by Emily Rodda
He looked despairingly at the glass door, through which the fox could be seen sitting as still as a statue while dots danced and jeered on the cobblestones of the square, keeping well out of reach.
‘Bing tried to make us get rid of Renée, you know,’ Patty rattled on, tossing cakes onto the rack with reckless abandon. ‘He complained to the mayor that Renée was a danger to his chickens. Just because Renée’s brother had that bit of trouble with Bodelia Parker’s parrot.’
‘What sort of trouble?’ Freda asked curiously.
‘He ate it,’ said Bun.
Bertha squeaked in horror. Freda turned to glare at the fox on the doorstep.
‘It’s not Renée’s fault that her brother is a bad lot,’ snapped Patty. ‘Renée’s a sweetie – and a hard worker, too. But Sylvester is nothing but a smooth-talking confidence fox. He told Bodelia he’d work for his keep, keeping dots off her vegetable garden. He charmed her completely. She went round boasting that she had the best and cheapest dot-guard in Hobnob. Gave him the run of her shop, after a while. And the first chance he got after that, he ate Patricia and left town. Poor Renée was mortified!’
‘I don’t suppose Patricia was too happy with the situation either,’ mumbled Conker, who had begun jiggling with impatience and glancing at the door. ‘Well, we’d better be –’
‘Going. Of course, of course!’ chuckled Bun, handing the box of tarts and a bag of bread rolls to Leo. ‘You need to make the most of your holiday. It’s been a pleasure to serve you, ladies and gents. You have a nice day, now.’
‘Do you think Bing blew himself up?’ Leo asked as he and the others reached the bakery corner and walked down to where the rug was waiting for them.
‘Nah,’ said Freda. ‘There’d have been bits of him lying around all over the place, and even Begood would have noticed that.’
‘That’s true,’ Mimi agreed as Conker nodded and Bertha shuddered delicately.
They climbed aboard the rug and it rose into the air, its fringe fluttering peacefully in the breeze. As it sailed across the back street, they saw that the cooking pot was still dangling from the knob of the bakery’s back door. Gentle, tinny snores floated to their ears.
‘You see? It’s quite comfortable,’ Conker told Bertha. ‘And it’ll have a good home in the bakery. Plenty of work to do, plenty of other pots to talk to, and so on.’
‘Who cares?’ said Freda. ‘The main thing is, it’s Bun’s problem now, not ours.’
Bertha shook her head and sighed, but didn’t say anything. She’d been very quiet since seeing the fox at the bakery.
‘Leo and I think the man who cheated Bun could have been Spoiler,’ Mimi said abruptly. ‘The beard and glasses are an obvious disguise. And passing fake money is just the sort of mean, small-time thing Spoiler would do.’
‘The man who passed the counterfeit coins said he was on his way to the Crystal Palace ball,’ Bertha objected half-heartedly. ‘And Spoiler wasn’t at the ball.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything!’ Leo exclaimed. ‘He could have been just trying to impress Bun. Or he could have meant to go to the ball, then changed his mind.’
Conker rubbed his beard and exchanged dubious glances with Freda. Clearly they were both unconvinced.
‘Look, I know you two don’t think Spoiler is in Hobnob, whatever you said in town,’ Leo said. ‘You wouldn’t have brought us with you if you’d thought he was here. But what if you’re wrong? I don’t think we should take any chances. We should contact Hal straight away.’
Conker frowned. ‘You’re probably right,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘As you say – it’s better to be safe than sorry. Tell you what, we’ll find Tye as soon as we’ve finished at Bing’s house, and tell her your theory. If she thinks the lead’s worth pursuing she’ll send a message to Hal herself.’
‘Right, so that’s settled,’ said Freda, eyeing the bakery box on Conker’s lap. ‘Let’s eat.’
Conker opened the box and passed it around. The Princess Pretty tarts proved to be just as delicious as Bun had promised, and a contented silence fell as the rug flew sedately over the town, heading west. The giant Snug trees and the smaller, paler trees of the grove were straight ahead, and behind them hulked the Strix’s cloud palace, looking even more solid and menacing than it had when the day was new. Leo tore his eyes away from it and nudged Mimi to make her do the same.
‘Don’t look!’ he whispered to her as she turned to him with a frown.
She hunched her thin shoulders in irritation. ‘You’ve got meringue on your lip,’ she said coldly, but Leo was relieved to see that she didn’t turn back to face the cloud palace all the same.
Hastily he wiped his mouth. ‘It’s just – you’ve got to be careful,’ he muttered, refusing to be put off. ‘It’ll be easier for the cloud palace to suck you in because of – of what you’re wearing. You know. I’m really worried –’
She rolled her eyes and to his great surprise smiled at him almost affectionately. ‘It’s all right, Leo,’ she whispered. ‘Really, honestly, you don’t have to worry about me. I admit I was really curious about the palace at first. And I can feel its magic, quite strongly. But it doesn’t attract me in the slightest. It’s fascinating to look at, but that’s all. After what Tye said, the idea of going anywhere near it scares me to –’
‘We’re nearly there!’ Bertha squealed, leaning recklessly over the side of the rug. ‘Bing’s Wood straight ahead!’
Chapter
23
The House of Bing
Excellent!’ said Conker, demolishing his second tart in a single bite. ‘Now, let’s get organised. The first thing we’ll do when we get to Bing’s place is examine the scene of the crime for clues.’
‘What sort of clues?’ Bertha asked excitedly.
Conker stroked his beard with great satisfaction. ‘Oh, hairs and footprints and buttons and threatening letters and handkerchiefs with initials on them and so on,’ he said airily. ‘The idea is to find proof that one of the suspects was at Bing’s house before the alarm was given.’ ‘Easy-peasy,’ said Freda.
‘I see!’ breathed Bertha, her eyes very wide. ‘And I suppose we’ll look for Wizard Bing’s body as well, while we’re there?’
‘Of course!’ said Conker. ‘Bing’s body would be quite a big clue in itself.’
‘This is so thrilling!’ cried Bertha, sitting very upright, her hat ribbons blowing back in the wind. ‘Investigating a murder is even more fun than fighting wolves!’
Leo was glad to see Bertha looking happy again. Conker and Freda were also looking eager and pleased with themselves. He hated to spoil their mood, but there was something he really had to say.
‘I think you’re all forgetting something,’ he said cautiously. ‘We still don’t know that there has been a murder.’
There was a short, disappointed silence.
‘Don’t we?’ asked Bertha, her forehead wrinkled in puzzlement.
‘No,’ Leo said gently. ‘All we know for sure is that Wizard Bing has disappeared. We’ve decided that he didn’t blow himself up, but he might just have run away, like Stitch the tailor said.’
‘If Bing had run away, someone would have seen him by now and reported it,’ Conker said, recovering a little. ‘Wizards are very noticeable characters, and Bing’s too conceited to stay hidden for long. Anyway, the chicken who gave the alarm said Bing was dead.’
‘That chicken sounded like it was one egg short of an omelette,’ Freda sneered. ‘It also said the sky was falling, if you’ll remember.’
‘We’ll interview it,’ Conker said firmly. ‘As soon as we’ve inspected Bing’s house.’
Freda made a disgusted sound, but Bertha looked pleased. ‘I’ve always got on very well with chickens,’ she confided to Leo and Mimi in a low voice. ‘The hens at home –’ she broke off and blushed ‘– I mean, the hens at Macdonald’s farm – were very good friends of mine. I often think about them, wondering how they are, and … and so on.’ Her lips
trembled a little, but she lifted her chin bravely, refusing to give way to her emotions.
‘Have another tart,’ Conker said hastily, pushing the box under her nose.
The rug began to lose height, and everyone looked over the side. The Snug was to their right, and the little wood where they had left Tye was directly below them. In the centre of the wood was a ramshackle house completely encircled by a broad band of shining water.
‘Lawks-a-daisy!’ Bertha gasped, surprise driving away her homesickness. ‘Wizard Bing’s house is on an island!’
‘I don’t see any sign of a boat, either,’ Conker frowned. ‘That’s strange. I wouldn’t fancy swimming across that lake. Bing obviously used it for defence purposes. There could be man-eating eels in it – or snapping turtles! Right, Freda?’
‘Wrong,’ said the duck. ‘That water’s so shallow it wouldn’t cover your boots. It’s just a dot barrier if you ask me.’
Conker nodded grudgingly.
The rug drifted down, down, past the crooked chimney of the ramshackle house, past the grey shingled roof dotted with birds’ nests, the rusty, lopsided gutters filled with moss and the creaking purple walls that all seemed to tilt in different directions. The wire mesh of a chicken pen glinted through the trees on one side of the house, and Bertha looked longingly at the path that led to it.
‘Scene of the crime first, witnesses second,’ Conker said firmly, and Bertha sighed.
The rug landed in the littered front yard of the house, right beside a sandwich tree that was taller but even weedier and more depressed-looking than the one in the town square. The tree’s sparse leaves were spotty and limp. Two grey sandwiches hung from the lowest branches, exuding a strong smell of very old fish paste.
‘Someone should put that thing out of its misery,’ said Freda, looking at the tree with distaste.
‘It must have been Wizard Bing’s first try,’ Bertha said. ‘What a shame! As Master Sadd said, a sandwich tree sounds like a very good idea.’
‘All Bing’s inventions sounded good,’ growled Conker. ‘The trouble was, none of them worked – or if they did they went wrong or had horrible side effects. Look at this place! It’s a disaster area!’
‘There are blue butterflies here,’ Leo said in a low voice, pointing at some spots of blue dancing in a nearby puddle of sunlight. ‘I think they followed us from the square.’
‘Probably,’ said Freda. ‘It’s their job, isn’t it?’
They clambered off the rug and began picking their way through the weird assortment of objects that lay abandoned on the ground in front of the house.
The first recognisable one they passed was a rusting machine that looked a bit like a bicycle except that it had huge springs instead of wheels.
‘Bing’s Kanga Komet,’ Conker said, his lip curling. ‘He claimed it was the ideal form of transport because it could jump up and down stairs and cross chasms, and so on. Well, it could, if you had the muscles of a troll, the balance of a tightrope walker, nerves of steel and a cast-iron behind.’
They skirted a huge stack of tiny leather harnesses covered with mould (probably left over from the ill-fated lizard experiment, Conker said), a vat of what looked like shiny brown concrete (which Leo thought was the remains of the super-chewy toffee experiment), and a ghastly, quivering bright orange bucket that smelled strongly of oranges and waved stubby feelers at them as they passed (no one knew what that was, but they all kept well away from it).
‘Wizard Bing certainly invented lots of things,’ said Bertha, with a touch of admiration. ‘He just kept trying, didn’t he?’
‘Unfortunately,’ said Freda, kicking aside a pair of frantically wriggling knitting needles that were trying to find something else to knit into the wobbly-edged scarf they were dragging behind them like a knobbly, bizarrely striped tail.
‘I’ve just thought of something,’ Leo said. ‘What if Bing’s new invention turned Simon into a mushroom, and made Bing himself vanish?’
‘You mean – the invention was some sort of magic wand?’ asked Mimi, suddenly alert.
Leo shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I mean, Bing was a wizard. And he did do some amazing things – even if they usually didn’t work out the way he meant them to.’
‘If he’s invisible, he could be anywhere,’ Bertha whispered. ‘He could be here, watching us, right now!’ She cleared her throat nervously. ‘Wizard Bing?’ she called softly, peering around. ‘Hello? Wizard Bing? Are you anywhere about?’
Feeling rather foolish, Leo listened with everyone else, but there was no sound but the rustling of leaves in the trees, the clicking of the knitting needles, which had found a grubby piece of string to work on, and a soft clucking and crooning drifting from the direction of the chicken house.
‘“Well, if he’s here he’s not admitting it,’ said Freda at last.
‘He’s not here,’ Mimi said positively. ‘We’d feel it if he was, I’m sure we would, and I don’t feel a thing.’
‘He might have gone into town,’ Bertha suggested. ‘He might have gone looking for Simon.’
‘More likely to sneak some chocolate bars from Candy Sweet,’ said Freda.
Conker shook his head. ‘I don’t think we’re on the right track with this invisibility business,’ he said. ‘It was a good thought, Leo – a very good thought, and well worth considering. But it would take a very special wand to make a fully grown man disappear for any length of time, and I can’t see a second-rate wizard like Bing being up to it. The man-into-mushroom thing … well, that’s powerful magic too, but it’s a bit easier to swallow.’
‘Is it?’ Leo asked, rather put out to find his theory rejected so quickly.
‘Oh, yes,’ Conker said confidently. ‘Person-to-plant transformations are more unusual than prince-into-toad, or hero-into-newt transformations, certainly, but there have been a few cases of maidens turning into trees over the years, and an old woman who’d hired Freda and me to exterminate her dots swore that this flower down by her duck pond was actually her son.’
‘She was just trying to make you sorry for her so you’d cut our rates,’ Freda muttered. ‘It worked, too.’
‘Oh!’ Bertha squealed, making them all jump. ‘Oh, I’ve just thought! Powerful magic! Everyone says that powerful magic is one of the main things that attracts the – the S-thingy!’ She jerked her head towards the looming cloud palace, being careful not to look at it. ‘If Wizard Bing’s invention was a magic wand, and he used it to mushroomise Simon, on purpose or by mistake, that would explain why the cloud palace is here in Hobnob – and so close to this house.’
‘Yes!’ Conker exclaimed, tugging frenziedly at his beard. ‘Oh, my guts and garters, we’re getting close to the solution now – I can feel it in my liver!’
He shook off the knitting needles, which were attempting to knit his trouser hems into their scarf, and pushed open the door of the house.
A hideous howling filled the air. Yelling in fright, Bertha, Mimi and Leo jumped back.
Conker merely sighed and beckoned. ‘It’s only a burglar alarm,’ he said as the howling faded away. ‘Come on.’
He and Freda vanished into the house. Bertha and Mimi went after them. Leo followed, still feeling rather shaky.
Dimness closed in around him. He could see the shapes of Conker, Bertha and Mimi moving ahead of him. He could smell herbs, ash and dust mixed with faint traces of something sweet and vaguely nauseating that reminded him of cheap air freshener.
He paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. Thoughts of Spoiler crouching hidden in the shadows crawled through his mind. The door swung softly shut behind him, and he felt something touch the back of his neck. He yelled and spun round, his heart pounding.
‘What is it?’ shouted Mimi in panic. ‘Leo!’
‘Hah!’ Conker roared, turning on the spot, his dot-swatters already in his hands and Freda snapping her beak beside him.
‘Leo, get back!’ squealed Bertha, swinging round at the
same time with her head lowered and her blunt teeth bared.
Leo gulped, blinked, and saw that what had touched him was the point of a crooked wizard’s hat that was hanging, together with a threadbare cloak, from a hook on the back of the door.
‘Sorry,’ he said, trying to laugh. His heart was still thudding painfully.
‘Lawks-a-daisy!’ Bertha panted. ‘Oh, you nearly gave me a heart attack!’
‘Pull yourself together, Leo,’ Conker said severely, shoving the swatters back into their holsters. ‘This is no time to give way to your nerves. We’re supposed to be looking for clues.’
‘Well, Leo’s just found one, hasn’t he?’ said Mimi. ‘In fact, he’s found two.’
‘What do you mean?’ Bertha asked in bewilderment. ‘What clues?’
‘Bing’s cloak,’ Mimi said, pointing at the limp shape hanging on the door. ‘And his hat. Didn’t those people in town say he never went anywhere without them?’
‘Yes,’ Bertha said, her eyes very wide. ‘But they’re still here, and Wizard Bing’s not. So that proves …’
‘That wherever Bing went, he didn’t go willingly,’ Conker finished grimly. ‘And he didn’t vanish himself, either. If he had, he’d have put on his hat and cloak first. Wizards are very formal about things like that.’
He clapped Leo on the shoulder. ‘Good work, Leo! Keep it up! Now, team, on with the search!’
Before Leo could deny that he deserved any praise at all for being scared by a hat, Conker turned and bustled away with Bertha and Freda hard on his heels. Leo looked at Mimi helplessly.
‘You owe me one,’ said Mimi with a mocking grin, and turned to follow the others.
Chapter
24
Bing’s List
The inside of Wizard Bing’s house was just as messy and neglected-looking as the outside. Bunches of dusty herbs and two dark lanterns hung from the low beams, which were festooned with spider webs. The fireplace was heaped with ash. A greasy frying pan, a dented kettle, a basket half-filled with straw and a large, lumpy turnip cluttered the threadbare hearthrug.
