by Lauren Child
Her mother smiled. ‘So long as I got my little Ruby Redfort,’ she said, hugging Ruby. ‘Who cares about stones?’
Ruby didn’t usually go in for this sort of schmaltzy convo, but tonight, well, tonight her parents had come back from the dead so Ruby was easing up on the teen attitude. She did actually mean every nice word she said, but she also wanted to get out of having to wear the flouncy yellow blouse her mother had picked out for her. It was touch and go as to whether this strategy would work, but it was worth a try.
‘So,’ said Ruby, ‘tell me again, what exactly happened out there?’
‘Oh, come on Rube!’ said her mother laughing. ‘We’ve told you around four times!’
But Ruby couldn’t get enough of the story – she was kind of proud that her parents had survived such a dicey situation. There was of course another reason for wanting to hear it over and over; it was RULE 14: VERY OFTEN PEOPLE NEGLECT TO TELL THE MOST IMPORTANT DETAIL. She’d learned this from Detective Despo; Crazy Cops might just be a TV show, but if you wanted to learn about detective work, then this show was packed with an awful lot of good tips.
‘Well,’ said her father, ‘I woke up to hear that little dog yapping…’
They went through the whole terrifying ordeal again. How, as the pirates started shooting into the water, both of them had escaped the clutches of almost certain death by diving deep down under the boat and holding their breath.
‘The pirates left us for dead, no lifebelts, no nothing,’ said Brant. ‘But we managed to grab onto Ambassador Crew’s luggage. The pirates had thrown it overboard. I think he might have been getting on their nerves; Lester can do that to people.’
‘Yes, we were very lucky with the suitcase,’ said Sabina. ‘It floated beautifully – it’s top-quality luggage, you know. Good luggage is always a good investment. The three of us, that’s Pookie, your father and I, clung on for dear life.’
‘Pookie?’ said Mrs Digby, who had come in to collect the tea things.
‘The yappy dog,’ said Ruby.
‘What kind of creature suits a name like Pookie?’ sniffed the housekeeper.
‘Pookie,’ said Ruby.
‘Well, I pray I don’t meet him,’ said Mrs Digby, picking up a tray and making her way back up to the kitchen.
‘Yes, the three of us managed to paddle towards the Sibling Islands, though why they call them islands I don’t know; they’re nothing like islands, just big old rocks – there’s absolutely no sign of life there. You can’t even climb onto them, unless of course you happen to be Spider-Man.’ Her mother was dusting her nose with powder.
‘But I thought the waters near the Sibling Islands were supposed to be super dangerous, what with the currents and tides and all?’ said Ruby.
‘Well, that’s true enough,’ said her father. ‘But the darnedest thing must have happened – the currents were still, totally still. Something to do with the moon, or is it the stars? I forget what causes it, but something up there.’ He pointed vaguely above him.
Of course, thought Ruby. He wasn’t exactly on the money with his explanation, but it was close enough – the asteroid! YKK 672. She had read somewhere that large asteroids, passing close enough to earth, could modify the local attraction of the moon and stop water currents for as long as the asteroid stayed near the atmosphere.
‘It can last several days, or just a matter of hours, you never can tell,’ continued her father. ‘For just a short window of time the currents calm, and you can actually swim without getting sucked under, and hey presto! Your parents don’t drown!’
‘Yes, were we ever lucky with that!’ said her mother. ‘Your dad and I are excellent swimmers, but no one can swim in the Sibling waters when the currents are strong. What are the chances?’ Her mother grinned and powdered her nose some more. ‘This happens once in a blue moon and we get lucky – who could believe it?’
Ruby could: her parents were born lucky.
‘So how come you know all this info on the tides and currents an’ all?’ asked Ruby.
‘It all comes from his days aboard the Sea Wolf – you remember, your dad worked for that diver guy in Tuscany, Italy?’ said Sabina. ‘Of course, he already had a free-dive scholarship at Stanton too.’
Ruby did remember this, but she had no idea Brant had actually taken any of it on-board – her dad wasn’t exactly the smartest fish in the barrel.
‘I studied under a genuine marine genius. Well actually, I worked for his marine genius co-divers. Francesco Fornetti rarely spoke to me, I was too junior,’ sighed Brant.
‘He was a terrific breath-hold diver,’ said Sabina. ‘Too bad about what happened to him.’
‘Yes, too bad – he knew more about ocean life than just about anyone around,’ added Brant.
‘Why, what happened to him?’ said Ruby. ‘Did he die?’
‘Professionally I guess,’ said her dad.
‘Meaning what?’ asked Ruby.
‘It happened in Twinford actually. We’d seen him a couple of times. We went on… um… a sailing trip with him. Then he started jabbering on about something he’d seen, some weird creature, couldn’t stop going on about it. He got laughed out of the ocean by a bunch of marine life experts. They all said he had gone crazy, swallowed too much saltwater or something,’ said Brant. ‘It was too bad; he just sort of disappeared after that.’
‘Anyway,’ said Sabina excitedly, ‘I just wish he’d been there when we saw the worrying thing in the water. He might have been able to identify it.’
‘What worrying thing in the water?’ asked Ruby. This was a new detail – they hadn’t mentioned the worrying thing in the water before.
‘Well,’ said her mother, ‘there we were, just busy swimming around the Sibling Islands, trying to find fresh water – which you might think impossible.’
‘Fortunately for us, it wasn’t,’ said her father. ‘There was a natural stream that ran down the north side of the north rock into the ocean; we found an old plastic bottle which we filled to the very brim and that’s what saved our lives.’
‘Terrible how people litter,’ said her mother. ‘Although we were very grateful for it at the time – without it we might have perished of thirst.’
‘But what about the thing?’ asked Ruby, impatient for them to get to the point.
‘Oh yes, there was definitely a thing in the water,’ said her father. ‘Pookie heard it – you know what a dog’s hearing is like.’
‘Very sensitive,’ agreed Sabina.
‘But what was it?’ asked Ruby.
‘We didn’t exactly see it,’ said her mother.
‘I felt its vibrations,’ said her father. ‘Like it was moving toward us. Our chances were looking really quite deathly and then something really strange happened. This sort of indigo cloud – like dye – kind of appeared in the water.’
‘Like squid ink?’ asked Ruby.
‘Well, sort of but not,’ said Brant. ‘It was like no squid ink I ever saw before. And blue, not black.’
‘It got all over Pookie and he didn’t like it one bit,’ said her mother. ‘Kept trying to lick it off and the more he licked, the more he yapped.’
‘Boy, did that dog yap,’ agreed Brant.
‘Though thank goodness he did,’ said Sabina. ‘Because the Runklehorns heard it – they were sailing past the far side of the islands and the next thing we heard was Eadie Runklehorn’s voice calling, Ahoy there Redforts, just the people we were looking for. We need a couple to make up a bridge four! We’re getting very bored playing Snap on our own.’
Brant was laughing at the very memory of it.
‘You know Eadie,’ he said. ‘Such an original sense of humour – there we are, clinging to a suitcase, practically drowning, and she makes a joke!’
Ruby was looking at them wondering if too much sun and saltwater had sent them insane. Not many drowning people would see the funny side, but she guessed this was the old Redfort survival instinct kicking in; keep laughing and nothi
ng can ever be as bad as it seems. She had read about this in the SAS/Marine Survival Handbook. It said there that the trick to surviving a life-and-death situation was ninety per cent attitude – same as her Rule 48.
‘So then what?’ asked Ruby.
‘And then, ta-da, they rescued us!’ Sabina said this last part with a flourish of her powder-brush as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be rescued from a sea monster.
‘Yes, and just in time for afternoon tea,’ said Brant.
‘So if you got rescued at 4pm on Friday, how come you didn’t make it back here until lunchtime the following Wednesday?’ asked Ruby.
‘Oh honey, you know what the Runklehorns are like,’ said her father. ‘Wouldn’t put us ashore until we’d played a dozen rounds of deck quoits and several hands of bridge. Then of course we remembered the pirates.’
‘You forgot them?’ said Ruby.
‘Well, it was all so exciting bumping into the Runklehorns like that,’ said Sabina. ‘The pirates clear went out of my mind – anyway, we all decided we had better sail the long way round since we didn’t want to get captured again and then of course we had engine trouble. Luckily, that nice fellow with the helicopter showed up.’
‘Supper was the only disappointment,’ said her father. ‘The chef had been having trouble trying to catch a single fish. We ended up eating canned tuna.’
‘I guess something was scaring the fishes,’ said her mother.
Water, water everywhere and not a fish to eat, thought Ruby. She remembered the other week when Mrs Digby had threatened her with cod-liver oil because the fish store was out of fish. Weirder and weirder still.
The doorbell chimed.
‘Oh, that will be the Runklehorns,’ said Sabina. ‘Go put on that nice yellow number, would you honey?’
Ruby opened her mouth to protest, but before she could say anything, caught sight of herself in the mirror. The T-shirt she was wearing was printed with the word duh. She would make her mother’s day perfect and go change.
Chapter 26.
Cerebral Sounds
THE DINNER CONVERSATION WAS OF COURSE LIMITED to the subject of pirates, rescue and lost treasure.
‘What gets me is why the coastguard didn’t pick up my mayday call,’ said Sabina.
‘Yes, that is a mystery,’ agreed Brant.
‘And Bernie sent message after message when our engine went kaput, but no one responded,’ said Eadie.
‘It was pure chance that we got rescued – the guy in the chopper just happened to be flying by,’ said Bernie.
‘Shame, it was a lovely spot,’ said Brant. ‘We were really having a high old time, weren’t we darling?’
‘Oh yeah,’ replied Sabina. ‘A swell time.’
While her parents and the Runklehorns laughed, Ruby was beginning to put things together in her head. She was sure that the pirates had to be responsible for the lost mayday calls: it made sense; this way they could rob and hijack vessels without being disturbed. But how were they doing it? From her mother’s description they didn’t sound like the most sophisticated villains at sea and surely, if they were going to all the trouble of blocking mayday calls, they must have a bigger target in mind than cruise boats and cash.
Like Blacker said, it wasn’t like many pleasure boats sailed in those waters.
‘Sabina was so heroic.’ Brant gripped her hand and smiled. ‘You should have seen her out there, quite an inspiration.’
Her mother’s family had always had confidence, but what they were famous for was their guts, the kind of courage that inspired awe – after all, there were legends about it. No one could be sure that these weren’t just tales told by drunken sailors, but Ruby chose to sort of believe them; they sounded just far-fetched enough to be true. And it wasn’t impossible that her mother had a pirate relative, though when she looked across at Eliza’s great-great-great-granddaughter, sitting there in her cerise Marco Perella evening dress, it did seem unlikely. Sabina Redfort might not have inherited her great-great-grandmother Martha’s brains, but she had certainly inherited her courage. Sabina Redfort was no wuss, no siree.
Later, when dinner was over and Ruby’s parents were sitting chatting with the Runklehorns, she went upstairs to her room and pulled out the list and the spider-map. It seemed likely that the dead couple, the couple who turned out not to be Ruby’s parents, were also the victims of the pirates, judging by the state of their yacht, the Swift, which had been ransacked. They too had been thrown to the waves, but they were not such able swimmers and with no ambassadorial luggage to cling to, drowning was their fate.
Ruby added their names under the heading, pirate attacks.
The facts on the piece of paper were growing and things were beginning to add up. Though she still wasn’t sure to what.
The drowned agent diver
Confused shipping
Unusual marine activity
Sea sounds
Missed maydays
The stranger
Pirate attacks
Ruby fell asleep without difficulty and slept soundly until an hour before dawn when her dream took a puzzling turn.
She found herself in her music class. Clancy was tapping out a message with a drumstick. Ruby was frustrated: she knew Morse code well, but she couldn’t decipher this, it just made no sense. What are you trying to tell me Clance? He was just looking at her like she was super dumb and continued to tap. Was it nonsense or was she not as smart as she thought?
She woke up, but the dream continued… or at least the tapping did. It was coming from the bathroom. Ruby fumbled for her glasses, got up and switched on the light. It was the cold tap, not quite turned off, and a steady drip was drumming onto a plastic cup that was sitting upside down in the sink. Ruby switched on the radio, which was still tuned to Chime Melody, and a reassuring old tune wafted out of the set, the kind of golden oldie that Mrs Digby adored.
As Ruby listened, she began to think about the recent interruptions, the strange unmusic-like music playing on the radio, music more suited to the classical radio channel Cerebral Sounds. The kind of music that had no business being played on Chime. Suddenly Ruby froze and she felt those tiny hairs on the back of her neck prick up. She could see it now, this thing that had sounded like a jumble of notes, a mess of sounds; she had heard it with her own ears, but failed to understand.
She ran to the wall of books that covered one side of her room and pulled at the quarterly code magazines that dated back several years. She remembered reading an article about something, something that might help her chase down the thought she couldn’t catch. She spread them out across the floor until she caught sight of the one she wanted. In this old edition was an article on musicians who had encrypted music and so passed secrets across the airwaves without anyone ever suspecting that these tunes were not just tunes. One of the most famous was a composer called Arvo Pärt, but there were many others: the highly successful composer and double agent Sarå H Stein, and Roberto Bowerbeck and Tristan Delaware to name a handful. At the back of the magazine was a 7-inch plastic record: low quality but it should still play.
Ruby put the record on the turntable and the needle automatically lowered itself onto the disc. The piece was by I Zac-Gardner: Preamble in Three Equally Divided Halves.
It sounded very much like the kind of thing Chime had been playing – music without melody.
Ruby pulled on her sweatshirt and ran down the stairs right to the bottom of the house. She moved lightly and almost soundlessly and only Bug heard a footstep.
She tapped lightly on Hitch’s door – she could hear him put something down on the table, a cup or a glass.
‘Ruby?’ he said quietly. ‘That you?’
She opened the door; he was still dressed from the night before, or maybe he was freshly dressed for the coming day. He looked only mildly surprised to see her.
‘Hey kid,’ he said. ‘What got you up before dawn?’
Ruby sat down in one of the two easy ch
airs that furnished the compact yet stylish apartment.
‘I figured something out,’ she said. ‘At least I think I figured something out, I just got to prove it is all.’
‘I’m all ears kid.’ He sat down in the opposite chair.
‘This Chime Melody thing I’ve been working on for Froghorn – I suddenly get it. It’s not interference, it’s not someone disrupting the airwaves – it’s more than that.’
‘More how?’ asked Hitch.
‘Well, old Froghorn dumped me with the job of studying each tape, each piece of music, trying to listen for a voice masked by the music, but that’s not what’s going on here.’
‘It isn’t?’ said Hitch.
‘No,’ said Ruby. ‘The music isn’t covering up the communication, the music IS the communication. It’s a code.’
‘You know this?’ said Hitch.
Ruby shook her head.
‘But you’re pretty sure?’
‘Eighty per cent. I figure each note is a letter. Could be more complicated though. You know, like when a note lasts for two beats, you skip a letter, or it changes into a number, or something.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Hitch. ‘But if you say so, I believe you.’
‘So I gotta listen to the tapes so I can figure out how it works.’
‘That all? You can go in and listen to them any day you like.’
‘I mean I want to bring them home; it would give me more time.’
He paused, considering the request; it wasn’t strictly protocol, but it was practical. He took a deep breath. ‘I can get them.’
‘What about Froghorn? Is he gonna make trouble?’
‘No, leave Froghorn to me. I can handle anything he cares to throw.’
‘And maybe…’ said Ruby, ‘don’t let’s say anything until I’ve got proof. I’d hate to give him the pleasure of knowing I’d got it wrong.’
‘I’ll keep it zipped kid. You can count on it.’
They went up to the kitchen and sat there for a while drinking tea and talking things over until they were interrupted.
