by Lyn Gardner
Tati was sobbing so hard that she couldn’t continue to speak. It was the longest speech that any of them had heard her make and they were all shocked and chastened by her obvious desperation. Olivia ran over and put an arm around her. Jack put his arm around Tati’s other shoulder. Her body heaved but the sobs gradually subsided.
“Tati,” said Jack gently. “Nobody’s going to be angry with you, but I really think you need to explain what’s going on.”
Georgia handed Tati a box of tissues and the girl wiped her eyes. She looked round at all the expectant faces and took a deep breath. Just as she opened her mouth to speak, there was a furious barking and whining from the street outside.
“Harry!” said Tati, looking frightened. She bolted into the hall and opened the heavy front door. Harry leapt at her, barking wildly. He held her sleeve between his teeth and tugged at it as if trying to make him follow her.
“Harry! Where’s Evie?” asked Tati anxiously. “Why isn’t she with you?” Harry whined again, and tugged urgently at her sleeve.
“Evie’s in trouble,” cried Tati. “We’ve got to find her!”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Swans set off in the minibus towards the centre of town with Harry showing them the way from the front seat. Tati had wanted him to lead them on foot, but when they got outside the house, Harry had leaned with his paws against the bus and barked so loudly and insistently that a light had snapped on in the house opposite.
“Clever dog, he’s telling us to take the bus,” said Aeysha, astonished. So they had piled into the bus and Harry proved far better than any satnav. He sat next to Pablo, and when he wanted Pablo to turn he barked and if Pablo turned the wrong way, he growled and whined.
As they headed up through the New Town, Olivia suddenly said: “I know where he’s taking us. Calton Hill!” She was right, and as the bus pulled up into the car park, they saw smoke. “Oh no!” cried Olivia.
The smoke was pouring from one of the dressing-room tents. Flames were licking at the canvas and shooting upwards as they were caught by the wind. Through the smoke they saw a desperate little figure trying to douse them with buckets of water from the standpipe in the car park. It was Evie, her face smeared with smuts from the fire.
“Help me!” she shouted when she saw them. “If it spreads, the big top will be lost too.”
Everyone ran frantically to her aid. Pablo quickly set up a hose from the other standpipe.
“Call the fire brigade, Liv!” said Jack urgently.
“I’ve already done it,” shouted Evie, and at that moment they heard the sound of sirens.
The fire engines arrived not a moment too soon. Another few minutes, and the big top would have gone up, but the firemen quickly brought the blaze under control, making sure it didn’t spread beyond the dressing-room tent. An hour later, the firemen left, leaving everyone sitting in an exhausted heap on the grass as the sun began to rise over Edinburgh.
“Evie,” said Jack, “I can’t thank you enough for saving the circus. If the big top had caught fire, that would have been it for us.”
“I don’t think that’s the only thing we’ve got to thank Evie for tonight,” said Olivia quietly, picking up a balaclava she had found abandoned by the standpipe. “You were at the square earlier, weren’t you? It was you who jumped over the balcony and helped save my dad and uncle and Pablo, wasn’t it?”
Evie grinned a little shyly. “Great minds think alike,” she said. “You and me, Livy, we make a great team. We worked together really well. I hope we can do the same on the high-wire. You’re a great artist, Livy, and brave with it.”
“Not as brave as you, Evie. Tonight you’ve been a real friend to the Swan Circus, and to me and my dad. To all of us, in fact,” said Olivia. Then a thought struck her. “How come,” she asked curiously, “you were here when the fire broke out?”
Evie shrugged. “I’ve been sleeping here most nights since my name appeared in that review,” she said. “Tati has, too, sometimes. This is where we were on the night of the storm. I know the way Mitch’s twisted mind works and was certain that once he’d connected me with the Swan Circus, he’d find a way to get at all of us. He’d already tried to trick Tati and me into meeting him at St Giles’ Cathedral but we gave him and his heavies the slip.”
Evie paused to take a breath. “I knew that he’d be particularly furious about what happened tonight and that he’d take his revenge, so I came straight here and waited. I thought Mitch would just trash the place, but about half an hour after I got here he turned up with a can of petrol. Fortunately he was a bit drunk and he didn’t do a good enough job.”
“The firemen said they thought it was arson,” breathed Aeysha. “They’re sending somebody to investigate in the morning. He could go to prison for this.”
“I wish,” said Tati softly.
Evie looked hard at her sister. “I suppose it was you who told Mitch that Jack knew where to find him?”
“I had to,” said Tati desperately. “He ambushed me on the Royal Mile and told me that if we betrayed him, he’d run you over and break your legs. He knew that we were with the Swans. He’s clearly been keeping an eye on us for some time and waiting for his chance. Moving in for the kill.”
“I knew he was getting serious when he drove that car at us,” said Evie. “I knew it was a warning. I’m sorry you got hurt in the process, Livy. But after that review, I knew he’d know for certain where we were and I realised we were putting you all in real danger.”
“Mitch says that he’s finished with Edinburgh and he’s leaving soon,” said Tati. “I think he’s in trouble with some of his former cronies. Before he leaves he wants the sapphires and if you don’t hand them over, he said you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life. Actually what he said was that, ‘She’ll regret it for the rest of her life – if she has a rest of a life.’ Oh, Evie, I was so scared that I thought if I told him what Jack had planned, he might leave us alone.”
Tati started weeping again. Evie hugged her. Georgia was looking at them with a puzzled expression. “I’m very confused,” she said. “Is this Mitch person also your uncle?”
Evie and Tati shook their heads fiercely. “That’s what he calls himself, but he’s not a real uncle. We haven’t got any family in this country.”
“I think,” said Jack, “that you’d better tell us the whole story right from the beginning.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“By the time we arrived in Edinburgh, Mum was desperate,” said Tati, settling into the sofa back at the house. “She knew she didn’t have long to live, and she knew that if she died that Evie could be taken into care and we’d be split up.” She bit her lip. “It was one of the reasons she said to tell everybody I’m eighteen. I won’t actually turn eighteen for another few months. Aunt Rhona seemed a better bet than a children’s home. She was our insurance policy against the future.”
“But Aunt Rhona had died by the time you got here, hadn’t she?” said Aeysha, remembering the conversation around the campfire on the first night Evie and Tati had come to the campsite.
“That’s right,” said Evie. “But there was one good bit of news. Aunt Rhona hadn’t much money but she’d left Mum the only things she had of any value: a sapphire necklace and some earrings. They weren’t worth a lot, but the few thousand pounds would make all the difference to us. We thought that if Mum improved we might even be able to rent a little flat for a few months.”
“That’s the necklace that Alfie filched from your pocket during his magic act, isn’t it?” said Georgia excitedly.
Evie produced the necklace with a flourish. The sapphires caught the light and sparkled, and everyone oohed and aahed over them.
“So it is real,” said Georgia.
“That’s why you were so upset about Alfie taking it,” said Olivia softly.
Evie winced and nodded. “I’m sorry, I know I was rude but I was upset.”
Olivia looked hard at Evie. If she was
lying, she was a very good actress. Olivia suddenly felt relieved that all her fears about Evie seemed unfounded, although there were a great many questions that still needed answering. Like why Evie had all those newspaper cuttings in her box.
“So,” said Olivia, the words slipping out before she had really thought them through. “The necklace really does belong to you after all.”
Evie looked surprised and affronted. “Of course it does. What did you think we are: jewel thieves?”
Olivia blushed bright red. Everyone turned to look at her. She wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Everyone was waiting for her to explain what she’d meant.
When Olivia didn’t say anything, Evie raised her voice. “You did, didn’t you?” she cried. “You thought we were thieves!”
“No, no, I didn’t,” protested Olivia, unable to meet Evie’s eye. She wanted to fall through the floor. “It was only that, I found these…” She reached into her pocket and pulled out the cuttings about the jewel thefts.
Evie stared at them, her face white. Her eyes were burning and she said very quietly. “It’s OK, Olivia, we all know that you can’t resist nosing into everything and then jumping to all the wrong conclusions.”
“Hold on, Evie,” said Aeysha very calmly. “I believe that the necklace really belongs to you and isn’t stolen and I’m sure that Livy does, too. She’s not making any accusations, she’s just asking some questions. You and Tati have been very secretive, and you haven’t always told the truth. Maybe it’s not surprising that Livy is asking questions?”
Evie looked furious. Tati put her hand on her sister’s arm. “Evie, Aeysha’s right. We owe them an explanation.”
“I saved their circus for them, didn’t I?” said Evie mutinously. “I shouldn’t have to prove myself to anyone.”
“You did save the circus, Evie,” said Tati gently, “but if it wasn’t for us, the Swan Circus wouldn’t have been at risk in the first place.” She looked around at the Swans and the grown-ups. “You’ve all been so kind to us and we’ve brought you nothing but trouble. I’m sorry.”
Jack went to speak but Evie cut him off. “Not that I owe you an explanation, Olivia, especially as you shouldn’t have been going through my stuff in the first place, but the reason I saved the cuttings was because I was trying to gather evidence that linked Mitch to the hotel robberies.” She flipped open her phone, and showed them the series of shots of Mitch in various hotels around the city.
“Tati and I followed him as much as we dared to and snapped him whenever we could when we saw him going into one of the big hotels. We thought he was probably staking them out, because the hotel would always be robbed a day or two after his visit. We kept them as proof of the connection between Mitch’s visit and a subsequent robbery.”
“But why didn’t you just go to the police and tell them your suspicions?” asked Alicia gravely, who had heard them return to the house and had slipped into the room and listened hard as Evie and Tati told their story.
Evie and Tati looked flustered.“We rang in an anonymous tip-off from the campsite phone box, and the police stopped the robbery but Mitch got away.”
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t go to the police in person, they’d have listened to you,” said Alicia.
Something suddenly occurred to Olivia. “Has he got some kind of hold over you?” she asked.
Tati and Evie looked at each other. “Come on, Evie,” said Tati eventually, “we need to come clean and tell them everything.”
Evie gave a heavy sigh and then she began: “We met Mitch at the hospital the day after Aunt Rhona’s solicitor had turned up with the sapphires and earrings and all the papers for Mum to sign. At the time, Mitch turning up seemed like a complete coincidence, but now I’m not so sure that it was.”
She shook her head, and then continued. “The meeting with the solicitor took place in the corner of the ward day room. It wasn’t very private, but there wasn’t anywhere else to go. There were other people in the room, most of them patients watching TV, but there were some visitors, too.
“We tried to get as far away from everyone as we could but there was a man sitting quite close with his face hidden by a newspaper. Looking back, I think that must have been Mitch. He’d have overheard everything – the solicitor checking that Mum really was Cora Purcarete, formerly Cora McDonald, of 13 Jekyll Street and Flat 4a, Horriston Terrace, Morningside, and saw him handing over the sapphires and earrings to Tati. I think he was just in the right place at the right time and seized the opportunity.”
“The solicitor had wanted us to leave the jewellery with him for safe-keeping, but Mum said we should turn it into cash. We had the documents to prove they were ours, so why not? She knew she didn’t have long,” said Tati sadly.
“For the rest of the day I had the strangest feeling that we were being watched, but I didn’t really think anything of it. We made an appointment with a jeweller’s for a valuation the following afternoon, but when we went to visit Mum the next morning, Mitch was there by her bedside. He said it was a happy coincidence; he’d been visiting a relative in the same ward and he’d recognised Mum: they’d worked together in the same circus in Spain before we were born.
“Mum was dopey from all the drugs she was taking, but she seemed to confirm that she knew him, so we took all his smiles and offers of help at face value. He seemed really interested in the fact that I could walk the high-wire. He even charmed the nurses and he told them that he was our uncle. Mum took a turn for the worse before lunch, so we never made it to the jeweller’s, and when she died later that evening we were so distraught we just let Mitch bundle us up and take us back to his flat.”
“It was a mistake,” said Tati grimly. “The first of many. In the morning, the sapphires and earrings were gone, and Mitch turned out to be far less charming than he appeared. He kicked Harry and shut him out of the flat. We were virtual prisoners. It was clear he was involved in a great many scams and that he was also a jewel thief. He was using his old circus skills to scale buildings and run across roofs, but he was out of condition and it was getting too dangerous for him. He thought he’d found the person who could do his dirty work for him. Evie.”
Evie looked at Olivia, her eyes burning. “So yes, Olivia, you’re right. I am a jewel thief. Or rather, a failed one.”
“Mitch promised that if Evie did just one job for him, then he would hand back the necklace and earrings,” continued Tati. “She refused, of course, but Mitch said that without the sapphires, Mum would be given a pauper’s funeral in an unmarked grave. We were desperate and grief stricken, and we believed him.”
“What happened?” asked Aeysha.
“I climbed up on to the roof of the hotel and in through the window of the room he’d told me to. The diamond earrings Mitch wanted were lying on the dressing table in the empty suite. It would have been so easy to take them. But I just couldn’t.” Evie looked close to tears. “It felt so wrong. So I didn’t. I just left and told Mitch that I’d been disturbed and had to leave in a hurry. Which was true, really, because as I climbed out of the window somebody came into the room and saw me. Fortunately I was wearing the balaclava. It was a narrow escape.”
“Mitch was furious, and angrier still when Evie demanded the sapphires and said that if he didn’t hand them over, we’d go to the police,” said Tati. “So that’s when he played his trump card.”
“What was that?” asked Eel, wide-eyed.
“He said that my fingerprints would be all over the hotel room and window ledge and that if we sneaked to the police, I’d be the one in trouble. He’d already found out that Tati wasn’t eighteen after all and said that the authorities would split us up and put me in a children’s home. He said I might even be put in prison. We were really scared. We didn’t have any adults we could turn to.”
“I wanted to run away,” said Tati, “but Evie wouldn’t leave without the sapphires. She said Mum wouldn’t have wanted us to. So we watched and waited. Tried t
o pretend to Mitch that we were beaten, and that Evie would do the next job he wanted when it came up. We started to gather evidence of what he was up to. We knew about the house scam and that he was using 13 Jekyll Street as the address. One night, when he was drunk, he accidently left the key to his safe where we could filch it. As soon as he was asleep and snoring we opened the safe, took the sapphires and fled. Only we dropped the earrings as we left the flat and Mitch woke up, so we had to leave them.”
“Is that when you moved into the garage?” asked Olivia.
“Yes,” said Evie, “We’d been on a little pilgrimage with Mum to see where she had lived as a child when we’d first arrived in Edinburgh, so we knew about the garages. I’d noticed that the padlock on one of them was broken. It felt like a place where we could feel close to Mum, and although he was using the address for the scam, we knew Mitch had never been there.”
“Weren’t you scared he’d come looking for you?” asked Georgia.
“It was way off his patch,” said Evie. “And in many ways he’s quite stupid. We reckoned the safest place to hide out was in the most obvious place. Often you don’t see what’s right under your nose.
“But we were getting worried that he might find us, and then he caught us lurking near one of the hotels where he’d been, and after that he began trailing us across the city. We had a couple of close calls, but Harry saved us,” said Evie, hugging the dog, who licked her face. “We didn’t know anywhere else to go.”
“I wanted to leave Edinburgh,” said Tati. “But Evie wouldn’t hear of it. She said she wasn’t leaving until we had the earrings, too. Evie is very determined.”
“We’ve noticed.” Alicia smiled.
Evie blushed. “But then you lot turned up in town. We only came to the circus and the workshop because somebody gave us a flyer for free tickets. It was better than being in the garage, and well out of Mitch’s way. He was becoming very persistent. I was surprised to see you, Olivia, and I’m afraid I was still angry with you about the magic show, so I booed you. Then at the workshop I walked the high-wire and Jack offered us a role in the show. It seemed like the answer to our prayers. I thought it could give us a breathing space and some protection until we worked out what to do next.”
