Minnie beckoned to Piotr, who was still watching the dry cleaner’s. With her other hand she texted Flora. Her heart was beating fast. She wanted to get to the safety of the cafe. She kept expecting Marcus to call them back any second and demand to know what she was up to.
She broke into a sprint.
‘What is it?’ Andrew asked breathlessly.
‘Did you see the backyard?’ Piotr asked, running too.
‘I’ll explain when we’re away from here. Come on,’ Minnie insisted.
Inside the cafe, Minnie sat at the window and ducked down, watching the market to see that Marcus wasn’t coming after them. There was no sign of him bobbing through the stalls. She let herself breathe again.
‘Tell us what you saw,’ Andrew begged.
They sat in an electric silence, looking out for the flash of red hair that meant Flora was running to meet them.
They didn’t have to wait long. Flora burst into the cafe, her face flushed, panting, stray strands of hair haloed around her face.
‘Did you bring it? Did it work?’ Minnie asked.
‘What are you talking about?’ Andrew whined. ‘The suspense is literally killing me.’
Minnie couldn’t help but grin: Andrew looked a long way from dead. ‘Marcus Mainwaring had a letter from Nigeria in his tray. While you distracted Marcus, I took the letter out of the envelope, photographed it and texted the photo to Flora.’
Flora unzipped her backpack and reached inside for her notebook. ‘It didn’t take long to print off the photo, scaled up to A4. I’ve brought it with me.’
‘With the postcard?’ Piotr asked.
‘With the postcard,’ Flora said.
She pulled two pieces of paper from her notebook. One was the replica postcard. The other, she unfolded and smoothed flat on the tabletop.
Minnie hadn’t had time in the gallery to read the letter. She’d had to work fast just to get the photo and put the letter back in place.
There was a heraldic crest at the top of the page: a shield with a lion on either side. A motto was written in a scroll beneath the lions – mens sana in corpore sano – and below that ‘St Aloysius High School’ and a Lagos address. Typewritten text filled the rest of the page, which Flora read aloud:
Dear Mr Mainwaring,
I write to thank you for your continued support of St Aloysius School. Your kindness in sponsoring equipment here is reaping rewards.
Improvements have been incredible after the outbreak of flu, aggressive though it was. We have employed a permanent nurse to oversee the well-being of the children. Age seems no protection against ill health sadly.
While donations are always welcome, we are also working hard ourselves. Our 14th auction of arts is scheduled. Class G3 are upmost in their hopes of raising our highest total ever.
Together we will ensure a bright future for St Aloysius and our students.
Yours faithfully,
Hopeful Otlogetswe
On the face of it, it wasn’t quite the confession of a criminal gang that Minnie had been hoping for. But if they were right, if the postcard was a cipher, then this letter might have a lot more to tell them.
Flora lifted the postcard, laid it on top of the letter and drew it slowly down the page. As soon as each of the empty squares framed a section of the text beneath, she froze.
‘Write this down,’ she told Andrew. He reached for her pen and scribbled on a napkin as she read out the text: ‘le, ft, lu, gg, ag, e3, 14, au, g3, pm.’
‘Oh.’ Andrew sounded disappointed. ‘It’s just gibberish.’
Piotr grinned. ‘No! No, it isn’t. It’s just got the gaps in the wrong places. Look.’ Piotr drew his fingertip along the napkin as he read. ‘Left Luggage 3, 14 Aug, 3 p.m.’
Minnie collapsed back on her seat. It really was a secret message. They’d been right. It took her breath away worse than the sprint from the gallery. There was an actual criminal gang operating in town. This was the proof. But doing what? She thought again of the orange T-shirt and the scruffy teddy in the battered black suitcase. This was real. They had to find the boy and get him away from the criminals.
‘What’s Left Luggage?’ Andrew asked, bringing Minnie back to the moment.
‘It’s when you want to leave your luggage for a while,’ Flora explained. ‘Say you’ve got a few hours in a city and you don’t want to carry your case around: you leave it in a Left Luggage locker. We went to Zurich last year by train and had a few hours in Paris. We left our luggage and went to the Champs-Élysées for macarons.’
If it had been Sylvie who’d said that, Minnie might have been tempted to make a sarcastic remark. But it was Flora, and she was probably on to something. So Minnie kept her sarky comments to herself – with a bit of a struggle. ‘So you get Left Luggage at a railway station?’ Minnie asked.
Flora nodded eagerly.
‘Is there one at the railway station in town?’ Andrew asked.
There was a collective round of shrugging and head shaking – no one knew.
‘What’s the date today?’ Piotr asked. Without being at school, where the date would always be up on the whiteboard at the front of the class, they’d forgotten all about dates and days of the week.
Except Flora. ‘It’s the 13th today,’ she said.
‘Well, then,’ Piotr said. ‘Tomorrow we need to get to the train station and watch the gang. Whatever is in Left Luggage locker 3 will lead us to the criminals.’