense to include me in the squad as a non-playing substitute. Investigation-wise, it gave me the perfect cover story, and football-wise it didn’t jeopardise the team’s chances. There was also no doubt at all that I genuinely wasn’t good enough to get in the team. I knew that. But even so, I still couldn’t help feeling just a little bit disappointed that I wasn’t going to get to play.

  ‘Have you got any ideas how you’re going to catch the thief?’ Kendal asked.

  ‘Hidden surveillance cameras should do it,’ I said, putting the irrational feelings of disappointment from my mind. ‘One in each dressing room. I can link them up to my mobile phone—’

  ‘That’s out of the question,’ Kendal said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Think about it.’

  I thought about it, and almost immediately realised what a ridiculously stupid idea it was. Hidden surveillance cameras in a school changing room? Yeah, right. That wasn’t asking for trouble, was it?

  ‘No cameras then,’ I said, somewhat sheepishly.

  ‘No cameras,’ Kendal agreed.

  ‘In that case, it’ll have to be some kind of motion sensor device, ideally with a Wi-Fi link to my mobile.’ I paused, thinking about the practicalities. ‘I’m not sure what equipment we’ve got in the office at the moment. I might have to customise one of the bugs we usually use.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘I’ll talk to my grandad and see what he thinks, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’ll give you my mobile number.’

  ‘I’ll probably need access to the changing rooms over the weekend.’

  ‘No problem. I’ll let Mr Jago know. Is there anything else you need?’

  ‘Who else knows about the thefts apart from you and Mr Jago?’

  ‘Well, the kids whose stuff was taken obviously know, and no doubt they’ll have been talking to their mates about it, but there’s nothing we can do about that. The teachers who’ve been guarding the doors know what’s been happening – Mr Wells and Mr Ayres. But that’s about it, I think.’

  ‘What about the Year 12s who’ve been watching the doors?’

  Kendal shook his head. ‘They were just told that it was a new security procedure.’

  ‘Does anyone else know you’ve asked me to investigate the thefts?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even the headmaster?’

  ‘He’s aware that Mr Jago’s dealing with it – he told him to deal with it – but he didn’t want to know any details himself.’

  ‘So if anything goes wrong, it’s nothing to do with him.’

  Kendal said nothing, which told me I was right. The headmaster wasn’t just looking after the school’s reputation, he was looking after his own as well.

  ‘Right,’ I said, getting to my feet and rubbing my arms again. ‘I’m going to get changed now before I freeze to death.’

  Kendal stood up. ‘I’ll get you my mobile number.’

  As we walked together back to the changing rooms, I could see a few kids watching us and muttering among themselves. I guessed the rumours would soon start spreading – Delaney’s in with Kendal now . . . Kendal’s got a new best buddy . . .

  I couldn’t help smiling quietly to myself.

  5

  Barton is about five kilometres from Kell Cross, and by the time I’d had a shower and got dressed and cycled into town, it was getting on for five o’clock. Delaney & Co’s office is situated in North Walk, a pedestrianised street at the quiet end of town. A lot of the small shops and businesses were either closed or closing up as I wheeled my bike along the pavement towards the office, and the street had that strangely muted end-of-the-day kind of feel to it. The sky was dark, the street lights glowing orange. The footsteps of office workers going home echoed dully around the streets, and there was a sense of weariness to the air. It was almost as if the town itself was winding down after a long hard day. In a couple of hours’ time the night-shift would begin, and the town would come back to life again, but until then it was going to sit down for a while, put its feet up, and take a much-needed rest.

  Delaney & Co shares a small office building with two other businesses. We’re on the ground floor, Tantastic Tanning are on the first floor, and Jakes and Mortimer, Solicitors are on the second floor.

  I opened the main door and wheeled my bike along the corridor. As I leaned it against the wall outside Delaney & Co’s office, I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. The tanning salon usually closes at four, so I guessed it was someone coming down from Jakes and Mortimer. I instinctively looked up to see who it was, but just as a pair of legs appeared on the stairs, the handlebars of my bike slipped off the wall, the front wheel jerked outwards, and the bike kind of lurched forward and began sliding down to the floor. As I lunged after it, stooping down to try and get hold of it before it hit the ground, I somehow cracked my shin against the front sprocket. It wasn’t a really hard whack or anything, but it caught me right on that bony spot, and it hurt like hell. I let out a sharp yelp of pain and a few choice words, and immediately bent down and rolled up my trouser leg to examine the damage.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I heard someone say.

  I looked up and saw a girl in high-heeled boots standing on the stairs just above me. I guessed she was about sixteen or seventeen. She had short blonde hair, heavily made-up eyes, and she was stunningly pretty. As well as the high-heeled boots, she was wearing a short black skirt and a little black jacket, and she was carrying a handbag and an armful of post.

  ‘I’m Bianca,’ she said, smiling at me, ‘Mr Mortimer’s new secretary. I started last week.’

  ‘Oh, right . . .’ I muttered, rolling down my trouser leg and straightening up. ‘I’m Travis . . . Travis Delaney.’ I stupidly waved my hand at the office door, as if that explained everything.

  ‘Is your leg all right?’ Bianca asked.

  ‘Yeah . . . yeah, it’s nothing . . .’

  She grinned. ‘It didn’t sound like nothing.’

  I just stared at her, unable to think of a single thing to say. My mind was utterly empty. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I could feel myself blushing. My face felt as if it was on fire. I lowered my eyes, looking down at the floor in a vain effort to compose myself, and that’s when I realised that I hadn’t rolled down my trouser leg properly. So, basically, I was standing there with a bright red face and a half-rolled-up trouser leg, mumbling incoherently and waving my hand around, with my bike lying on the floor at my feet.

  Way to go, Travis, I told myself. You certainly know how to impress the ladies, don’t you?

  ‘Well,’ Bianca said, ‘I’d better get going before the post office shuts. It was nice meeting you, Travis.’

  I looked up, desperately trying to think of something cool to say to rescue the situation, but as Bianca headed gracefully towards the door, glancing back at me with an easy smile, all I could manage was a dopey-looking grin and another idiotic wave of my hand.

  I watched her go out and close the door, and then I just shook my head, let out a sigh, and bent down to pick up my bike.

  6

  Before setting up Delaney & Co on his own in 1994, my grandad had spent five years in the Royal Military Police and twelve years as an officer in the Army Intelligence Corps. My mum and dad had started working with Grandad straight after leaving university, and when Grandad retired from the business about ten years ago, they carried on running the agency together. So Delaney & Co had always been a huge part of my life, and I’d pretty much grown up with the business – hanging around the office all the time, helping out Mum and Dad whenever they’d let me. But like so many other things that we take for granted, it wasn’t until after my parents’ fatal car crash that I’d real
ised how much Delaney & Co meant to me. The business, to me, was Mum and Dad. It was us, our life. And the idea of it not being there any more was almost too much to bear.

  I’m not quite sure how I’d persuaded Grandad to come out of retirement and re-open Delaney & Co – in fact, I’m not even sure it was down to me at all – but whatever it was that had convinced him to do it, it meant everything to me that he had.

  Although he was tougher and smarter than most men half his age, there was no getting away from the fact that Grandad wasn’t as active and healthy as he used to be, which was why he’d asked Courtney Lane to be his partner. Courtney had been Mum and Dad’s assistant. She was still in her early twenties, and as well as being super-athletic and incredibly intelligent – both academically and street-wise – she was rapidly becoming a really good private investigator.

  Courtney had carried on dealing with all the secretarial and administrative stuff for the first couple of months after Grandad had re-opened the business, but eventually – just over two weeks ago – Grandad had taken on a new assistant. The person he’d hired was an old acquaintance of his from his Army Intelligence days, a woman called Gloria Nightingale. I didn’t know exactly how old Gloria was, but I assumed she was about the same age as Grandad, around sixty-two or sixty-three. Not ancient, but certainly not young.

  When I went into the office that afternoon, still blushing from my encounter with Bianca, Gloria was sitting at her desk in the main office, tapping away at her laptop.

  ‘Hello, Travis,’ she said, looking up and smiling at me. ‘Are you all right? You look a bit hot.’

  ‘I just got off my bike,’ I told her, trying to sound casual.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ She glanced over at the window. ‘Was that Bianca I saw just now leaving with the post?’

  ‘I think so, yeah.’

  Gloria looked back at me. ‘She seems like a nice girl, doesn’t she?’

  I shrugged. ‘I suppose so . . .’

  I could tell from the teasing glint in Gloria’s eyes that she knew perfectly well why I was blushing, and that she was just having a bit of fun at my expense. I knew she didn’t mean anything bad by it though, and if it had been anyone else I probably wouldn’t have minded. But it wasn’t anyone else, it was Gloria, and the way I felt about Gloria Nightingale was complicated, to say the least.

  About a week after Gloria had started working for us, I was in the sitting room at home one night and I’d overheard Grandad and Nan talking about Gloria in the kitchen. I’d thought at first they were just chatting about how she was getting on in her new job, but it soon became apparent that Grandad was actually telling Nan, for the very first time, that he’d hired Gloria as his assistant. I was really quite shocked, to be honest. Grandad always discusses everything with Nan, and I’d taken it for granted that he’d consulted her about employing Gloria, and I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t.

  Nan didn’t sound very pleased at all when he told her, which I assumed was simply because he hadn’t talked to her before hiring Gloria, but then Grandad had said something like, ‘Look, I’m sorry, love, I understand how you feel, but—’

  And Nan had blown her top. ‘Do you?’ she’d snapped. ‘Do you really? Is that why you didn’t ask me if I minded you employing your old girlfriend?’

  Nan had stormed off in a huff then, leaving Grandad on his own in the kitchen, and me in a state of utter bewilderment. Old girlfriend? Old girlfriend ? Gloria Nightingale was Grandad’s old girlfriend?

  I simply had to find out what that was all about, and I knew just the right person to tell me. My great-grandmother, Granny Nora, shares the house with us. She’s eighty-six years old and suffers from chronic arthritis, so she spends most of her time in her room upstairs, which is fitted out like a self-contained little flat. She’s Grandad’s mum, so obviously she knows more about him than anyone else, and I was sure she’d have some answers for me.

  Granny’s usually more than happy to talk to me for hours – about everything and anything – but when I’d gone in to see her that night, her arthritis was really playing up and she was in a lot of pain, so I didn’t stay very long. When I’d told her what Nan had said about Gloria, and asked her what she’d meant by it, Granny had smiled her devilish smile and told me that it was a long and convoluted story, which she’d tell me all about when she was feeling better, but the essence of it was that Gloria Nightingale had indeed been Grandad’s girlfriend for a short while before he’d met and married Nan.

  ‘Nan doesn’t like her, does she?’ I’d said.

  Granny had chuckled. ‘Show me a woman who claims to get along with her husband’s ex-girlfriends and I’ll show you a liar.’

  So that was the situation with Gloria. It felt really awkward, knowing that she was Grandad’s ex-girlfriend, and I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with it. Since my parents had died, I’d come to think of Nan and Grandad as sort of substitute parents. They could never replace Mum and Dad, of course – that was unthinkable – and they weren’t my entire world in the way that Mum and Dad had been, but I felt I belonged with Nan and Grandad now. They were mine – my guardians, my family, my everything. So although Grandad wasn’t my dad, and Nan wasn’t my mum, this whole business with Grandad and Gloria still felt how I imagined it would feel if you found out that one of your parents was spending a lot of time with someone they used to go out with.

  Like I said, it felt really awkward.

  Not quite right.

  Kind of icky, if you know what I mean.

  I just didn’t like it, basically. And that’s mostly why I didn’t feel very comfortable around Gloria.

  Another reason, at least initially, was the overall impression she gave of being a bit stuck-up and old-fashioned. She was one of those well-groomed elderly women who always dress quite formally – tweedy skirts, sensible shoes, cardigans, blouses, pearl necklaces – and she had an almost aristocratic air about her that was quite intimidating at first. But, as my mum once told me, you have to be very careful about judging people by their appearance, and the more I’d got to know Gloria, the more I’d realised she wasn’t just a ‘stuck-up old posh lady’. She was posh, there was no denying that, but there was nothing stuck-up about her. She was perfectly friendly, quite funny at times, and – perhaps most surprising of all – she knew more about modern technology than anyone I’d ever met. Computers, phones, cyberspace, surveillance equipment . . . she knew almost everything there was to know about everything.

  I had to admit that in lots of ways Gloria was a pretty cool old lady, and if I hadn’t known about her history with Grandad, and how Nan felt about her, I’m fairly sure that having her around the place would have been OK.

  But I did know about her and Grandad.

  And it wasn’t OK.

  I kept trying to tell myself that it was what it was, that these things happen, and that it wasn’t up to me to judge anyone.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t always as easy as it sounds.

  ‘So what’s been going on?’ I asked Gloria that afternoon after she’d finished teasing me about Bianca. ‘Anything exciting?’

  ‘Your grandad’s been in his office all afternoon,’ she told me, looking over at the door to what used to be Mum and Dad’s private office, ‘and Courtney’s out working on that tanning salon case.’

  I went over to the coat rack on the wall next to Gloria’s desk and hung up my parka. ‘What about you?’ I asked, turning to her and glancing idly at the screen of her laptop. ‘Are you working on anything interesting?’

  ‘Never you mind, nosy-boots,’ she said, quickly closing her laptop.

  Even though she did it in a light-hearted manner, it was still a slightly odd thing to do. In fact, to be honest, it kind of annoyed me. Delaney & Co was my grandad’s business, and until a few months ago it had been my mum and dad’s business. So surely it wasn’t right for someone who’d only been working here for a couple of weeks to hide anything about the business from me?

  Then again,
I thought, maybe I was just overreacting, being too sensitive. As Grandad’s secretary, Gloria had to deal with a lot of confidential information, and maybe she was just taking her responsibilities a bit too far. Or perhaps it was something else she didn’t want me to see, something personal – her Facebook page, a private email . . . it could have been anything really.

  The office door opened then, and when I turned round and saw Courtney Lane coming in, I quickly forgot all about Gloria. Courtney always looks pretty spectacular, and today she was even more eye-catching than usual. One side of her head was shaved, the hair on the other side swept up into a striking platinum-blonde wave. Her eyes were darkened with smoky-black eyeliner, her lips were a bright glossy pink, and she was wearing short denim shorts, yellow-and-red striped tights, and a black leather biker jacket over a cropped white vest.

  ‘Hey, Travis,’ she said, her familiar smile lighting up her face. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Excellent, thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Good.’ She grinned. ‘Do you want to see what I’ve been up to?’

  7

  The tanning salon case that Courtney had been working on was a supposedly straightforward injury compensation claim. Jakes and Mortimer, the solicitors on the top floor, were acting on behalf of a young woman who’d allegedly suffered serious eye damage as a result of visiting a local tanning salon called Tanga Tans. According to this woman, she hadn’t been provided with any protective eyewear, the timing mechanism on the sunbed she’d used was faulty, and the staff at the salon were both negligent and unprofessional. Jakes and Mortimer had taken on her case, and they’d contracted Delaney & Co to investigate Tanga Tans and gather evidence to back up their client’s claim. So that afternoon Courtney had visited the salon wearing a hidden miniature surveillance camera, and now she was back with the results.

  She shared the private office with Grandad now, and as we went in there to watch her surveillance video, I was half expecting Gloria to come in with us. But as I followed Courtney over to her desk, Grandad went out into the main office and spoke quietly to Gloria for a moment or two, and when he came back she wasn’t with him. I had no idea what that meant, if anything, and Grandad had his blank face on, so I knew there was no point in asking him. It wasn’t the first time he’d done something like that though – sidling off for a quiet word with Gloria – and it was beginning to get on my nerves a bit.