Danger Ahead

by R. A. Spratt

  ‘Always with the sniffing,’ said Ian.

  ‘Can you smell that odour?’ asked Friday.

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ said Melanie.

  ‘We’ve smelled it before,’ said Friday. ‘It’s what Sebastian smelled like on the night of the fire alarm.’

  ‘You’re saying he’s involved?’ asked Ian.

  ‘Minks secrete that spray from an anal scent gland,’ said Friday.

  ‘Please!’ said Melanie. ‘That’s way too much information.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Friday. ‘Minks spray that scent on people when they’re scared. Sebastian must have been handling a mink when it sprayed him. All the counsellors must be in on it. Minks are very aggressive. They give nasty bites and scratches.’

  ‘Which explains why Nadia and Louise have scratched-up arms,’ said Ian.

  ‘And why Pedro always wears long sleeves,’ said Friday. ‘I assumed he had tattoos he wanted to cover. But what if it was actually mink bites?’

  ‘But they’re camp counsellors,’ said Melanie.

  ‘They must have got jobs at the camp as a cover,’ said Friday, ‘so they’d have a reason to be out here in the forest,’ said Friday. ‘The Camp Courage counsellors are all terrible employees. They’re missing half the time and they always fall asleep on the job.’

  ‘And it’s painfully apparent that Sebastian knows nothing about wilderness survival,’ said Ian.

  ‘Do you think Geraldine is in on it?’ asked Ian.

  ‘Perhaps that’s how she lost her leg?’ said Melanie. ‘A mink bite?’

  ‘Shhhh!’ hissed Friday. ‘Get down!’

  The three of them bobbed down.

  ‘Why are we hiding?’ asked Ian.

  ‘On the far side of the shed,’ whispered Friday, ‘Pedro just walked in.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ asked Ian.

  ‘We’ll have to inform the police,’ said Friday.

  ‘Right now we’ve got to get away from here,’ said Ian. ‘We can’t let them know we’ve found their operation. The fur trade is a high-stakes trade. They could be dangerous.’

  ‘They already have been,’ said Friday. ‘Sebastian turned nasty when I announced that we would be heading this way. Now we know why.’

  ‘Let’s move,’ said Ian as he started to shuffle back towards the cover of the forest. ‘We can skirt around the shed and keep going.’

  ‘Wait!’ said Friday. ‘There could be …’

  Suddenly Ian stumbled backwards, tripping over a length of string. The string tugged a pulley and a flare shot up into the sky with a loud whistling sound.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Melanie.

  At the top of its flight the flare exploded, releasing a bright orange plume of smoke.

  ‘… booby traps,’ finished Friday.

  ‘I think they know we’re here now,’ said Melanie.

  They could hear Pedro running inside the shed.

  ‘Run!’ cried Friday.

  Ian grabbed Melanie by the hand and yanked her to her feet. All three of them took off sprinting into the forest.

  ‘What should we do?’ asked Ian. ‘We can’t outrun him.’

  ‘We’ll think of something,’ said Friday. ‘Just keep moving!’

  ‘Maybe he’ll sprain his ankle,’ said Melanie, ever the optimist.

  They broke through the trees, onto the riverbank. The floodwater was still high and moving fast.

  ‘He’s got us trapped,’ said Ian. ‘We can’t get away.’

  ‘Yes, we can,’ said Friday. ‘Look!’

  Churning its way upstream, against the heavy flow of water, was a boat. The best kind of boat for three young people trying to escape an illegal fur farmer. A police boat.

  Friday, Ian and Melanie started waving and calling out. ‘Over here! Help! We need to be rescued!’

  The boat altered its course and headed for their spot on the bank.

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ said Ian. ‘We’re going to make it out of here.’ He put his arms around both girls in celebration.

  ‘He is going to slow down, isn’t he?’ Melanie was watching the boat and it was gaining speed as it came towards the bank.

  ‘Get out of the way!’ cried Friday. She shoved Ian and Melanie aside as the police boat rammed hard onto the bank, the prow narrowly missing their heads.

  A policeman vaulted over the side, landing in the shallow water. He looked very familiar.

  Ian groaned. ‘Not you again.’

  It was Sam Fullerton. Ian’s kidnapper.

  ‘But it’s only a few weeks since we last saw him,’ said Melanie. ‘He hasn’t had time to go to the police academy and qualify as a water police officer.’

  ‘I think we’ll find he stole the boat and the uniform,’ said Friday.

  ‘Wainscott, you’re not getting away from me this time,’ cried Fullerton desperately.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to do with it!’ cried Ian. ‘Go and harass my dad.’

  ‘I just want what’s mine!’ pleaded Fullerton.

  ‘Yes, but you keep committing lots of other crimes to try and get it,’ said Friday.

  ‘Shut it!’ yelled Fullerton. ‘I don’t have a problem with you. It’s the boy I want.’

  Fullerton lunged for Ian. And Friday grabbed for Fullerton. They all collapsed in a heap on the ground, writhing as they each tried to get the upper hand.

  ‘Get away from them!’

  They all looked up to see Melanie swinging a sock in loops around her head.

  Fullerton straightened up. There was clearly something hard and heavy at the bottom of Melanie’s sock.

  ‘Don’t you try anything,’ Fullerton warned.

  Melanie took a step forward, still swinging her sock.

  Fullerton took a step back to move away. His foot caught on a tree branch and he toppled over backwards, hitting his head on a rock. He lay motionless.

  Melanie stood over him as she clutched her sagging sock. ‘This rock in the sock tip totally works,’ she said.

  ‘Well done, Melanie,’ said Friday.

  ‘Come on,’ said Ian. ‘Let’s get out of here before Pedro catches up.’ He grabbed the boat by the prow and started pushing it back into the water. ‘Jump on, and get the engine started.’

  Friday and Melanie scrambled aboard. Melanie sat in the captain’s seat and soon had the engine started. Once the boat was safely adrift, Ian jumped on board too.

  Melanie was turning the boat into the flow of the river just as Pedro burst out of the trees and ran down the bank and into the water.

  ‘Get back here!’ yelled Pedro. He lunged forward and grabbed the side of the boat. Friday picked up an oar and rapped him hard across the back of the knuckles.

  ‘Ow!’ yelped Pedro. He let go and was immediately carried away by the current. ‘Help!’ he cried.

  ‘Just swim to the bank!’ called Ian.

  ‘Um, I don’t want to be provocative,’ said Melanie, ‘but isn’t there a waterfall near here? The one the Houseboat nearly went over?’

  ‘Oh my goodness, she’s right,’ said Friday. ‘It’s about a kilometre downstream.’

  ‘But what about Pedro?’ said Melanie.

  ‘We’ll let him die,’ said Ian.

  ‘We can’t do that,’ said Friday

  ‘Why must you always insist on doing the right thing?’ asked Ian.

  ‘Because it’s the right thing,’ said Friday.

  ‘Let’s pick him up, then,’ said Ian. ‘But if we all go over the waterfall and die, I’m blaming you.’

  They turned and headed over to Pedro.

  ‘Don’t let him grab the boat again,’ said Friday.

  ‘Then how are we going to save him?’ asked Ian.

  ‘Here,’ said Friday. She found a rope and threw an end to Pedro. ‘Grab hold.’ Pedro grabbed the rope and held it tightly. ‘Now, let’s make for the far shore.’

  Half an hour later Friday, Melanie and Ian stumbled into Camp Courage, leading Pedro, who they had tied up with
the rope. They were surprised to find the Headmaster being given a guided tour by Geraldine.

  ‘What’s going on here?!’ demanded the Head master. ‘Please don’t tell me you’ve kidnapped this man.’

  ‘No, that would be silly,’ said Melanie. ‘Friday has made a citizen’s arrest.’

  ‘What?’ demanded the Headmaster.

  ‘This girl has been a troublemaker from the start,’ accused Geraldine. ‘I’ve tried to break her spirit, but no amount of potato peeling or latrine digging will do it.’

  ‘They’re not sent here to have their spirits broken,’ said the Headmaster. ‘They’re sent here to learn basic wilderness skills, and get some fresh air.’

  ‘Well, we’ve had plenty of that,’ said Ian.

  ‘You’d better call the police,’ said Friday.

  ‘Why?’ asked the Headmaster.

  ‘All the counsellors are criminals,’ said Friday. ‘They’ve been running a huge illegal mink-farming operation on the other side of the river.’

  ‘And the rest of our group needs to be rescued,’ said Melanie.

  ‘Yes, that too,’ agreed Friday. ‘I can give the rescue services the coordinates. They’ll need to treat four children for hypothermia and one man with a sprained ankle and a head injury. Pedro’s group have been abandoned somewhere as well, while he snuck down to check on the minks.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ demanded the Headmaster.

  ‘Camp Courage is a sham,’ said Friday.

  ‘I knew it was too good to be true,’ said the Headmaster. ‘Affordable, convenient and willing to take Highcrest students.’

  ‘It’s rubbish!’ exclaimed Geraldine. ‘Don’t believe a word of it.’

  ‘It explains all the strange things that have been happening ever since we arrived,’ said Friday. ‘The counsellors made up the story about the ghost of Ghost Mountain to keep the students away from the river at night, because that was when they were sneaking over to feed and check on the minks.’

  ‘Which is why the counsellors were always so tired during the day,’ said Ian.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Friday. ‘They wore glow-in-the-dark clothes, like the scrap Drake found, so that if anyone saw them walking along the riverbank they would look like a ghost.’

  ‘But why did Sebastian and Nadia have that argument about cheese?’ asked Melanie.

  ‘Because,’ said Friday, ‘the main food fed to commercially farmed mink is cheese. Expired cheese thrown out by supermarkets and factories.’

  The Headmaster turned on Geraldine. ‘And you allowed this to go on? Were you involved too?’

  ‘No! It’s all lies,’ protested Geraldine.

  ‘She wouldn’t have known about it,’ said Friday. ‘The counsellors knew she would never stumble across their operation. With her prosthetic leg, Geraldine would never be able to make it across the rickety old footbridge.’

  ‘You kids wouldn’t have found out either if you weren’t so nosey,’ growled Pedro.

  ‘We weren’t being nosey,’ said Ian. ‘We only stumbled across the shed while we were trying to find help because Sebastian was so incompetent as a wilderness expert he nearly got us all killed.’

  ‘I would have figured it out eventually,’ said Friday, ‘because there was one thing you couldn’t hide – the smell.’

  ‘It’s got to do with a deeply unpleasant gland on a mink’s bottom,’ said Melanie. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to know the details.’

  ‘But when you applied for the job here you told me you were a former boy scout,’ Geraldine accused Pedro. ‘You showed me your Queen’s Scout certificate.’

  Pedro snorted a laugh. ‘It took me half an hour to make that on Photoshop. As if you could get anyone with real qualifications to work here with what you pay. We were going to earn ten times what this whole camp is worth with just one shipment.’

  ‘I’m going to kill you!’ yelled Geraldine as she launched herself at Pedro, forcing the Headmaster to do the most athletic thing he had done in years. He grabbed hold of Geraldine and restrained her, while Ian pulled Pedro out of the way and Melanie went into the office to call the police.

  Chapter 23

  In Conclusion

  It took a lot of time to sort the mess out. Pedro and Sebastian were easy enough to deal with. Pedro was already captured and Sebastian couldn’t run anywhere, so he was still sitting by the riverbank sulking when the police found the rest of the Houseboat team.

  The other camp counsellors, Nadia and Louise, tried to make a run for it. Fortunately, their survival skills were every bit as bad as Sebastian’s, so the police eventually caught them when they took a rest and sat on an ant hill. They ended up running towards the police, begging to be arrested so they could go to hospital and have the extensive bites to their bottoms taken care of.

  Harvey, Wai-Yi, Susan and Patel were taken to hospital in a helicopter. There was nothing wrong with them, but Wai-Yi’s mother was an ambassador, so the Chief of Police wanted to make sure that no expense was spared. It was bad enough that a group of children had stumbled across a criminal operation his officers should have discovered. He didn’t want an international diplomatic incident on his hands as well.

  The Treehouse, Tent and Hole teams all went back to school on the bus. There was a lot of grumbling and complaints. But secretly, most of them were excited to have been supervised by a gang of criminals for four weeks and they couldn’t wait to horrify their parents with the news.

  Geraldine was taken away. Not to the police station, but to the hospital for a mental-health check. The shock of discovering that she had been unwittingly harbouring a criminal organisation was too much. She prided herself so much on her discipline that discovering her total failing as a leader had overwhelmed her. She snapped and kept barking at the police officers to “drop and give me twenty”.

  It turned out that the story of Geraldine breaking her leg and nearly drowning in the river as a child was entirely true. But it hadn’t been a counsellor who’d saved her. It had been her father. He’d founded Camp Courage. But he hadn’t died in the accident, he’d carried on running the camp for another forty years. When Geraldine inherited the family business, she found it difficult to forgive or forget her terrible accident.

  Back at Highcrest, Mrs Marigold was on standby. She had been briefed, and she was personally affronted that her students had been taken someplace where they had not been properly fed. She was whipping up industrial-sized quantities of trifle, banoffee pudding and lasagne to undo the dietary damage that had been done to the students’ young growing bodies.

  Friday, Ian and Melanie had to stay back at the camp to be interviewed by the police. It was well after dark by the time Friday finished her interview. She’d had to explain herself several times because the story was so complicated. The police had a hard time following the twists and turns of what had happened. In the end, they’d allowed Melanie to sit in on Friday’s interviews to act as a translator. She could tell them what Friday meant when she used unnecessarily long, big words or digressed into pedantic details about science.

  Friday was very weary as she trudged out of the mess hall. The camp looked marginally less shabby at night-time. The totally inadequate lighting helped. When she looked up at the sky above, the clouds had finally gone and Friday could see the magnificent spectrum of stars in the Milky Way.

  ‘You know, all the shonkiness of this camp cannot diminish the epic beauty of the night sky out here in the middle of nowhere so far from the light pollution of civilisation,’ said Friday.

  ‘I know, it’s pretty,’ agreed Melanie. ‘But frankly, I’d take a little more light pollution for a little less shonkiness.’

  ‘You’re just tired,’ said Friday.

  ‘I’m always tired,’ said Melanie. ‘It’s just now I’ve got an actual reason to be.’

  ‘Come on,’ said the Headmaster. ‘I’m driving you three back myself.’

  The Headmaster’s BMW was parked off to the side of the courtyard.
Ian was already leaning against the side of the car waiting.

  ‘Why?’ asked Friday. ‘You’re not going to do something sinister like drive us all over a cliff because of all the trouble we’ve caused, are you?

  The Headmaster patted Friday on the shoulder. He was proud of Friday, but there was no way he could bring himself to actually say that in words.

  ‘No, I just want to make sure you actually do get back,’ said the Headmaster. ‘I know what you’re like. If I left you to your own devices, you’d probably get diverted trying to solve the Great Train Robbery or find the real identity of Jack the Ripper.’

  Friday rubbed her forehead. She was very tired. ‘But everyone knows who did the Great Train Robbery,’ said Friday. ‘Their fingerprints were all over their hideout because they didn’t burn it down properly. And anyone with any sense can tell you that Montague John Druitt was Jack the Ripper because all the evidence …’

  Ian took Friday by the hand. ‘Shhh. The Headmaster was joking.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Friday, with a tired sigh. ‘I still miss the social cues for that.’

  ‘I know,’ said Ian. ‘That’s what we love about you.’

  ‘I think I’m going to cry,’ said Melanie. ‘I love it when exhaustion starts to bring out everyone’s true feelings.’

  They were all very quiet in the car on the way home. Melanie was asleep as soon as she did her seatbelt up.

  Friday and Ian were soon sleeping too. They had been through a difficult four weeks, an arduous two days and way too much walking.

  Friday was dreaming about hot baths and kittens purring when suddenly there was a jolt. She woke up and realised that the purring was actually the purr of the car engine and the heat was Ian’s body warmth because she was slumped up against him.

  ‘Where are we?’ yawned Ian.

  ‘Back at the school,’ said the Headmaster.

  ‘Why did we stop so suddenly?’ asked Friday.

  ‘Because somebody has parked their motorbike in my parking spot,’ said the Headmaster grumpily.

  Friday peered out the window. There was a bright red Ducati in front of the car. A leather-clad rider and a pillion passenger got off.