Catch Your Death
Page 28
She reached into her satchel. ‘I got something for you,’ she said.
‘You have?’ Clancy decided it was probably a donut or maybe an éclair, though most likely a donut since she had one of Marla’s bags in her hand.
But what Ruby handed him was a little silver key.
‘It’s for my bike,’ she said, nodding over to the wall where the bike was leaning. ‘It’s a little beaten up. Hitch picked it up in the helicopter before the fire reached it.’
It looked exactly like Ruby’s bike, but for the fact that it was blue, Windrush blue. Clancy could only stare, his mouth ever so slightly open, but no words forming.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘You painted your bike blue?’
‘No, I painted your bike blue buster,’ she said.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Clancy, who really didn’t get it.
‘Look bozo, you need to have a really cool bike, cool, as in reliable and tough, which my bike is, right? And I know you have a thing for blue bikes and so rather than have you act all crazy again trying to get your hands on one, I thought I’d better make my bike you know, blue.’
‘Jeez Rube. . ’ He couldn’t think of much else to say; this was Ruby’s bike, the one she was nuts about, the one she said she would never give away, ever. He began to flap his arms. ‘Rube, I can’t take this.’
‘Yes you can bozo because what am I gonna do with a blue bike? I don’t even like blue bikes.’
She turned to go. ‘It’s nice to see you alive Clance, you know that?’
‘Yeah,’ said Clancy, ‘nice to see you alive too Rube. You’re quite the survivor.’
RUBY LIMPED BACK TO WHERE HITCH WAS WAITING IN THE SILVER CAR. She got in and he started the engine. A second later, a call came through. Hitch flicked the switch on the dashboard and out of the speakers came LB’s gravelly voice.
‘So Redfort, I hear you made it.’
‘Well, some of me did – my hair doesn’t look so great,’ said Ruby, ‘and I suppose, if you’re gonna get picky about it, I broke my arm too, plus I missed taking the survival test.’ Ruby was not going to whine about it – she wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction; she would take failure fair and square on the chin. Just like someone wise had recently told her: ‘The only thing you control is your reaction to what’s beyond your control.’
LB said nothing.
‘So. . . I’m guessing that’s a fail as far as Spectrum goes,’ said Ruby.
‘Survival doesn’t sound like failure to me Redfort,’ said LB.
‘Sam Colt was pretty impressed with your determination and I have got to admit that your uncovering of the Cyan wolf plot deserves recognition, even though you let the wolf escape.’ She paused. ‘I’m putting you forward for stage three of the Field Agent Training Programme, we’ll see you in September. Try to work on that smart mouth of yours Redfort.’
Ruby was about to give a smart mouth reply, but Hitch gave her an eye signal that Ruby interpreted as quit while you’re ahead. So she did.
‘Oh, Hitch, one other thing,’ said LB, ‘might you be able to throw any light on how my Paris paperweight went walkabout and then several weeks later made it back onto my desk?’
‘Sounds like quite the mystery,’ said Hitch, ‘you want me to look into it?’
‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ said LB dryly.
Ruby glanced at him and thought she saw the faintest of smiles play on his lips, but she couldn’t swear to it.
They drove home in silence. As they turned the corner into Cedarwood Drive, Ruby made to get out of the car, then stopped, turned to Hitch and said, ‘By the way, thanks for rescuing me out there.’
Hitch just smiled. ‘It was nothing kid. Everyone needs rescuing once in a while.’
THINGS I KNOW:
...................
Why Dr Harper owes Hitch – it all has to do with a paperweight.
Which mushrooms will kill you and which ones won’t.
THINGS I DON’T KNOW:
...................
Who the woman in the floral dress is working for.
What she is planning to do with the Alaskan Cyan scent.
Where Lorelei von Leyden is now.
Where the Lapis bowerbird is now.
Whether the Cyan wolf made it out of there alive.
Whether the Count has anything to do with this.
Ruby Redfort
There really was a lost perfume of Marie Antoinette. A gift from Louis XVI to the young French queen, it was created by royal perfumer Jean-Louis Fargeon and contained notes of rose, jasmine, bergamot, cardamom, incense, cinnamon, sandalwood, patchouli, tonka bean and amber, as an homage to the queen’s beloved Trianon gardens.
Marie Antoinette carried the scent in a black jade vial, which she kept with her at all times – even when imprisoned in the Temple Tower during the French Revolution. Just before her execution, she handed the perfume to her closest friend and confidante, the Marquise de Tourzel, for safe-keeping. The original vial is still in the possession of the Tourzel family, locked away in their Burgundy château.
The formula for the queen’s perfume was written down by the royal perfumer’s apprentice, Pierre François Lubin, under the coded name of ‘jardin secret’ (or ‘secret garden’). Discovered two hundred years later in the archives of the Lubin perfume house, the long-lost perfume was finally released under the name ‘Black Jade’ in 2012.
The Siamese Crocodile, Pygmy Hippo, Sumatran Tiger and Black-tailed Python are all real species, and all are rare or endangered.
Siamese Crocodiles are relatively small freshwater crocodiles from South-east Asia. Adults average three metres in length but can grow to four metres. They are now virtually extinct in the wild, apart from some areas of Cambodia.
Pygmy Hippos are nocturnal, which is why Ruby never saw the one in her garden.
Sumatran Tigers are one of the smallest of all tiger subspecies, with darker, thicker stripes than those found in other parts of the world. There are fewer than 500 in the wild, living exclusively on the island of Sumatra.
Black-tailed Pythons live predominantly in the Indian subcontinent. They are endangered as a result of being hunted for their beautiful patterned skins.
Bowerbirds are also real. Native to Australia and New Guinea, they are songbirds known primarily for their extraordinary courtship behaviour. To attract a mate, the male bowerbird builds a complex nest structure called a ‘bower’, decorating it with sticks, acorns, leaves and shiny or brightly-coloured objects and flowers.
The extinct ‘Lapis Bowerbird’ was invented for the purposes of this book. However, there is a real bird – the Satin Bowerbird – which, like the imaginary bird in this story, almost exclusively decorates its bower with blue objects.
Our noses actually work like a code cracker. Inside them we have things called olfactory receptors. In humans there are about 1,000 different sorts of receptors. When molecules enter the nose, some of these receptors will be turned on when they react with the molecule. Once the receptors are turned on they send information via nerves to the brain. The brain then interprets the information and registers whether you are smelling a strawberry or a fish or something else.
Because the smell turns some of the receptors on and the rest remain off, this means that each smell is like a piece of binary code made out of a sequence of 0s and 1s. Because there are so many different receptors in the nose, humans can detect up to 10,000 unique smells.
Lorelei von Leyden’s smell code is based on the fact that each time you register a smell your nose is using these receptors to identify the molecule that corresponds to that smell. Each molecule is made up out of a combination of atoms from the periodic table, and as Ruby learns from the book she reads within this book, often substances that smell contain benzene rings.
For example, if you smell almonds then your nose has probably detected the molecule called benzaldehyde. This consists of 7 carbon atoms, 6 hydrogen atoms and
1 oxygen atom. It is written C7H6O. But it is the shape of the molecule which is key to von Leyden’s smell code.
Benzaldehyde
Note that there is a carbon atom at every point where two or more lines meet and five invisible hydrogen atoms too – it’s just a convention of chemical notation not to show them.
This particular molecule is arranged with 6 carbon atoms in a hexagon – the benzene ring – and then there is one interesting twig sticking out of the ring which is made up of the seventh carbon atom joined to an oxygen atom and a hydrogen atom. It is this twig that corresponds to a letter in von Leyden’s code. In this case the letter T.
Benzaldehyde is a very simple molecule, but it is possible to have quite a complicated system of twigs sprouting out of these carbon rings and each molecule will have its own smell. For example five different smells (thyme, vanilla, anise, cinnamon and orange) were used to encode the message WHY THE DELAY.
Working backwards, you could, if you wanted to, change your name into a combination of smells that encode your name, giving you your very own personalised perfume.
If you want to play around with making molecules and seeing what they might smell like, there is a tool that allows you to do this at www.chemspider.com
Not every chemical has been made by chemists so the smell you come up with might not be known yet!
Marcus du Sautoy.
Thank you to Rachel Folder for some very good plotting ideas, and for writing them on big sheets of paper in very neat handwriting and sticking them up on the walls. Thank you to AD for chatting through the story and helping me sift out the not so good bits. Thank you to my editor Nick Lake for untangling a tangled book, David Mackintosh for beautiful design and illustration, Lucy Vanderbilt for her American-speak. Thank you to Le Labo for letting me sniff their delicious smells and scents and explaining how they become perfume, and thank you to Marcus du Sautoy for his brilliance in sniffing out a very tricky code.
Thank you to HarperCollins for providing me with a warm glassy office to work in when my central heating failed me.
And as always thank you to my publisher and editor Ann-Janine Murtagh, for her late-into-the-evening editing, advice and kind words.
Books one and two out now, bozo!
Copyright
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2013
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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For Ruby Redfort games, puzzles, videos and more, visit: www.rubyredfort.com
Visit Lauren Child at www.milkmonitor.com
Copyright © Lauren Child 2013
Series design and illustrations by David Mackintosh
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Source ISBN: 9780007334100
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007523337
Version: 2013-09-20
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