“The kitchen?” Tim jerked around. “Nick—this is no time for a cup of tea!”
I ignored him. A minute later I was back with a vegetable knife. It wasn’t perfect but at least the blade was flat at the top. Another minute. There were only four left.
My hand was still shaking. I paused for a few seconds and fought to control myself.
Three minutes to eleven.
I leaned down and inserted the tip of the knife into the hole at the top of the black box. It slipped and the blade brushed against one of the wires. My heart did a double backward somersault and dived into my stomach. I was sweating now. I could feel it trickling down the sides of my face. Using all my concentration, I pushed the knife back into the right place. It came into contact with the screw. I turned it.
The screw wouldn’t move. I tried again, harder. This time I felt the screw give. But would there be another fail-safe device? Would turning the screw be enough to set the whole thing off? It was too late to stop. The knife made three complete revolutions. The screw rose up then fell out. It landed on the table with a little rattle. Tim squeaked.
I put the knife down and reached for the lid of the box with my finger and thumb. They had never felt bigger or more clumsy. I didn’t know how much time had passed. I didn’t dare to look at the clock. Somehow I got a grip on the plastic and pulled as gently as I could, looking for a wire or a spring mechanism that might join it together. There was nothing. I dropped the lid and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. So far so good.
I had been right about the electrical circuit. Inside the junction box there was a wire and an ordinary switch. It had three positions. At the moment it was in the middle. I could push it to either side. But which side? Make the wrong choice and I wouldn’t be given another. I glanced at the clock. I had less than a minute to decide.
“Left or right, Tim?” I called out.
“Left or right what?” he asked.
“Just say—left or right.”
“Left.”
“Left?”
“Right.”
“Right?”
“No, I mean . . . left’s got to be right. Left!”
I pushed the switch to the right. The alarm bell rang. Tim screamed. But the clock just went on ticking. Mickey Mouse grinned at me. I felt all the strength drain out of me. I’d done it.
It took me half an hour to untie Tim. My hands were still shaking at the end of it. At last he stood up, took one last look at the bomb, and went off to get dressed.
I sank limply into his chair. I’d done it. I still couldn’t believe it. Upstairs I could hear Tim thumping about in the bedroom. I sighed. He could at least have remembered to say thanks.
PENELOPE
Ma Powers had left a bit of food in the kitchen and Tim cooked lunch. He burned the toast and his eggs weren’t so much scrambled as cemented, but I was hungry enough to eat anything. It’s funny how extreme danger can give you a big appetite. I’d had two close calls in less than twenty-four hours and it seemed like my stomach was celebrating. I’d drunk three cups of coffee and eaten half a pack of biscuits before I knew what I was doing. If I stayed in this game much longer I was going to get fat. Or dead.
I told Tim what had happened since I’d left my encounter with Big Ed and my night with Mr. Palis. We thought of phoning the teacher again but there didn’t seem much point.
“So who was it, then?” Tim asked.
“Who?”
“The person who cut you free from the railway.”
I shrugged. “I’ve no idea. At least, I thought I’d seen him somewhere before but . . . in the rain, it was impossible to tell.” I cast my mind back to the night before. “I don’t even know how he found me—if it was a he. I was in the middle of nowhere. Nobody knew I was there. It doesn’t make sense . . .”
There was less to puzzle about in Tim’s side of the story. In fact, I could more or less guess what had happened to him without asking. Left alone with Johnny Powers and with me mysteriously gone, he would have been lucky if he’d lasted ten minutes.
And that was about it. Johnny had gotten back from wherever he’d been to find me missing. He’d questioned Tim and he hadn’t liked the answers. Suspicion is a fast-growing seed and with Tim around it had had plenty of fertilizer. He hadn’t been invited to the big gangster meeting in the afternoon. The atmosphere during dinner had been as frozen as the fishsticks Nails Nathan had served. Tim had gone to bed early only to be dragged out at dawn. Johnny had decided not to take any chances. Tim had been tied up and gagged . . . and the rest I knew.
“Did he say anything?” I asked.
“He didn’t say anything nice,” Tim muttered.
“I’m sure.” I sighed. “But did he say anything that might tell us where he is now?”
Tim thought for a moment. “He told a sort of joke just as he left,” he said. “That guy Needles Nathan had fixed up the bomb and he said it would blow us both sky-high. Then Powers said that was okay because by the time you got back, they’d have gone underground.”
“Underground? Was there anything else?”
“Yes. That was when he put the hat on me. He said something about going to the bank. But he hoped that when the bomb went off, they’d be able to hear it.”
Tim had told me what I wanted to know. If Powers hoped to hear the explosion, that had to mean he was somewhere near. “Going underground” could mean he was simply hiding or it could mean something more. As for the bank, that didn’t make any sense at all. For one thing, there were no banks in the area and anyway this was Sunday. They would all be closed.
I hadn’t said anything, but Tim must have read my thoughts because he suddenly bolted upright in his chair.
“You’re not going to look for him, are you?” he groaned.
“What other choice do we have?” I asked.
“How about going home and forgetting all about it?”
“The police are still looking for us,” I reminded him.
“For you,” Tim said.
“For us. You helped me escape, remember?”
And so we left. Tim had changed into more ordinary clothes and I was still wearing the gear that Mr. Palis had given me. As always, there was nobody around in Wapping, but if anyone happened to pass, they probably wouldn’t give us a second glance. I’d found a small backpack in the cupboard upstairs and I took that, too—to make me look more ordinary, I told Tim.
But that wasn’t quite true. I’d defused the bomb, and while the switch in the junction box remained on the right, I was fairly sure that it was harmless. So I took it with me in the backpack. Who could say? It might come in handy.
We spent the rest of the day going around in circles. The light was failing before I realized that we were, too. We hadn’t found anything. There were a hundred and one places Powers could have chosen to hide out in . . . empty apartment buildings, construction sites, half-built houses, and even derelict mobile homes.
“If only Snape hadn’t gotten killed,” I muttered.
We’d paused for breath, sitting on a low wall beside Wapping High Street. My prison shoes were still pinching and I’d walked enough for one day.
“I thought you didn’t like him,” Tim said.
“I didn’t. But right now he’s the one person we could go to. He knew the truth. He might be able to help us.”
We didn’t speak for a while. Then Tim frowned. “Are you sure there aren’t any banks around here?” he
