Page 30 of The Secret Christmas Library

‘Shut up, everyone!’ said Mirren, still upset after her ordeal, and realising that she looked like a walking snowman.

They were all gathered round the stove, looking cosy and well fed and self-satisfied.

The end of a loaf of fresh bread was sitting on the bread board; empty egg cups indicated she’d been right about the hens; coffee was still brewing on the stove, and crumb-ridden marmalade jars and butter tubs littered the large, scrubbed pine table.

‘Skiing accident?’ said Theo languidly, winking at her to show he was teasing.

‘I NEARLY DROWNED, ACTUALLY!’ spluttered Mirren.

‘Why didn’t you tell us you can get trapped in a cave at the bottom of the stairs?’ asked Mirren. She had suddenly got very hot inside her wet clothes from the warmth of the Aga, something very unlikely to have a good effect on anyone’s mood. Steam was rising from her body.

Jamie jumped up. ‘Do you want to . . . ’

He gently unwound the scarf from round her neck. Great clumps of snow fell on the floor and they watched them melt. He then tugged at her snowy jumper, telling her to take it off.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You’re freezing.’

Mirren felt like crying. She’d had such a shock, and his surprising gentleness undid her. She wondered where he’d learned it.

‘Here,’ said Theo, taking off his expensive jumper and flinging it at her. ‘What on earth did you do?’

‘I . . . ’ Mirren swallowed. ‘I went down the stairs . . . ’

‘Third floor,’ said Jamie, snapping his fingers. ‘Sorry, we should have warned you.’

‘Why didn’t you just take the front steps?’ said Esme, puzzled.

‘Because I didn’t grow up in a house with more than one set of stairs,’ said Mirren. ‘Nobody explained the rules.’

‘Those are . . . yeah, they’re meant to be kept locked.’

Mirren remembered how stiff the door had been. Perhaps, now she thought about it, it had been locked, and the wood had softened, just like the rotting window frame in her bedroom. ‘Ah,’ she said.

‘Did you give it a really good tug?’ said Jamie, his lips twitching.

‘I thought it was the way!’

‘Are you sure you weren’t snooping?’

‘Well, no. For one thing,’ said Mirren, ‘I wanted breakfast. And secondly, even if I were, I think this is a job about snooping, or am I wrong? Are we basically here to do snooping or not?’

‘Fair point,’ said Jamie.

‘But I wasn’t.’

‘Okay.’

‘I wasn’t!’

‘Did it not occur to you that you might have gone down past the kitchen?’ said Esme.

‘There’s nowhere to get off,’ said Mirren.

Bonnie snorted from the stove. ‘Come on, Esme, she was curious. You remember what we were like with that staircase.’

‘I’m glad they at least tried to keep children out of it,’ said Mirren, taking a long and very welcome sip of her coffee.

‘Where does it go?’ asked Theo.

‘It leads down to a secret cave. In the cliff.’

‘No way!’ said Theo. ‘Cool! For smuggling?’

‘At one point, no doubt, but no, mostly for escape,’ said Jamie. ‘There were some . . . divided loyalties up here. For the King, for the Young Pretender, but even before then . . . there was some fairly emphatic landing of literature from the Netherlands, Germany . . . ’

Bonnie sat Mirren down at the seat nearest the Aga and put a heaped plate in front of her. Sausages, bacon, eggs . . .

‘Tea? Coffee?’

‘You don’t need to . . . ’

Mirren tried to get up to help. Bonnie gave her a stiff look. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You’ve shown everyone that you’re a good and helpful person – it’s fine. So just sit down and let me do my job.’

Stung, Mirren sat down on her chair with a thump.

The breakfast was delicious, though – there were triangles of soft brown fried potato cakes, called, inexplicably, potato scones, which you spread with butter and salt and which were obviously going to decrease your life expectancy by half an hour for every one you ate but which were so uncommonly delicious she couldn’t really complain about it.

Bonnie put down a huge mug of tea, which warmed her from the outside in, and gradually her shivering subsided.

Theo was writing out the binary code by hand, and Jamie was translating it. It was number after number; ridiculous to use a number code to transcribe numbers, but, Mirren was starting to realise, wholly typical.

‘Well, this is boring,’ scowled Esme, looking out of the window. The snow reached up to the window ledge. The day, though, was starting to clear; there was the slightest hint of blue sky.

Mirren finished her breakfast as the boys looked down the long list of numbers. The goose house theory seemed to be losing ground. She looked out.

There were two windows, one facing the front of the house with the buried cars, and one facing west, towards the kitchen garden.

The freezing winter sun was gradually rising above what was left of what must once have been neatly trimmed topiary hedges; they were overgrown now, and scruffy, but their layout remained, and the sun marked bright lines through the gaps across the pristine snow.

The light lay like diamonds, sparkling a full array of colours on this ground on which nobody had ever walked, in this silent world, without an engine, a police siren, or even a plane overhead.

Nothing at all. A city girl all her life, Mirren leaned forward to breathe it in.

‘I don’t think it’s boring,’ she said, putting her fingers to the window. Frost feathered the inside. It truly was cold. Esme looked at her with a curled lip, as if about to make a sarcastic response, then changed her mind and looked round at the boys. ‘What is it?’

‘Just a string of numbers,’ said Jamie, looking frustrated.

‘Well, have you tried phoning it?’

Theo was about to sneer but Jamie looked up. ‘Oh, that’s actually quite a good idea,’ he said.

‘What does it start with?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, is there a bit that looks like a phone number?’

They studied the page.

‘There’s a zero then an eight . . . ’ said Theo eventually.

‘Isn’t that, like, a freephone number?’

Esme snorted. ‘Grampa wouldn’t have bothered setting up a free anything.’

‘But nobody’s mobile has got a signal,’ pointed out Theo. ‘Plus, they’re all dead, because I spent all day yesterday using mine as a stupid torch.’

‘House phone’s working,’ said Bonnie, stacking plates.

‘You’re telling me your phone is so old it can survive a power cut?’ said Mirren. ‘Does it wind up and have a trumpet on the end?’

Jamie was frowning at the numbers.

‘I don’t think.’

‘Maybe he made it before they did,’ said Theo. ‘What did they used to be like?’

‘Forres Castle 74262,’ said Bonnie automatically. They all turned to look at her. ‘What?’ she said. ‘That’s how my gran had to answer the phone. That’s how I’d still answer it if it ever rang. It used to ring all the time. We had an exchange.’

They all followed her along the passage, Mirren heaving another blanket around her shoulders. It might look ridiculous, but remaining swaddled was the key to not gasping whenever you left the relative comfort of the kitchen or the drawing room.

The telephone, remarkably, was in a room of its own, which did indeed have a large bank of wires leading to various mysterious rooms Mirren hadn’t come across yet: the Ladies’ Smoking Room, the nursery, the day room and the boot room all having their own connections.

‘Wow,’ said Theo again. ‘This place must have been really something . . . ’

‘In its day, yeah, yeah,’ said Esme who had, nonetheless, come through to see if her hunch worked. There was indeed a dialling tone; it truly was that old.

Laboriously, Jamie dialled the numbers in every order they could think of.

They got a Chinese restaurant in New York, lots of dead dialling tones, many ‘please replace the handset and try again’s, someone shouting ‘QUE? QUE?’ down an intensely crackly line that felt as if you could hear the snow lying on the lines, and a friendly person in Australia who was extremely interested in what they were doing but couldn’t actually help them in any way.

Mirren meanwhile was examining the telephone directories.

There was none for London, but Mirren called Directory Enquiries, something she was astounded to discover still existed.

She jotted down the care home number, then rang it while Jamie stared again at the numbers, puzzling over them.

They couldn’t call every combination; they’d be here till the heat death of the universe, as Esme had pointed out, unhelpfully.

Mirren had never used a rotary dial phone before, and it took a while to get used to.

‘Hello?’

‘Yes, Bright Fields Nursing Home?’

Mirren recognised the voice of the receptionist; alas, it was the grumpy one. She used to be a librarian, and had left when she wasn’t allowed to shush children any more.

‘Hello? Is Nora Sutherland working today? It’s her daughter.’

‘Can’t you call her mobile?’

‘No,’ said Mirren. ‘I’ve lost my mobile and I don’t remember the number. That’s why I’m calling you.’

‘You don’t know her mobile number?’

‘What’s your mum’s mobile number?’ said Mirren, stung.

The receptionist recited a series of numbers. ‘I’m very close to my mother,’ she said.

‘Okay, well, is Nora there?’

‘No, she’s on her day off.’

Mirren sighed. ‘Well, can you tell her I rang, and that I’m stranded in the big storm in Scotland?’

‘What big storm in Scotland?’

‘The big snowstorm that’s cut off the electricity?’

‘Not heard anything about that.’

Jamie and Esme were making faces and shaking their heads.

‘Oh,’ said Mirren.

‘It’s raining here.’

‘Okay. Well. Can you tell her I’ll be home when I can? I’m just chasing down a book.’

The woman paused for a moment. ‘You’re the one who found that old Stevenson, aren’t you?’

‘Um, yes . . . ’ said Mirren.

‘Yeah. I used to be a librarian. You were in all the library periodicals.’

‘Fame at last,’ said Mirren, as Theo, listening in, looked fierce.

‘So you’re looking for another one now, are you?’

‘Yeah,’ said Mirren. Then, on impulse, ‘How would you track down a missing book?’

The woman laughed, and for the first time didn’t sound grumpy at all.

‘Well, I’d make a guess at some of the regulars . . . but then I’d put in the ISBN number, I suppose.’

‘The ISB what?’

Suddenly Theo’s head shot up. He gesticulated madly for her to hang up the phone.

‘Um, thanks. Uh, just tell my mum I’m fine, okay?’ Mirren managed to say, before Theo practically hung up for her. ‘What?’ she said to him.

‘The whole of Britain thinks “weather” means London weather,’ Esme was grumbling, but Theo was still agitated.

‘No. No,’ he said. ‘I’m an idiot. An idiot. Wasting time with this stupid phone . . . ’

‘Don’t you want to call your family?’

‘Ssh. And stupid birds . . . ’

‘I thought wild goose chase was quite clever, actually,’ said Jamie quietly.

Theo took the piece of paper.

‘Books have something called ISBN numbers. International Standard Book Numbers. Every book has them. Thirteen digits.’

Everybody stared at him, then Jamie counted up the digits. ‘There are only ten of them,’ he said.

Theo shook his head. ‘It can still be an ISBN. Before 2007 they were only ten digits.’

‘I have to say,’ Jamie said, slowly, ‘that this is kind of the thing you were hired to know before.’

‘I know, I know,’ said Theo. ‘Sorry. But we need to check. We need to check.’ He looked around at the piles of phone directories, leading on to another bookshelf crammed with road maps, atlases and travel writing. ‘I don’t think we could possibly find it by hand.’

‘If we had any internet, couldn’t we look it up?’

‘Yes, although even then,’ said Theo, ‘you’d still have to find it.’

‘But we’d have a title,’ said Mirren. They looked at each other, both full of excitement. She jumped up. ‘We have to find some internet!’

Theo laughed. ‘To the Internet Well!’

Jamie and Esme exchanged glances.

‘I suppose . . . there is occasionally a signal . . . ’ said Jamie. ‘Out in the far woods.’

‘But nobody’s got any battery,’ said Theo.

‘Haven’t they?’ said Jamie, looking at Esme. She looked shifty and they all stared at her. ‘Only a tiny wee bit?’ said Jamie in an imploring voice. ‘Please? We’re stuck.’

‘Even my spare is nearly out,’ said Esme eventually, pulling out her phone, and a spare battery pack. ‘You had better be cutting me in to this bloody thing, if it even exists.’