Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones

mathematical laws. It also had to be somewhere where any of them might naturally expect to go. Even though they would be tugged to this spot by a series of Magid-made accidents, I could not stretch the laws of probability too far for fear the three I did not select would notice.
    This was why I ruled out all the solitary nodes like Stonehenge, or most castles, or that hidden valley in Derbyshire, and looked mainly at towns or at country places where there were conference centres. Before long, I was sitting in a heap of guidebooks and information leaflets, darting between these and the globe, and then to the detailed maps spread out on the floor. I needed a mundane, normal-seeming node. Stan was a great help here. As a jockey, he had rushed all over the country to racecourses in every corner of it, and he knew hotels and nodes I had never heard of.
    Myself, I had hoped to bring everyone together in London, but that did not satisfy the numerical conditions. Annoyingly, it would have been fine had Mallory still been in the equation. I found I was interrupted here by a great rush of anger and exasperation at Mallory. How dared she lead me such a dance! How dared she go on doing so, even when I had eliminated her!
    Stan recalled me by suggesting we considered some of the nodes in the Midlands. There are some good strong ones there. I wondered about Nottingham, but the numbers were off there too.
    “Pity, that,” Stan said. “Nottingham’s a place where everyone goes sooner or later. All sorts of reasons. You want a lot of reasons. Concerts, conferences – or a racecourse would do it.”
    “There are reasons for going to Birmingham,” I said, “but the node there’s only a pinprick. How about Stratford-upon-Avon?”
    “Too many tourists,” he said. “Is Wigan any good?”
    Wigan was numerically wrong. After hours of discussion and measuring and reading brochures, we settled on a medium-sized town called Wantchester. We both knew it. Stan said there were at least two good hotels there because of the racecourse. The guidebook claimed there were conference facilities and a factory that made small-arms. These were clearly new since Stan’s day, and mine. Stan remembered a pleasant, sleepy town. My memories were from a summer holiday there with my family, and I mostly remembered the river. There had been a fishing competition there for children. I had been in the grip of a fishing craze – I suppose I would be about nine at that time – and I had eagerly enrolled in the competition. I fished all day without the slightest luck. I was, I remember, disentangling my line from a willow tree for at least the fortieth time when my brother Will arrived and wanted to try his luck too. He never wanted to be outdone by his younger brothers.
    The supervisor must have been very good-humoured. He gave Will instructions and Will borrowed my rod, and the supervisor left us to it. Will, in his usual way of always succeeding at everything, almost instantly hooked a fine fat fish. He struck at precisely the right moment and landed it perfectly. Then there was terrible trouble, because Will couldn’t bear to kill it and neither could I. It flopped about madly. We shouted for the supervisor, but he was out of hearing, and we were forced to deal with it ourselves. Between us, we succeeded in getting the hook out of its mouth and we threw it back in the river, where it floated on its side, convulsing and obviously dying. Will realised he had half-killed it. He burst into tears, even though he was thirteen. I felt awful. I kept trying to get the fish out of the river again and I couldn’t. We were in this state when our brother Simon wandered by. Simon hates killing things, so he had kept away from the fishing. When he saw us, Will in tears and me white and dithering, he simply waded into the water, fetched out the fish and whacked its head on a stone. “There,” he said, and went on his way. I gave up fishing after that. Will never tried