by Laura Wood
Betsy was still pouting, but her voice had softened when she said, “All right then, but you owe me!” She turned and stomped off with a toss of her head.
Jack grimaced at us. “Looks like I’m in the dog house!” he said ruefully, and then he grinned, and I smiled back, thinking he was way too good for this Betsy girl. There was something about this Betsy girl that was bothering me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.
The surfing lesson was well and truly over by now, and we headed up to the castle for lunch. When we arrived there seemed to be a bit of a commotion outside on the front lawn. Bernard Booth was standing with his arm around a weeping Agatha, and he was shouting at Fuddling who remained as stone-faced as ever.
“How could you not have seen anything?” Bernard yelled. “You’re supposed to be keeping an eye on things. I can’t believe that this has happened again.”
Agatha was sobbing gently and Mr Grant jogged over, a concerned look on his face. I tried to sidle over as stealthily as possible so that I could find out what was going on. My heart quickened; was this something to do with Jenny’s disappearance?
“What’s going on?” Mr Grant asked. “Is everyone all right?”
“We’re fine,” Bernard said wearily. “It’s those vandals again, they’ve been playing about with the spray paint.” He gestured towards the shiny new bathroom conversion for the camping site. There, on the side, the word LEAVE had been scrawled in red paint.
“Who would write such a horrid thing?” whispered Agatha.
“The same idiots who put a brick through the window last week,” said Bernard, with a scowl. He turned to Fuddling again and pointed an accusing finger at him. “And you told me you would keep an eye on things.”
“With respect, sir,” Fuddling said coldly, “I have only one pair of eyes and I cannot be everywhere at once. As I suggested before, you would be wise to employ some sort of groundsman for the purpose.” With this he turned on his heel and swept past us in to the castle.
Bernard Booth was left staring speechlessly after him.
“Let’s go and have some lunch,” Mr Grant said soothingly. “I’m sure it’s just some local kids messing around. We can have it cleaned up in no time.” With that he began guiding the Booths back towards the dining hall. We all followed quietly behind.
“What was that about?” Kip hissed out of the side of his mouth.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe it was the same people who took down all the tents? Someone who doesn’t want the Booths here.”
“Do you think Muggins did it?” Ingrid whispered.
“Doesn’t seem his style,” I replied, puzzled. “Although the ransom note did say ‘you are not wanted here’.”
“But why would Muggins want the Booths to leave the castle?” Ingrid said. “Surely he’s just after the ransom?”
“What if it’s a ghostly warning?” Kip asked, his eyes widening.
My stomach did a little flip. “I don’t think so, Kip,” I said with more certainty than I felt. “It probably is just someone from the village playing a prank. It’s not necessarily related to our cases at all.”
The three of us filed into the dining hall and sat down for some lunch. The sea air had certainly given me an appetite and I hoovered up everything in front of me as if my name was Kip Kapur. I think I was beginning to get used to Mrs Crockton’s terrible cooking. Once lunch was over we had the whole afternoon to ourselves so while others may have been playing Frisbee in the grounds, or reading in dappled sunlight underneath a tree, Kip, Ingrid and I had work to do. My mind was positively spinning with things we needed to get on with. Top priority was going to be finding where Muggins was keeping Jenny. We now knew how he had kidnapped her from her locked room, and we knew that she was safe and that he was staying put for the time being thanks to the phone call we had overheard, but we still didn’t know where he had stashed her while waiting for his ransom demands to be met. It seemed likely that if Muggins was hanging around then Jenny must be somewhere nearby.
There was also the matter of Moira Booth. Now that we knew she had been working with the vanishing smugglers, their disappearance was even more intriguing. To be completely honest with you, I wasn’t sure what our next move should be. As we finished our lunch I saw Kip and Ingrid looking at me expectantly and realized that I was going to have to come up with some sort of a plan, and pronto.
“So…” I said, remaining in my seat as the other students left the hall and hoping that if I started saying words then a plan would miraculously fall from my lips. “I’ve been thinking about a plan and planning for what we should do next, and the mystery of it all is so, you know, complex… but that’s not to say it’s unsolvable, as long as we have a plan, which I do. Have a plan. Definitely. Because making a plan is an important thing to do. And so the plan is…” I had been talking for a long time without taking a breath, and I could see Ingrid and Kip’s eyes getting rounder and rounder.
“Poppy?” a voice was at my shoulder and I turned to see Mrs Crockton’s smiling face.
“Hello, Mrs C!” I cried, overjoyed that I didn’t immediately have to present my top-notch plan to my friends. Mrs Crockton, I saw, was beaming all over her face and wobbling a bit like a jelly with suppressed excitement.
“If you three would like to come with me,” Mrs Crockton said mysteriously, “there’s someone you might like to meet.”
We followed her into the kitchen where we found an old man sitting in one of the chairs. He was very tanned and wrinkly, with wispy grey hair, and his right eye was all scrunched up. He held an unlit pipe in his left hand and, despite the warmness of the day, he was wearing a raincoat and a pair of thick black boots.
“Children,” Mrs Crockton said, “Allow me to introduce you to … Tom Redshank.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The three of us stood as though turned to stone. Had Mrs Crockton really just said this man was Tom Redshank?
“G-g-ghost smuggler!” stuttered Kip, his face pale and his eyes bulging like currants in a Chelsea bun.
Tom Redshank laughed a low, rumbling laugh. “Afraid not, little ’un. I’m as real as the day is long.”
Kip bristled at the “little” comment, but given that we had yet to establish how dangerous the man – or spectre – in front of us was, he kept his mouth shut in a thin line.
I had to admit that I was inclined to believe the man was no ghost. For one thing he looked very alive, and for another I didn’t think that ghosts wore yellow rain macs.
“Tom here is distantly related to the Tom Redshank you know about,” Mrs Crockton clucked. “I ran into him in the village and mentioned that you were interested in the stories of the Redshank brothers. Thought you might like to hear about it all from the expert.” She smiled at us and I could feel my own mouth spreading into an answering grin. Had Mrs Crockton just delivered us a new line of enquiry when my plans had reached a dead end? I wanted to do a little jig right there and then.
“Anyway,” Mrs Crockton continued, “I must just go and check on the laundry. I’ll leave you four to get acquainted. There’s tea in the pot there. Would you like some biscuits?” she asked.
There was a pause. “Er… Made ’em yourself did you?” Tom asked shrewdly.
“No, I didn’t have time,” Mrs Crockton sighed. “I’ve been that busy.”
“What a shame,” murmured Tom, meeting my eye so that we could share a look of great relief. “Biscuits would be lovely, Mrs C … though not a patch on yours, of course.”
“Get away with you!” A pleased blush spread over Mrs Crockton’s cheeks and she plonked a biscuit tin on the table before bustling out of the room.
Tentatively the three of us sat around the kitchen table with Tom. He poured us all cups of tea then sat back, his unlit pipe in his mouth. “Well then,” he drawled, “I hear you lot have some questions, do ye?”
I nodded, my mind racing. Where to begin?
“We heard the story of Henry
Redshank’s disappearance and it sounded really interesting,” Ingrid began carefully. “We are interested in mysteries, and this seemed like a good one.”
Tom nodded. “Oh yes, it’s a good one all right. Puzzlin’ people for over two centuries as it’s been.”
“Do you believe in the ghost?” Kip blurted out, sending a mouthful of biscuit crumbs spraying across the table. “Do you believe that he’s still here in the castle, I mean?”
Tom raised one eyebrow but didn’t speak for a moment. “I know there are a lot of goings-on up here,” he said, eventually. “Goings-on that can’t be easily explained.” He sat back in his chair and sucked thoughtfully on his pipe. “But do I believe this hokum about deals with dark forces?” He shook his head. “No, I do not.”
“Did you know that Moira Booth might have been working with the smugglers?” I asked quickly.
Tom looked at me from under bushy white eyebrows. “Ah,” he said softly, “I heard a rumour or two in that direction. Doesn’t surprise me, from what I hear about Moira Booth.”
“Like what?” Kip asked, reaching for his third biscuit.
“Oh, she was quite the firecracker, so the stories go.” Tom smiled. “Expert fencer, crack shot – could hit a moving target from a mile away, that sort of thing. Even heard she knew how to box, if you can believe such a thing of an eighteenth-century gentlewoman.”
I could. The more I heard about Moira Booth the more excellent she sounded. “So it really does sound like she could have been helping the Redshank brothers, even leading them?” I said slowly.
There was another pause and the pipe was returned to Tom’s mouth. “Well, now, here’s where we run into problems, see,” he muttered. “All this talk of the Redshank brothers is strange indeed.”
“Why’s that?” Ingrid asked with a frown.
“Well, it’s like this,” Tom said. “Tom Redshank was a smuggler and no mistake. After that night he sailed to France and lived a good life by all accounts, falling in and out of trouble.” Here Tom fell silent for a moment, glancing around the table at all three of us, making sure he had our attention. “There is one strange thing though,” he said finally. “I’ve been through the family tree a dozen times, and Tom Redshank didn’t have no brother.”
“What?” I gasped.
Tom nodded.
“Well…” Kip frowned. “Maybe Tom and Henry were cousins or something and people at the time got it wrong and thought they were brothers and it stuck?”
“Well that makes sense,” Kip said. “It’s just that over time people have started referring to them as brothers instead of cousins.”
Tom leant back in his chair again. “Could be,” he said with a smile. “But I can’t find any cousin in the family tree either.”
A crackling silence filled the room.
I finally broke the atmosphere. “What … what exactly are you saying?” I asked.
Tom’s eyes met mine. “I’m saying that whoever Henry Redshank claimed to be, he weren’t no Redshank.” He waved his pipe at me again. “I’m saying there never was no Henry Redshank to begin with.”
We were interrupted then by the return of Mrs Crockton, her arms full of clean laundry. “Everything all right in here?” she asked.
I couldn’t speak, and neither it seemed could Kip and Ingrid. Tom stretched and got to his feet. “It’s fine,” he said. “Always nice to have a chat about the family history, but I’d best be off.” He moved towards the door. “Thanks for the tea,” he said to Mrs Crockton before turning to us, “And good luck with the investigation. It’s a head-scratcher, that’s for sure.” He gave a low chuckle and with that he was gone.
My head was spinning. The further into this mystery we got, the more complicated things became. Who was the mysterious man that we knew as Henry Redshank? Something was tugging at my mind – the solution to this problem was so close I could almost touch it.
Mrs Crockton must have noticed our dumbstruck faces. “Are you all right?” she asked, her voice full of concern.
I was about to answer, when a terrible sound split the air.
Someone was screaming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
All four of us ran in the direction of the awful scream – it was coming from the drawing room. When we arrived, we saw Agatha, limp and crying in the arms of her husband. Mr Grant was standing nearby, a stunned look on his face. Fuddling was also there, but his face remained as emotionless as ever.
“Agatha! My dear! What is it? What’s wrong?” Mrs Crockton asked breathlessly.
“It’s Elaine!” Agatha said in a quavering voice, and a shiver of fear ran through me. “She’s been … kidnapped!”
Miss Susan – kidnapped? I had to lean against the back of a nearby sofa, as my knees seemed to have turned to the wobbliest of jelly.
“What?” Mrs Crockton gasped.
It was then I noticed Mr Grant was holding a piece of paper in his trembling hand. I took it from him gently. He didn’t even seem to notice. It was another ransom note. I handed it to Ingrid who read it aloud:
“What is going on?” Mrs Crockton was looking wildly around at the other grown-ups. “Is this real? And what does it mean: ‘I have your friend as well’?”
“As well as Jenny,” choked Agatha miserably. “Jenny was kidnapped four days ago.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
Mrs Crockton turned deathly pale and sat down hastily in the nearest chair. Even Fuddling looked shocked.
“What happened, exactly?” Ingrid asked in a voice that sounded like it was coming from far away. “When did Miss Susan disappear?”
Agatha was crying again. “I don’t know!” she wept. “I don’t know how it happened – it seems impossible. I hate this place! Something wicked is at work here!”
“What do you mean, it seems impossible?” I asked urgently, my brain beginning to whirr back into action.
“We … we were having a drink in here,” Agatha explained through her sniffles. “We were talking about Jenny. Elaine said that she was going to call an inspector she knew – someone who we could trust to help us. She’d been trying to get me to agree since she found out about the kidnapping and she finally wore me down. I agreed that she should contact him.”
“Inspector Hartley,” Kip said.
Agatha nodded. “Elaine was just going to phone him,” she continued, “and then Fuddling came to talk to me – he said that someone had broken another window.” All eyes swung towards Fuddling and he nodded slightly. “I didn’t want him to overhear the phone call, so I took him out to the hall. We spoke for five minutes and when I came back, Elaine was … gone! And that,” she pointed a quivering finger towards the note, “was in here instead. But we were in the corridor!” she insisted, “and no one came in or out of the room!”
Mrs Crockton exclaimed in horror, clutching her chest, and Fuddling nodded slowly. “It’s true,” he said in his flat voice. “Miss Susan did not leave this room. We would have seen.”
“No you wouldn’t!” I exclaimed. Everyone turned to me. Without another word I made my way over to the secret door.
I had been wondering and wondering whether this tunnel could have been opened from this side and now I was sure – there was no other way Miss Susan could have vanished. But how did you control the door? I noticed one of the stuffed deer heads that was mounted right next to where the door had been. It was then I realized one of the antlers was a little bit crooked. “Kip, give me a boost!” I said.
Kip threw himself forward, a heroic look on his face as he cradled his hands and puffed out his chest. (He was always happy to show off how strong he was – it came in very handy whenever you needed someone to help chuck you in the air.) I put one foot in Kip’s hands and he threw me up as hard as he could. Somersaulting towards the wall I reached out and grabbed on to the deer’s right antler. With a creaking noise I felt it move in my hand and then spring back into place. Silently, the secret door slid open revealing the dark tunnel behind. I turned back t
o see the flabbergasted faces of all the grown-ups staring at me. “There’s a secret tunnel,” I said unnecessarily. “That’s how someone could take her out without you knowing.”
“How – how did you find this? How could we not know that was there?” Bernard Booth cried. He swung around to face Fuddling. “Did you know about this?”
“No!” Fuddling’s shocked face told me that he was telling the truth. “I had no idea … not in all my years here. I swear.”
“But you would have heard something.” Mr Grant seemed to be waking up now. “Elaine wouldn’t go without a fight. If someone had tried to kidnap her, she would have made a commotion.”
“Not if she was knocked out first,” I said, my eyes landing on another important clue. I walked over to the drinks table where a small glass sat, half filled with amber liquid.
“What’s this?” I asked Agatha, pointing to the glass.
“It’s Elaine’s drink,” she said. “The sweet sherry she likes. I got it for her specially … she’s the only one who drinks it…” She trailed off in horror. “You think someone drugged her drink?” she gasped again.
“I think somebody knew that she was the only one who drank sweet sherry,” I said, feeling all the pieces of the puzzle falling into place. “It would be easy to put something in the bottle.”
Agatha let out a little sob. “You’re right, she was woozy just now. I told her she needed to have a lie down, but she shrugged it off. I thought it was the stress of all this. Goodness knows I’ve been feeling it too!”
“If someone put something in her sherry to knock her out it would be easy to overpower her. She might even have dropped off before the kidnapper made his move!” I exclaimed.
“But why would anyone want to kidnap Elaine?” Bernard asked, his hands spread in front of him.
And then, with perfect timing, Horatio Muggins appeared on the scene. Alongside him were Stanley Goodwill and Jack Jenkins. Horatio certainly didn’t look like he had just pulled off a daring kidnap. His dark suit was as neat as ever, not a stitch out of place. However, he brought with him a familiar musty smell that I couldn’t quite place.