Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest (23 page)

“Simone,” Constance said. “She was very definite about it being important.”

“She’s survived the last eight months without it. I think she’ll be fine. How old is she?”

“Eight.”

“And on anti-depressants? What kind of school was that?”

“Well…” Constance stammered, defensive by proxy. “What about these. Antihistamines.”

“Do any of the kids seem like they have allergies?”

“Not really.”

“Then they’re fine,” Nilda said. “When I mentioned it, I really meant things like insulin for diabetes. Did you ask Inspector Styles?”

“I did. He said they hadn’t had access to anything stronger than aspirin since March.”

“Well, take that list to Hana. If she thinks any are important, then we’ll see what we can do, but really, the children seem fine. And as for everything else,” she added kindly, quickly detaching the rest of the list, “we’ll organise a looting expedition just as soon as we’ve brought that food in from the coaches. Okay?”

Mollified, Constance left.

It would make a nice change going out looking for clothes and shoes, and yes, perhaps some toys for the children. Secure the food supply first, and then get people organised. Get them working in teams with specific tasks and set goals. There was certainly more than enough work to keep everyone occupied. What she needed was a pen and some paper. Actually, what she really wanted was something to eat. They had enough food now that some could be spared. She set off towards the dining hall. Stewart was there, scrubbing at tables.

“Got to keep it clean,” he said as she entered. “Can’t have the kids getting sick.”

“No. No. Of course not,” Nilda said. “Are you here on your own?”

“Constance was meant to be helping, but she’s disappeared. Aisha, too, but she said she felt like she wanted to throw up. That’s why I’m cleaning. In case there’s a bug.”

“She’s…” Nilda began, but stopped. It was Tuck who’d confirmed Aisha’s pregnancy when they had got back from Kent. Nilda had suspected as much, but if Aisha wanted to keep it a secret, it wasn’t her place to start telling everyone. “I’ll give you a hand,” she offered. “But I could do with something to eat. Is there anything left?”

“From lunch? No. Those kids ate it all. They eat a lot don’t they, children? Always eating. There should be some biscuits in the storeroom.”

“Enough to spare?” she asked, her stomach growling eagerly.

“Oh yeah, we’re still a few days away from having to use any of the stores. They came from Liverpool Street. The train station,” Stewart mumbled. “Dev. He found ‘em. One per person. In first class. There’s a list.”

Nilda parsed that until she’d deciphered the meaning. She went into the kitchen and found a clipboard hanging from the wall. It was a reassuringly long list. Some entries were short, containing little more than a name and a number such as ‘rice 25kg’. Others gave mouth-wateringly precise detail such as ‘Lovvit & Baker, Chocolate Chip, Biscuits, 2 boxes x 100 packets x 2 biscuits per pack.’

She looked around the kitchen. It was immaculate. The steel gleamed, the fresh fruit and vegetables were neatly arranged on the counter, and the packets on the shelves were well organised. Even the knives were neatly ordered, aligned perfectly with the well-scrubbed chopping boards they sat on. It was all very reassuring.

Stewart came into the kitchen, the disinfectant spray dangling from his hand.

“You find them?” he asked.

“I was looking at the list and your kitchen. It’s impressive.”

“Oh, the list isn’t mine. I just do the cooking.”

“You don’t look after the storeroom?”

“Don’t need to. Not yet. That’s why they call it stores. Three more days.” He looked slowly around the kitchen, his eyes falling on the fresh food. He picked up a carrot and moved it from one pile to another. “Maybe two, then we’ll start on the stores. But there’s the food outside. Not sure how much that is. The longer we leave it, the better. Make sure you cross those biscuits off when you take ‘em. That’s important.”

That much was written in bold red letters at the top of the list. She scanned down the page, turned to the next, then the third. “Nothing’s been crossed off,” she said.

“Yeah. I don’t think people hand in everything they find, you know?” Stewart said. “They go out, find something nice, and they keep it for themselves. Well, fair enough, I say. I mean, we’ve all been hungry. We know what hunger can do. Terrible, terrible things. So everyone keeps a bit aside, and what does it matter as long as everyone has enough? That’s all that matters, right? As long as they cross off what they take. We don’t want to be eating the stores, you see. Because when we do, it means people have run out of their own private supplies. That’s when the trouble will start. When people will change. We can’t run out of food. That’ll be the end. Can’t have that. Not now. Not ever.”

“You know Chester’s going to Anglesey tomorrow,” Nilda said. “He’ll come back with food.”

“If they’re still there. They might not be. They might have nothing to spare, and then what? No. We can’t rely on the kindness of strangers, not unless they can rely on us. And they can’t do that unless we know we can rely on ourselves. That’s why the stores are important.”

Nilda nodded and smiled, but decided it was time to give up. Stewart seemed to have brief moments of lucidity followed by periods of utter detachment. She took the flashlight from the hook, opened the door, and went to search for the biscuits.

She was immediately struck by the size of the room and the sheer number of boxes. Since the dining hall had been barely half full with a hundred people in it that morning, she supposed the Tower must have been catering for thousands a day. As she ran the light down the rows of mostly brown cardboard mixed with the multi-coloured packaging of the more expensive brands, she had a flashback to her previous life, and smiled at the memory.

She scanned the light along the shelves until she found the one containing the biscuits. It was empty. Disappointment mixed with irritation. Whoever had eaten them could, if not crossed them off the list, at least have removed the empty box. She tracked the light left and right, looking for something else vaguely snackable. There was a label that read ‘Brazil nuts’. She checked the box. It, too, was empty.

Don’t panic, she told herself. Don’t let dark thoughts turn fear into fact. She tried another box, and a third. It was only when she reached the sixth that she found one with something inside it: two small bags of rice.

Slowly, methodically, she went through the room, checking each box against the list Stewart had given her. When she’d finished, she’d found there was enough food for one hundred meals, but only if you really stretched out that rice.

Again she told herself not to panic. It was bad stock management, nothing more. She repeated that, standing in the near dark, trying to convince herself that everything was okay.

“Tell me again how this works,” she asked Stewart, back in the kitchen. “What food do you use for cooking?”

“Fresh food, anything that’ll expire, that’s all here,” he said. “Anything we’re keeping for the long-term, that goes in the storeroom.”

“Right. So how often do you go in there?” she asked.

“I don’t. I’ve got everything I need here. Two thousand calories a day, that’s what we’re on. I’ve got it marked down in the ledger over—”

“Right, and this list,” she said, tapping the clipboard. “Was this started back when you were all in Kirkman House?”

“Oh no. We started that when we were putting everything away.”

She opened the kitchen cupboards, hoping against hope that somehow the missing food would have found its way in there. There just weren’t enough cupboards. A few did contain food, but not nearly enough.

“Is everything all right?” Stewart asked.

“It’s fine,” she said. But it wasn’t. After they’d eaten what was in the kitchen they’d have to start on the stores, and it turned out they hadn’t got any left.

“And how often do people come and help themselves?”

“Well, check the list. They’ll have crossed it off.”

“But no one has crossed anything out.”

“Exactly,” he said, as if that answered anything. Perhaps it did.

“What about Hana and the food for the animals?” she asked.

“Oh no, that doesn’t go in. We separated out all the food that would do as feed. No additives, that sort of thing. That’s all in her store over in the Keep.”

“And how much time do you spend in here?” she asked.

“Well, there’s cooking. And then there’s the cleaning up. Most of the time, I suppose, except when there’s other work to be done. I mean—”

“Yes. Yes, I know.” She looked at him, and properly this time. The man was a shadow of whoever he’d formerly been. It was her fault, or Hana’s or someone’s for letting responsibility fall on his shoulders.

“I have to go,” she said.

“You said you’d help with dinner.”

“I’ll send someone,” she said, and almost immediately forgot as she went outside. She heard the buzzing of the drone as it flew overhead, followed by the sound of children yelling and running after it. She found no cheer in the sound. They needed the food outside the castle walls more than ever, but for now it was safer where it was. She looked around. What should she do? What could she do? An idea came to her.

“Set a thief,” she murmured, and went to find Chester.

He was where she’d left him, sitting in the chair, surrounded by maps, his eyes closed.

“Nilda?” he asked, then opened an eye. “Yep. I thought it was you. You have this firm walk. As if you’re determined to get somewhere, and the ground better play along or get out of the—”

“We have a problem,” she interrupted.

“Another one?”

“A big one,” she said. “We’re missing food from the storeroom. A lot of food.”

“How much?”

“Almost all of it. At best there’s three days left. More likely it’s two. This is the list of everything that’s come in and meant to have gone into the stores. Most of it came from Kirkman House. You see here, at the end, that’s what’s actually there. There’s a few bags of rice. A dozen tins. Some sugar. Not much else.”

He took the list and glanced at it. “Well, it doesn’t look good. But does it matter? We’ve got all that stuff from the—”

“Chester, Listen! I’m saying it’s been stolen!”

He looked down the list again. “Biscuits, icing sugar, nuts… it’s stuff people would have snacked on. Did anyone tell them not to?”

“Two things. First, they left the empty boxes in there. I mean, surely you can’t be saying that people got peckish, went in, found the place nearly empty, and didn’t say anything.”

“Well, perhaps it’s—”

“Second,” she interrupted. “Forgetting the fact that no one snacks on icing sugar, we’re missing at least twenty-five kilos of rice. Who eats raw rice?”

Chester glanced at the list again. “You can’t eat raw rice. And you can’t cook it without people knowing. Are you sure it was ever here?”

“Stewart says the list was written when they arrived from Kirkman House. You see here, that’s the entry for the rice. That’s Hana’s handwriting.”

“So it almost certainly was put in there. Could an empty box have been put in there and marked as full? No,” he said, answering his own question before Nilda could. “One box, sure. Two, maybe, but not all of them. Alright, so someone took it. They couldn’t have eaten it all, so it’s been hidden. Not a bad idea that, the empty boxes. I take it these entries at the bottom are the things found more recently? And that food was actually there, right? And it was all near the door?”

“Yes. Exactly,” she said.

“So we’re dealing with a professional.”

“McInery?”

“No. I don’t think so,” he said. She was about to ask how he could be so sure when he continued. “She’d have added rocks to the empty boxes for that extra layer of authenticity. No, it’s not her kind of crime. Where’s the profit in it? Besides, she wouldn't have had the opportunity since she came back from the museum. Nor would Tuck, Jay, or the others.”

“If not her, then who?”

“Well, I suppose Stewart is the obvious suspect.”

“I honestly can’t believe he would. Not with his obsession about calories and people not going hungry.”

“He’s had the opportunity, and you’ve just given him motive. Perhaps he’s been hiding it deliberately.”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “He hasn’t got enough neurons firing in the right direction to manage something that subtle.”

“Perhaps not,” Chester said, unconvinced. “Okay, so not him. I’d say that leaves you as the prime suspect, squirrelling away food to keep your son from starving like you did back in Penrith, except I know you’ve not had the time either. And that leaves pretty much everyone else.”

“That doesn’t help. But if they weren’t eating it, why would anyone steal the supplies?”

“Either they’re doing it out of pre-emptive self-preservation, or so they can play the hero when we run out. Whichever it is, how much danger are you in?”

“You mean that we’ve got the food from the mansion, and you’ll soon be back with a boat laden with supplies? What if it keeps happening? What if it all goes missing during the depths of winter when no boat can reach us? What if you don’t make it to Wales, what then?”