I Spy by Graham Marks Page A

looked over his shoulder, just in case, by some miracle, Ahmet had come back to rescue
him, but the wide, cobbled street was silent and empty. Absolutely no sign of anyone following him.
    When he looked round he saw a woman with close-cropped dark brown hair and wearing a blue sailor-style dress coming down the hall towards him, smiling broadly. Just exactly what, he wondered as
she approached, did she have to be so happy about?
    “Young Master MacIntyre! How nice to meet you... do come with me and I’ll take you up to the playroom and introduce you to Arthur and Christina, who can’t wait to make your acquaintance!”
    For one blissful moment Trey thought he had to be dreaming, that at any moment he’d wake up in his bed, back in his room at the Pera Palas, and none of this would be
happening...but then he was walking down the hallway, Miss Renyard’s trilling voice bouncing off the silk-lined walls as he dragged his unwilling feet up two flights of stairs (were these
kids locked away in the attic?), and not one word of what she was saying sinking in.
    “...and after we have been to the archaeological museum, and had a lovely picnic lunch in the park, we shall take a little look at the Topkapi Palace, which I have heard is
quite...”
    The fact that this torture was going to happen to him until his father’s work was done was beginning to really get to him, and the thought occurred to him that maybe he could fake some
kind of terminal illness and get to stay at the hotel instead; he wouldn’t even mind if they took him to the hospital.
    “...only been with the family a week or so, but the children are very nice and I’m sure you’ll all get along swimmingly togeth...”
    Or maybe, maybe , he could have an accident! Nothing too serious, just bad enough to mean he couldn’t go off on any trips to yet more museums and palaces, as he really
did think, apart from not wanting to spend any time at all with these Limey kids, he had been to more than enough since leaving Chicago.
    “...and here we are!”
    Trey stumbled to a halt to see Miss Renyard had stopped walking down the wide corridor and was standing by a door. She was smiling at him again, in that way he’d noticed some adults did
when they really wanted everything to be all right, but had an inkling that this might not necessarily be the case.
    “Shall we go in?”
    “Okay...” Trey nodded, and then remembered his manners. “Thank you.”
    “What a sweet accent!” Miss Renyard chirped as she opened the door and beckoned for him to follow her. “Arthur, Christina – here’s your new
friend!”
    Trey was still trying to work out what this Miss Renyard had meant by him having an accent – when it was as plain as the nose on a pug dog’s face (as his gramps would say)
that she was the one who sounded funny – as he entered the room. The play room, he reminded himself. And indeed there was the girl kneeling on the floor surrounded by a whole
gang of dolls – all dressed much like she was, in frills – and the boy, standing at a table covered with an electric train set, the engine clickety-clacking its way round the extensive
track.
    “Children!” Miss Renyard clapped her hands. “This is – what does the ‘T’ stand for?”
    “Trey,” Trey replied.
    “Trey...what an unusual name.”
    “Not really.” Arthur Stanhope-Leigh let out a bored sigh as he expertly slowed the train down to take it through a sharp bend in the track. “He’s called T. Drummond
MacIntyre the third , isn’t he...and ‘trey’ sort of means three, so it’s obvious, really.”
    Trey did not appreciate being talked about almost as if he was an object, and one that wasn’t even in the room, and felt like boxing this stuck-up kid’s ears to show him just how much he didn’t appreciate it.
    “Well I think it’s a very nice name.”
    Trey saw the girl had got up from the floor and he noticed for the first time that, with her mass of blonde, curly hair and