‘Hmmmm,’ said Queenie, who didn’t want to be discouraging, but who remained not entirely convinced by the plan. ‘Do you think this might be a little overelaborate?’
‘The sword doesn’t have to be medieval. That’s optional.’
‘It’s not just that. It’s the whole thing.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘I don’t want to cut his head off, I just want to stop him robbing me. I want to catch him in the act and get him sent to jail.’
‘The sword can be blunt. Or we could use a Viking club. That should just knock him out. And the electric current doesn’t have to be fatal. Paralysis would be fine.’
‘Why don’t we just put in a camera to record what he does, and we can tip off security to arrest him on the way out.’
‘That’s all you want?’
‘I think so.’
Binary Tim’s three-times-normal-size eyeballs filled with three-times-normal-size tears. Big, wet golf balls of disappointment. ‘You don’t want the motion-triggered medieval sword?’
‘I don’t think we need that.’
‘The electrified toilet seat?’
‘I think that might be a hazard for the staff.’
‘I could put an exploding cactus on the windowsill. Just in case.’
‘That’s very kind of you, but I think I’ll pass on the exploding cactus.’
‘Laxative in the sprinkler system?’
‘Just water will be fine.’
‘OK,’ said Tim, looking more than a little crushed. ‘If you’re sure.’
‘I’m sure.’
Queenie gave Binary Tim a kiss on the cheek by way of thank you, which seemed to cheer him up enormously, and he left in good spirits. It was only then that Queenie noticed Hannah was awake.
‘Hannah, dear. You’re up! What would you like for breakfast? Boiled egg, fried egg, poached egg, coddled egg, scrambled egg, devilled egg, eggs Benedict Cumberbatch or omelette? Or all of them. That’s what I had and quite delicious it was, too.’
‘What’s eggs Benedict Cumberbatch?’
‘It’s poached egg on a muffin with bacon and hollandaise sauce served in a deerstalker hat. Delicious.’
‘You like eggs, then?’
‘Oh, yes. Absolutely. You can live off eggs and water and nothing else. Did you know that? Or maybe that was coconuts. Anyway, we can order you the whole egg medley and, if you don’t finish it, I’ll polish off your leftovers. Did you hear Binary Tim’s plan?’
‘Yes. He’s very ambitious.’
‘Wonderful man, but works best off a short rein. Wild imagination. Which is normally a good thing, but it’s not what you want in an IT consultant.’
‘So he’s putting a camera in the box office?’
‘That’s the plan.’
‘And that will catch Armitage?’ asked Hannah.
‘I think so.’
‘But what about Billy? What if he’s there, too? Will he get arrested?’
‘We have to find him first. We have to warn him. If we want Armitage to meet his dooooooom, we have to make sure he commits the burglary, but without Billy taking part, and without Armitage noticing anything strange. It’s a conundrum, and we need someone small and unobtrusive and cunning to get a message to Billy before the burglary takes place. Someone he knows and trusts who can sneak behind the lines of Armitage’s operation without being noticed.’
‘ME!’43 said Hannah.
‘Yes,’ replied Queenie. ‘You. Now are you ready?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘Not before you’ve had your eggs you’re not. Now eat up.’
Hannah ate up. The eggs Benedict Cumberbatch was the best breakfast she had ever tasted, though the deerstalker hat was a little chewy.
Hannah on the rampage
HANNAH BOUNDED OUT of the presidential suite powered by a surge of egg-fuelled energy. Boy, she was buzzing.
Then she realised she had Queenie’s alarm clock in her pocket. She switched it off and she stopped buzzing, which was a relief.
Hannah went down in the lift and up again, because she liked lifts, and down again, and out into the Oh, Wow! Centre, which was filled with excited people walking around, wondering why they were excited and how they had ended up in the middle of nowhere in a huge and pointless tent. They were there for the final night of Queenie Bombazine’s Aquatic Circus, of course, but since it was just after breakfast time, these people had really arrived preposterously early, which perhaps explained their confusion.
Hannah went off to look for Billy. She hunted and hunted and hunted and hunted and hunted and hunted, but to no avail. He was nowhere to be found. Not even if you hunted and hunted and hunted and hunted and hunted and hunted.
Hannah’s rampage was not going to plan. In fact, it was proving a little monotonous.
She was so disappointed that she decided to console herself with a stick of candy floss.
Yes! Candy floss!
From the candy floss stall!
Which is when she found him!
Oh, joy!
Oh, rapture!
Oh, bliss!
Oh, stop using exclamation marks!
I can’t help it!
Stop!
I can’t!
You have to!
I’ll try!
The reason why Hannah had been unable to find Billy was because he’d spent the entire morning on the roof of the candy floss stall waiting for Hannah, and the roof of the candy floss stall was a place Hannah had not thought to include in her hunt.
No sooner had Hannah ordered her candy floss than Billy leapt down from his perch to give her an enormous hug-of-the-century. Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm, Billy failed to notice that his ankles were tangled in a string of bunting. So his top half leapt down, but his legs didn’t. This happened just as Hannah was passed her stick of candy floss.
The upshot of this simultaneous candy floss delivery and bunting entanglement was that just as Hannah was about to take her first bite, an unidentifiable head plunged down and hung there, buried inside the cloud of pink sugar.
Hannah’s first thought was that she was being attacked by a cunning, airborne candy floss thief. When she heard the word ‘Help!’ emerging from inside her candy floss, she began to think maybe this person wasn’t a thief, but she still couldn’t understand why they would choose to dangle inside her mid-morning snack.
‘Hannah!’ said the candy floss. ‘It’s me!’
‘Who?’ said Hannah to the candy floss.
‘ME!’ replied the candy floss aka Billy, who wasn’t thinking straight at this moment, on account of being upside down, tangled up in bunting, suffocating inside a portion of novelty fairground food.
Hannah decided the best thing to do was to take a large bite of the floss. This bite revealed to her the most joyous and wonderful sight she had ever seen. Billy! Swathed in what now looked like a fluffy pink balaclava.
‘Bmmmmmlmmmmmmmmm!’ yelled Hannah, whose mouth was too full for any successful attempt at speech.
‘Hannah!’ said Billy. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere!’
‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ replied Hannah. ‘I never thought I’d find you here. Inside my snack. How did you do that?’
‘Magic,’ said Billy, modestly. (Every skilled performer develops an instinct for making mistakes look like part of the show.)
‘I’m so pleased we found each other,’ gabbled Hannah. ‘I’ve got amazing things to tell you. It turns out you’re my brother! Or my half-brother! Depending on who my father is! Which I don’t know just yet, but both of the men who might be are going to be here tonight which means I might be about to find out. And one of them’s your father. He’s on his way! He’s coming to find you! And either way we’re definitely siblings. Isn’t that just the best thing ever!’
‘It really is! I can’t believe it!’ said Billy, who was so delighted by this news that he completely forgot he was hanging by the ankles from a stri
ng of bunting.
Nature, however, has a way of curing people of this kind of forgetfulness. Billy’s reminder of the unusual circumstances surrounding his reunion with his sister came about only a second or two later, at the moment when the bunting tore, releasing him to the unforgiving mercies of gravity.
Gravity, like other laws of physics, has little truck with sentiment.
Billy crashed downwards, landing on top of Hannah, giving her that hug he’d been meaning to give only a short while earlier, though as it turned out this wasn’t so much an I’m-so-pleased-to-see-you hug as the more unusual terribly-sorry-but-I-seem-to-be-using-you-as-a-landing-mat variety.
Hannah didn’t mind. She was far too happy to let a small matter like being knocked over and landed on bother her.
When they’d finally untangled themselves from one another, Hannah suddenly spoke in a sharp whisper. ‘Quick! We have to hide!’
‘From who?’
‘Armitage! We’ve made plan! Me and Queenie and Granny! Actually, Granny isn’t a huge part of it since she keeps dozing off, but there is a plan! Armitage can’t see us together! Because tonight he’s finally going to meet his dooooooooooooom!’
The golden phablet
ARMITAGE SHANK WAS IN A BAD MOOD.
Yeah, yeah, what else is new? Armitage was always in a bad mood.
These things are relative, so when I said Armitage was in a bad mood, I meant he was in a mood measured on his special scale of badness, on which good is bad, and bad is just appallingly, atrociously, unimaginably, stinkily grumpy. That’s the mood we were talking about. Imagine if you had one foot stuck in a mousetrap, the other in a box of snakes, were wearing clothes made of sandpaper, had just accidentally dyed your hair luminous purple, and a bag of rotten haddock had just been tied to your nose by someone who was also tickling the back of your neck with soggy pondweed. Imagine what kind of mood that would put you in. That’s how Armitage felt. Not because he was in the unpleasant situation I have just described, but because he had lost his phone, and he hated losing his phone.
The thing is – and Armitage didn’t know this – he hadn’t lost his phone. His phone had been stolen (or, rather, borrowed) by Billy. If Armitage had known this, Billy would have been in a whole huge bucket of trouble, but – IRONY ALERT – Billy had learned exceptionally good thieving skills from Armitage, so had little trouble taking his phone without raising the alarm.
‘I need to send out a jeet on Jitter saying that I’ve lost my phone, but I can’t because I’VE LOST MY PHONE!’ yelled Armitage, who, having searched everywhere in vain, was now lying on the floor, sobbing, beating the ground with his fists. Armitage suffered from a really rather undignified tendency to indulge his moods.44
‘I’m sure it will turn up,’ replied Billy, who at that moment realised he had forgotten to turn the phone off and, since it was in his pocket, an incoming phone call would give him away. Armitage had no friends, so this was unlikely, but nonetheless, Billy decided he had to get out of there fast.
‘I have to get out of here fast,’ said Billy.
‘Why?’ sobbed Armitage, who was now beating his chest with one hand and pulling a fistful of hair with the other, while glancing at himself in the mirror to gauge which action had a more tragic appearance.
‘I . . . er . . . fancy a bit of candy floss.’
‘Good idea. Get me one, too,’ said Armitage, suddenly leaping towards Billy and eyeballing him with an intense stare. ‘You mustn’t be too discouraged by what has happened today. I know it’s hard. I know our rampage may seem doomed and cursed right now, but we have to remember what is within reach. After tonight, we can use Queenie’s money to buy whatever phone we want. I might even get you one. In fact, if our plan comes off, tomorrow I was going to go out first thing and buy THIS!’
Armitage reached into a pocket of his safari suit, and was annoyed to find the climax to his masterpiece of motivational speaking ruined by the fact that the ‘THIS!’ in question was not there.
He looked in another pocket, then another one. Then another one.
Armitage’s safari suit, designed for rampages of a long, complex and gadget-heavy nature, had seventy-three pockets. It was in the seventy-first pocket that Armitage eventually found what he was looking for.
‘THIS!’ he repeated, triumphantly pulling out a tightly folded piece of paper, though even Armitage had to admit the gesture would have been more dramatic had he tried this pocket seventy pockets earlier.
He handed the paper to Billy. It was a picture of a sock, torn from a magazine.
‘A sock?’
‘No, the other side.’
Billy turned over the paper. ‘A phone?’
‘No!’ replied Armitage. ‘A phablet. The pinnacle of human technological achievement. The ultimate communication device in the entire history of the human race. The perfect union of smartphone and tablet computer. The iSung Gooseberry 7d special edition, with fingerprint recognition, iris recognition, recognition recognition and recognition recognition recognition. The gadget of our dreams.’
Billy, who did not have gadgets in his dreams, looked a little nonplussed.45 ‘What’s recognition recognition recognition?’ he asked.
‘It’s like recognition recognition, but faster. It’s a whole new generation of recognition. I’ve been reading about it in What Phablet? for months. Jitter has been alight with rumours, and now it’s on the market! We can be almost the first!’
‘Oh,’ said Billy. ‘That’s . . . great.’
Armitage held Billy firmly with one hand on each shoulder and gave him an encouraging squeeze. ‘There is hope, Billy. We just have to put adversity behind us and march on bravely, undeterred by the curses that fate tosses into our path!’
‘OK,’ said Billy. ‘I’ll try.’
‘One day we’ll have every gadget a person could possibly want! I promise you! At least, I will, but I’ll let you borrow them sometimes, if you’re good, especially the obsolete ones.’
‘Thanks. I can hardly wait.’
‘You don’t have to. The waiting’s almost over, Billy. The future is about to arrive.’
‘Isn’t the future always about to arrive?’
Armitage thought for a moment. ‘It is. You’re right. But not this future. Not a future as high-spec and brand new and gadgety as the one we’re going to have. Everything we’ve been deprived of all these years is about to fall into our lap. It’s not easy being a thief. It’s a very uncertain career, with poor promotion prospects, a high drop-out rate and no pension plan. We’ve waited a long time for our moment of triumph, Billy, but tonight’s the night!’
‘Great. I’m going to pop out for that candy floss.’
‘There seems to be an awful lot of candy floss stuck in your hair. Why can’t you just eat that?’
‘Er . . . it’s gone off. Look.’
Billy plucked a lump from out of his fringe and handed it to Armitage, who stared suspiciously at the pink dollop, which looked chewier and hairier than candy floss ought to. In fact, it looked more like a skinned rodent than a fairground treat.
‘OK,’ said Armitage. ‘Off you go. But make sure you’re back in good time for our dastardly plan.’
‘I will be. Don’t worry,’ said Billy, though inside his inner cackle was having a secret, silent cackle-party. The future really was about to arrive and not the one Armitage wanted.
The secret rendezvous
I CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENS in this chapter, I’m afraid.
Why not?
Because it’s a secret, obviously. If I told you, it would just be a normal rendezvous. All I can tell you is this. Billy snuck out. Or is it sneaked out? Or should that be snicked out? Snucked? Snacked? Whatever – he left in a sly and secretive fashion and met up with Hannah in a secret place.
Where?
I can’t tell you. Obviously!
They had a short meeting, during which they perfected their plan to foil Armitage’s plan, hugged a little more, chatted a
bout Important Things, and picked the last of the dried candy floss out of Billy’s hair (which proved to be a much more enjoyable activity than you would have thought).46
Billy also handed over Armitage’s phone to Hannah, as arranged.
Hannah reminded Billy that his father could be arriving any minute, which wasn’t strictly necessary, since Billy had spent the last two days thinking about little else.
Billy reminded Hannah that the father who might be arriving any minute might also be her father. This was a pointless statement for exactly the same reason.
Parting is such sweet sorrow, wrote an old bloke in a puffy shirt many, many years ago, and he was right. He wasn’t talking about hairstyles, either. He was talking about saying goodbye to someone you don’t want to say goodbye to, and that’s exactly what it was like for Billy and Hannah. But they had to separate one last time, in order to enact their fiendishly clever plan.
Good old Billy and Hannah, eh? Aren’t they wonderful and brave and clever and resourceful and kind and good at picking stuff out of each other’s hair? One day, somebody should write a book about them.
They have? Who? When? Where can I buy it? Does it have pictures?
The dastardly plan meets the anti-dastardly-plan plan
Circus of Thieves on the Rampage Page 8
