The Facebook Killer by M. L. Stewart Page A

cried mother, “after you soldier Joe,” said father, “why
didn’t you take some time out to bring me here?” wept Laura.
    The voices chased me up the rope ladder, I
climbed faster and faster. The ivy trying to grab me, wrap itself
around my ankles and pull me into its spider-infested nest. I
managed to get to the hatch. I was breathless. I clambered inside,
quickly reeling in the ladder and pulled it firmly shut.
    I lay on the dusty floor
and curled up into a ball, ignoring Kalif’s pleas from below to
join me. This was my place, my secret kingdom and for the first time since all of
this began I felt at home.
     

Chapter 14
     
    I don’t know what time it was when I awoke or
even whether it was day or night. The treehouse was almost
airtight. I wrestled with the wooden bar, which held the window
shutters in place. Once free I tried to push the shutters outwards
but the ivy had a too strong a grip over them. I managed to slide
Kalif’s knife in the gap between them. Slicing blindly up and down,
they started to give a little. A couple of minutes later and they
were open. The obstructing ivy, two feet thick. Leaning out of the
window I carefully cut a rough square through the ivy. Making sure
to bring each piece back inside so as to leave no evidence on the
forest floor. A few more cuts and the breeze rushed in followed by
daylight.
    The treehouse was as large as I had
remembered, about twenty feet by ten feet. To this day I still
don’t know how my father had built it and so high up. As I got
older I had often wondered if it hadn’t actually been there
already. Maybe a birdwatcher’s hide? Of course Father denied this
vehemently, but I always remember Mother smiling the first time I
asked him.
    Apart from the dust and a few spiders the
interior was in pretty good shape. I had never seen the roof but it
had obviously held up well and the extra few feet of ivy helped as
an added barrier against the rain.
    As we dove back to London I broke the news to
Kalif. He didn’t seem very impressed but it made perfect sense. We
would all move in immediately.
    Think about it. We now had our own transport
and cooking facilities. The van had a toilet and shower. OK we
would need to find somewhere more discreet to park it, preferably
closer to the treehouse if possible.
    On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a
DIY store to purchase a lot of the items we would need for the
“makeover” before moving onto an electronics store where Kalif
bought a pay as you go satellite broadband usb and five hundred
quids worth of top ups. I would charge the laptop in the van.
    Two hours later we had picked up Norman and
Albert. I said a final farewell to my BBC news friend and we were
on our way to our new country home.
    I had initially decided to make the other
three live in the camper van and I would live in the house but I
realised that if someone found them in the van it could be Game
Over. So we all moved in together, the Kill Family Robinson.
    It took three trips to carry everything to
the treehouse but at least I knew exactly how to get there now.
Each time I walked a slightly different route taking great care not
to leave a trail of trampled vegetation or broken twigs. In the
morning we would investigate a new parking place for the van.
    And so I set to work renovating my childhood
den, which I had decided to name “Laputa” after a film I once
watched, Laputa was a mythical city in the sky, which was concealed
by the swirling clouds of a thunderstorm, my ivy.
    I brushed all the dust out through the hatch
before installing the pulley system. This would allow me to haul
things up into Laputa. It also had the added benefit of allowing me
to leave using the rope ladder and then use the pulley to winch it
back inside, closing the hatch afterwards. There was enough ivy
around the tree to hide the rope. No more need for the fishing
wire. The end of an era was upon us. The positioning of the small
solar panel was dilemma in itself. It