Then Aslan crashed into the kitchen door. It hadn’t even slowed him – and, unlike Fitz, he could go straight under the table.
With a heave the boy shouldered open the massive door. There was no time to shut it behind him; everything would now depend on his sprint. Flying across the gravel yard he kept his tread light as a dancer’s, trying not to create the traction that on loose stones might slow him. When he had gained the grass, he pushed his feet more firmly into soil. The skies were gathering with thick storm clouds as the day gave way to red gales, but the grassy lawn over which he now dashed lay firm and dry beneath his feet, and with every pace he added speed. Thirty metres from the crumbling stone walls of the Old Friary stood an ancient stone well – covered, with a stone roof. To either side tall hedges stretched away, impenetrable as thickets, bristling with boring, thrilling thorns. Clambering on to the stonework, Fitz reached high and placed the book delicately on the roof above him. Fast hand-over-hand work took him up the carved wall of the well house, and he just managed to sling his legs out of reach as Aslan ground to a stiff halt, all slather and barking, on the lawn behind him.
Fitz stood on the roof looking down. There was nothing menacing in the dog’s stance, or in his eyes. The fear that had closed round Fitz’s throat, squeezing his shoulders even as it loosened his stomach, now started to drain from him. He had got away with it.
‘Not this time, my friend,’ he said, and smiled at the panting and good-natured dog. He loved Aslan, but with a wariness. He had always shuddered to think what the impetuous Alsatian might do to Mr Ahmadi’s books if he ever managed to catch Fitz in one of their chases. He had seen discarded piles of feathers after a hawk’s sudden plummet from the sky. It didn’t bear thinking on.
Fitz was about to jump down off the back of the well house, into the strip of wood that bordered this and his own cottage’s garden, when he heard a window opening behind him. It was a delicate sound, barely audible over the rising wind – but even whispers, when dreaded, can cut the air like a knife. The boy froze. For several seconds, nothing happened. Aslan had stopped smearing his muzzle into the dry grass.
When Fitz turned, he saw Mr Ahmadi framed in the broad casement. He’d swung the window wide after unlatching it, and stood now in the red storm light, his arm still extended. Even from this distance, Fitz could see the starched elegance of his tailored shirt, the heavy wool weight of his suit, and his neatly trimmed black hair. Everything Mr Ahmadi Junior did, he did with precision. It was no accident that he had opened his window just at the moment Fitz had thought to turn his back on the house, just at the moment he was about to drop down into the wood and make a safe escape.
Somewhere in his stomach, buried deep, Fitz wanted to scream, and run away. But the man in the window seemed the same man as always – precise and severe, but proper, even kindly. He quailed. ‘I borrowed a book,’ he called out. His voice sounded brave.
Mr Ahmadi said nothing in reply. Larks dared the air between them, and quivered into the hedges on every side.
‘I will bring it back,’ he shouted, with less conviction.
‘Always you take the wrong ones,’ answered Mr Ahmadi. He didn’t need to force the resonant, deep reed of his voice; it carried. ‘Always you mistake. Always you turn simple things into adventures.’
‘Mr Ahmadi Senior said I could borrow any book I wanted,’ Fitz protested.
‘A power to do wrong is not the same as an obligation to do wrong,’ said Mr Ahmadi. After a pause, almost too faintly to hear, he added, ‘Quite the reverse. You should read better books.’
Mr Ahmadi was not looking at him. He was scanning the woods behind the hedge. Fitz thumbed the flimsy cover of this slim volume that he held wedged beneath his arm.
Aslan, who had been watching the conversation with detachment, suddenly stood up and barked. He had heard something over the wind. As a rule, Mr Ahmadi frowned at Aslan’s antics – when he noticed them at all – but now he seemed to smile. In this way, Fitz heard Clare’s voice before he heard it.
‘Supper is on the table, Jaybird,’ she shouted. The soprano tilt of her voice seemed to summon the little birds again from their hidden hedges, and they flurried in the air over the lawn. Mr Ahmadi, the voice on the telephone, the plotter, the murderer, had broken into a wide and benevolent cheerfulness. Fitz felt the last tension drain from his legs.
With his free hand, Mr Ahmadi carefully shielded the protruding lens of his telescope where it stood against the casement; with the other, he slowly drew the window closed behind him. ‘Bring it back tomorrow,’ he said, almost inaudibly as the window shut and the latch turned into its seat.
‘I will,’ Fitz called, almost over his shoulder as he turned and slipped down the back of the well house, scrambling lightly over the cords of dry wood Mr Ahmadi’s gardener had stacked against the winter.
In the friary garden, even under the riot of a threatening southwesterly wind, even under the severe gaze of Mr Ahmadi Junior, all that it contained was eternal, blessed, a kind of paradise enclosed and shut off from the rest of the world. But beyond the hedge, everything changed, and today more than ever. He felt it the moment he jumped down on to the hollow bare earth of the
