Inside the house, Shelby took a deep breath and dialled the number her mother had written down. When he answered she felt a surge of adren-aline in her belly like when she was approaching a big jump.
'Hello, is this Chad? This is Shelby.'
'Hi.' Chad sounded dejected.
'Mum told me what happened.' Shelby waited. In the background she could hear the hum of conversa-tion. When Chad didn't say anything Shelby felt stupid, wishing she hadn't rung after all. 'So what happened at the police station? Who did you have to talk to there?'
'It was a woman. A sergeant,' Chad replied.
'Sergeant Everard? Was she mean to you? She must find her job stressful or something. She's always frowning.'
Chad asked. 'You know her?'
Shelby sighed. 'Yeah. She's yelled at me a few times. Actually, one of the times was the day you gave me a lift home from the Gully. Remember that day? My parents thought I'd been kidnapped, and when Sergeant Everard found out I wasn't, she told me off for wasting police time.'
Chad sighed. 'I've never been in trouble with the police before. I can't really afford to. My whole family has big plans for me. Mum wants me to go into politics. Dad wants me to be a professional footballer. My sister wants me to be a vet.'
'What do you want to do?' Shelby asked.
'I'd like to be a PE teacher,' he answered. 'I don't think you can be a teacher if you have a police record.'
'You're a juvenile. It doesn't count.'
Chad was quiet again for a while and then he spoke. 'Everything was going well for me, you know? I was doing OK at school and in sport. Now this. These things stay with you forever. They always do.'
Shelby remembered how Sergeant Everard behaved when Diablo first went missing – how she spoke to Shelby as though she had done something wrong. Sergeant Everard had formed an opinion about Shelby that would always follow her; no matter what good things Shelby did afterwards.
'My mum says it will all blow over,' Shelby assured him. 'She said Mrs Edel will calm down now she has Diablo back.'
'Man, that lady is a complete fruit loop! She drives in like a mad woman and starts screaming and threat-ening people. I was sure she was going to deck someone. She attacked us! She was trespassing, verbally assaulting, and about half a dozen other illegal things. She should be the one arrested.'
These were the same details but a different emphasis to the version that Erin had given. Shelby wondered who was telling the truth, or whether the real story was somewhere in the middle.
'So I guess you made friends with the circus people without me,' Shelby joked, trying to lighten the mood.
'You should see what they do! They stand up on the horse's back and do spins and hang off the side. It's amazing! I reckon you and Keisha would get on really well. She's about our age,' Chad said. 'Zeb is cool too. He's Keisha's grandfather. Zeb has been training horses since he was about ten years old. All they do is talk about horses all the time. You would fit in perfectly.'
Shelby bit her lip. Her first instinct had been that she would get along well with the circus people too, but now there was 'the barney'. She had been friends with Erin and Lindsey for a long time and she'd only just met Chad. She didn't know whom to believe, and now she felt as though they were both asking her to choose a side.
'They didn't steal the horse, Shelby,' Chad said.
'How did Diablo get there then?' she asked.
'I don't know, but they say they didn't steal him and I believe them. Why would they? They have a trillion other horses that are better looking and can do way more cool stuff than Diablo. He's nice, but he's just a horse.'
Shelby hadn't thought about Diablo that way before. She had always seen Diablo the way that Lindsey and her mum did – as the best and most valuable horse on their property.
She supposed people would look at Blue differently to the way she did as well. People who didn't know Blue would wonder why she kept him when he was kind of ugly and too small for her, and not good at anything except galloping around in the bush. But Shelby loved him. Blue was her best friend.
'You should come and meet them,' Chad told her. 'They are much more interesting than Lindsey Edel and her mum – trust me.'
Shelby flushed. 'Lindsey is my friend, Chad. The Edels have been really good to me. They keep Blue for me, and they arranged for me to have lessons with a proper instructor.'
Chad snorted. 'If they're such good friends then maybe you could make them stop ruining my life.'
15 Operation Beelzebub
Connor was in his pyjamas, sitting on his father's lap, reading from a thick book. Blake was lying on his stomach on the floor, colouring in. His hair was still wet from his bath. Shelby could see the comb marks.
'William the conkwee . . . conkwee-err . . .' Connor read.
'Conqueror,' corrected his father.
'Conqueror arrived in one thousand and . . .'
'Ten sixty-six,' Dad said. 'It's a year.'
Connor rubbed his eyes.
'You're tired. I think that's enough for tonight.' His father smoothed a hand across Connor's forehead.
'One more paragraph!' Connor insisted.
'One more sentence.'
As Shelby approached she could see the title, A Guide to London. She huffed and dropped into the armchair with a thud.
'Why don't you want to go to London, Shel?' asked Blake, leaning on one elbow and chewing the end of his pencil.
'I do want to go to London. I just don't want to live at Aunty Jenny's house for a year and a half beforehand.' She glared at her father. 'So you've decided then. Nice of you to let me know.'
'No, we have not decided and you watch yourself, missy. You might officially be a teenager now, but that's not an excuse to be rude.'
'Fine!' Shelby stood up and stomped into the kitchen.
'What's that face all about?' her mother asked.
'Just my whole life is falling apart and nobody cares!'
'I care. Truly!' Shelby's mum held out a bag of potatoes and a peeler.
'You just want a slave!' Shelby complained.
'How about an exchange? Clearly we need to launch an investigation about this whole Diablo business. I'll help you plan your operation if you help me cook the dinner.'
'Really?' Shelby grinned. 'You would do that?'
Her mother nodded. Shelby's mother was a part-time store detective. She was also doing a course at TAFE in surveillance and investigation, so she pretty much had a degree in solving mysteries.
'I know what we need!' Shelby put down the potato she was peeling and jogged down the hall-way. In a moment she was back with her brothers' blackboard under her arm. She placed it on the kitchen bench, leaning it against the splashback. Then, with the chalk, she drew a horizontal line in the middle like she had seen on Without a Trace.
She drew a short vertical line at the beginning. 'I fed Diablo on Good Friday. He was definitely there then!' Next to her mark she wrote, 'Last seen by SS @ 4.45 pm.'
Her mother scraped some vegetables from the cutting board into a saucepan. 'We know he was gone on Easter Saturday morning when you went in to give him his breakfast. What time was that?'
Shelby drew another mark in the timeline and wrote, '7.30 am – gone!'
'Then I saw him in the stable at the Equus Caballus place today at about three thirty.' She drew a new mark at the end of the timeline and wrote, 'Tuesday 3.30 pm – Found'.
'Now we just need to figure out what happened in between,' her mother said.
Shelby threw the piece of chalk in the air and caught it. 'How do we do that?'
'Interview people. Find out if anyone saw anything suspicious.'
'Marie and Shelby Shaw – Private Investigators on the case!' Shelby grinned.
'Don't tell people that you're investigating a case, Shel,' her mother said as she looked in the fridge for the next ingredient.
'Why not?'
'Because people will either make things up, because they want to be helpful, or they will
withhold information because they have a guilty conscience, or because they decide that what they saw is not impor-tant, when in context it's actually significant. Worse still, they will make things up and lie about real things, and then you're worse off for talking to them than if you hadn't.'
Shelby blinked. 'But why would people do that? Why don't they just tell the truth?'
'Very few things people say are about truth, Shelby,' her mother told her.
'You're saying I should lie to people to stop them lying to me.'
'No.' Her mother sighed. 'I don't want you to sneak around, or spy on people – just ask questions. If you can find out what happened – the bare facts of the case – you might be able to help resolve a dispute between your friends, but it's possible that you may not get to the bottom of it, honey.'
Shelby frowned thinking. 'Like hide and seek.'
'What do you mean?' asked her mother.
'When you play hide and seek one person's job is to hide and the other person has to find them. We're playing the same game except with the truth, and they don't know we're playing, so that makes it easier – like how easy it would be to find someone in hide and seek if they weren't actually hiding.'
'Except, of course, if someone really does have something to hide then they would be playing the game,' her mother said, rinsing the chopping board.
'I think I get it now,' Shelby smiled.
Her mother divided the meat into portions. 'An operation like this needs a name. What shall we call it?
'Operation Diablo?' suggested Shelby.
'That might be a bit obvious. How about we look on the internet and see if there is a word that means the same thing as Diablo, but other people wouldn't know what that is?'
'Can we have code names?'
'Code names are essential!' her mother answered. 'But first you have to finish peeling those spuds.'
'I thought you might have forgotten about that.'
'Not much escapes me, Shelby.'
While the meal was cooking they looked on the internet and decided on 'Operation Beelzebub' and their code names were 'Cherub' for Shelby, and 'The Seraph' for her mum.
After dinner Shelby sat at her desk and wrote a list of people she needed to interview. She decided to start with Erin. They had a Science assignment to do over the holidays, so she could use that as her cover story for ringing.
'Have you started your assignment?' Shelby asked when Erin answered the phone.
'Are you kidding?' Erin answered.
'Neither have I,' confessed Shelby. 'So how do you reckon those people stole Diablo?' Shelby held her pen over the notepad, ready to record any information that might be useful.
'I've been thinking about that,' replied Erin. 'During the storm, those circus people ran across the Gully, knocked down the back fence, ran up to Diablo's enclosure, took him, ran back to their place and put him in the stable.'
'That's your theory?'
'Yes. What's wrong with it?'
Shelby snorted and put her pen down. 'If they are going to come in the back way, wouldn't it have been easier to steal one of the horses from the back paddock? There are broodmares in there that are pretty valuable, and that are actually in foal to Diablo, which is like a two-for-one. Why didn't they steal all the horses in the back paddock? Why Diablo? Why would they put a big branch on the fence to cover up the fact that they knocked the fence down when they could have just used the gate? Doesn't that seem like a lot of trouble to go to? You know, Erin, the more I think about it, you couldn't have come up with a dumber theory!'
'OK, Miss Smarty-Know-Everything, how do you think they did it?'
'I don't know. I can't figure out why they would want him.'
Erin scoffed. 'Diablo was a champion dressage horse, Shel. Don't you know anything?'
Shelby swapped the phone to the other ear. 'Yeah, but he's old now, Erin. He's the equivalent of about sixty in human years. What good is he to them? A circus is not going to lug around an animal that doesn't perform. I don't get it.'
'Maybe they didn't know he was old?' Erin sug-gested. 'It was dark and stormy, remember?'
'Maybe,' Shelby mumbled. Even if it was dark and they couldn't tell how old he was, that didn't explain why they went past so many good quality horses to single out the stallion.
If they did steal him, why didn't they try to hide him? They could at the very least have put a hood over his head! They had made no attempt to even disguise him.
One interview down, and Shelby didn't think she was any closer to what really happened – if anything, she had more questions.
16 Capital
Lindsey wasn't much more help than Erin in solving the mystery of Diablo's disappearance, although Shelby did find out some things she didn't know before.
In the morning, before any of the trail riders arrived, Shelby, Lindsey, Erin and Hayley wormed the riding school ponies. All the horses were in the small triangular yard in the far corner of their paddock, which had once been a cattle race. It was a funny shape so they didn't use it very often.
The girls worked in pairs – one holding onto the halter while the other squirted the worming paste into the horse's mouth. Once they were sure the horses had swallowed the paste the girls let them back into the larger paddock.
'Wow, your horses are heaps easier to worm than mine!' Hayley remarked.
'That's because your mum comes at them with the worming plunger as though it's a weapon,' Lindsey answered. 'It's no wonder they freak out. You can tell just by looking at her face that she expects a war.'
Hayley shrugged. 'My mum attacks everything like it's a war.'
'But she gets lots of things done,' Shelby added. She liked Mrs Crook, even though she could be aggressive.
'How much do you think he weighs?' Lindsey asked, tilting her head towards the roan gelding Shelby was holding.
'I'll get the measure.' Shelby fetched the weight/height tape that the girls had brought with them and passed it around the horse's girth. 'Three hundred and seventy-five kilos,' she told her friend.
Lindsey wound the measuring dial on the tube of worming paste to the appropriate mark.
'I heard those people who found Diablo got arrested,' Shelby said, trying to sound casual.
'Where did you hear that?' Lindsey asked.
'Mum told me,' answered Shelby.
'I reckon they're gypsies, like in Famous Five,' said Erin.
'They're not gypsies! Besides, those people call themselves "Romany", you ignoramus!' Shelby told her.
'Nobody says "ignoramus". That is so 1985,' Erin retorted.
'How would you know?' Shelby snapped. 'You weren't even born then!'
'I do have pay television, for your information,' Erin replied, raising her chin.
'Romany,' repeated Hayley. 'Maybe I'll call Smarty's foal Romany?'
Not long ago Hayley had bought a pony from the other three girls. She'd called the pony 'Quicksmart', and now the pony was being agisted at a stud with a view to being put in foal the next spring.
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