by Lauren Child
Her mood had certainly turned sour by the time she was dropped back home, and the bouquet from Melrose Dorff arrived not a moment too soon. A huge bunch of fragrant blue flowers and a note: Please accept our enormous gratitude and this voucher to be spent in our store and redeemable against all Melrose Dorff merchandise*.
Everyone at Spectrum was very happy about the recovery of the Katayoun & Anahita jewels, everyone that is except for Agent Froghorn. He got zero credit for his hours of effort watching all that dull security footage and he was greatly resenting the attention Ruby Redfort was garnering from solving the case.
‘Boy, do you ever think you’re the cat’s pyjamas,’ said Froghorn as they filed out of the debriefing.
‘The cat’s pyjamas? Are you for real Froghorn?’ said Ruby.
‘You muscle in on my case little girl so you can pick up all my hard work and make yourself look good. I know what you’re up to, trying to become the new Bradley Baker, but here’s the news: everyone knows you don’t stand a chance, you’re never going to make it as an agent so do us all a favour and give up.’
‘Froghorn, did anyone ever tell you being a sore loser is a very unattractive trait?’
Ruby herself wasn’t feeling as satisfied or as smug as Froghorn was imagining. She was concerned that they still had no idea where this rare and thought to be extinct bird had escaped from – she also had no idea where the bird was now.
Meanwhile, back at the Crew home, something else had gone missing. Clancy had no idea what had happened to the Forgotten tube of ground glows though he was pretty sure he knew who the culprit was. He had collected up all the glows and hidden the tube in his desk drawer, but now it was gone.
‘Olive, have you been in my room?’
‘No.’
‘I know you have so you might as well tell me,’ said Clancy.
‘So why are you asking?’ said Olive.
‘To give you a chance to stop acting like a little kid.’
‘I am a little kid,’ said Olive.
This was true: Olive was only five.
‘Olive, when you were in my room, did you take something?’
‘I haven’t been in your room,’ said Olive.
Clancy rephrased the question. ‘Olive, when you weren’t in my room, did you take something?’
‘No.’
‘I know you did,’ said Clancy.
‘So why are you asking?’ said Olive.
‘Olive, can you just give whatever it is that you didn’t take back to me.’
‘I can’t remember,’ said Olive.
‘Can’t remember what you did with it?’ he asked.
‘What I didn’t take,’ said Olive.
‘It was a little tube – looked like Fresh Breath Mints,’ said Clancy.
‘Oh yes,’ said Olive. ‘I ate one, but it didn’t taste of mint and it was hard to swallow.’
‘Olive! You’re not supposed to eat them.’
‘Why not? They say mints on the packet, I asked Drusilla.’
Pause.
‘My friend Leah ate one too,’ said Olive.
Clancy tried to keep calm.
‘So are there any left or did you eat them all?’
‘We just ate one, two, three,’ said Olive. ‘We were saving the rest for when we were really hungry.’
‘So where are the rest of them?’ asked Clancy.
‘Don’t know,’ said Olive, skipping off. ‘I never took them.’
Chapter 37.
From the jaws of death
CLANCY PHONED RUBY THE NEXT MORNING to explain about the missing ground glows.
‘I’m really sorry Rube. I know that they’re super valuable and irreplaceable and all, but Olive just won’t tell me what she did with them.’
‘It’s not your fault Clance; it’s just a downer is what it is. Now I have no backup plan for getting unlost.’
‘Yeah, it totally sucks. I’ll see if I can trick her into telling me.’
‘Boy, are your sisters some trouble,’ said Ruby.
‘Yeah, Olive’s sending me crazy; she keeps following me around.’
‘By the way, I’ve done that punctuality essay of yours and it’s a good one; the handwriting looks perfect,’ said Ruby. ‘It’s here if you want to come and collect it?’
‘Yeah, why not,’ said Clancy, ‘at least it’ll get me away from Olive for a few hours.’
He showed up a half-hour later and he wasn’t looking one bit relaxed.
‘You seem sorta edgy Clance, something going on?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Clancy, ‘maybe.’
‘What do you mean, maybe?’ said Ruby. She was sitting on the roof wrapped in a blanket.
‘Rube, have you ever felt like you were being followed?’
‘Yeah, plenty times,’ said Ruby. ‘More than once by you.’
‘Well, I could swear someone’s on my tail,’ said Clancy.
‘Who? I mean who would follow you apart from Olive.’
‘No one I can think of,’ said Clancy.
‘Could be a hippo, ever thought of that?’
‘No Ruby, I hadn’t as a matter of fact, but thanks for taking this concern of mine so seriously.’
‘I am taking it seriously. I mean my mom’s seen a hippo, my dad thinks he’s seen a hippo, who’s to say you’re not being followed by a hippo?’
‘I guess I am,’ said Clancy bluntly. ‘I mean how much sunning do you Redforts do every day?’ Cause I hate to break it to you this way, but you’re all sounding a teensy bit insane.’
‘I’m just trying to be open-minded, that’s all. I’m the totally last one to think it’s likely that a hippo is roaming free in Twinford, but I’m beginning to think I’ve been too dismissive. You know Melamare thought she saw some thing which sounded from her description a little like a python and hey, think about it, Del thought Mrs Gilbert’s spaniel Gilbert was eaten by a tiger and, let’s face it, he is missing, and now you think you’re being followed so we have to agree something’s up, right?’
‘OK,’ said Clancy, ‘so what now?’
Ruby pushed her sunglasses back on top of her head and looked at him hard.
‘You have a hunch that something is following you, so when did all this start?’ asked Ruby, like she was Detective Despo and the world of Crazy Cops was not a fiction.
Clancy sat back in his deckchair and looked up at the cloudless sky.
‘A couple of nights ago, I just had a weird feeling like I was being watched. Then last night, when I was walking back from the park, I had a really strange feeling like I was being followed.’
‘What kind of weird feeling? A weird bad, a weird creepy or a weird unusual?’
‘A weird weird,’ said Clancy, ‘and then just now on my way here it happened again.’
‘The same weird?’ asked Ruby.
‘No,’ said Clancy, ‘sorta differently weird. I mean last night I smelled this smell, a smell I think I smelled before, but I can’t place it.’
‘Where did you sense the weirdness today?’
‘It was by Cedar Pond. I just sensed someone was watching me.’
Ruby was concentrating; she sat silently for a few minutes, contemplating what should be done, then she got to her feet and hopped down the open-tread staircase which led from the roof to her bedroom. She came back less than thirty seconds later with her pair of special agent issue binoculars.
‘OK,’ she said, ‘so you leave and I’m gonna watch what happens. I can see pretty far from here, so long as you take the Cedar Street route and make a turn on Faber Drive, I can track you.’
‘But what if someone is after me?’ said Clancy. ‘I mean what if they’re waiting to make a move and suddenly pounce while you’re looking through those magnifiers? I’ll be long gone before you can reach me.’
Ruby went down the stairs again, rummaged around in various drawers and came hobbling back with a pair of walkie-talkies; she handed him one of the receivers.
‘I can warn
you if I see anything, OK?’
‘OK,’ said Clancy uncertainly.
‘And if anything does happen and you get grabbed then you can tell me your whereabouts, and Hitch and me will find you. So go,’ said Ruby, pushing him towards the stairs.
Clancy paused. ‘I was going to climb down the tree and slip out the back gate, less chance of being followed.’
Ruby rolled her eyes. ‘Being followed is the whole point bozo; you need to leave by the front.’
Clancy sighed. ‘OK, but if I get snatched and murdered by a psychopath it will be down to you.’
‘I’ll plant a tree or something in your memory, OK? Now split.’
Ruby got into position; she had a great view from up on the roof and could see all the way to the ocean.
She watched as Clancy made his way down the street. He was walking fairly fast and she could tell he was resisting the urge to run. There was no sign of anyone, not a car, not a bike, not one single psychopath. She followed him round the winding streets as he made his way towards home. Nothing and then. . . something.
Clancy froze. It was so quick Ruby couldn’t make out what it was. ‘Keep walking buster,’ Ruby muttered. As if he had heard her, Clancy began to put one foot in front of the other; he was acting really nervous and whoever was trailing him was going to sense it for sure.
Something moved in the bushes, then slowly, very slowly, walked out onto the sidewalk; it was a hundred yards away. Clancy didn’t see, but Ruby did. She thumbed the switch on the walkie-talkie to send him a message in Morse code.
He didn’t seem to register or maybe was too panic-stricken to decode the message so she buzzed him and watched as he fumbled for the walkie-talkie.
‘What is it?’ he hissed into the radio.
‘Get up a tree now bozo!’
‘What?’
‘Climb, darn it!’
Clancy dropped the receiver and lunged towards the nearest climbable thing. He hoisted himself up onto a road sign and continued to climb right to the top, not looking back. Once he had got as far as he could possibly go, he looked down. What he saw was a Sumatran tiger, though he didn’t realise this at the time, he wasn’t counting the stripes or working out how close together they were, he just saw a very large cat with a lot of teeth looking hungrily up at him.
Clancy watched as the creature crunched down the walkie-talkie.
Ruby watched from her vantage point. ‘Oh jeez.’
The authorities were there in no time at all; they had just come from a similar incident involving an entirely different species on the other side of town.
It was a great coincidence that it happened to be another boy Ruby knew.
Quent Humbert had been doing some bird watching down by Twinford River when he had spotted a large prehistoric reptile, actually a Siamese crocodile of a very good size.
Luckily for Quent, he had managed to squeeze himself into a concrete pipe, a drain too small for the Siamese croc which was over thirteen feet long. He was there for some hours because the reptile had decided to wait it out, sure that at some point Quent would make a false move and when he did he would be ready for it. Luckily, a fisherman on the opposite bank spotted the crocodile and called the Sheriff’s Office. Quent Humbert unsurprisingly went into shock and was found to be incapable of verbalising what had happened.
Clancy was not exactly over the moon about his wildlife experience either.
‘Why the Sam Hill did you tell me to climb a tree?’ he exclaimed. ‘Tigers can climb trees you know!’
‘Yeah, but they prefer not to because they find it hard to get down,’ said Ruby.
‘Hard to get down?’ spluttered Clancy. ‘By the time it started worrying about getting down, I’d already have been devoured.’
‘What I’m saying,’ said Ruby, ‘is it probably wouldn’t have chosen to follow you up in the first place – anyway, you didn’t climb a tree, you climbed a road traffic sign, so you were way out of trouble.’
‘Yeah, no thanks to you! Why didn’t you tell me to play dead – that’s what you’re meant to do if you encounter a tiger.’
‘Because I thought the chances of you pulling that stunt off were next to zero; you’d have been flapping around like a flounder.’
They bickered on like this all the way back from the police station.
When she got home, Ruby went directly to her room and pulled out her notebook. Things had got pretty strange. She added the animals recently sighted: most were rounded up and their species correctly identified.
THE SIAMESE CROCODILE – native to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia – spotted by the unfortunate Quent Humbert at Twinford River.
THE TIGER – native to Sumatra – chased Clancy on the street outside my house.
THE PYGMY HIPPO – native to West Africa swimming in our pool.
BLACK-TAILED PYTHON - native to South-east Asia - seen by Gemma in the school corridor.
LAPIS BOWERBIRD – native to Australia nesting in Harker Square.
A POLICEMAN CRITICALLY ILL IN HOSPITAL HAVING BEEN ATTACKED BY SOME WILD ANIMAL (thought to be a wild dog). Animal yet to be identified as no witness to the attack and the officer still in coma.
Ruby looked up each animal in turn and discovered that every one of them was either rare, endangered or thought to be extinct.
Lorelei von Leyden
hurried to answer
the phone. . .
. . .and switched it to speaker; she had been busy sorting papers on her desk, papers that were giving her a headache.
‘Tell me some good news,’ she demanded.
‘We found it,’ said the voice of the young man. ‘It was pretty easy once we knew how; we trapped it and took it up to the mountain hideaway. No one’s going to discover it there.’
‘Not even her?’ asked Lorelei.
‘Not even her,’ said Eduardo ‘Quit being so paranoid, you don’t even know if she’s in town.’
‘If she’s not in town, then why the messages? She’s getting nearer and she wants me to know it.’
‘She’s trying to scare you by getting her flunkies to pass you these threats – it doesn’t mean a thing. The important thing is we have the creature.’
‘But what if it does mean something? What if she is here?’
‘Look, how about I keep an eye out for her, track her down? What does she look like?’
‘That’s just it, I don’t know. I’ve never met her, never even seen so much as a grainy photograph. She could be sitting right next to you for all I know.’
The man instinctively looked around him, but the square was empty, but for a friendly-looking middle-aged woman in a flowered dress reading and eating an ice-cream.
Chapter 38.
Alive
THE THEORY THE NEWSPAPERS HAD COME UP WITH was that the animals had been smuggled into the country illegally and were to be sold to a private collector or dodgy circus troupe – somehow the plan had gone wrong, the deal had collapsed and the animals had escaped or been set free.
Ruby checked in with Hitch; he was drinking his seventh coffee of the day and looked like he had a lot on his mind.
‘So what’s new?’ said Ruby.
‘Sheriff Bridges and his team have done a pretty good job contacting all the zoos and animal sanctuaries in the Twinford County area.’
‘And?’ said Ruby.
‘And nothing. They followed up with door-to-door enquiries and led investigations into the many sightings (both real and bogus) of animals seen roaming around the city streets and municipal parks.’
‘No leads?’
‘Zip,’ said Hitch. ‘No zoo has been broken into and no zoo has accidentally left the gate open – so to speak.’
‘So now what?’ asked Ruby.
‘It’s not our case,’ said Hitch. ‘We haven’t been assigned to look into it because it’s got nothing to do with the kind of thing we do.’
‘But what if there’s more to it than we think?’ said Ruby. ‘Something more siniste
r than all these theories; maybe it’s not about collectors or animal rights activists or someone who left the gate open.’
‘If something comes up that falls into Spectrum’s remit, then we’ll be asked to step in.’ Hitch put down his mug. ‘But for now, I gotta go. LB wants me to head into HQ. I’ll see you later kid.’
Ruby walked back up to the kitchen where Mrs Digby seemed to be preparing a ton of vegetables.
Ruby stared at the old lady for a while; a thought had been going round and round, ever since she spoke to Mrs Attenburg: what if he’s alive?
The housekeeper looked up. ‘What is it child, what’s in that head of yours?’
‘Have you ever heard of Flemming Fengrove?’ she asked.
Mrs Digby stopped chopping. ‘Now what put that name in your head child?’
‘Someone mentioned him the other day,’ said Ruby, ‘so I wondered if you might have heard of him.’
‘I’ve more than heard of him,’ said Mrs Digby, ‘I used to work for him.’
‘You worked for him?’ said Ruby. ‘I thought you’d always worked for Mom’s folks?’
‘Always have, but now and again – when I was younger – I’d take on extra jobs, sometimes at the Fengrove place. The parties were something to see,’ said Mrs Digby, ‘but it was no easy ticket, I can promise you that; all those guests who needed feeding and all those animals wanting to eat you. Crazy times,’ she added, returning to her carrots.
‘Where is his place?’ asked Ruby as if she was merely curious to imagine rather than about to make a mental note.
‘North out of town,’ said Mrs Digby, pointing with her carrot, ‘all the way along until you reach the canyon road and then you just drive and drive until you get to a sharp fork to the left and then you head steep up in the direction of Wolf Paw Mountain. Easy to miss if you don’t know where you’re headed.’
