Kat Wolfe Takes the Case

by Lauren St. John

  The girls skidded to a halt near the sailing club. All thoughts of the collie went from Kat’s head as she took in the scene. The caramel sands of Bluebell Bay – often teeming with dog walkers even at this hour on a Sunday – were empty, glistening and extra wide, as if the sea had been instructed to roll back and stay there.

  But it wasn’t the sight of an uncrowded beach that had the town residents gawking on their doorsteps in curlers and pyjamas. The tide had been at its highest at around midnight. The effects of the landslide had only become evident as the waves retreated in the early hours of that morning.

  On the edge of the beach, a police cordon manned by two security guards in black T-shirts held back a buzzing wall of phone-clutching onlookers. A posse of sweaty cameramen kept bashing the unwary with their heavy lenses. In the car park beyond, Sergeant Singh was remonstrating with the driver of a Fast News broadcast van, while a TV reporter with confident blonde hair had her lipstick touched up.

  Spotting a gap in the crush, Harper dived in. Kat wriggled after her, wrinkling her nose at a musky armpit. They were brought to a halt by a man mountain. Kat’s gaze travelled up over a hillock of chest, then up some more. At the top was a pair of dark sunglasses.

  ‘No kids on the beach,’ barked the guard. ‘Not unless you want your skull cracked open by a boulder. In case you hadn’t noticed, half the cliff’s collapsed into the bay. The only people allowed into the cove are dinosaur experts with hard hats and photo ID.’

  ‘Palaeontologists, you mean,’ Harper said brightly. ‘That’s why we’re here. We’re Professor Lamb’s assistants.’

  He snorted. ‘And I’m the Easter Bunny. Move along. You’re in the way.’

  Harper didn’t budge. ‘We won’t be in the way if you let us through. That’s Professor Lamb, down the far end of the beach. He’s Bluebell Bay’s official palaeontologist, and he needs our help urgently.’

  ‘Doing what, exactly? Building sandcastles? Hold on, sir . . .’ The security guard stuck out a tattooed arm as a gaunt man tried to sneak past. ‘The beach is closed until further notice.’

  ‘Says who? I’ve been fossil-hunting here since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I know my rights. Let me go.’ The man made a dash for it, nearly knocking Kat over. There was a jam stain over his heart.

  ‘They’re the ones you should be stopping, not me,’ he ranted, stabbing a finger in the direction of Professor Lamb and his group. ‘Call themselves experts? They don’t have a clue.’

  ‘Harper and Kat?’ A young man in an Indiana Jones-style fedora came rushing up. ‘Phew, I thought I’d never find you. It’s bedlam here, and that’s before we’ve announced an official discovery. The rumour mill’s working overtime.’ He stuck out a tanned hand. ‘Ollie Merriweather. I’m a PhD student from Bristol Uni. I’m working with Professor Lamb for the summer.’

  He handed them hard hats. ‘Hurry, guys. I don’t want to miss the big find – if there’s one to miss. My thesis is riding on this.’ He nodded at the guard. ‘It’s cool, Mike – they’re with me.’

  But as they set off along the beach, Jam-Stain Man swerved around the guard and seized Ollie’s arm. ‘You tell Professor Lamb that, if the reports are true, he doesn’t understand what he’s unleashing. When blood is spilt, as blood there will surely be, don’t say Harry didn’t warn you.’

  There were titters from the crowd. Ollie grinned as Mike steered the man away. ‘I’ll do that, Harry. Thanks for the tip. Come on, girls – let’s go.’

  ‘What was that about?’ demanded Harper, struggling to keep up with the student’s long stride. ‘I don’t want Dad mixed up in anything dangerous.’

  Ollie laughed. ‘Trust me, you have zero worries on that score. Ask any palaeontologist or archaeologist, and they’ll tell you that nutters are a hazard of the job. Whether we’re in Tutankhamun’s tomb or Timbuktu, no discovery is complete without some local crackpot gabbling on about the forces of ancient darkness and blood being spilt.’

  ‘How does Harry know what you’ve found if you haven’t found it yet?’ asked Kat.

  The student slowed. ‘At daybreak, a fisherman noticed a mysterious shadow on the exposed cliff face and put it on social media. Every fossil fanatic in the United Kingdom seems to have seen it.’

  ‘What mysterious shadow?’

  A helicopter blasted overhead, and Ollie covered his ears. ‘We’ve asked the coastguard to keep the choppers away from the cliff in case they blow any fossil we do uncover to Antarctica, but it’s had no effect.’

  They found Theo Lamb balanced on a stepladder, examining flecks in the sandstone. Before she’d met him, Kat had pictured Harper’s father as tweed-wearing and eccentric, with ‘mad professor’ hair. In fact, he was as easy-going as he was brilliant. His mop of brown curls gave him a boyish demeanour, and he was almost always in faded jeans and a band T-shirt. Today it was Bob Dylan.

  He waved from the ladder. ‘Hey, assistants! Good to have you here. Stay well back unless I tell you to approach. This cliff’s as fragile as icing sugar.’

  He returned to studying the sandstone while Ollie and seven or eight other Jurassic Coast experts and officials spread out along the beach, necks craned, scanning the rock for hints of bone.

  Harper was fizzing with anticipation. ‘Kat, this could be it – the find that makes his name. For years, Dad’s been trying to convince his palaeontology peers that Bluebell Bay’s cove hides a sleeping giant like Predator X. That’s the biggest ichthyosaurus ever discovered. That’s why we moved to the Jurassic Coast from Connecticut – so he could hunt for it. He’s been called a clueless know-nothing more times than I can count. Now he has a chance to prove his critics wrong.’

  The urgency of Professor Lamb’s text message had led Kat to believe that a dinosaur skeleton would be unveiled shortly. But nothing happened for an exceedingly long and boring time. Every now and then, the stepladder was shifted and various people tapped at rocks with geology hammers while others shook their heads. The sun climbed higher. Kat was starving. She began to feel quite cross.

  She took off her shoes and stood in the shallows, staring up at the cliff. What had caused the vibrations that she and Harper had experienced before it collapsed? Did they have a natural or unnatural cause? Had anyone else noticed them?

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, girls, thank you for your patience,’ said Professor Lamb, climbing off his perch. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint everyone, but it seems we’ve been the victims of an elaborate hoax. I think it was Mark Twain who said that a lie travels halfway round the world before the truth puts on its boots. That’s what we’re looking at here: fake news, Jurassic style.’

  Groans followed this announcement. One by one, the experts drifted away, heading back into town.

  Harper threw her arms around her father. ‘It’s not fair, Dad. I hoped so hard that this was going to be the Find of the Century for you. I could cry with disappointment.’

  He ruffled her hair. ‘No tears, kiddo. That’s the way it goes sometimes. You gotta be philosophical in this business, or you lose your marbles. How about I treat you and Kat to brunch?’

  A BBC helicopter thundered overhead, peppering them with grit. He raised his voice. ‘DAMN THESE CHOPPERS. LET’S GO EAT WAFFLES.’

  ‘Professor, wait!’

  Ollie’s arm was arrow straight. He was pointing at a bulge in the sandstone about three metres above him. The crumbling gold rock gave the illusion that something was twitching beneath it, like a sidewinder viper emerging from a desert dune. Professor Lamb’s face went the mauve of a Chesil Beach pebble. He grabbed Harper’s hand, and she grabbed Kat’s, and they moved forward together, as if in a trance.

  A film of gold dust lifted off the cliff face. Kat had the sense of a billowing curtain blowing back. The sunlight caught the bleached bones beneath, turning them silver.

  Ollie clutched at his hat. ‘Tell me I’m not seeing things.’

  Harper said faintly, ‘A dragon!’

  ‘And not just any dra
gon,’ said her father. ‘If I’m not mistaken, it’s a two-hundred-million-year-old dracoraptor, breathing fire across the ages. It’s so perfectly preserved that one could almost believe it capable of springing from its sandstone tomb to hunt again.’

  Kat’s heart skipped a beat. Her eyes met Ollie’s. Amid the excitement, there was something distracted in his, as if he were remembering the earlier threat – the one he’d laughed about and forgotten to pass on.

  ‘. . . tell Professor Lamb that . . . he doesn’t understand what he’s unleashing. When blood is spilt, as blood there will surely be, don’t say Harry didn’t warn you.’

  ‘Ma’am, I’ve checked the reservation system three times. Unless we have a ghost wing I’m not aware of, we’re fully booked. Overbooked, to be truthful.’

  The woman’s husband slid a fifty pound note across the reception desk. ‘Any chance we can persuade you to search harder for one of these, uh, “ghost” rooms?’

  ‘Sir, even if an invisible room were available, which it’s not, it’s against hotel policy to accept bribes . . . or pets,’ said the manager, staring coldly at the French bulldog the couple were trying to conceal behind a suitcase. His smile could have frozen a polar bear.

  At the Grand Hotel Majestic, Kat and Harper had spent an entertaining afternoon watching these exchanges from the comfort of a blue velvet sofa overhung by a luxuriant palm. It was free theatre. Dinosaur hunters, reporters and travellers from as far away as Rajasthan and Cancun competed to bribe, cajole and berate the manager into giving them rooms at the best hotel on the Jurassic Coast, most to no avail. The couple from Yorkshire were just the latest casualties of his arctic politeness.

  Kat almost felt sorry for them. Almost, but not quite. Didn’t they read the news? Had they spent the past three and a half days in an undersea cave? How could they not know that ever since Professor Lamb and Ollie Merriweather had unearthed one of the oldest and best-preserved dinosaurs ever found in the United Kingdom, Bluebell Bay had become the centre of the palaeontology universe?

  Every fossil obsessive, newshound or wannabe documentary-maker who could fly, drive or crawl to the Jurassic Coast was here. The narrow lanes were gridlocked and, with half the beach still cordoned off, the town heaved. There were queues outside every restaurant, including the Sea Breeze Tea Rooms, which everyone knew made the driest scones and most execrable tea in all of Dorset.

  The farmers were making a fortune renting out their fields to campers, and there’d been so many rows over parking that extra police had had to be drafted in from Bridport.

  And still the hordes kept coming. Some arrived half expecting to find the dracoraptor already excavated and cantering along the beach like a CGI dinosaur from the movies. Most came to get as close as possible to what the tabloids were calling the ‘Jurassic Dragon’.

  ‘Despite appearances, it’s not a dragon as such,’ Professor Lamb had told the BBC lunchtime news. ‘In some people’s minds, the fiery dragon of myth and lore was an actual dinosaur. I can assure you that it’s a creature of fantasy, pure and simple.’

  ‘But isn’t it true that when the first dracoraptor was discovered in 2014, it was named after the red Welsh Dragon?’

  Professor Lamb’s mouth twitched. ‘Yes, but that’s because Nick and Rob Hanigan, the amateur palaeontologists who discovered it in the Vale of Glamorgan, wished to honour the national symbol of Wales. “Draco” is Latin for “dragon”, and “raptor” means “robber” or “plunderer”. What we’ve found is a carnivorous neotheropod. A distant cousin of T. rex. She’s a new species of dracoraptor – as agile as a leopard, with serrated, dagger-like teeth for slicing through meat. We know that she roamed these shores around two hundred million years ago during the Hettangian age of the Early Jurassic—’

  ‘If the dinosaur you found is not a dragon, how do you explain the wings on her shoulders?’ the presenter broke in.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  An image of a dragon-shaped shadow on Bluebell Bay’s distinctive cliffs flashed up behind Theo Lamb. ‘This photo, taken by a fisherman on the morning of the find, clearly shows what some are saying is the first evidence of the real-life flying reptile that inspired the dragon. Do you think you might be mistaken about her being a dracoraptor?’

  ‘What you’re seeing is a trick of the light. Behind the dracoraptor, we found a trace fossil of a pterosaur—’

  ‘You’re saying there was no flying creature on that cliff?’

  ‘We are not in a position to confirm or deny, but—’

  ‘We’re out of time, Professor Lamb. Thanks for your insights.’

  Harper watched the interview five times straight on her phone, becoming more annoyed with each viewing. ‘Most reporters aren’t interested in science, only sensation. The find on its own is miraculous. Why do they need some fantastical angle?’

  Kat was still gripped by the parade of hopefuls going to and from the front desk. ‘You have to admit that even you thought it was a dragon when you first saw it . . .’ She moved a palm frond to get a better view. ‘Oh, no! Another poor family just crashed and burned.’

  As the family fled, dragging a drooping cockapoo, Harper prodded Kat. ‘Now’s your chance. Go give the manager your Paws and Claws agency business cards.’

  ‘No way! You heard what he said about pets. What’s the point in leaving pet-sitting cards around when none of the guests are allowed animals?’

  Harper rolled her eyes. ‘Because it’s a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity! Over the next few weeks, everyone who’s anyone will be visiting the Majestic. They won’t just come to stay. They’ll come to wine, dine and network. Some of those winers and diners will have dogs that need walking or kittens that need company. You wanted new riding boots. This is your passport to paying for them.’

  Her dimples deepened. ‘Course, if you’d rather spend the summer sifting through dracoraptor bones with me and Dad . . .’

  Kat smiled. ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ Much as she adored Harper and Professor Lamb, the thought of spending hours at a stretch dusting off dinosaur ribs when she could be racing Charming Outlaw along a beach or cuddling kittens was not appealing.

  She took a bundle of Paws and Claws cards from her rucksack. ‘Right, I’m going in. If I’m not back in five minutes, send a search party.’

  ‘Will do,’ confirmed Harper. ‘Give me some cards. I’ll scatter them around. Good luck with the manager. You’ll be fine as long as you avoid eye contact. It’s the icicle stare that gets them every time.’

  First stop was the hotel library. Harper left five Paws and Claws cards on a glass table piled with Belgian-chocolate-coated strawberries. ‘Help Yourself!’ a pink sign invited her. She nibbled a strawberry thoughtfully while studying a framed poster of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile and wondering whether she and Kat should have business cards printed for their Wolfe & Lamb Detective Agency. How else would they find a new mystery to solve?

  Next, she visited the garden. The Majestic occupied a commanding position on the slopes above Bluebell Bay, and its terraced lawns, blooming with red roses and blue rhododendrons, were as famous as its pool.

  Bending to trail her fingers through water the hue of crushed aquamarines, Harper studied the guests baking on white sunbeds. Despite their plush surroundings, none seemed relaxed. One man clutched his phone so tightly to his ear that the blood had drained from his knuckles.

  Two umbrellas along, a pale, freckled man with a pale, freckled partner was taking delivery of a watermelon carved into the shape of a shark. Its black grape eyes were as enigmatic as his sunglasses. Each time he spoke to the woman, he covered his mouth with his free hand, as though afraid that the waiter or a fellow sunbather would read his lips.

  On the opposite side of the pool, Rosalyn Winter, blonde TV reporter for Fast News, frowned over her laptop, typing furiously. She’d been in Bluebell Bay since the morning of the discovery.

  A familiar hat caught Harper’s eye. Its wearer was in the terrace restaurant
, on the top tier of the garden, obscured by a jungle of hydrangeas. Harper ventured closer, discreetly dropping Paws and Claws cards on Rosalyn Winter’s table and two garden benches. There was no mistaking the fedora owner’s eager voice.

  ‘I can’t thank you enough for trusting me with this assignment. You can count on me, I promise.’

  A chair scraped back. Ollie Merriweather came striding jauntily across the lawn. Harper glimpsed his table companion’s hairy wrist as its owner replaced a green-and-gold bottle in an ice bucket. Had Ollie been drinking champagne too? In the short time she’d known him, he’d mentioned the size of his student loan three times.

  His grin turned lopsided when he saw her. ‘Harper! What are you doing here?’

  ‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ said Harper, noting that he’d swapped his rumpled chinos and polo shirt for a crisp white shirt, smart waistcoat and tie.

  ‘What am I doing here? I, umm . . . ran into an old friend.’ His gaze raked the garden. ‘Is your father with you?’

  It occurred to Harper that her dad might not approve of her and Kat scouting for pet-sitting business at the town’s fanciest hotel. ‘No, I’m helping a friend.’

  ‘You mean Kat? I think she’s trying to get your attention.’

  Through a thicket of pool umbrellas and climbing roses, Harper saw Kat waving wildly. She lifted a hand in response.

  Ollie leaned nearer. ‘Maybe don’t mention you saw me here, eh, Harper? Wouldn’t want your dad to think I was slacking off. I’ll be working late tonight to make up for it.’ He winked. ‘No harm in helping an old pal.’

  Whistling, he exited through a garden gate. Before joining Kat, Harper glanced at the terrace table he’d vacated. A waiter was shaking out a fresh white cloth. Ollie’s ‘old pal’ had gone.

  By the pool, Rosalyn Winter cast aside her laptop, snatched up a robe and sprinted along the path that led to reception. A buzz hummed through the garden. Deckchairs were upended as other guests followed. A waitress abandoned a tray of smoked salmon sandwiches to the seagulls. Harper joined the slow-motion stampede.