Circus of Thieves on the Rampage

by William Sutcliffe

  THAT NIGHT, Qeenie’s final performance at the Oh, Wow! Centre was truly spectacular. Of course, Queenie Bombazine’s shows were always spectacular, but this one was extra spectacularly spectacular.

  Every time you watch a movie, it’s the same, but when it comes to live performance, no two nights are identical. Every audience is different, and each audience is an ingredient in what happens on the stage. Performers can feel when the audience is interested, excited, tense, scared, bored, sleepy, restless, alert, thrilled to the point of heart attack, or asleep. Nobody knows how this happens, you can just feel it, and every performer in every kind of performance adjusts the pace of what they are doing to fit with the response of the spectators.

  Sometimes, something special happens. The performance and the response gel, to produce a perfect show. Every laugh, sigh and gasp comes exactly when the performer knows it is going to come, and even a perfectly rehearsed, slick-as-clockwork show lifts to another level. All actors hold nights like this dear in their hearts, and they only come once in a while. When they are gone, you have to just let them go. Like dreams, and escaped budgerigars, you can’t chase after them and get them back. Even if you try and do everything identically the following night, it won’t be the same.

  Queenie’s closing night at the Oh, Wow! was one of those nights. Every single person there was rapt for the entire show.47

  Everyone, I should say, apart from two people at the back, who, when the inflatable palm trees for Reginald Clench’s tuba-playing Hawaiian maiden routine appeared, slipped out of the arena and headed for the box office, tiptoeing in a distinctly dastardly fashion.

  Those two people, of course, were Armitage Shank and his unfortunate adopted son, heir to the Shank Entertainment Empire, Billy.

  Which brings us to a third un-rapt, or perhaps I should say differently-rapt, member of the audience: a girl in the front row, who had her opera glasses trained not on the stage, but in the other direction entirely, towards the two dastardly tiptoers.

  Where they went, she followed.

  To where did Armitage and Billy (and Hannah) tiptoe?

  To a pillar. A large pillar holding up the roof of the Oh, Wow!

  Why? Had Armitage suddenly taken an interest in the wonders of modern engineering? Was he thinking of building his own huge and pointless tent in the middle of somewhere else?

  Oh, no. This pillar had been chosen for three purely practical reasons. Firstly, because it was large enough to hide behind; secondly, because it overlooked the box office; and thirdly, there is no thirdly, I just counted wrong.

  Armitage stared at the box office door in the way a cat stares at a mouse hole. I’m not saying he went down on all fours and purred, I am simply trying to point out the intense fixity of his gaze, combined with an undertone of menace and greed.

  Oh, Armitage, why are you so mean? Why do you steal? Why do you covet other people’s money just so you can buy more stuff that you don’t even really need?48

  Within a minute, Reginald Clench walked out of the box office, carrying a tuba, dressed in his stage costume of yellow flip-flops, grass skirt and a garland of jasmine flowers around his neck. In fact, his gait was closer to a skip than a walk, such was Clench’s excitement as he headed towards the stage. Not so long ago, his tuba-playing, Hawaiian maiden routine had been a mere hobby; now he was performing to a live audience in the country’s largest auditorium. Nothing had ever made him quite so proud and happy, not even Rudolph’s first march.

  ‘You stay here!’ hissed Armitage to Billy. ‘If anyone comes, give the signal to bail out. Three sharp whistles. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Keep your eyes peeled.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘This is it, Billy. Untold riches! More phablets than in your wildest dreams!’

  ‘That’s hard to imagine.’

  ‘I’m telling you, one of these days they’re going to award me the Nobel Prize for Evil.’

  ‘I don’t think there is a Nobel Prize for Evil,’ replied Billy.

  ‘There will be. Mark my words.’

  Leering his leeriest leer, Armitage scurried away to commence what he was confident would be the most dramatic and lucrative burglary of his entire burglarising career.

  Reginald had locked the door of the box office, of course, but Armitage could pick locks as easily as he could pick his nose. In fact, if he felt like showing off, he could do both at once, one with each hand. But this was no occasion for fancy routines. He broke through the box office door as quickly as he could and slipped in.

  Like all good burglarisers, he had thought in advance about the countermeasures that might have been put in place by way of security, and no sooner was he through the door than he stood dead still, scouring the room with his beady, nasty, mean, piggy49 eyes.

  Queenie was no fool. Armitage knew a trap would have been laid for him. But what was it, and where would he find it, and how would he get round it?

  As we have already seen, Armitage had a lookout in place. But this lookout was not looking out. He was waving happily at Hannah, who had appeared from the auditorium just as Armitage disappeared into the box office.

  Now that Hannah was there, with Armitage right in the middle of his burglary, the task was simple. She had to call the police, on Armitage’s phone, but not before Billy had time to run off and hide. Because, whether he liked it or not, Billy was an accomplice. And, however wonderful it would be for Armitage to meet his dooooooom, it would all be for nothing if Billy met his dooooooom with him.

  The plan was already planned. They didn’t even need to exchange a single word. Hannah looked at Billy; Billy looked at Hannah; they nodded; Billy handed over the phone and ran off to his secret hiding place.

  Hannah counted to a hundred, dialled 999, and told the police that if they came to the box office of the Oh, Wow! Centre as quickly as possible, they would catch the country’s most notorious burglariser in the act of an audacious crime. She also told them that she could hand over the burglariser’s phone, which was bound to contain evidence of his dastardly, dismal, detestable, dire, disgraceful, deceitful, devious, dubious, despicable, dirty, depraved, dishonest, disgusting, dreadful deeds.

  But, only a second after she hung up, something extraordinary happened – something that had no place whatsoever in Hannah and Billy’s anti-dastardly-plan plan.

  A man appeared. A man in a hurry. A man still dressed in prison uniform.

  Hannah had seen the old posters. She recognised him immediately. This was Ernesto Espadrille.

  The shock of it froze her to the spot and seemed to glue her mouth shut. She wanted to run towards him and throw herself into his arms, she wanted to shout to him that they simply had to talk, she wanted to call out and tell him where to find Billy, but before she had a chance to do any of these things, Ernesto slipped away, following Armitage into the box office.

  Hannah couldn’t just stand there and watch. She had to speak to him. So, in a sudden and major departure from the plan she had made with Billy, she ran towards the box office after Armitage and Ernesto, her two maybe-fathers.

  In a calmer frame of mind, Hannah might have sensed that the middle of a burglary, with the police already on the way, was possibly not the best time to resolve the question of her paternity, but Hannah was not in a remotely calm frame of mind whatsoever. The conundrum at the very heart of her identity wasn’t a topic she could put aside and forget about, not for a moment.

  This was a one-off opportunity. Both maybe-fathers were in the same place! That was never going to happen again. One of them had just got out of jail and the other one was almost certainly about to go to jail. This presented a very small window of opportunity – a fleeting chance to confront them both. So what if they were busy? So what if the police were coming? So what if just being in that room put you in danger of immediate arrest? Hannah had to know which father was which and who was who and what was what. She couldn’t wait a moment longer. Granny’s confusing, long-winded, Russ
ian-doll tales just weren’t good enough. Hannah needed the truth, and this was her chance to go and get it.

  So off she went, without even pausing to fear for the consequences.

  Fearlessness is an admirable attribute. Sometimes. Other times, not so much.

  At this point, with things getting a little complicated, we have to step back a few moments in time. Don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere seaweedy or old-trainery. We’re just skipping back one fragrant little time-hiccup to the moment we last saw Armitage.

  He has just stepped into the box office. He is standing dead still, scouring the room for security devices. His skilled eye soon falls on a suspicious-looking item. Of course, in this room, at this moment, Armitage himself was the most suspicious-looking item, what with him being a burglar in the middle of a burglary, but we are inside Armitage’s head now and, through his eyes, suspicious-looking items were items whose purpose was to stop burglaries. Yes, folks, this is what it feels like to be inside the warped, topsy-turvy brain of a master criminal. Weird, isn’t it?

  The object that caught his eye was an award. A suspiciously shiny, new-looking award. A trophy, in fact, awarding Bean-Counting Functionary of the Month status to Arthur Tariff in the discounts, supplements and rip-offs department. What made this trophy suspicious was the fact that it had a wire snaking out from the back, and a small hole in the front, through which was visible a tiny lens. Armitage knew immediately what this was: a security camera, a disguised security camera, put in place for the purpose of catching him.

  Armitage reached into the twenty-third largest pocket of his safari suit and took out a piece of thick card. Onto this card he wrote: Haha ha HAHAHAHAHAha ha ha ha ha ha HA! HA! HA! HA! TOO OBVIOUS!

  He stuck this piece of card in front of the lens of the camera, ensuring that all it would record was his cackle and gloat. And oh, how Armitage loved to cackle and gloat. If anyone ever asked him if he had any hobbies, this was the answer he usually gave: cackling and gloating. And badminton.

  Now the burglarising could begin.

  Except for . . . goodness me . . . what on earth was that?! A statue? Or a dog?

  Armitage had just spotted Rudolph. Rudolph was standing to attention. Motionless. He was upright, in a kennel especially designed for upright dogs, twice the height, with an arched opening right to the top. It looked more like a sentry box than a kennel. In fact, it was a sentry box. Rudolph was on guard duty. Just like the soldiers outside Buckingham Palace, his body was rigid and unmoving.

  Armitage stared at Rudolph. Rudolph stared dead ahead.

  If this was a guard dog it didn’t seem to be doing a very good job.

  On other burglarising missions, Armitage took with him a raw steak, for the purpose of distracting guard dogs, but he hadn’t been expecting to find a dog in the box office, so this time he was steakless. He patted through the pockets of his safari suit, and in the twenty-seventh one on the left he found a square of chocolate that he’d stolen from Billy earlier in the day.

  ‘Here you go, boy,’ he said, putting it gingerly at the dog’s feet.

  The dog still didn’t move.

  ‘You’re a weird dog,’ said Armitage.

  You’re a weird man, thought Rudolph, but he didn’t bark or twitch.

  Armitage concluded that this was either the world’s worst guard dog, or that it was actually dead and stuffed. What he didn’t even consider was that Rudolph might have been instructed to observe, but not to intervene until a particular trigger point had been reached.

  Armitage now turned his attention to the safe. Joy of joys, wonder of wonders, rapture of raptures, the thing wasn’t even locked! Distracted by the excitement of getting changed into his Hawaiian maiden costume, Clench had been slack. He’d made a catastrophic error.

  Of all the things to forget!

  Armitage let out his biggest cackle of the day as he reached in and began to stuff his pockets with money. He would have quite liked to include ‘stuffing my pockets with money’ on his list of hobbies, but to be honest this didn’t really happen often enough for Armitage to count it as anything more than an occasional pastime.

  Just as Armitage was beginning to think this was the easiest burglary of his entire career, he heard a voice in the room behind him, a voice he dimly, distantly recognised from his dim and distant past.

  ‘ARMITAGE SHANK! WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING? IN FACT, I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND I’M NOT EVEN SLIGHTLY SURPRISED. NOW WHERE’S MY SON?’

  Armitage spun round and gazed up in horror. The voice belonged to a man he had not seen for many years. A man he thought was safely locked up in jail. A man in the top ten on Armitage’s list of People Who Will Want To Do Me In If They Ever Find Me Again. Ernesto Espadrille.

  Two angry men, one brave girl and a massive heap of cash

  HAD HE BEEN THINKING MORE CLEARLY, Armitage might have concentrated on finishing stuffing his pockets with money; he might even have tried to ignore Ernesto’s surprising outburst; but the idea of Billy not being his son was one that made Armitage’s brain sizzle with uncontainable fury.

  ‘Your son?’ snapped Armitage, his moustache quivering like a plucked harp string. ‘You don’t have a son!’

  ‘Don’t give me that nonsense,’ replied Ernesto. ‘Just tell me where to find Billy!’

  ‘I tell you, he’s not your son, he’s mine. You ran off and abandoned him years ago. He can’t ever forgive you for that. Luckily, I was around to pick up the pieces, or who knows what would have happened to him? Disappointment, debility, destruction, distress, despair, defeat and destitution. He calls me father now, and has completely forgotten that anyone else has any claim on him. If he sees you, and remembers what you did to him, it’ll break his heart.’

  Ernesto’s response to these words was to shrink. A human being cannot literally diminish in size from one moment to the next, but that is exactly what appeared to happen to Ernesto. The pain of hearing these words seemed to knock the life out of him. Within the few seconds it took Armitage to utter this speech, Ernesto gave the appearance of shrivelling into a smaller, lesser man.

  ‘I . . . I . . . didn’t abandon him,’ stammered Ernesto. ‘I had no choice.’

  ‘Billy knows you betrayed him. He loathes you. I’ve tried my best to teach him not to hate – to have a kind and gentle soul – but the pain runs too deep. You have scarred him to the very bones.’

  ‘I . . . I . . . came for him as soon as I could.’

  ‘Too late. Many, many years too late. Now go away and leave me to finish my work before you wound him any further.’

  Suddenly, a voice piped up from the doorway. The voice of a young girl. A voice supercharged with outrage and anger and also a little bit of loveliness.

  ‘LIES!’ bellowed Hannah. ‘IT’S ALL LIES! DON’T BELIEVE A WORD HE SAYS!’

  ‘Who are you?’ said Ernesto.

  ‘That’s what I came here to ask you,’ replied Hannah. ‘Who am I? You two are the only people who know the answer.’

  ‘Oh, my dizzy uncle!’ yelped Armitage. ‘It’s you! You’re that girl! The one who tricked Billy! The one who stole all the things I had stolen and gave them back! How did you get here? Who are you? Who are you working for? Why won’t you leave me alone?’

  The sight of this mysterious, theft-foiling girl gave Armitage a cold, porridgey feeling in the pit of his stomach. Last time, she had been Very Bad News Indeed. He did not want her there. Not one little bit.

  Hannah had no interest in any of Armitage’s questions. She leapt towards Ernesto and grabbed his hands in hers, looking up passionately into his eyes. ‘Everything Armitage just said is a lie! Billy loves you! He knows you didn’t abandon him! He thinks about you every day! Armitage forces him to steal and do bad things and he doesn’t want to do any of them! He wants to be with you. He’s been waiting and waiting for you to come back and get him and as soon as he sees you he’ll be the happiest boy in the world and he won’t ever want to see Armitage for a singl
e second ever again, because Armitage is a bad, bad, bad person and you’re not and Billy wants to be with you again more than anything else in the whole world including chocolate.’

  ‘Chocolate?’ said Ernesto and Armitage together.

  ‘Maybe that last bit about chocolate doesn’t make any sense. The point is, everything Armitage just said is a lie. Billy knows he’s your son. And I think I am, too! Not your son, I mean your daughter. Am I? You have to tell me, because, if it’s not you, it’s him!’ said Hannah, jabbing a finger towards Armitage. ‘And frankly I’d rather have a warthog for a father than that horrible, rotten, lying thief.’

  ‘Daughter?’ said Ernesto and Armitage together.

  ‘My mother was Esmeralda Espadrille. I was born exactly twelve years ago yesterday while she was on a world tour. My granny says there are two people who could be my father. You or you. I have to know. And it has to be you, Ernesto. Please, please, please tell me you’re my father.’

  At this moment, two strange things happened. The first one was hardly surprising, given Hannah’s phone call. It was the sudden interruption of a police siren.

  The second thing, far stranger, was Armitage’s reaction to this sound. As if suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of inexplicable and uncharacteristic generosity, he leapt forward and began to pull all the money out of his pockets and shove it into the pockets of Ernesto’s prison uniform. (Such was Ernesto’s hurry to see his son again that he hadn’t paused to change out of his prison clothes into something a little less suspicious. This, as we are shortly to discover, was a costly error.)

  As the sound of police boots approached, Armitage bent over and thrust his head into Ernesto’s armpit, grabbing Ernesto’s arm and squeezing it around his own throat.

  ‘Help! Help!’ yelled Armitage. ‘He’s got me! Please don’t shoot! I’m a hostage! He’s got me round the neck and he’s going to throttle me unless he gets all this money. I’m so scared! He’s a monster.’