Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Kris Alexandros: The Town House

I got away from Spenser as quickly as I could, and I called back to Uncle Sal. He told me what I'd already suspected, that the family wouldn't forgive me if I couldn't get them this Box. If Spenser got it back, I was fine, but they couldn't guarantee what he might do to my friends. If I recovered it myself, it might give me a chance to get in with this mysterious Circle. I didn't care so much about that any more.

I was just getting onto the cycle path back onto campus. I could have got a taxi, but I didn't think it would be worth that much money to travel a bit more quickly. A lot of students didn't have their own cars, and would go by bike into town, so the college authorities had some kind of deal with the Highways Agency to ensure this path was always reasonably well maintained. A long paved path, like many of the ones on the campus itself, flagstones engraved with memorable quotes about the need for education. It went over bridges and through underpasses all the way from campus to the town centre shopping district, so once I hit the path it was just an easy jog to get home.

I wasn't sure I wanted to just go home, though. Even if I didn't care about the Box any more, it was clear Spenser did. I had to do everything in my powers to keep my friends safe. Right in that moment, I was more concerned with where they were than what they'd done with the Box, but I didn't really expect those questions to have discrete answers. So after arguing with Spenser, and arguing with Sal on the phone, my next course of action was to call Marco. I thought I could talk to him as I walked,and make sure they had actually managed to escape.

"Ahoy!" I said as soon as he answered, "I'm Kris. Did you get away safely? Where are you?"

"You made it, then?" he answered a question with a question, though in both cases the answers were obvious, "We're at Monty's place. Did you know she stays at her folks' place in town? Pretty nice house, I'll text you the address."

"No, I didn't. Are we regrouping there? Have you still got the Box?" I was half hoping that the answer might be 'no'. If it was already lost, I might lose my degree, but that meant at least everyone would be out of immediate danger. And if Spenser had proved the smart one, everybody won. I couldn't believe I was rooting for that wannabe gangster, but there were so many different forces at work here. Any ending that didn't involve someone getting shot would be good for me.

"We got it covered," he said. He sounded a little surprised, but I really couldn't work out why, so I just put it down to my lack of full familiarity with tone and inflection in English accents. "You should come if you haven't got any more lectures, we can discuss what we're going to do next."

"Yeah, I'll do that," I turned around, although I didn't know quite where I was heading yet. There was probably some way to look at his text message without interrupting the call, but I didn't know what it was. "Where should I come off the cycleway?" There was a little mumbling on the other end of the line, and the next voice I heard was Montgomery's. She'd walked this path many times, though always with intense disapproval from her mother, so she could tell me exactly which route to take.

The house looked fairly posh. It wasn't giant, but it was an older building and not part of one of the terraces that ubiquitously filled most of the student accommodation districts of town. It was a detached house, built in dark grey stone. An uneven cube, with small bits of roof space where the lower floor was larger than the upper, and ostentatious baroque ornamentation where the upper floor overhung the front door to provide a little shelter. It had everything an upper middle class person might think of to show how wealthy they were, standing out even more than most in a street of not-quite-identical residences. There was even a tiny turret, probably just large enough for one person to sit inside, providing windows to one of the attic rooms. It was like a moderately old house dressing up as a gothic or fairytale castle for Halloween, you could tell it was still just a house but the pretentions were tasteful and impressive in their own right.