set the parcel on his crowded desk and began tearing off the packaging. A young face appeared around the door behind him.
“Let’s see!” Paul cried.
Paul Thornbury was eleven. He had curly, fair hair and was small and slight for his age. He shared Martin’s love of fantasy though and the two of them could spend hours together glued to a DVD or poring over comics or discussing the latest monster in Martin’s all-time favourite show. Was it as good as the Zygons, or was it as dismal as the Myrka? During such conversations they spoke in a language that Carol, quite frankly, didn’t understand. She had no use for science fiction and fantasy. She preferred real life, but was more than delighted to leave them to it, while she sat in front of Casualty or House with a glass of white wine. Martin could never understand why she watched those programmes. Didn’t she have enough of that at work? Carol would always nod, but added that she enjoyed laughing at the mistakes.
Paul stood beside Martin and watched him pull the bubble wrap and newspaper out of the adapted cardboard box. He had found this for Martin. He had entered it as a special search in eBay and had been checking it for the past seven months, without success. Then, a few weeks ago, one had come up and now here it was.
Martin tore the last piece of packing from it and turned the glass object in his hands so that it caught the light. It was a fresnel lens. Quite hard to come by nowadays, but essential if Martin was going to build the full-size Police Box he had always wanted. It would be nothing without the lamp on top.
“Mum’ll go spare,” Paul chuckled.
This was their big conspiracy. They had been keeping it a secret from her for ages, ever since they discovered a website giving instructions on how to build one. When they had moved in, Carol had consigned all of Martin’s ‘toys’ to the one room and not even the mugs or fridge magnets were allowed in the rest of the house. If so much as an X-Files coaster appeared anywhere, it was swiftly returned to the inner sanctum with a Post-it note attached, on which she’d drawn an exclamation mark.
“We’ll just have to outvote her,” Martin said. “How good will one of these be in the garden?”
“Most excellent!” Paul agreed.
Martin rubbed his hands together gleefully then hid the lens inside an accommodating R2-D2.
“She’ll come round,” he said hopefully. “We’ll get it started one weekend when she’s working and she won’t be able to stop us.”
“What happened after school?” Paul asked. “I heard Mum talking on the phone.”
“Good job you had your piano lesson and weren’t there,” Martin told him. “Two very nasty fights. The Head is furious.”
“Wish I’d seen it,” the boy said, disappointed. Then he added, “She put too much salt in the lasagne again.”
Martin returned downstairs and discovered that for himself. Back in his own room, Paul surveyed the beginnings of his own crazy collection. His shelves were already full of fantasy figures and graphic novels. He was glad his mum had found and teamed up with Martin.
An email alert sounded from his computer and Paul hardly heard Carol shouting goodnight to him as she left for work. It was going to be a very busy, traumatic night in the hospital.
Paul frowned at the email. He didn’t recognise the sender. It was just a number, 7734, but it didn’t appear to be an advert for Viagra or a phoney bank scam and there weren’t any dodgy attachments.
“Tonight at Nine!” read the title.
He opened it.
Flash mob at the Landguard – tonight at nine. It’ll be a blast! Great sounds! Mystery A-list celeb! Bring your mates! Bring a bottle – or ten! Be a part of this awesome happening. It’s gonna be on the news. We’re going for a record!!!!!!!!!
“Weird,” Paul said. He had no idea who would send him anything like that. It wasn’t any of his Facebook friends. Not even Anthony Maskel or Graeme Parker, his closest friends at school, would have sent him something like that. Usually they sent him links to daft things they’d found on YouTube.
He thought about the Landguard for a moment. It was the huge old fortress down on the peninsula, dating back hundreds of years. It always struck him as strange that such a historic building should be slap bang next to the modern, industrial container port.
Paul rushed downstairs to tell Martin. The man laughed. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in something like a flash mob and had looked forward to a quiet night of escapism in front of a DVD.
“But it’ll be huge!” Paul said. “Cameras and famous people. The email said so!”
Martin sighed. “You know,” he said. “The Internet is fantastic for stuff like eBay, but I think I preferred the world when it was simpler. When I was your age, the most new-fangled piece of kit we had was a pocket calculator and…”
“This isn’t the breast thing, is it?”
“Have I said this before?”
“You and your friends,” the boy recited wearily, “used to key in the number 5318008, then turn the calculator upside down and snigger.”
Martin chuckled. “Happy days,” he said.
“Ummm… whatever,” Paul muttered with a baffled grimace. He liked Martin, but sometimes he really did say some daft things for a forty-three-year-old maths teacher.
“Oh, go get your coat on,” the man told him. “I can watch the universe being saved again tomorrow night.”
Paul was already in the hallway zipping up his fleece.
“There’ll be no one else there, you know,” Martin said. “We’ll be stood there like two trainspotters without a station.”
In Felixstowe that evening, every young person under the age of twenty received that very same email. Afterwards, when the tragedy was being investigated, nobody could ever trace where it had originated.
The first part of the harrowing diversion was being created.
Where are the Exiled Prince’s sheep so rare, their fleeces of finest gold? Dead and dying from lack of care and frozen by the cold. Shun the Bad Shepherd, drive him from your sight. Where was he when the lambs did stumble and bleated in their plight?
EMMA TAYLOR THREW her hair straighteners across her bedroom and yelled an angry stream of filth. She had only finished half of her hair when they had sparked and smoke started to pour out of them.
“What do I look like?” she screamed at her reflection. “Britney Spears in meltdown mode!”
Stuffing her unfinished hair under a baseball cap, she stormed out of the house, without a word to her parents, and strode furiously down the street towards Ashleigh’s.
Taking out her mobile, she punched up her friend’s number aggressively and waited for her to pick up.
“What you gawking at?” she snapped at a group of teenage lads on bicycles, giving them the finger as she clomped by.
In her ear Ashleigh’s tinny voice answered. She was squealing with excitement.
“Ohhhh, myyyy God!” she cried. “You will not believe the email I just had!”
“I need to use your straighteners!” Emma demanded, ignoring her. “Life or death emergency. My crappy ones have exploded – thank you so much, Dad, you cheapskate. Nearly burned my eyebrows off! Seriously though – I was well terrified, no word of a lie.”
“Shut