The Eddie Dickens Trilogy

by Philip Ardagh

  At that moment, the door to the office burst open and in marched Mad Uncle Jack and Even Madder Aunt Maud, holding Malcolm the stuffed stoat like a baby, closely followed by Mr and Mrs Dickens (still without her wedding ring).

  ‘Is he here?’ Mad Uncle Jack demanded.

  ‘Is who where?’ spluttered the inspector, struggling to his feet. ‘What is the meaning of this intrusion?’

  ‘My boy, Eddie Dickens. Have you locked him up again? He’s gone missing,’ said Mrs Dickens.

  The inspector raised an eyebrow and looked across to Mr Chevy. The peeler shook his head. ‘No, sir,’ he said.

  ‘No we haven’t,’ said the inspector, ‘and the last time we locked him up he signed a piece of paper saying he didn’t mind. Isn’t that right, Mr Chevy?’

  ‘Indeed it is, inspector,’ agreed the peeler. ‘He signed along the dotted line. I drew the dots myself.’

  ‘It’s not then we’re worried about,’ said Mad Uncle Jack. ‘It’s last night. He didn’t sleep in his bed.’

  ‘Well, his bed was blown up a few days ago,’ Mad Aunt Maud explained, instantly making matters more complicated, ‘but he wasn’t in the bed he should have been sleeping in since his bed was blown up, if you see what I mean?’

  The inspector obviously didn’t.

  ‘What matters is that my son is missing!’ Mrs Dickens wailed.

  ‘And Malcolm wasn’t trying to poison me at all,’ said Mad Aunt Maud. ‘That was a misunderstanding. It wasn’t a poison pill, but a wedding ring. It bounced right off his nose, you see?’

  ‘Malcolm? Who’s Malcolm? And what’s all this about exploding beds and poison pills that aren’t poison pills …?’

  ‘My wife is a little confused,’ said Mad Uncle Jack, in a whisper loud enough to wake the police-station cat, which had been sleeping under the inspector’s desk. ‘She is, of course, referring to Sally, who is stuffed.’

  ‘I’d like to report my son missing,’ said Mr Dickens, who hadn’t heard a word. ‘His name is Edmund Dickens.’

  ‘Sometimes known as Eddie?’ asked a smallish man, stepping through the open doorway. He wore a pinstripe suit, speckled with sand. Nobody saw his lips move because they were covered by a large walrus moustache.

  ‘And who are you, sir?’ sighed the inspector.

  ‘He’s the librarian –’

  ‘The gas man –’

  ‘The dog-catcher –’

  ‘The tree-counter –’

  You see, our Mr Lalligag had given himself a different cover story – a different identity – to just about everyone he’d met at Awful End. Now he spoke the truth. ‘My name is Abe Lalligag from the Pickleton Detective Agency and I am on the trail of some missing jewels, stolen by Arthur Brunt the billionaire burglar.’

  ‘From Barking?’ asked the inspector. ‘He’s one of the convicts who escaped from Grimpen Jail.’

  ‘And, I’m afraid he has taken Eddie Dickens hostage,’ said the detective. ‘I too was held prisoner until half an hour ago. I was rescued by a passing rector. There’s no time to lose. We must save the boy and reclaim the jewels!’

  ‘A passing what?’ asked Mr Dickens.

  ‘Rector!’ said Mrs Dickens.

  ‘Where do you think he’s taken the boy?’ asked the inspector.

  ‘To the moors!’ said the detective. ‘In a hearse.’ He caught sight of Wolfe Tablet’s balloon through the window. ‘That would be an ideal mode of transport. Come on!’

  Before the inspector or his loud-checked suit had time to protest, everyone piled out of his office, down the corridor and out to the balloon.

  Beating off the competition with her stuffed stoat, Mad Aunt Maud was the first into the basket, with a leg up from Mad Uncle Jack, who stepped in with ease after her. Mr Lalligag of the Pickleton Detective Agency was next on board and he was already untying the guy ropes as Mr and Mrs Dickens scrambled in after him.

  The balloon basket was already off the ground as Wolfe Tablet made it aboard his own contrivance, but the police inspector and Mr Chevy the peeler were far too slow.

  No matter how much they stood on the ground, shaking their fists and crying ‘Come back!’ the balloon was up, up and away on its rescue mission.

  ‘How do you make this thing go left or right?’ demanded Detective Lalligag. ‘Is there some kind of lever?’

  ‘Air currents!’ said Wolfe Tablet, adjusting the flame in the burner under the hole in the middle of the balloon envelope, so that it made the air inside it hotter and so rise. (Hot air rises. Even hotter air rises even higher. So now you know.) ‘We fly up until we find the air currents – winds – in the direction we want to go.’

  ‘Which is over there!’ Mr Lalligag pointed.

  Mr Tablet was a skilled balloonist and it wasn’t long before he had them flying over the moors.

  ‘There!’ cried Mad Uncle Jack, leaning right out of the basket and pointing.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Mad Aunt Maud.

  ‘A gorse bush the colour of my favourite old waistcoat.’

  ‘Oh, so it is! Look, Malcolm!’ She held the stuffed stoat, nose first, over the side.

  ‘Any sign of my poor Eddie?’ Mrs Dickens wailed.

  ‘Not yet, madam … but look! There’s the hearse!’

  Sure enough, there below them – looking no larger than two gerbils pulling a shoe box – were the black horses and the hearse, abandoned by Barking as he and Eddie had carried on by foot.

  ‘Look!’ cried Aunt Maud excitedly, and everyone piled over to her side of the basket. ‘That stream looks like a wiggly blue snake from up here!’

  ‘It is the boy and the convict we’re after!’ Mr Lalligag fumed. ‘The boy and the convict!’

  Meanwhile, Mr Tablet had opened a wooden box fixed to one of the sides of the basket and was putting together a piece of complicated photographic equipment which he called a camera. ‘Photographs of the capturing of the billionaire burglar would be a sensation!’ he declared.

  ‘We’ve got to find him first … There!’ said the detective triumphantly. ‘That’s them!’ And, sure enough, it was. There below was Barking with Eddie close behind, running through a patch of ferns almost as tall as they were. Eddie was carrying a carpet bag and, by the way he was struggling, Mr Lalligag reasoned that it must contain the stolen jewels. ‘Can you bring this balloon down ahead of them?’ he asked.

  ‘It might be a bit of a bump, but I can indeed,’ said Wolfe Tablet. He fiddled with the burner, pulled a rope or two and they were soon going down all right!

  ‘Wheeeeeee!’ said Mad Aunt Maud. ‘We’re flying, Malcolm. Flying!’

  If Daniella’s landing in the rose bed at Awful End had been undignified, this landing was a total disgrace! Of all the places they could have landed, they hit a rocky outcrop on a slope and the basket tipped over, with everyone still inside it, and then the balloon dragged them along the ground. There were plenty of ‘oohs!’, ‘arghs!’ and ‘oofs!’ and each and every one of them who’d been through the experience now knew what it felt like to be one of a litter of unwanted kittens inside an old coal sack stuffed with rocks.

  Wolfe Tablet clutched his beloved wooden box camera to protect it as best he could. Mad Aunt Maud hugged Malcolm and Mad Uncle Jack hugged her. Detective Lalligag and Mr Dickens held on to each other, and Mrs Dickens held on to the edge of the basket.

  They’d all managed to get about as upright as they could when Barking came running out of the patch of ferns. The last thing on earth he’d expected was this extraordinary welcoming committee, and he came to a halt.

  ‘Give it up, Brunt,’ said Mr Lalligag. ‘You’re a gentleman burglar, not a violent man. You’re outnumbered and would have to shoot us all in order to escape.’

  Barking glared back at him. ‘We meet again, Lalligag!’ he said, because that’s the kind of thing criminal masterminds always seem to say when finally face to face with the detective who’s been tracking them down. ‘I’m not going back to the stinking jail and I
’m not giving up my treasure after all this time!’ He looked furious. Fuming.

  ‘Er, why are you wearing my son’s clothes?’ asked Mr Dickens, stepping forward. Lalligag put out a hand to stop him. Eddie’s father, still being deaf from the blast, really had little if any idea who was what or what was going on.

  Barking put his hand on the butt of the revolver tucked into the waistband of his – yes, all right, Eddie’s – trousers. ‘I have a simple proposition,’ he said.

  Eddie found it hard to believe that this was the same man who’d been sniffing thistles and licking ears … or perhaps the ear-licking had really been instruction-whispering, all a part of Barking’s – of Brunt’s – pretence.

  ‘If I let the boy go unharmed, then you, in return, must let me go with the jewels,’ said Barking. ‘If you follow me, however, I shall start shooting. I can’t say fairer than that.’

  Lalligag appeared to be considering the proposition, when a couple of newcomers arrived on the scene.

  ‘First, tell me this,’ said a voice from the top of a nearby hummock – or was it a hillock? (I always have this problem.) Everyone turned to look.

  ‘Ah, the local ironmonger!’ cried Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘Hello, Mr Collins,’ Even Madder Aunt Maud waved. ‘Coooeee! I’ve been racking my brains and I’ve remembered that I do like you!’

  It was, if the truth be told, the Great Zucchini. He was riding a ‘borrowed’ carthorse bareback, with the lovely Daniella up behind him, frilly petticoats rustling in the breeze. ‘How did your stolen jewels come to be in my sandbags?’ he demanded.

  ‘Daniella!’ cried Eddie, dropping the carpet bag. ‘You came to rescue me!’

  ‘It was Harold’s idea,’ she called down. ‘He didn’t want to leave you with the likes of ’im!’

  The likes of ’im – that is to say, Barking, or Arthur Brunt the billionaire burglar, if you prefer – pulled himself to his full (if somewhat small) height and looked across to the escapologist on horseback, but kept his hand firmly gripped around the revolver. Then a look of smug pride shaped his features.

  ‘When I was tried, convicted and sent to jail, they never found the latest batch of jewels I’d stolen. They searched my house, my hideout and dug up half of Barking, but never recovered a single sparkler.’ (No, he wasn’t talking about fireworks. A sparkler is slang for a gem or diamond.) ‘They never found them because I’d smuggled them into jail with me. And who’d think of looking for them there? When I, along with Bonecrusher, Swags and the others found a way to escape, I didn’t want to risk being captured with the jewels … so when you came to the jail requesting we sew sandbags for your act, I came up with the plan to fill them with my ill-gotten gains –’

  ‘So the stolen jewels “escaped” first, then you followed and came to get them back!’ said Eddie.

  ‘Exactly …’

  ‘Why all the talking?’ demanded Mr Dickens, who’d seen a lot of mouth-opening and closing, but hadn’t heard an actual word that was said. ‘We’re only a few pages from the end of the final episode. What we need is action, not words!’ Of course, no one had any idea what he meant, but his words did have some surprising results.

  ‘One thing you should know, Brunt,’ cried Lalligag, lowering his head and charging across the springy moorland grass like an angry bull in a bullfight, ‘is that I never load my gun!’

  Startled, Barking pulled out the revolver he’d taken off Lalligag earlier, and – to his credit, I suppose – fired it up in the air rather than straight at the oncoming detective, just in case the Pickleton detective was lying and it was loaded.

  There was a resounding ‘CLICK’.

  Lalligag wasn’t lying: the gun was empty.

  Barking dodged the detective, grabbed the bag from Eddie, who was too startled by the speed of the snatch to put up much of a struggle, and darted off down the hillside.

  The Great Zucchini and Daniella came thundering down off the tummock – that’s it: it was neither a hummock nor a hillock – on the carthorse, galloping after him. Mad Uncle Jack, Even Madder Aunt Maud and Eddie’s parents were also in hot pursuit, with Eddie close behind.

  Only Wolfe Tablet stood his ground, because he was setting up a tripod and taking pictures.

  ‘Nobody steals my great-nephew’s clothes and gets away with it!’ cried Mad Aunt Maud, who wasn’t particularly clear about the escaped-convicts/stolen-jewels/escapologist side of things, but was fully aware that Eddie shouldn’t be walking around the misty moors in next to nothing … and she dived onto the ground, throwing out her arms to catch the iron ball that Barking was now dragging behind him.

  To us, it would have looked like something out of a game of rugby, but – although it was first played in the 1820s – no one had come up with any proper rules yet, so few people had been to a rugby match.

  It didn’t stop Barking, though. He just kept on running across the springing turf, with Mad Aunt Maud being dragged behind.

  When she’d made that dramatic dive, Malcolm – or is it Sally? – had flown out of her hands and been caught brilliantly by Eddie, running alongside.

  He was bursting with pride that his great-aunt had taken such direct action against a master criminal, and was inspired to act himself. He threw Malcolm as hard as he could towards the fleeing convict.

  There was a loud ‘THUD’ of stuffed stoat coming into contact with back of human head, followed by a cry. Barking stopped running, but the carpet bag kept on going: it flew out of his tiny paws and burst open, its glittering contents spilling onto the ground …

  … and what dangerous ground! Without even realising it at first, Eddie had just saved Barking’s life, possibly a number of their lives. They’d been heading straight for the bog!

  At first glance, the land just ahead of them looked as solid as the ground surrounding it, with tufts of grass and heather sprouting up, covering its dangerous secret. Just beneath the surface was mud deep enough to suck down a herd of wild deer – and certainly a tiny convict weighed down with a ball and chain – never to be seen again.

  ‘Good shot!’ cried Daniella.

  ‘My jewels!’ cried Barking, watching them sink without trace for ever. ‘No!’ And the cry transformed into the plaintive cry of a howling hound: ‘Oooo-ooooooooooow!’

  Eddie thought back to the night in the cave and wondered if there really was more of a doggy side to Arthur Brunt than the billionaire burglar himself realised.

  ‘Well done, Malcolm!’ said Mad Aunt Maud, struggling to her feet and retrieving her beloved stoat. She held him by the tail and brought him down on Barking’s head for good measure. ‘You’re a naughty, naughty man!’ she told him.

  Mr Lalligag of the Pickleton Detective Agency stepped forward and handcuffed the defeated villain. He’d lost the jewels but got his man.

  Eddie looked around him. He hadn’t felt so happy in ages. His family had come to rescue him … even Daniella and the Great Zucchini had come to his aid. And it was he, Eddie – with a little help from a stuffed stoat who was as good as family – who had finally stopped Barking. He wanted to remember this moment for ever. Fortunately, someone else had the same bright idea.

  ‘Everyone smile, please!’ said Wolfe Tablet. ‘And don’t move!’

  There was a bright flash and a loud bang, followed by a smell of sulphur.

  And that, once again, dear readers, is the end of another of Eddie Dickens’s rather strange adventures. For those of you who don’t like questions left unanswered and loose ends untied, let me try to put your minds at rest.

  I should start by telling you that Wolfe Tablet was so pleased to have been in on the capture of the billionaire burglar that he eventually dropped all charges against Zucchini’s troupe for tying him up in the Rancid Rat and stealing his precious hot-air balloon. The original photograph of Eddie next to the handcuffed Barking can still be seen in the Wolfe Tablet Museum in the West Country. (I forget where it is exactly, and I don’t have my guide book with me today. I’v
e been there, though, and they do very good cream teas.)

  Eddie’s father’s hearing returned completely, eventually, and Mad Aunt Maud’s injuries – from being hit by a balloon, dragged along in a balloon basket and pulled along the ground by a convict, whilst clutching his ball and chain – soon healed. Mad Uncle Jack bought a new waistcoat the colour of the gorse bush.

  Malcolm was, I am pleased to report, undamaged by the part he played in the convict’s heroic capture.

  Eddie’s mum, meanwhile, got her wedding ring back, but please don’t ask me to go into details as to how.

  The Great Zucchini and his escapology troupe moved on to tour the rest of the country, but not before a huge party was held at Awful End. Eddie found that he could speak to the lovely Daniella without dribbling and that girls are really just human beings after all.

  Bonecrusher and the other escaped convicts were finally caught – all except for Swags, who somehow got away. Those of you who read the third and final book in this trilogy will run into him again … just as Eddie himself did.

  Which leaves one final matter: that of the carthorse ‘borrowed’ by the Great Zucchini and Daniella when riding to Eddie’s rescue. His owner eventually found him, chewing the plants in the rector of St Botolph’s garden. You wouldn’t know the man. Why should you? He was the local ironmonger. His name was Mr Collins.

  THE END

  until the next time

  Terrible Times

  Book Three of the Eddie Dickens Trilogy

  For Suzy Jenvey and Vivian French

  A Message from the Author

  Whose beard is now out of control

  If this is the first Eddie Dickens book you’ve come across, DON’T PANIC!!! Each book is a self-contained adventure. For those of you who have come with me and Eddie all the way from Awful End to here, though, I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. A number of readers – okay, a lot of readers – have asked why this is the last Eddie Dickens book and why I’m not going to write any more. The last Eddie Dickens book? Says who? This may be the last of the trilogy, but what’s to stop me writing some ‘further adventures’ some day? You know, I get the feeling I might just do that. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Terrible Times.