Casper Candlewacks in the Claws of Crime!

by Ivan Brett

  Blossom’s Bloomers

  ‘They’re Heaven-Scent.’

  Visit us on the corner of the village square, next to the sweet shop.

  Casper nodded and stuffed the business card into his pocket. “Sorry, I hadn’t heard of you. We spend a lot of time in this garage, don’t we, Lamp?”

  Lamp squeaked.

  “That’s OK,” said Lavender. “Drop in if you’re passing. We’ve got a summer sale on.”

  “If you buy a full bunch, you’ll save a whole bunch!” sang Daisy.

  “Sounds good. I’ll… um… definitely buy a full bunch then.”

  “Will you? That’s brilliant!” Daisy skipped forward and planted a kiss on Casper’s cheek.

  “Right then, darling, plenty more of those cards to hand out before tea time.” Lavender wrinkled her nose cheekily at the boys and sauntered out of the garage.

  Daisy skipped into the sunshine in pursuit of her mother, stopping to chirp, “Nice to meet you,” before disappearing round the corner.

  The garage was quiet again. Lamp shuffled towards Casper with a worried sort of face on. “Casper?”

  “Yes?”

  “I can’t feel my feet and my heart’s gone thumpy. What’s wrong with me?”

  “I think you’re in love, Lamp.”

  “Oh…” Lamp mouthed the word ‘love’ to himself a few times, and then wrote it down on his clipboard. “Is that bad?”

  “I don’t really know,” said Casper. “I hope not.”

  The boys worked in silence for about an hour and a half, disturbed only by the occasional clink of cogs or the whirr and crackle of Lamp’s hamster running furiously on its electric wheel. But gradually another noise swelled in the distance, a mix of yelling and clanging and stamping of feet. As the sound grew louder, Casper could make out the frantic ringing of a bell and the screams of a lady who must have been either very upset about something or a terrible singer. The boys scurried outside and were presented with the sight of that nervous wreck Clemmie Answorth tearing down the road at full speed, swinging a bell precariously round her head.

  “HEAR YE,” she screamed. “HEAR YE!”

  Casper and Lamp leapt back as Clemmie thundered straight past them, clanging her bell in their faces as she passed. She reached the end of the street, tripped over, sprang to her feet and raced back again. More villagers had appeared at their front doors now.

  “I SAID, HEAR YE!” There was a rip in Clemmie’s skirt and she was missing a shoe. “MAYOR RATTSBULGE…” – she was quite out of breath – “REQUIRES YOUR PRESENCE… Oh, dear.” Sandy Landscape gave her a full watering can and she drank gratefully. “Thank you. IN THE VILLAGE SQUARE, AT ONCE!”

  She dropped the bell, chased it down again and clanged off in the direction she’d come from.

  “Ooh, are we getting presents?” Lamp’s face perked up.

  “No, she said ‘presence’. We’re meant to go to the village square.”

  “Not even one little present?”

  “Perhaps something even better, Lamp.” Casper felt a surge of excitement like he’d not felt for exactly two months. “Let’s go and have a look,” he said. And so they did.

  was the summer of 1374, and a young knight rode out into the countryside to hunt weasels. Suddenly, he was ambushed by a band of villains. They nicked his horse and pushed him down a hill. Down he tumbled, over rocks and under cows and through prickly thistles, until he landed face down in a river running with the clearest and sweetest water he’d ever drowned in. Fortunately, he was rescued by a passing river nymph with long wavy hair and scaly skin. They fell in love, built a house by the river and had eighteen beautiful children with thirty-six beautiful gills (which is two each, if you share them out nice and fairly).

  However, their peace was disturbed when the band of villains returned, demanding a refund for their horse, since it had broken down and they didn’t carry a spare. But the young knight muttered those famous words, “Hast thou a receipt?” and slew the leader with his gigantic iron sword. Then with the help of his eighteen fishy children he rounded up the rest of the band, wrapped them all up in a brown paper parcel and posted them to Norway. They were never seen or heard of again. Then, to celebrate, the young knight popped down to the shops and spent his pocket money on some priceless rubies and emeralds and a pot of glue, and stuck them all on to his sword.

  That young knight was called Sir Gossamer D’Glaze, the river was the Kobb and his house by the river came to be known as Corne. Sir Gossamer had many adventures, but when he died he bequeathed his sword to the village, and there it has remained to this day (apart from one time when it was sold in a car-boot sale to a dentist with a limp, but that doesn’t count, for obvious reasons).

  So now it is clear why Corne-on-the-Kobb is so proud of its sword. If, say, somebody were to come and steal it, who knows what hysteria would follow…

  The long hot summer had toasted Corne-on-the-Kobb like a slice of granary bread on a beach holiday. The grass was parched and brown, the flow of the River Kobb had ebbed to a thirsty trickle and several pigeons had a serious case of sunburn. This was the worst drought that the Kobb Valley had seen since 1915, when the whole place became a savannah and some lions moved in and ate everybody. But that’s another story and the lions have politely asked me not to mention it.

  Casper and Lamp crunched through the sun-baked park towards the village square. Lamp was dawdling behind, staring into space and smiling vacantly.

  “What are you doing?” said Casper.

  “I’m going to call it Daisy.”

  “Call what Daisy?”

  “My lie detector. It’s a lovely name.”

  Casper sighed. “That might get confusing. Someone’s already got that name.”

  “Who?”

  “Daisy.”

  Lamp scratched his head. “Oh yeah.”

  “How about The Bluff Boiler?”

  “That’s nice too.” He galumphed forward and giggled. “I’m in love.”

  As the boys approached the square, the first thing they saw was ‘Blossom’s Bloomers’, a little terraced shop where ‘Murray’s Doorknob and Salami Emporium’ used to stand. Now it was fronted with a dark green awning and walls covered in flowering clematis. Outside the entrance were displayed hundreds of little plant pots holding geraniums, tulips and pansies of every colour, in front of muscular sunflowers and luscious lilacs. There was a queue of villagers trailing out of the door and halfway round the square, and more leaving the shop already loaded with bouquets of roses or baskets of wild grasses. The square itself was adorned with beautiful flowering wreaths on every door, window boxes filled with delicate petunias and vases stuffed full on every porch, beside every bench and lining the steps to the village hall. Finally, flapping at the top of the flagpole on the village-hall roof was not the normal tattered flag, but the most gigantic bouquet of multicoloured hydrangeas the world had ever seen since the world’s biggest hydrangea bouquet competition last year, which, admittedly, had some pretty massive bouquets of hydrangeas.

  “Wow,” cooed Casper. “They must make a killing.”

  “I’m going to buy some flowers for Daisy,” said Lamp.

  “She’s probably got enough already.”

  Through the window Casper could see Daisy wrapping up a large bunch of peonies while Lavender snipped some sweet peas from their stems and presented them to a blushing gentleman. Casper dragged Lamp away from the shop and into the square where Mayor Rattsbulge was trying to gather a crowd. So far he’d only managed to attract the attention of Clemmie Answorth (still clanging her bell), old Mrs Trimble and the flock of pigeons.

  “Oi!” he shouted to the enormous flower shop queue, spraying greasy flecks of spit all over Mrs Trimble. “We’ve got an emergency here.”

  The queue members just grunted and shuffled forward a bit. More people joined the back, sighing longingly with flowery business cards clutched to their chests.

  The mayor bellowed, “Come here, you sc
oundrels! This is no time for flowers.”

  “Ooh, are they selling flowers?” said Mrs Trimble, who owned twenty-six cats (all called Tiddles). She put on her spectacles and trotted off to join the queue.

  Mayor Rattsbulge had had enough. “Fine,” he barked. “Nobody’s getting the cash reward…”

  At the words ‘cash reward’, the villagers’ idiotic ears pricked up. They dropped whatever they were holding (such as babies, packed lunches or priceless Ming vases) and bounded towards the mayor like squirrels to a nut buffet, barging Casper and Lamp to the back of the crowd with well-placed elbows or teeth. Instantly the square was packed with penniless, greedy idiots, and the flower shop was empty.

  “That’s better,” said Mayor Rattsbulge, taking a chomp of the Scotch egg that he’d put in his top pocket for emergencies.

  “Oh, no, she’s here,” groaned Lamp, pointing to Casper’s right where a skinny little girl with long brown hair and a hawk nose approached them, hand in hand with her pointy mother.

  Casper winced. “Anemonie Blight.”

  In a recent poll, Anemonie Blight was voted the most evil girl in the cosmos (pushing the previous winner, Empress Vandraga ‘Slayer of Children’ into second place). Made from a pint of pure hate and a sprinkling of malice, then oven-baked in the furnaces of hell, Anemonie was only happy once she’d made somebody cry. Two weeks ago she’d burst Teresa Louncher’s eardrum in a game of Rock, Paper, Nuclear Explosion. Last time Anemonie had seen Casper, she punched him so hard that even Lamp got a nosebleed.

  “She’s coming this way,” quavered Lamp, visibly shaking.

  Casper crossed his fingers and closed his eyes. Anemonie was close – not more than five metres away now. He held his breath, prepared for the pain and waited, and waited, and… oddly, nothing happened. Casper dared to open an eye. Anemonie had walked straight past them, head down, hands deep in the pockets of her sickly pink jumpsuit.

  Casper nudged Lamp, who had been cowering behind his hands. “She’s gone,” he said.

  Lamp chewed his lip. “Why didn’t she hit me?”

  “I know. That’s not like her at all.”

  Casper watched as Anemonie stopped next to her pointy mother at a spot right at the back of the square and observed the scene from afar.

  “Now, now,” drawled Mayor Rattsbulge, “give me your attention or I’ll raise taxes.”

  The villagers hung on to the mayor’s every word like nits on a hippie’s beard.

  “Somebody…” Mayor Rattsbulge’s bottom lip quivered, so he hid it behind a mouthful of Scotch egg. “Somebody…” – Scotch egg now swallowed – “has assaulted Betty Woons and stolen the bejewelled sword of Sir Gossamer de Glaze.”

  Those who hadn’t already heard the news shrieked. Those who had already heard the news nodded knowingly, saying, “Haven’t you heard?” and, “Horrible news,” and made shrugging gestures.

  “Now Betty doesn’t remember a thing because the thief hit her quite hard on the head…”

  Betty Woons grinned at the crowd and then slapped the top of her head with her withered hand, tutting loudly.

  “…and nobody else witnessed the crime at all. In fact, the only clue we have is this.” He felt around in his Scotch egg pocket and plucked out a wiry black cat’s whisker.

  The crowd gasped.

  “Yes, we worried this day would come, and I fear it has. He’s here. This whisker is the calling card of none other than the French cat burglar Le Chat!”

  As those terrible words of Le Chat spread through the crowd like a snotty cold, jaws dropped in horror, eyes sprang with tears and mothers clutched on to their children like wriggly teddy bears. They’d all heard about him, they’d all been warned about him, but not once did they think he’d actually strike in Corne-on-the-Kobb.

  “Now, few people have seen him in the flesh, but we believe him to look something like this.” Mayor Rattsbulge held aloft a large poster featuring a photograph of a regular black cat, with the words WANTED – dead or alive (preferably dead) hastily scribbled along the top in big black letters, and *Artist’s impression at the bottom.

  Audrey Snugglepuss gasped. “I’ve seen him.”

  Mrs Trimble went very pale. “But that’s… that’s Tiddles.”

  The crowd screamed and pointed at Mrs Trimble. One person threw a shoe.

  “Calm down,” bellowed Mayor Rattsbulge. “Nobody’s blaming Tiddles.”

  The crowd stopped screaming.

  Mrs Trimble sobbed, reached into her bag and dried her eyes on a newborn kitten.

  The mayor straightened his mayoral gown (which he’d made himself by stapling together three rolls of red carpet material) and continued. “Now, the roads out of the village were guarded last night, and they have been ever since. This has given me valuable time to think about how to catch this scoundrel, and you’ll be pleased to know I’ve got a plan!”

  Casper, who had been watching Anemonie Blight and her mother, noticed them become distinctly twitchier as the meeting progressed. Anemonie kept rubbing her wrists, and her mother couldn’t stand still.

  “It’s a foolproof plan if I may say so myself, both original and unpredictable. It’s taken me nearly all day and three whole pies to think of it, but here it is…” He did a drum roll on Mitch McMassive’s bald head. “You find Le Chat for me!”

  “Hurray!” cheered the villagers, applauding their mayor’s genius plan most wholeheartedly.

  “Whoever can catch Le Chat and retrieve the sword will be rewarded with…” Mayor Rattsbulge pulled a wad of crumpled banknotes out of his pocket and hastily counted them. “One… two… two… five…” Losing count, he shrugged and shouted, “Twenty-thousand pounds.”

  The crowd went, “Ooooooh!”

  “And…” The mayor rooted around in another pocket, producing something brown and sticky. “…The rest of this pie.”

  The crowd went, “Aaaaaah!”

  Sandy Landscape rolled up his sleeves. “Cor, imagine that – twenty grand. I’m gonner gold-plate my wellies.”

  “I’m going to gold-plate my house,” said Audrey Snugglepuss.

  “I’m going to gold-plate my cats,” said Mrs Trimble.

  “’Ere, can I have half o’ that money now if I promise to find the sword?” shouted Sandy.

  “No chance.” Audrey yanked him back by his belt loop. “It’s mine.”

  “You’ll have to get past me first,” squeaked Mitch McMassive, launching himself at Audrey’s legs and bundling her to the ground, knocking over Clemmie Answorth in the process. Sandy Landscape dived on top, launching punches into the crowd. Then, with a left hook, he felled old Mrs Trimble, who shrieked and dropped her bag of cats. The cats tumbled out into the melee, ripping and nipping with furry fury.

  “SILENCE!” bellowed Mayor Rattsbulge.

  Cats and villagers alike froze and stared at their mayor. Sandy Landscape let go of Mitch McMassive’s head and put his teeth back in.

  “One more thing. There’s a dangerous criminal on the loose, and I don’t want any more of my villagers hurt than is necessary. So I’m imposing a curfew: everybody must stay in their houses after dark. Understood?”

  “Yes, Mayor Rattsbulge,” chorused the villagers.

  “What about the Summer Ball?” came the shrill tones of Audrey Snugglepuss from somewhere beneath Sandy Landscape’s foot. “That’s tomorrow, and the cake’s all ready.” The Corne-on-the-Kobb Carrot Cake Appreciation Society, of which Audrey was the president, baked a giant cake every year for the occasion. “Will all those carrots have died for nothing, mister mayor?”

  Audrey’s question got a roar of agreement from the villagers. The Summer Ball was a much-loved event in Corne-on-the-Kobb – you got free wine and sausage rolls all night, and the best-dressed villager won a pig.

  “Of course the ball will still take place.” Mayor Rattsbulge wouldn’t dream of cancelling it, not while there were free sausage rolls and a massive cake, anyway. “But no loitering outside. We’ll lo
ck the doors once you’re all in. Now clear off, and find my sword.”

  The crowd cheered as the mayor waddled down from his perch, then they promptly got back to beating chunks out of each other with handbags, wooden legs, or whatever else was to hand.

  “Come on, Lamp,” said Casper, just as Mitch McMassive flew straight past them and crashed into a bin. “Let’s go home before things get any uglier.”

  As they left the square, Casper could feel the gaze of the little pointy-nosed girl burn the back of his neck. “I don’t trust Anemonie,” he said. “Did you see how shifty she’s acting?”

  “Not as shifty as him.” Lamp nodded towards an olive-skinned little man with a black beret, whom Casper swore he’d never noticed before. He sat on a low wooden stool by the steps to the village hall, his pursed white lips sucking on a needle-thin cigarette. He watched the mass brawl with a smirk.

  “Who’s that?”

  “He looks weird.”

  “He looks French, Lamp.”

  “Like Le Splat.”

  “Yeah, like—” Casper gasped. “Do you think he’s part of it?”

  But Lamp wasn’t listening. He was too busy waving through the window at Daisy. She grinned and waved back, giving Lamp a minor heart attack.

  Families are odd things. They come in all shapes and sizes, colours and smells. Some families grow on trees, some families come by post and some families arrive off the train with a bulging suitcase and a head full of dreams. The biggest family in the world contains two fathers, three mothers, twelve grandmothers, twenty-six brothers and a poodle. The smallest family in the world is so minute that it can only be seen through a special microscope. The Wriggle family of Essex makes a living by travelling the world and juggling ducks. There is a rumour of a new sort of family that exists only on the Internet, which can be downloaded in bite-size chunks for a weekly fee. All of these are examples of the wonderful, remarkable or downright laughable sorts of families that you can get these days. But none of these even come close to the insanity of the Candlewacks family of Corne-on-the-Kobb.