by Nikki Young
Copyright © 2017 Nikki Young
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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To Hope, Scarlett & Ike
Contents
Part 1
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Part 2
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Part 3
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Part 4
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Part 5
James Story
Part 6
Stacey’s story
Part 7
1 week later
Have you ever had something lucky?
A pair of trainers that helped you run faster, a pen that made you have the best ideas, a hat that every time you wore it you won at chess?
Well I have my lucky underpants.
At least I did until they went missing.
Right when I needed them most.
It was last summer, when I started a secret agency with my friend James. We called it Trinity Spies, after our street, which is called Trinity Grove. I know Trinity means ‘three’ and there were only two of us, but we ended up with my next-door neighbour Stacey joining, so it did kind of make sense in the end.
This was the agency:
1.Me – Harry Bond, Agent 009 (my age). My real name is Harry Smith, but it’s way too boring for a secret agent.
2.Brosnan – my black labradoodle dog.
If you didn’t know, a labradoodle is cross between a labrador and a poodle. This makes for one crazy dog, but crazy in a good way. And yes, in case you were wondering about his name, we’re all big James Bond fans in our house and Pierce Brosnan is my mum’s favourite Bond actor. My dad wanted Connery, but someone told him all the best dogs have a name beginning with ‘B’, so Brosnan it was.
3.James Murphy – Agent James Hunt (inspired by the film Mission Impossible).
James (also aged 9) is my best friend. We play football together and go to the same school. We’re both sports mad but we don’t like the other one to win. James is worse than me, though. He keeps a record of everything, like how many goals we’ve each scored, our best times for the 100 metres, how many tennis matches we’ve each won, etc., etc. That might sound annoying, but it’s not. James is really funny and he makes me laugh a lot. And even better, he lives on the same street as me, so we get to see each other whenever we want.
4.Stacey Webster – Agent Stacey Cortez (because she wants to be like Carmen Cortez from the Spy Kids films, even though she looks nothing like her – Stacey has short-ish blond hair and is a bit like a pixie).
Stacey wasn’t in the secret agency to begin with, but because she’s my next-door neighbour and kept interfering in our business all the time, she ended up being part of the team. I think it might have been because James quite likes her, although he would never say it. In the end, even I had to admit it was quite useful having her around.
This is the story of what happened during the summer. As leader, most of it is written by me, but I’ve included James’ and Stacey’s side of things as well, so that nothing is left out.
There were spy tricks, foxes and the mystery of the strange new people who moved into number 35 on our street. It kept the Trinity Spies very busy and it all started when my lucky underpants went missing…
Part 1
Week 1
Forming the Trinity Spies
Monday
We started the secret agency today – the first day of the first week of the school summer holidays. Our first job was to make a secret lookout den in my back garden (in the shed), where we are going to have our meetings. The shed was full of cobwebs and stank of the stuff Dad uses to paint the fence. We found an old plastic table and some chairs in there, so we spent most of the afternoon clearing a space so we could set them up. James got a bit fed up of doing that. He said it was boring (he always says stuff is boring).
‘I’m going to go and find my lucky underpants,’ I said to James. ‘I think we might need them.’
‘Gross, do you still wear those old things?’ James said.
‘You know I do.’
‘Well I’m going home anyway. I’ll come back tomorrow after breakfast.’
‘Zero nine hundred hours for the meeting,’ I said.
‘Yeah, yeah, whatever,’ he said as he walked out of the back garden gate.
James thought I only wore my lucky underpants for football matches. What he didn’t know is that I wore them when I played against him on the PlayStation, at table tennis club or even for a game of chess. Every time I had on my lucky underpants, I beat him and I knew I would need them to help me be the best secret agent.
But when I went up to my room disaster struck. They weren’t in the back of my pants drawer, where I always keep them.
‘Mum have you seen my lucky underpants?’
‘Lucky underpants? Which ones are they?’
‘The ones with Spiderman on them,’ I called out, then immediately regretted it.
‘Spiderman!’ said my brother Max as he came out of his room. ‘That’s so lame.’
He ruffled my hair as he walked past, laughing all the way down the stairs. I felt like my face was on fire; no doubt, I would never live that down. Max, being fourteen, thinks he’s a grown-up man already. Everything I do is lame according to him. I tried to rearrange my already messy curls.
‘Mum, I need those pants. I have to wear them for the pre-season cup at the end of the holidays and for the football camps.’
‘Well, I’m sure they’re around somewhere. Knowing you, you’ve probably not looked properly and anyway that room of yours is so messy I’m surprised you can find anything. I’m always telling you to tidy it up.’
I could tell my mum was going to be no help whatsoever, so I went and checked in the laundry basket before going back to my room. I checked everywhere I could think of – my drawers, football bag, under the bed – but I couldn’t fin
d them. I sat down on the bed scratching my head.
‘What am I going to do now, Brosnan?’
Brosnan gazed at me with his big black eyes and nuzzled his head into my lap. I always felt like he understood. He was the only one who seemed bothered by what had happened to me.
‘If I don’t find them in time for the cup game, I could risk our team losing. They’ve never lost a match when I’ve worn those pants and it will be my fault.’
I felt sick at the thought and couldn’t help wondering how I would ever manage to beat James again if I didn’t have those pants. I didn’t move from my spot on the bed until Mum called up to say dinner was ready. After dinner, Brosnan and I went back out to the den, so we could keep up the watch duty, should anything happen. We hadn’t been there long when we heard the back gate click open.
‘Shush, Brosnan,’ I said, ‘someone’s coming into the garden. It might be a thief who’s come to hide his stash here where he thinks no one will find it.’
But then I heard:
‘Harry… Harry… Oh, hello, what are you doing in there? And why are you wearing those stupid sunglasses when it’s so dark?’
It was Stacey from next door (ugh!):
1.She never waits to be invited, just walks right in whenever she feels like it.
2.She asks way too many questions.
3.She’s a girl and there’s no way I was telling her about the secret agency. NO GIRLS ALLOWED.
So I pulled off my glasses and quickly shoved them under my seat.
‘What do you want, Stacey?’ I said to her.
‘My mum sent me round to find out if you’ve had anything go missing from your washing line recently. We’ve had a T-shirt and a pillow case snatched. It’s a bit of a mystery.’
MYSTERY
Both mine and Brosnan’s ears pricked up as she said this.
A mystery washing thief. That could only mean one thing.
SOMEONE MUST HAVE STOLEN
MY LUCKY UNDERPANTS.
‘No idea, but I’ll let Mum know,’ was all I said to Stacey, as I ran off.
Tuesday
Today James came round early: 8:45 a.m., to be precise. He came in through the back gate and straight into the kitchen, like he always does. He doesn’t need to knock; everyone is used to him being around. When I walked into the kitchen, he was sitting at the table eating a bowl of cereal, looking like he’d been up and dressed for ages. Even his hair was all styled in that sticky-up way he likes to do it.
‘You not ready yet?’ he said, through a mouthful of cornflakes.
I looked down at my worn tracksuit bottoms with the hole at the knee and thought about my messy curls that I could never be bothered to brush. This was typical of James. Because I told him to be here at 9:00 a.m., he made sure he was here earlier just so he could beat me. No doubt he would give himself a tick for winner of who gets to the meeting first. My stomach felt sick and heavy at the thought of my missing underpants.
‘Have you not had breakfast yet?’ I asked, sitting down opposite him and emptying what was left of the Rice Krispies (in other words, the dust at the bottom of the pack) into another bowl. As I poured the milk in, some of it bounced straight out of the bowl and landed on the table. I wiped it up with my sleeve.
‘Yeah, this is my second breakfast. I got starving waiting around for you.’ James got up to put his bowl in the sink, whilst I set about eating as fast as I could to catch him up.
‘Whatever, James, come on, let’s go have our meeting,’ I said, as I slurped the last of the milk from the bowl and left it on the table.
At the agency headquarters, I told James all about the washing thief and we worked out our plan. First, we decided to investigate the neighbours – and I do have some interesting ones. I’ll tell you about them.
Mrs O’Connor next door (the other side to Stacey) is from Ireland and she goes to church every day. My mum tries to avoid her when we are going to school because she talks so much it makes us late. She always gives me 50p when I see her, though, so I like her a lot.
Mrs O’Connor told us that she was missing one of her underskirts (gross!), so she couldn’t be the thief.
Next door to her is grumpy old Mr Newsome, ‘Gruesome Newsome’ we call him (not to his face though). If we’re playing football outside my house and the ball goes into his garden, he won’t let us have it back. He’s always shouting at us, saying we’re too noisy, and he goes round to complain to Mum and Dad that we’re out too late at night. None of us likes him.
We couldn’t decide whether to knock on his door, but eventually we did.
‘What do you want? I’m busy,’ was his greeting. Then, ‘Stop wasting my time with such stupid questions. Be off with you before I call the police,’ was his answer when we asked if he’d had any washing stolen.
‘Seems like he’s got something to hide to me,’ said James.
I agreed.
Through the gate at the bottom of my garden is an alleyway that runs along the back of all the houses on our side of the street. In the afternoon we borrowed my dad’s binoculars and went down to see if we could spy into Gruesome Newsome’s garden, but his gate was locked and we couldn’t see over his fence. We tried standing on a plastic crate to see over, but that didn’t work either. Gruesome Newsome has the highest fence on the whole street and loads of trees at the bottom of his garden. Even with James balancing on my shoulders, it didn’t help. And we were too wobbly like that anyway, so he couldn’t even hold the binoculars straight to look through them. Instead, we went back to my house to see if we could get a better view from my bedroom window.
That was when we saw him hanging out some washing.
And not all of the clothes were his.
‘There’s a T-shirt that could be Stacey’s,’ I pointed out, ‘but I can’t see my lucky underpants.’
‘Does that look like Mrs O’Connor’s’ underskirt?’ said James.
We’d never seen Mrs O’Connor’s underskirt before so we weren’t sure, but we were pretty sure that Gruesome Newsome lived alone, so the question was why would he have clothes on his washing line that were definitely not his.
We set our task for the next day – to find out what Gruesome Newsome was up to.
‘If I had my lucky underpants I bet we’d have found out who the thief is by now,’ I said to Brosnan that night. ‘But if the thief is wearing my lucky underpants, then we might never catch him.’
Wednesday
I rushed out the kitchen door and down the garden path at 8:40 a.m. this morning, only to find James already sitting in the lookout den. Another tick for James then, I thought, trying to put my missing lucky underpants to the back of my mind.
After what we’d seen yesterday, James and I decided we should investigate Gruesome Newsome, so we kicked a ball around in the street out the front of my house and waited for him to leave. When he came out of his house it didn’t take him long to spot us.
‘Oi, you young hooligans, you better not kick that ball into my rose bushes again or you’ll be for it, do you hear?’
‘Yes, Mr Newsome,’ we said, as though we were answering a teacher at school.
We pretended to carry on playing, but as Gruesome Newsome began to walk off down the street we ran up to my front door and threw the ball into the house. Then we legged it back onto the street so we could follow him, ignoring the shout of ‘watch it, lame boy,’ from my brother, who happened to be walking through the hall at the same time and got hit on the ankles with the ball.
Gruesome Newsome was carrying a big bag and he took it to a house on Feather Street (that’s two streets along from ours). We hid behind lamp posts, trees and bushes all the way in case he turned around and saw us, but he never did. I think he’s probably a bit deaf, ’cause he’s quite old. It was so funny. There’s no way we could hide or camouf
lage ourselves and if he had turned around he would have easily seen us. When Gruesome Newsome went into the house, we waited behind a car parked opposite. We were waiting for ages, just sitting on the floor and James got bored, so we started playing ‘throw the stone at the ant’ to pass the time. We got so into it (especially James, of course) that we nearly missed Gruesome Newsome leaving. Luckily, I heard the front door bang shut and nudged James in the ribs to let him know. We watched Gruesome Newsome leave and this time he was carrying a different bag. Through the binoculars we saw an old woman in the house, taking the things out of the bag that Gruesome Newsome had brought. They looked like the clothes from his washing line, including Mrs O’Connor’s underskirt (we thought).
WAS HE STEALING PEOPLE’S WASHING
TO GIVE TO THIS OLD WOMAN?
Thursday
I went to James’ house today. He said it wasn’t fair that he always had to come round to mine. I didn’t mind and it was good to get away from Max, who was still winding me up about the Spiderman pants.
We went back to the old lady’s house on Feather Street. James knocked on her door and said we were investigating the disappearance of washing from people’s lines and had she lost any of her own? I would have knocked on her door, but James really wanted to do it.
‘I don’t know, young man. I’ll have to ask my Colin. He’s the one who does all my washing for me,’ the old lady said.
Then she invited us in! It was awful. We thought we’d never get out of there.
1.Old people talk a lot.
2.Their houses smell funny.
3.They have nice biscuits though.
