Fifty Fifty (21 page)

‘It’ll only take an hour or so,’ said Jude over the phone. ‘As long as your dad doesn’t come home early it’ll work like a dream.’ He laughed loudly,
although Gil couldn’t see anything in the plan that was at all amusing.

It took about two minutes to get his bag from his room and then Gil was ready. It was far too early to leave, but he couldn’t bear to hang about the house. It made his stomach churn. As he
was about to pull the front door closed behind him Gil hit a problem. How was he going to get back in? He really couldn’t face scaling the conservatory roof again. The only option was to
leave the front door unlocked. Gil set off up the road, hoping that the local burglars would all still be in bed.

It was only a short walk to the library but by the time Gil got there his knees were shaking. He felt as if there was a hole in his ribcage and someone was poking at his heart with a pointed
stick.
It’s a normal day, a totally normal day
, he told himself, but when he pushed open the library door he nearly ran away. It was packed. The children’s section was full of
tiny kids with their parents and there was nowhere for Gil to sit. One or two of the older kids at the computers looked uncomfortably like people from school. The parents had occupied every single
cushion and chair and the toddlers were climbing over them as if they were in a playground. Gil found a small piece of floor in a corner. He dumped his bag and sat down, swivelling round so he
couldn’t see the bag. Then he pulled a book off the nearest shelf and tried very hard to pretend he was reading it.

Some time later Gil felt behind him and found his bag had gone. It gave him a prickly feeling in the back of his skull to think that Jude had been so close and he hadn’t even seen him.

When he got home, Gil sat in the front room and waited for Jude to phone. Time slowed to a standstill. It was midday, but Gil didn’t want to eat. He couldn’t even watch television.
He had time to go over every single thing that could possibly go wrong. Mum and Dad would come home early. Jude would find that Dad’s keys were special keys that couldn’t be copied and
then he would disappear and never bring the keys back. Mum and Dad would crash on the way back from lunch and he would never see them again – oh, this was ridiculous. Now he was starting to
think like Mum.
Get a grip,
he told himself.

By the time the phone finally rang in his pocket, Gil had heard the sound in his head so many times that he was convinced he was imagining things. It was almost a shock to find Jude on the end
of the line.

‘Hi, Gil,’ he said. ‘We’re all done. You can have your keys back soon.’

‘Oh. Good. I was worried you weren’t going to be able to copy them.’

Jude laughed quietly. ‘Even uncopiable keys can be copied,’ he said. ‘You need to know the right people, that’s all. Now, there’s just one thing I want to ask you
about. I think you might have more idea than me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s a note in the tin and I’ve got a hunch it might be some sort of code, maybe for the burglar alarm. The paper’s got some dates and times on it, and then it just
says
Sigma.
Does that mean anything to you?’

‘It’s Greek,’ said Gil.
‘Sigma
is the Greek letter
S,
but it doesn’t look much like an
S.
It’s a maths symbol. You see it on spreadsheets
and stuff

Yeah, well, I was always crap at maths,’ said Jude. What does it look like?’

Sigma
was
. How could he describe
? Gil drew it in the air with a finger,
zigzagging backwards and forwards while he talked.

‘It’s hard to explain,’ he said. ‘Sort of like a pointy number 3, only backwards. Or a
z
with an extra line.’

As Gil spoke, he glanced at the house phone sitting on the table next to him and had a sudden idea. Numbers on keypads were always arranged in a square – 1-2-3, 4-5-6, 7-8-9, with the zero
on its own underneath the 8. What if you were meant to press the numbers in the shape of the
Sigma
symbol?

‘It might be something to do with the way the numbers are set out on the keypad,’ said Gil, thinking aloud. He imagined the Greek letter drawn on top of the numbers on the phone, and
started to trace the shape with his finger. ‘If you have one number for each point of the
Sigma
symbol, that would make . . . um . . . 3-1-5-7-9. Or possibly 2-1-5-7-8. Or even
3-1-6-7-9 if you had an extra long middle bit.’

There was a pause, and Gil knew Jude must be scribbling.

‘Excellent,’ said Jude after a while. ‘That’s really helpful. We could try disabling the alarm but it’s a lot simpler if we’ve got the code. See you back at
the library, then?’

‘Yes, OK. Uh – Jude?’

‘What?’

‘When are you planning to do this?’

‘Soon. Look, let’s get this stuff back to you, all right?’

‘OK. And then what?’

Gil waited for Jude to say something else, but there was just a dull silence that told him Jude had ended the call. What was he expecting Jude to say, exactly? ‘Come with us, Gil.’
Something like that?

This time Gil saw Jude come into the library. He was wearing a smart black jacket over his jeans, and his hair was brushed and tied back. Gil’s school bag was slung casually over his
shoulder. It made him look camouflaged somehow, as if he was making a deliberate effort to blend in with his surroundings. Gil watched Jude’s eyes as they swept over him and completely failed
to make contact. He felt a little flash of pain at being ignored. Of course it had to be like that, Gil said to himself, it wasn’t safe for Jude to acknowledge him. But the hurt stayed, like
a burn.

Before Gil returned Dad’s key box to the drawer in the desk he looked for the piece of paper that Jude had mentioned.
12 noon 20
^th
March to 12 noon 3
^rd
April
,
it read.
Sigma.
The note was in Dad’s handwriting, and ‘Sigma’ was underlined twice. The third of April was the next day, Sunday. So if
Sigma
was the code, it would
be changed at twelve noon tomorrow. Surely that meant Jude’s raid would have to happen tonight?

Gil searched his school bag, hoping and dreading to find a note from Jude.
Midnight,
it might say.
Join us. Be there.

But there was no note this time.

He waited in the front room until it was nearly time for Mum and Dad to come home, half-watching the television while he ate snacks. He hadn’t really done anything, he told himself. He
hadn’t stolen Dad’s keys, just borrowed them for a short time. The video he’d taken in the labs didn’t exist any more, except in the memory of two people. What Jude chose to
do now – well, that was his business. Everything was back in its place as if nothing had happened. So nothing
had
happened, had it? Gil went back over his fictional account of the
day’s events, adding little details here and there to make it more likely that Mum and Dad would believe it. By the time he’d finished it was so convincing he almost believed it
himself.

The house phone rang twice while he was waiting. Each time Gil picked it up and said ‘Hello?’, and each time there was a little click before the line went dead. It spooked him
slightly. But there was nothing to be spooked about. Everything was fine. And at half past three he went out of the front door and deliberately locked it behind him. It would be much more
convincing if Mum and Dad found him hunched up on the doorstep when they got home.

‘Oh, you poor thing,’ said Mum. She put a hand on Gil’s shoulder. ‘Whatever happened?’

‘He was just horrible to me,’ said Gil. ‘He said I was rubbish at skating because I hadn’t been for three weeks and then he kept laughing and trying to push me over. I
know I should have stayed there but he was really doing my head in. I couldn’t cope with it.’

‘It’s so unlike Louis,’ said Mum, shaking her head. ‘What’s got into him? I didn’t think he was the sort to behave like a bully.’

Gil put on his most miserable face and looked at the floor. It was going well, but he still had to get round Dad, who was looking disapproving.

‘So you came home on your own?’ said Dad. ‘All the way from the ice rink?’

‘Yes,’ Gil said. ‘I was careful, Dad, honestly.’

‘And what exactly have you been doing since you got here, given that you couldn’t get into the house?’ said Dad.

‘Not a lot. Well, I did go to the library for a bit. I thought you wouldn’t mind that,’ said Gil.

Dad looked really irritated. ‘The whole point of making plans is so that we know where you are and we know that you’re safe,’ he said. ‘Now we find you’ve been
wandering the streets for hours. You should have sorted it out with Louis. I’m not impressed.’

Mum stepped in. ‘Come on, Matt. Gil hasn’t actually done anything wrong. He just used his common sense in a difficult situation.’

There was a little pause, and Gil thought the worst was over, but Dad wasn’t finished.

‘I’m going to phone Louis and ask him what on earth he thinks he was doing,’ said Dad, switching his anger to another target. ‘He must have realised that his actions were
putting you in potential danger. He should have stopped you leaving the rink.’

‘No, Dad!’ Gil protested, in genuine panic. ‘You can’t do that! It’s too embarrassing. Look,
I’ll
phone him.’

He went straight to the phone with his heart banging and pretended to dial numbers. Then he had a one-sided conversation, loudly enough for Dad to overhear.

‘Oh, hi, Louis, it’s Gil. Yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah, I just came home. Ye ah, cool, I’ll come over. Cool. See you in a bit.’ He put the phone down and went back to Mum and
Dad.

‘Louis is sorry and he wants me to go over,’ Gil said. ‘Is that OK?’

‘Sure,’ said Mum, looking at Dad.

Dad just about nodded.

Gil heard the phone ring again as he was walking away from the house and it bothered him, though he wasn’t sure why. There was no way Louis would call him, and Jude wouldn’t be
stupid enough to call the house phone.

Gil wandered up the road without being sure where he was going. After a while he found himself at the library again, but the instant he went inside he realised it wasn’t such a smart move.
He was sick of the sight of the library. The ghost of Jude lurked around every corner and the longer Gil sat and pretended to read books, the harder it was to persuade himself that nothing at all
had happened.

Jude had everything he needed now to break into the labs. And Gil knew he would only find out about the raid when Dad found out, and then he would have to fake surprise or concern or something
else he didn’t feel. He longed for it to be over quickly.

After an hour Gil judged that Dad would have had time to get over his irritation. He went home and rang the bell, but when Mum opened the door she looked so white and scared that Gil wished he
could just turn and walk away again.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Dad wants to see you in his study.’

She didn’t move away from the door. Gil stood looking at her, gradually filling up with fear. Seeing Dad in his study was bad news. It was like being sent to the headteacher’s
office. What had happened while he’d been out?