Tunnels 03, Freefall

personal trainer. You should give it a try."
    This elicited another piercing hoot, which sent a nearby pigeon flapping away.
    But as Mrs. Burrows tore along the pavement, Will would have been amazed by the change in his stepmother's bearing. There was a lightness to her step that he wouldn't have merited possible. She already looked years younger.
    As her sister chatted on, Mrs. Burrows glanced at her watch. "Look, there's no news from the police and I really can't talk now. Expecting a delivery at the flat," she said, ending the call before her sister had to opportunity to respond.

    * * * * *

    As she came around the corner, she saw the lorry from the removal company was already there.
    "Oh, God, sorry I'm late. Got held up," she called out as she broke into a run towards a man in blue overalls, who was just about to get back into his lorry. Once she'd opened up, he carried a whole series of cardboard boxes inside. She wasted no time in slicing the tape on one of the boxes to inspect the contents.
    "Moving in?" he inquired, as he heaved yet another box onto the top of the pile.
    "Yes, I put all this into storage until I found somewhere to live," Mrs. Burrows replied distractedly as she took out several of her old videotapes and chucked them straight into a bin liner. "Time for a clear-out. A real clear-out."
    After the man had brought the last of the boxes up, she spent the whole afternoon going through them. There were so many that there was barely any room to move around in, but she eventually came to a batch that had Bedroom 3 scrawled on them with a marker pen.
    "Will's," she said as she opened the first of these. She unwrapped the white paper from the precious finds that had been on the shelves in his room -- his 'museum' as he had called it. There were so many Victorian pate dishes, broken clay pipes, and Codswallop and perfume bottles that her lap was soon so full of items, she had to find space on the floor for them.
    Then she came to a box of his books and, grunting with the weight of it, lugged it over to the table by the window. At first she took each book out to check through it, shaking it by the spine to see if anything had been hidden in the pages. Finding absolutely nothing and growing weary of the process, she began to take the remaining books from the box and stack them on the table without looking inside them. Near the bottom of the box was what purported to be a Geological Guide to the British Isles , a book dating back to the sixties or seventies from the old-fashioned styling of its cover. Mrs. Burrows didn't pay it any particular attention, but as she glanced at the book that had been below it in the box, she frowned. This book had no jacket but in faded gilt letters on its cloth-bound cover was the title, Geological Guide to the British Isles .
    "Two copies of the same book?" she said to herself as she picked up the one with the dust jacket again. She opened it. The pages weren't printed -- instead there was handwriting on them. "Hello," she said, knowing immediately whose it was. Her husband's. Dr. Burrows'. She removed the jacket to see what was underneath. It was a notebook with a marbled purple and brown cover, and stuck to the front was a label with Ex Libris in ornate writing and a drawing of a wise-looking owl wearing circular glasses. And on this label someone had scrawled Journal . She recognized it as her husband's messy handwriting again.
    "So this is it. I'm finally going to find out what really happened," she announced to the many piles of boxes in the room. And she didn't once leave the table as she read the book from cover to cover, turning the pages, which more often than not had muddy fingerprints on them. "Will," she said, smiling affectionately because she knew they would have been his.
    As she progressed through the journal, she became breathless with excitement. She was at last finding out what Will and Chester had learned before they went missing. Although she knew nothing of the tunnel that the boys had re-excavated beneath her former home in
    Broadlands Avenue
    or, if indeed, there was any link between their disappearance and her husband's observations, she still felt she was making progress. Mrs. Burrows avidly read her husband's thoughts about the strange people he'd identified in Highfield, the luminescent orb that had turned up at Mrs. Tantrumi's house, and about a local well-to-do businessman from the eighteenth century called Sir Gilbert Gabriel Martineau. As