Ben kept walking. ‘I know,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth. ‘So we need to work out a plan. If we stand here staring at the building they might see us.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Daisy, feeling a bit dumb.
They retreated back past the lolly shop (again), and through the lane to the bottom of the hill they had recently descended and plonked themselves on a patch of grass.
‘Okay,’ said Ben. ‘Now that we know where they are we can go and tell Professor Blont what we know, give him the letter and he and the police can sort it out.’
‘But, Ben, now they’ve got the stone they’re probably about to leave the hotel and go back to wherever they’re from. By the time we find Professor Blont and convince him to do something, it’ll probably be too late. We’ve got to do something now.’
‘Yes, but …’ began Ben, but he stopped because he knew it was no use. ‘So what do we do?’
‘Easy. We work out a plan to get the blue glowing stone back from them.’
‘O-kay,’ said Ben uncertainly.
‘It shouldn’t be too hard,’ said Daisy.
‘Unless it is,’ responded Ben.
They tried to think. Daisy sat cross-legged, shut her eyes and held the bridge of her nose, because she had seen her teacher do that once when she was thinking. She waited for a brilliant idea to appear.
Nothing.
Come to think of it, when her teacher had closed her eyes and held the bridge of her nose, the only idea she had come up with was that they should open their maths books and complete unit 26. Hardly brilliant.
Daisy rearranged herself, resting her chin on her fist. That was how that guy in the famous sculpture, The Thinker, had sat.
Still nothing.
Of course it was never clear that The Thinker had actually come up with any ideas. In fact, Daisy suspected he hadn’t because if he had, surely there would have been a follow-up sculpture called The Thinker Acts on the Brilliant Idea He Had When He Was Thinking.
Daisy drummed her fingers on the ground. She did some humming and then stole a glance at Ben, who was staring blankly into the middle distance, or possibly the far distance, or maybe even the near distance.
Eventually she thought that she should probably say something, just to check that her voice was still working. ‘So …’
That seemed a bit feeble on its own, so after a bit she added, ‘… a plan, then.’
‘Yep,’ replied Ben slowly. ‘That’s what we need.’
There was another long pause, and then at the same time they both said, ‘Hmmm.’
Daisy waved her arms about in vague shapes above her head. Somehow, it seemed to help. ‘Okay! I’ve got it! We find out if they are staying at that hotel, then if they are, we find out what room they’re in, get a key, get them out of their room, sneak into their room, find the blue stone and take it.’
‘Great,’ said Ben unenthusiastically. ‘Perfectly worked out. There’s just one tiny detail you’ve missed. How?’
Daisy slipped into the public telephone box, picked up the receiver and dialled information. ‘What. Number. Do. You. Want?’ said the electronic, or robotic or something-else-not-at-all-human voice at the other end.
‘The Cross Hotel.’
‘Did. You. Say. “My. Dross. Photo. Bell”?’
‘No. The. Cross. Hotel.’
‘Did. You. Say. “The East. Albanian. Teaspoon. Trading. Company”?’
‘No. I –’
‘Did. You. Say. “Disturbing. Grumpy. Dwarf”?’
Eventually the robot put her through to a human and she got the number. Daisy inserted some coins and dialled.
‘Cross Hotel,’ said a human, elderly, female voice.
Daisy deepened her own voice, trying to make it sound as adult as she could. The hotel looked small, so she was hoping that the person at the front counter would have some idea of what most of the guests looked like.
‘Hello. I’m trying to get in touch with someone staying at your hotel, but – this is a bit embarrassing – I don’t actually know his name. See, we were introduced at a party last night, and I just didn’t take in his name, but he told me the name of his hotel and … Well, I simply must get in touch with him, it’s very important.’
‘Could you describe the man, madam? Perhaps I can help.’
‘Thank you. He was an older gentleman with a white beard, and he had a companion. A younger man with curly brown hair.’
‘Ah, yes, I think that would probably be Mister Sinclair, madam. And I believe his companion’s name is Dennis.’
Now how’s that for a coincidence. We were just calling them Sinclair and Dennis because we didn’t know what their real names were, and because ‘Sinclair’ seemed to be a better name than ‘Cardboard’, and Dennis seemed to be a better name than ‘Lots-of-Curly-Brown-Hair’, and guess what? It turns out that their names really are Sinclair and Dennis! Gadzonks!
‘Yes, that’s it! I remember now. Thank you so much! And he’s in room number …?’
‘I’m sorry, madam. We’re unable to give out that information.’
Rats! Time for plan B. ‘Of course, I understand,’ Daisy said, all sweet and innocent. ‘Perhaps you could put me through to his room?’
‘Yes, of course. Putting you through.’
A moment later the phone was ringing again. Daisy hardly had time to feel nervous, but somehow she managed to fit it in.
‘Hello,’ a sleepy male voice answered. Daisy was sure it was Sinclair/White Beard/the older man/the one we decided not to call ‘Cardboard’.
‘Hello, I’m sorry to disturb you. This is reception,’ said Daisy, trying to sound posh like a hotel receptionist. ‘We’ve been having some problems with our phone system. Calls seem to have been going to the wrong rooms. Can I just confirm that this is room one hundred and four?’
‘Sorry? No, it’s not. It’s … What is it? … Two hundred and six.’
‘Is it? I’m so sorry, sir. Thank you. And while I’ve got you, sir, are you in your room for the rest of the day? We just want to know when to send someone up to make the bed.’
‘You don’t need to worry about that. We’re checking out in an hour.’
‘Thank you, sir. Sorry to disturb you.’
Daisy hung up and turned to Ben. ‘I’ve got a room number, a name and a deadline. They’re leaving in an hour. Come on!’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To buy some matches, of course.’
Chapter 7
THE TRUTH ABOUT RUNNING
The next part of their plan had six simple parts:
1. Get the key to Sinclair and Dennis’s room.
2. Get Sinclair and Dennis out of their room.
3. Go into their room.
4. Find the blue glowing stone.
5. Run away very quickly.
6. Celebrate the success of the plan by shouting, ‘Woohoo! We did it! Our brilliant plan worked! All six parts!’
The hotel doors were big, wide and made of glass. As Daisy approached, they automatically slid open. Inside, the foyer was nearly as big as Daisy’s whole house, and much more elegantly decorated with lush carpet, expensive-looking wooden furniture and nice paintings on the walls. At one end was a café where people sipped mugs full of the sorts of things you drink out of mugs: tea, coffee, hot chocolate, more tea, string.
Okay, not string very often.
Next to the café was a wide carpeted staircase leading, Daisy guessed, up to the guest rooms. In the middle of the foyer were a few armchairs and at the far end was a wooden counter, behind which stood a grey-haired woman who looked like she might own the voice that Daisy had spoken to on the phone. Behind her were a series of wooden compartments containing room keys. Daisy walked up the foyer towards the counter as casually as she could. She spied a comfy chair that was
tucked away in a corner and sat in it, trying to look exactly like a twelve-year-old hotel guest who was just filling in time while her parents went to the toilet or paid the bill at the café or did some other boring parent-like thing.
About a minute later the hotel doors opened again and in walked Ben. He trotted into the middle of the foyer, ignoring Daisy, and let out an angry flurry of barks. In a park no one would have cared, but in a smart hotel foyer people take a lot more notice of barking dogs. Everyone stared. Guests looked surprised, even alarmed. Hotel staff emerged from the café and, Daisy was happy to see, the woman behind the counter left her post to investigate. Ben, still barking, started running around in circles. The hotel staff chased after him. Everyone in the foyer now had their attention focused on the dog-created commotion, which was why no one noticed Daisy quietly slip behind the counter, calmly scan the pigeonholes and then pick out the key from the one that read ‘206’. Nor did anyone – except Ben – notice her stroll calmly across the foyer past the commotion and up the stairs.
Once she was out of sight, Ben, who was now being chased by seven shouting hotel staff, took off out the door. Slowly the shouting lessened in volume as everyone realised that the dog had gone so they didn’t have anything to shout about anymore. Twenty seconds later everything was back to normal, apart from the fact that there was one less key at reception.
Daisy walked up to the second floor, where there was a corridor with five or six doors on either side. She found room 206 near the end, and then walked back up the corridor until she was directly under the fire alarm. She checked to make sure the corridor was empty. It was (unless you count the carpet, which of course you don’t). She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket, rolled it into a cylinder and extracted the box of matches she had just bought. She struck one, lit the paper cylinder and held it above her head. For a few seconds all that happened was that her arm began to hurt. Then the fire alarm started hooting and water sprayed out from the ceiling.
Daisy dropped the paper, stamped out the flame and put the charred remains in her pocket. Then she began to scream.
Daisy had always been very good at screaming and had many different types in her repertoire. There was the ‘I dropped something on my toe’ scream, the ‘I bumped my head on something’ scream, the ‘I don’t want to get dressed and go to school today’ scream, the ‘I’ve lost the really good book I was reading’ scream and the ‘nothing is really wrong, I just need a really good scream’ scream. She decided that on this occasion the best one to use would be the ‘lost book’ scream. She hadn’t used it for a while, so she was a bit out of practice, but it had just the right mixture of panic, fear and desperation to be convincing.
Daisy let rip with three huge screams and then started shouting, ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’ as loudly as she could. She ran up the corridor banging on doors, making sure that she bashed especially hard on room 206’s.
As people began to emerge from their rooms, Daisy raced to the stairs and up to the third floor. There she peered over the railing and saw three people racing downstairs from floor two. Then she saw two more. Yes! It was Sinclair and Dennis! As soon as they were out of sight, Daisy raced back down to the now deserted second floor, unlocked room 206 and slipped inside. She figured it would be at least nine or ten minutes before the hotel staff realised it was a false alarm, managed to get the sprinkler and alarm shut off and let everyone back up into their rooms. With a bit of luck a fire engine would turn up and firefighters would delay things even more by striding around in their big uniforms trying to look important and shouting things like, ‘Stand back everybody!’, ‘Don’t panic!’ and ‘Where’s the best place to attach a very large hose?’
To be safe Daisy gave herself a strict time limit of seven minutes to search the room. She hoped Sinclair hadn’t taken the stone with him. He obviously thought it was important, but she had tried to make things seem as urgent and life-threatening as possible in the hope that he would just rush straight out.
The room was a normal, smartly set-up hotel room with two beds. It contained a desk, a comfy chair, a thin television, a bathroom, a very small fridge and two bedside tables that were … well, where do you think they were? Beside the beds of course! A few pieces of clothing were strewn about, and on the desk was a cake with several candles on it which looked and smelt like they had recently been blown out. Two pieces of cake were sitting, standing, or maybe even lying on plates. It’s hard to tell with pieces of cake.
Daisy remembered that Dennis had said it was his birthday today and realised that she must have interrupted his party. She felt a tiny weeny pang of guilt for three-quarters of a second, but then got over it.
She started searching for the stone. She looked under the pillow, under the other pillow, inside the pillow slips, under one bed, all through that bed, under and all through the other bed, in the very small fridge, under the very small fridge, in the drawers of the bedside tables, in all the drawers, in all the cupboards, in all the shelves, in all the bags, in all the clothes and shoes that were in all the drawers, cupboards, shelves, bags or otherwise strewn about, in the desk, on top of the wardrobe, underneath the wardrobe, in the bathroom cupboard, behind the toilet, inside the toilet, behind the curtains, under the desk, in all the desk drawers, and under the beds again. She found the stone twelve times, but unfortunately only in her imagination.
In the bathroom next to the sink she did, however, find two tiny toothbrushes, each smaller than her fingernail. They almost looked like miniature toothbrushes. ‘Huh? How extremely odd. What on earth would toothbrushes this tiny be used for, and why would they be in Sinclair and Dennis’s room?’ she might have asked herself if she’d had time, but because she was in a hurry she only got as far as, ‘Huh?’
Have you heard the expression, ‘Time flies when you’re having fun’? So what does time do when you’re not having fun? Walk? Ride a bicycle? Catch the train? Sit at home sulking on the sofa? Anyway, here is another very well-known saying that I just made up: ‘Time flies even faster than it does when you are having fun when you are searching a hotel room for something, and you can’t find it.’
It had been very clever of Daisy to give herself a time limit of seven minutes to search the room. It was a lot less clever of her not to be wearing a watch, and not to have noticed what time the clock that sat on one of the bedside tables (which was beside the bed) was showing when she entered the room. So when Daisy thought she had been searching the room for about five or six minutes she had in fact been in there for ten and a half minutes.
She had run out of places to search and was beginning to think that Sinclair must have taken the stone with him when she noticed a vase on the coffee table. Of course! She pulled out the flowers – plastic, so don’t feel sorry for them – and shoved her hand into the vase. It was a tight fit, and she had to push hard to get her hand to the bottom. As she felt about, she realised two things:
1. The stone was not in the vase; and
2. A much easier way to have found that out would have been to turn the vase upside down.
She tried to pull her arm out of the vase but it seemed to be slightly stuck.
Suddenly the door opened and before she had time to hide, panic or even think, Yikes! The door is opening! in walked Dennis and Sinclair.
‘Who would have thought that those tiny candles could create such a fuss,’ Dennis was saying.
Sinclair’s eyes widened as he saw Daisy. ‘What? You?’
Daisy backed away, the vase still on her arm. She saw another vase next to the television. She pointed to it with her vase arm. ‘It’s in there, isn’t it?’
‘Is it, boss?’ asked Dennis, sounding, as usual, confused. ‘I thought it was in your pocket?’
Sinclair’s eyes dropped to his right pocket which was full of his hand. His right hand obviously. You try putting your left hand in your right pocket. It’s very difficult. It looks weird, too.
As Daisy pondered her options, none of which she would have described as ‘Excellent’, ‘Decent’, or even ‘Not too bad’, a ball of furry energy burst through the doorway and between Dennis’s legs. It came right at her, then abruptly stopped, turned around and snarled at Sinclair.
It was a giant rat who lived in the hotel and loved charging into rooms and terrorising guests.
No, it wasn’t. It was actually a hallucination brought on by the fact Daisy was having a really difficult day and hadn’t eaten enough fruit.
No, that’s not true either. Sorry for all the lies. Sometimes I’m a bit of an unreliable narrator. You should eat fruit, though.
It was Ben, of course.
Ben snarled at Sinclair again and then leapt at him. Sinclair instinctively covered his body with his hands, pulling his right hand out of his pocket. Ben bit Sinclair’s right arm. Sinclair shrieked, his fist opened, and a small canvas bag emitting a blue glow fell to the floor between Sinclair and Daisy. Ben landed and Sinclair kicked him. Daisy, her arm still stuck in the vase, dived for the bag and, on her knees, grabbed it with her vase-free hand. As her fingers closed around it she felt a jolt of power surge through her. A second later a hand grasped the back of her neck.
‘Drop it!’ yelled Sinclair above her. Daisy turned just in time to see Ben leap at Sinclair and bite him on the thigh. Sinclair yelled in pain and his grip on Daisy’s neck relaxed. She rolled away and jumped to her feet.
‘Come on!’ cried Daisy, and they ran for the doorway. Dennis stood in front of it.
‘Stop her!’ shouted Sinclair.
‘Hey, little girl,’ began Dennis. ‘How about you just stop and stuff and … yeah … Um, we could play a game. Yeah! Do you know, “Who Am I?”’
Ben leapt at Dennis who, with surprising agility, stepped neatly aside into the bathroom. Ben ended up outside in the corridor, and Daisy, clutching the bag in her free hand, followed him. They sprinted for the staircase and raced down. Daisy could hear heavy footsteps pounding behind them, indicating either that Sinclair and Dennis were chasing them, or that two other large adults had decided to go for a jog inside.
Daisy Malone and the Blue Glowing Stone Page 7
