As the door creaked open, I peered through into the room
which had red painted walls and was in a very messy state, as if someone had
stayed there for some time. The man, who I assumed must be Mr Smith, was
sitting on the wooden bed with the bear held in wrinkled hands.
As he stood up I saw that he was thin and much taller than
me. Trying to keep calm, I asked if I could have the bear back but he replied
loudly “It’s my bear and my reward.”
I tried to reason with him- after all, someone really wanted
it back- but we both ended up raising our voices and shouting over each other.
I made a grab for the bear but he kept a tight grip on it. As we both pulled
it, the arm ripped, the stuffing flew out onto the floor and out rolled what
looked like a large diamond.
Within an instant we both tried to get the stone, which had
rolled a little way across the floor. But at that moment there was a loud knock
on the door, which sent my heart into my throat. Quick as a flash Mr Smith bent
down and picked it up, putting it deftly into his backpack. I opened the door
to find an elderly couple, a woman wearing glasses and a man carrying a small
bag. Something about them reminded me of my grandparents, I thought as I asked,
“Hello, can I help you?”
“Is this 4A?” the man asked. “No!” answered Mr Smith
aggressively. As the man turned to walk away he pulled a camera out of his bag
and took a photograph, before briskly walking back down the stairs.
“That was odd,” I said to Mr Smith. As he looked at me I
could tell how much the event had shaken him, and he seemed to calm down as we
looked at each other.
“Look, maybe we can work together on this” he said. “Maybe
we can split the diamond in half? Or at least, split the money we’d get when we
sold it.”
I still felt somewhat guilty about the person in the
newspaper who was looking for the bear, but the discovery of the diamond made
me think that perhaps the story wasn’t as straightforward as I had thought at
first. I began thinking about what I could buy with my half of the money. Perhaps
a shop, selling sweets or cakes on Trafalgar Road.
We discussed the idea. What should we do next? It seemed as
if people were already looking for us in the hotel. Perhaps I wasn’t the only
one who had followed him here. Mr Smith suggested that we needed to find an
unlikely hiding place for the diamond so that we could come back and get it
when things had died down a bit. I knew the area but not that well. I gazed out
of the window and my eyes landed on a multi-coloured group of buildings with a
smaller one in the middle. It had a large fence surrounding it. “What’s that?”
I asked my new companion.
Mr Smith smiled. “That could be the perfect hiding place,”
he said. “That is Millennium Primary School.”
***
As we walked along John Harrison Way, the sun lit up the
golden buildings and the neat gardens of the Millennium Village. In the
distance, we saw the modern building that was the school.
We sprinted up to the silver gates but found that we were
confronted by an intercom system. I rang the buzzer and when the receptionist
answered with a cautious “hello?” I replied with the first thing that came into
my head. “I’m running a writing workshop.”
“Well come to the desk and sign in then” she said and the
buzzer sounded to let us in.
We sighed with relief, but we still had to get past the
receptionist, and ducked down to crawl on our hands and knees past her desk.
Through the door and upstairs, and we came across a science lab, which I
thought could be a good place to hide it; we could put it amongst the chemicals
and crystals that I imagined would be there. The lab was multicoloured with
shelves full of mysterious-looking liquids in large bottles.
However, we saw that there was a teacher in the corner, with
frizzy grey hair, leaning over a bubbling saucepan, so we turned back and
returned downstairs.
I looked down the corridor, which seemed immensely long. The
colours were bright and there was a lot of light. In different circumstances it
must have seemed a calming place.
We bumped into a small child of about five years old. “What
are you doing?” she asked.
“We’re teachers. Get back to your classroom.” I said
sternly, and opened the nearest door. We walked into a room full of toddlers,
who I thought were being naughty, crying and running around.
“BE QUIET” Mr Smith shouted. “We’re the new teachers.” I was
already wondering whether he should have said this so loudly, and then I
realised that the real teacher was standing there, staring at us. “Who are you?
Get out of this school!”
Not wanting to admit that we’d lied, I tried to think of an
excuse. “Erm…. Erm.. I need a stapler” I said and ran back out of the room.
“In here!” said Mr Smith, opening a door marked
‘Headmaster’. There were big piles of paperwork and a computer. Could we hide
it here, I wondered?
We heard the door begin to open and had to dive under the
desk. We were sweating like mad! But luckily the head teacher went to make
himself a cup of tea, and we jumped out of the window and headed to the
playground.
We then saw what we thought was an excellent hiding place- a
wooden decked platform which must have space underneath it. Mr Smith ripped a
really strong branch from a tree, which took several minutes despite my trying
to make him hurry up. He finally got it off and we used it as a crow bar to lift
up the planks of wood, before slipping the diamond in.
“Right, let’s go” said Mr Smith, “we can come back tonight
to get it back.”
We were just about to leave when a man came chasing after us. “I’m the caretaker,” he said, “and I’ve got a CCTV tape of everything you’ve done. I’ll give it to the police.. unless you let me join you!”
