by Anna Dale
‘Get used to it. We’re famous now,’ said Arthur, handing the constable his pocketbook and pen.
‘Better open up,’ said PC Chubb, gesturing to the doorway of the bookshop, where the sign had been turned so that it said Closed. ‘I think you’ll find you’ve got a customer waiting.’
They looked to where the constable was pointing and saw a hunched old man standing patiently beside the door. He was wearing his hat and raincoat despite the sunny weather, and had a suitcase at his feet.
‘It’s Mr Hardbattle!’ Miss Quint cried. ‘Whatever is he thinking of? The daft old sausage! Why would he close the shop on a Saturday? What could have happened to make him do that?’
Arthur flung open the door of the police car and rushed to Mr Hardbattle’s side. ‘Have you got your oomph back?’ he asked the old man. ‘Are you going on another expedition round the country to find the You Know What a new home?’
Gazing at Arthur with dull, lifeless eyes, Mr Hardbattle patted Arthur’s shoulder. ‘It’s time to face facts,’ he uttered in a feeble voice. ‘My bookselling days are behind me. I’ve been on the phone to an old people’s home in Ivychurch. They said that if I didn’t mind sharing a room I could move in right away.’
The others had piled out of the car and joined Arthur and Mr Hardbattle on the pavement. PC Chubb gave a cheerful wave as he drove away, but nobody waved back. They were far too busy digesting Mr Hardbattle’s shocker of an announcement. Their elation at foiling the kidnap plot was replaced with a feeling of dismay.
Mr Hardbattle picked up his suitcase with a weary grunt. ‘There’s just one thing, Arthur, before I catch my bus: could I depend on you to look after old Scallywag? They don’t allow dogs at Sunset Lodge.’
‘But, Mr Hardbattle, you can’t –’ began Arthur.
‘You’re worried about your aunt and uncles, I know,’ Mr Hardbattle said. ‘They’re welcome to stay until the lease runs out, but then they’ll have to move on, I’m afraid. The same goes for you and your niece, Miss Quint,’ he said, giving them all a watery smile. ‘I’m glad that I waited until you got back. Didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye.’ He handed the shop keys to Miss Quint, and lifted his hat in farewell.
There was a moment of dreadful silence, during which Scallywag whimpered, and Arthur, Susan and Miss Quint each tried to think of what they might say to change Mr Hardbattle’s mind.
‘But there’s still a week to go!’ said Arthur as Mr Hardbattle turned to leave. ‘All sorts of things might’ve happened by then. We could find a new place for the magic tomorrow! You mustn’t quit! Not yet!’
‘I’ll miss you!’ said Susan, close to tears.
‘Well, I won’t!’ said Miss Quint, the harshness of her words making Susan and Arthur gape. ‘Nor will Trunk, I shouldn’t think,’ continued Miss Quint heartlessly, ‘and as for Scallywag – she’ll forget you in a trice! She’s bound to prefer to have a nice, young master. I’m really looking forward to driving your van. I might even take it up to Scotland on holiday. Five hundred miles all in one go shouldn’t put too much of a strain on the engine, and once we’ve got to Scotland I think it would enjoy zooming up and down all those enormous hills . . .’
She hesitated, worried that she might have gone too far. Miss Quint knew that she was taking a huge gamble by pretending that Mr Hardbattle’s imminent departure did not bother her.
Mr Hardbattle failed to take a single step in the direction of the bus stop. He wavered, as if he were a fern whose fronds had been caught in a gentle breeze.
Sensing that his nerve was weakening, Miss Quint prepared to deliver her killer blow. ‘It’s a shame you couldn’t have delayed for an hour or two,’ she said. ‘I’d made up my mind to come clean at last! There are a few things that I should have told you. You see . . . I didn’t follow your instructions to the letter. Still, if you’re sure you have to go right this minute, you better had. So long!’
Mr Hardbattle put down his suitcase. A touch of his old spirit flickered in his eyes. ‘You’ve called my bluff!’ he said to Miss Quint, not seeming to be too displeased about it. ‘The wiles of women are a wonder to behold!’
Miss Quint seized Mr Hardbattle’s elbow with one hand and unlocked the door of the bookshop with the other. The bell jingle-jangled as she led him inside. Trunk, who had been sitting on his shelf, feeling lonely, clambered to his feet and did a little jig.
‘So, you didn’t mean all those things you said?’ said Susan to Miss Quint. ‘Phew! I’m glad about that!’
Once they had all trooped into the shop, Miss Quint sent Susan upstairs to put a kettle on the stove. In the meantime, she and Arthur made short work of revealing to Mr Hardbattle all that had happened in the week that he had not been in Plumford. To their surprise, he took it all in his stride. When he found out about the lies he had been told, he was hurt and a little cross, but quickly decided to forgive them. His mood had improved considerably since Miss Quint had persuaded him to stay.
‘Good gracious me!’ Mr Hardbattle murmured as he stroked a bookend, which had jumped into his lap. ‘What goings-on! All those wishes! A tea party, a winged girl and stolen goods, you say!’ He was not outraged so much as astounded. Grateful to both Miss Quint and Arthur for helping to rescue him from the doldrums, he gazed at them with affection.
Susan arrived with a tray of teacups and a plate of pink wafer biscuits, which Miss Quint did not like and, for that reason, were the only ones left in the tin.
‘Ah, here’s the winged wonder!’ Mr Hardbattle said, eyeing Susan with interest as she lifted the teapot and prepared to pour out.
Revitalised by their refreshments, they began to discuss what should be done about the three kidnapping burglars who were locked inside the van. Mr Hardbattle argued in favour of letting them out, but the others were less willing to give them their freedom, knowing how cunning they could be.
‘What we really need to do is return them to their books!’ pronounced Mr Hardbattle, putting his teacup aside and rising from his chair. ‘If we all have a good snoop, I’m sure we’ll turn them up!’
Arthur and Miss Quint, who had searched every inch of the bookshop more than once, without success, did not share his optimism. Nevertheless, they humoured the old man and joined in the hunt.
Searching on his knees under the desk that held the cash register, Arthur paused to say hello to the origami sheep before straightening up and going through the objects on top of the desk. When he heard a soft thumping noise above his head, he looked up and saw that Trunk had gone doolally again. The elephant was charging up and down his shelf, coiling and unfurling his trunk by turns. He had behaved in such a way before, when Arthur had been searching for the missing books on his own and again when Miss Quint had turned the bookshop upside down for the identical purpose.
‘Trunk!’ called Arthur. ‘Whatever is the matter with you?’
As soon as the elephant realised that he had got someone’s attention, he stood stock-still and extended his trunk, almost as if he were trying to point something out. Arthur followed the direction in which the elephant’s trunk was aiming and his eyes settled on the fireplace.
‘You want us to light the fire? Is that it?’ asked Arthur, extremely bewildered. ‘But it’s the beginning of June! The temperature’s warm enough, don’t you think?’
Arthur turned away and sought out another area of the shop in which to ferret. He did not see Trunk watching him sadly with his black felt eyes or notice the great shuddering sigh that the elephant gave. No one witnessed what happened next, apart from the black cat bookends and one of the ducks from the painting that was flying past Trunk’s shelf at the time and almost crashed into the hatstand in confusion.
It was a sight that had never been seen before in Hardbattle Books. Trunk shuffled forward to the edge of his shelf, where he had spent every single day since his little girl had le
ft him behind, and let himself fall.
He landed with a thump on his bean-filled backside and sat still for a moment, in shock. Then he got to his feet and walked across the wooden floor, past the origami sheep, which bleated with surprise, and the wastepaper basket, which toppled over in alarm, emptying its rubbish all over the floor. Trunk continued across the room and came to a stop in front of the fireplace. His ears crinkled when it occurred to him how dirty he was going to get, but with a do-or-die kind of shrug, he scrambled into the grate. Instantly, he sank up to his bottom in ash. Reminding himself that he could be sponged clean (it said so on his label), Trunk ignored his predicament and looked up the chimney. He knew what he was searching for and spotted it in less than a minute: a little cubbyhole above the chimney breast, which had something tucked inside.
Trunk waded through the slough of ash and jumped on to the hearthrug. Then he studied the fire irons and selected a tool. Grasping the poker between his soft front feet, he plunged back into the grate, and gave the things in the cubbyhole a good hard prod. FLUMP . . . FLUMP . . . FLUMP went the books as they landed in the ash heap, covering Trunk from head to toe in pale grey powder. He flapped his large ears and blinked.
The sound of the books falling in the fireplace alerted all the others to the elephant’s discovery. When they had got over the shock of seeing Trunk in another place than on his shelf, they reached into the grate and seized the books.
‘Well I never!’ Mr Hardbattle said, blowing ash from the book that he held so that he could read the title. Miss Quint and Susan did the same with theirs. Feeling ashamed that he had not realised what Trunk had been trying to communicate, Arthur chose to lift out Trunk and told him that he was a superstar.
‘These are the books we’ve been looking for!’ confirmed Miss Quint, flicking through the soot-covered book in her hands, entitled Tinseltown Ticket. ‘But how did Trunk know where they were?’
‘He must have seen the culprit put them there!’ suggested Arthur.
Mr Hardbattle frowned. ‘Aren’t we expecting to find one more? Perhaps I should have a feel around.’ He stooped to pick up the poker, but Arthur stopped him.
‘No!’ he said quickly. ‘That’s all of them! I mean . . . Trunk’s the sort of elephant to have done a thorough job. If there was another book up there I’m sure he would have found it.’
Arthur felt himself blushing. He tried to avoid Mr Hardbattle’s searching gaze.
‘Um . . .’ said Arthur. ‘What shall we do now?’
‘I think it’s high time we let those scoundrels out of my van,’ Mr Hardbattle said, ‘don’t you?’
.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Brought to Book
Having had their hands untied, the three gang members crawled out of the back of the van with scowls on their faces and stood in sullen silence. As well as being peeved that their plan to kidnap Lady Smythe-Hughes had come to nothing, they were also sore about being imprisoned in a van for hours on end. While Mr Hardbattle locked the van doors, Miss Quint and Scallywag made sure that the wily trio did not make a run for it.
‘Into the bookshop, if you please,’ Mr Hardbattle said, leading the gang over the threshold. Miss Quint and Scallywag brought up the rear.
Standing next to each other behind a table, they looked like the accused in the dock of a courtroom. From their perch on Mr Hardbattle’s desk, Arthur and Susan watched the three ne’er-do-wells, feeling only faintly afraid. The gang’s appearance was dishevelled. All of them were sweating after their long stint in the van. Mrs Voysey-Brown’s mascara had melted in the heat and there were black smudges all around her eyes. However, she was not as damp as Jimmy, whose bellhop’s suit was mostly polyester, or Mr Claggitt, whose hair was sticking up in spikes, having had a litre of lemonade sprayed over it.
‘Nice nephew, you are!’ Jimmy growled at Arthur, raising his arm to shake his fist. His sleeve was torn and muddied. ‘I could get the cops to arrest you for assault!’
‘That fib has been confessed to,’ Mr Hardbattle said. ‘You’re not Arthur’s uncle. I’m aware of who you really are. No more lies, please, and no more threatening language either! It surprises me that you’d want to involve the police. I should think they’d be more interested in your gang than in young Arthur here.’
‘If we go down, we’ll take you with us!’ vowed Mr Claggitt angrily. ‘One mountaineer goes over the edge, all the rest follow. That’s how it is. We’re like a climbing party that’s attached to the same length of rope!’
‘What he means,’ said Mrs Voysey-Brown, casting her eyes to the ceiling in a long-suffering way, ‘is that we’ll tell the police that you helped us.’
‘They wouldn’t believe you!’ said Arthur.
‘You seriously think they’d take your word over ours?’ Mr Hardbattle said, getting quite hot under the collar. ‘The testimony of well-brought-up children, a respected member of the Women’s Institute, and a chap who works in a bookshop?’
‘You’re the proprietor,’ murmured Miss Quint. ‘Don’t do yourself down.’
‘That we would be thought more unreliable than a scurrilous bunch of sponging layabouts?’ Mr Hardbattle shook his head.
Despite being warned that if they were not careful they would find themselves in a police cell, Jimmy, Mr Claggitt and Mrs Voysey-Brown persisted in being sulky and insolent. Only when Mr Hardbattle drew their attention to the three books which Trunk had discovered in the chimney – Tinseltown Ticket, Rockfall! and Champagne for Geraldine – did their attitudes improve.
‘We’re sorry, ain’t we, mates? We were wrong to do what we did!’ said Jimmy, falling over himself to apologise. ‘Let us make it up to you, eh? Tell you what, guv’nor . . . how’s about we give you a hand in the shop? I’ll shelve these books for you, shall I?’
He moved to pick up the books that Mr Hardbattle had slid on to a nearby shelf, but Miss Quint was too quick for him. She snatched up a newspaper, rolled it into a tube and rapped Jimmy smartly on his knuckles.
‘I’ll thank you to leave those books where they are!’ Miss Quint told him sternly.
In an attempt to improve relations between the two camps, Mr Claggitt spoke up next. ‘You’re a reasonable chap, Hardbattle, I can see that,’ he said, giving the old man a forthright nod. ‘Can’t we let bygones be bygones? We’ve broken the law, I won’t deny that, but thanks to your good self and your fine team of helpers, we’ve seen the error of our ways. We shan’t be tempted back into a life of crime so keep your head, sir, I beg you, and don’t do anything hasty.’ When Mr Claggitt had finished his speech, he smiled in a weak, affected way that made Arthur feel quite ill.
The word ‘sorry’ was not in Mrs Voysey-Brown’s vocabulary. Instead of taking her cue from her colleagues’ attempts to appear repentant, she placed the blame squarely on their shoulders, insisting that she had been a pawn in the whole affair.
‘This wretched venture was Jimmy’s idea,’ she grumbled in her husky voice, ‘and Claggitt urged him on. I wanted nothing to do with it! It’s those two who you should punish, not me!’
Mrs Voysey-Brown’s flagrant attack on her two companions heralded a free-for-all during which the three gang members turned on one another.
‘What nonsense!’ exclaimed Mr Claggitt, his eyebrows shooting towards his hairline. ‘How could you tell such barefaced lies? You’re as much to blame as the rest of us.’
‘I’m not as grasping though,’ retorted Mrs Voysey-Brown, distancing herself from the burly mountaineer. ‘I would have been content with a suite at the Savoy, but you had to set your sights on Switzerland!’
‘Deny me the Eiger, would you?’ Mr Claggitt roared. ‘You’re a heartless woman, Dolores! It’s been hell this past week without a summit to conquer!’
‘Shut your cakeholes, the pair of you!’ Jimmy said, losing his temper. ‘If I h
adn’t been so quick off the mark and worked out that Miss Quint wasn’t kidding when she said that we’d been sprung from books, you wouldn’t be here at all, you thankless nerks!’
When their differences of opinion looked like developing into a brawl, Miss Quint stepped in and told them to pipe down and pull themselves together. She glanced at Mr Hardbattle, and then at Arthur and Susan, and finally at the three books on the shelf.
‘Let’s do it, shall we?’ Miss Quint said.
While her friends flicked through each book to find a suitable page so that they could begin the unwishing, Susan sat down quietly on a chair by the hearth. She held Trunk in her lap and patted his plump body to get rid of all the ash that still coated his velour hide. She had no idea why, but the recent dramas and disclosures had given her a sinking feeling in her stomach. Susan did not understand what Arthur and the others were about to do. All she knew was that she did not want to play any part in it. Sensing her anxiety, Scallywag did what she could to alleviate Susan’s feelings of distress, and licked her ankles.
Overjoyed to be on the verge of getting rid of the three troublemakers, Miss Quint and Arthur forgot to think of an errand on which to send Susan so that she would leave the room. As a result, Susan was there on the shop floor, watching, when the last three party guests were unwished.
Having traded insults and fallen out with each other, none of the gang members seemed upset to learn that they were being sent back to their books. Their dream of living in the lap of luxury in Switzerland was in tatters and, having come close to getting caught by the police, it no longer seemed such a terrible thing to be returned to their stories.
Before the unwishing got under way, the thieves were made to hand over the money that they had made from selling their haul of stolen goods, and Arthur unpinned the diamond brooch worn by Mrs Voysey-Brown. He also remembered to ask them to write down all the names and addresses of the dealers to whom they had sold purloined items. Miss Quint said that she would arrange for the details of the dealers to be left with the bag of money and the unsold antiques (currently in the cupboard under the stairs) on the doorstep of Plumford Police Station.
