by Eoin Colfer
There was a note underneath tagged on by the investigating policeman.
This is not a priority one case. The girl’s mother made her complain. Possibly Maura is sneaking herself chocolate, and invented this mysterious After Eight man to stay out of trouble.
I, on the other hand, was not so sure. Another one of Lock’s youth had been hit in the weak spot. The list was growing: April, May, Red, MC Coy, Maura Murnane, and of course, me. There was a conspiracy here. I was certain of it.
* * *
The Sharkey children obviously watched too much television. They gathered around my computer, expecting me to unravel this riddle with a few strokes on the keyboard and a knowing look.
“I have to go out,” I said.
Red headed for the bedroom. “I’ll get you some of my old clothes.”
Genie was disappointed. “Don’t you want to build a profile?” she asked.
“With what?”
“With all the evidence that you downloaded from satellite surveillance, obviously. Don’t you watch CSI?”
I ground my teeth. “I need to visit the crime scenes first, before they get even more contaminated.”
Herod punched Genie on the shoulder. “Moron. He has to visit the crime scenes.”
Genie swatted her little brother with a hairbrush. “I know that, Roddy. Don’t touch the jacket. I haven’t cut the security tag off yet.”
Red returned with an AC/DC T-shirt and a purple tracksuit. The tracksuit was so shiny that it seemed to crackle with static electricity.
“Put that on,” he said, throwing me the bundle. “It’s time to test your disguise.”
We left Chez Sharkey on foot, because two boys on a bicycle would fit the description doubtlessly being circulated by the police. I pulled the tracksuit sleeve well down over my cast.
There was a policeman leaning against the front gate pillar, on stakeout just in case the dangerous fugitive Fletcher Moon decided to wreak revenge on his attacker.
The officer on duty was a Cork man. John Cassidy from Cobh. He had once consulted me on a spate of burglaries across the bridge. I’d pointed him in the right direction and charged him a box of Maltesers. Cassidy had only spoken to me once, but he was a policeman and trained to recognize faces. Even ones covered with fake tan.
“Remember,” Red whispered out of the side of his mouth. “You’re a Sharkey now. People will treat you differently.”
My plan was to sidle past Officer Cassidy with a hand shadowing my face. This was not Red’s plan. He wanted to put my disguise to the test. He grabbed my elbow, steering me right into Cassidy’s line of sight.
“Hello, Officer,” he said, grinning broadly. “Have you met my cousin . . . eh . . . Watson?”
Watson? Oh, very funny.
Cassidy grunted. “Watson, is it. You Sharkeys certainly do pick names. Genie, Herod, and Watson. I have to ask, Red. Why Herod?”
“Mom wanted something Biblical. It was her last wish. Herod was all she could think of at the time.”
Red’s eyes were looking somewhere else. Into the past, where his mother was alive and made the house a home. For a long moment he was distant, then his trademark jaunty grin flashed back.
Cassidy turned his attention to me, and I felt as though there was a flashing arrow over my head with my real name written on it. He gave me a slow once-over.
“Just don’t go robbing anything while you’re in town, Watson. I don’t know how things work wherever you’re from, but here in Lock we take a very dim view of vagrant criminals.”
I was dumbstruck. This policeman had accused me of being a thief without knowing a thing about me, except that I was a Sharkey.
Red elbowed me in the ribs. Cassidy was waiting for a response.
“Okay, Officer,” I said sullenly. “I’ll stay out of trouble. No problem.”
Cassidy gave me his version of a scary stare.
“Just see that you do, or you’ll have me to deal with.”
We were eye to eye, and there wasn’t a flicker of recognition. People see what they expect to see.
“I’ll have to deal with you.”
“So long as you understand that, we’ll have no problem.”
“Not a problem in the world, Officer.”
And just like that, Fletcher Moon was invisible, hidden beneath an earring and a tracksuit. Watson Sharkey, however, was all too visible, and branded as a thief before he even opened his mouth to speak. Was this what being a Sharkey was like? If it was, I couldn’t wait to become a Moon again.
There was a line of cars outside the Moon house. Mom’s Mini, Dad’s Volvo, and a police blue-and-white. Through the net curtain I could see my mother sitting on the couch, her face whiter than her favorite emulsion, Arctic Snow. Dad was there, too. I caught sight of him as he paced past the window. A human pendulum. But the image that will always stay with me was the moment Hazel entered the room. She asked for something. A drink, or permission to use the house phone, and my Dad exploded. He turned on her, shouting, until she retreated up the stairs. Dad never shouted. Hazel never retreated. What was I doing to my family? Could it ever be undone?
Red punched me on the shoulder—his version of encouragement.
“Keep it together, Half Moon. They can either be sad for twenty-four hours or forever. You’ve got a job to do, so get on with it.”
Twenty-four hours or forever. Twenty-four hours would seem like forever, at the very least. Better get on with it. Time to be a professional.
I nodded tersely. “Okay. Around the back.”
There was an eight-foot concrete wall running along the side of our house. Hazel and I were absolutely and utterly forbidden to climb it, and had been doing so since we were five. Red and I scaled the wall using well-worn hand and footholds. It took me longer than usual with my injured arm. A single crow stood sentry halfway down. The bird played chicken with us until we came too close, then rose in a squawking black flurry of feathers. To me the crow sounded louder than a full orchestra, but nobody came out to check on the commotion.
I dropped down beside the very bushes where my attacker had hidden. Red landed beside me, very quietly. Like someone used to prowling. It struck me that until yesterday, he had been my prime suspect.
“Been here before?” I asked him, forcing a smile.
“No,” said Red. “If I had, I certainly wouldn’t be here now.”
I thought about that for a second and couldn’t find a single reason why Red would return to the scene with his victim. Unless, of course, he was insane.
“Had any checkups recently? You know, with a psychologist?”
Red raked his fingers through the grass. “If you’re not going to search for clues, I am.”
I caught his wrists. “Stop it, Red. You’re destroying evidence.”
Red leaned back on his haunches. “Okay, detective. Detect.”
I studied the area behind the bush, where my attacker must have waited. I didn’t touch anything, just looked—sweeping my eyes across the ground like twin scanners. It had rained since the assault, so most physical evidence would have been washed away. But maybe there was something.
I found my something tucked in tight at the bush’s base. A single huge footprint.
I pointed it out to Red. “Look, a print.”
Red blinked. “That’s huge. Who is this person? A clown?”
I felt suddenly scared. “This is the biggest print I have ever seen. It must be a foot and a half from toe to heel. This person is a monster.”
We squatted there for a moment, staring at the print, imagining the man that left it. I don’t know about Red’s imagination, but mine was running riot, dressing the man in a black cape and covering his face with scars. He probably had an eye patch, too, and a hump.
“Where are the other prints?” asked Red. “Did this guy just pogo down from space on one foot?”
“The rain,” I explained. “It washed away the trail. This print was protected by the bush.”
Re
d pulled out his cell phone and used the built-in camera to photograph the print.
“Just preserving the evidence,” he said.
I smiled. “You’re learning.”
In the Bernstein manual there is a short chapter on undercover work. The first line says, in capital letters, AVOID UNDERCOVER WORK. Bernstein goes on to say that an undercover assignment is the most difficult type of detective work. This is because it often forces the detective to go against his nature and pretend to be something he isn’t, i.e., a normal person. If the criminal under investigation suspects that the undercover operative is not “a stand-up guy” and is possibly a “rat fink stool pigeon” then statistically the undercover operative has a mere fourteen percent chance of survival.
Encouraging stuff. Especially since I was undercover as a member of a criminal family. Double whammy.
Our next stop was another recent crime scene. Mercedes Sharp’s house. I needed to find a connection between my assault and the missing mini-disk. If there was a link, then I would know we were after a single perpetrator. Or a single group of perpetrators.
As we passed through Lock’s housing developments, I tried to imitate Red’s swagger, become a Sharkey. Red had a way of walking that made him look cool. Everything he did, from opening a can of cola to running his fingers along a rail, looked cool. It would take me several lifetimes to perfect that. When I opened a can of cola it looked as though I was afraid it would explode, which it often did.
“What are you doing?” Red asked. “Did someone kick you in the behind?”
I decided, foolishly, to tell the truth. “I’m walking cool. Like you.” I wiggled my fingers theatrically. “Being a Sharkey.”
Red raised an eyebrow. Just one. “Being a Sharkey? Listen, Half Moon. Being a Sharkey is not something you can learn in a day. You might fool an adult, but not a kid. Just stand behind me and hope nobody notices you.”
I shot Red with a finger gun to show that I understood.
“What was that?”
“It was, you know, a finger gun. It means loud and clear. Ten four.”
Red sighed. “Thank goodness for that. I thought you were about to start picking your nose.”
I stopped trying to be cool after that.
Mercedes’s house was empty. Her father owned the local paper, and her mother was editor-in-chief, so both were probably out beating doors to find me. The house was an old detached building with wild ivy scaling the walls and weeds clawing their way through cracks in the flagstones.
“Nice place,” commented Red.
“If you like jungles,” I said. “Lucky for us, the Sharps like a natural-style garden.”
“Why is that lucky for us?”
“Because the crime scene should be relatively uncontaminated, except by the weather.”
We slipped down the side path around to the back of the house.
“I wonder which is Mercedes’s window?” said Red.
It didn’t take long to figure out. There were six windows at the rear of the house, but only one had the word Mercedes spray painted on the glass.
“I’m guessing that one. Whoever took the mini-disk must have been grateful.”
“Mercedes has a sister, you know,” Red pointed out.
“Your point being?”
“My point being, Half Moon, that the sister probably lifted the mini-disk. That’s what sisters are for.”
“Good point. We’ll check on that later. Somehow.”
There was a flower bed at the base of the wall. Just a bed. No flowers. It seemed as though they had been ripped out.
“Signs of a search,” I noted, scribbling it down in the notebook that the Sharkeys had thoughtfully stolen from my room. “Someone really went through this.”
“Maybe a gardener?”
“No. We’ve got rose stalks here, and ferns. These aren’t weeds. Someone was looking for something.”
I pulled back a sheaf of withered ferns. Below it was a second giant footprint. A connection. For a moment I felt light-headed. Here was the first concrete proof that there was a link between the crimes. And where there was a link, there was a pattern. Bernstein. Chapter six.
“Red. Can you photograph this?”
Red held the phone at arm’s length. “This guy is big, Half Moon. Maybe too big.”
Red was right, but I didn’t care. I had the scent in my nose. There was a connection and I was right. The truth might hurt, but it was the truth, and I would find it.
“We have no choice,” I said. “Either he’s the criminal, or I am.”
I swept the area for more clues, but in all honesty we were lucky to find the footprint and evidence of a frenzied search. We were about to pack it up when something scraped on the gravel behind us.
“Red Sharkey?” said a voice. “What are you, like, doing?”
I knew who it was before turning. A private detective does not forget the voice of his first cash customer. April. I kept my head down, using Red’s frame as a shield. Through the crook of his arm, I could see her. April was dressed as perfectly as ever, in a pastel pink tracksuit, a matching lunch box dangled from one hand.
Red was calm under pressure. I got the feeling he was used to being under pressure.
“Hey, April. I was walking past, thought I saw someone suspicious coming around the side. Me and Watson, my cousin, thought we’d check it out.”
April didn’t swallow a word of that. “I was right about you and your family. Here you and your little friend are snooping around Mercedes’s garden. Maybe you were snooping around May’s garden, with a torch.”
I stepped into the open. It was time to find out if I still had an employer. “Red wasn’t there, April, but I was. The torch wasn’t mine, though.”
“What do you mean?” asked April. Then the penny dropped, from a great height and with a loud clang. “My God, Fletcher. Is that you? What happened?”
I tried to get in the essential information. “It’s me, April. I just want you to know that I had nothing to do with May’s dress.”
But April was still trying to get to grips with my appearance. “But your hair. It’s gone, and red. And your nose, my God, your nose. And you have an earring now! And a tattoo!”
April stepped closer, completely forgetting that I was definitely a fugitive and possibly an arsonist. “Is that food coloring in your hair? Tell me that’s not a real tattoo. And that tracksuit. Those colors are all wrong for you.”
Then it dawned on her that she was sharing space with two dangerous criminals. Her mouth formed an ‘O,’ but no sound came out.
Do not spook a scared animal, says Bernstein. The same principal applies to humans on the edge. No loud noises, no sudden movements and no big gestures.
“April,” I whispered, keeping my hands by my side. “Red and I. We’re both innocent. Red broke me out so that I could prove it. There’s something going on in Lock, and I have to find out what it is. You, Mercedes, May, Red, and I. We’re all victims. And there are more. I don’t know how many yet. You know I could never set a fire at May’s house.”
“So what were you doing in her garden in the middle of the night?”
Good question, and difficult to answer without sounding like a lying criminal.
I chose my words carefully. “There was a bruise on my arm after the attack. It spelled out Red’s name, backward. I needed to photograph it with May’s digital camera. The dress was on fire when I got there.”
This was so preposterous that April took a step backward. “You wanted to photograph your bruise? Is that the story you’re going with?”
I shrugged. It was the truth. What else could I say?
“And you two are working together. Red Sharkey and Fletcher Moon are a team? I’m not paying any extra.”
“I’m not taking the blame for any of this,” said Red, kicking a pebble. “If Half Moon can get me out of trouble, I’m prepared to put up with him for a short period.”
Obviously we weren’t best friends just
yet.
“So what did you find out?”
“We established a link between the assault and the robberies. The same person was responsible for both.”
April snorted. “I already know that. So which of you was it?”
“Not us. Someone bigger than us. A lot bigger.”
A car crunched over the gravel driveway out front.
“That’s Mercedes and her Gran, home for lunch,” said April. “Right on time.”
Red grabbed my arm. “We have to go. Now.”
I looked pleadingly at April. “Don’t say anything. Just for one day.”
April was in control and she liked it. I knew from the smirk on her lips that she wouldn’t turn us in, just yet. Having us under her thumb would be too much fun.
“One day. Though you’re going to feel pretty stupid when it turns out that Red really did take Shona’s hair.”
There were doors slamming now. I could hear Mercedes complaining at the front of the house.
“April. We have a contract. You can trust me.”
April spent half a second thinking. “I doubt it.
There’s a hole in the hedge on the left. It brings you out behind the school.”
I nodded, then bolted for the hedge. Red was already a shadow on the other side of the branches. As I squeezed through the foliage, I heard Mercedes squeal as she came around the corner. For a moment I thought she had seen me, then I realized that this was how Mercedes said hello.
PROOF, OR RESULTS?
BACK AT CHEZ SHARKEY, Herod had a car door propped up against the garden wall.
“Go!” shouted Genie, clicking the button on a large stopwatch.
Herod pulled a flat metal ruler from the leg of his jeans, sliding it between the window and frame. He jiggled the ruler for a few moments and the car door lock popped.
“Clear,” he shouted, stepping back.
Genie stopped the watch. “Fifteen seconds. Not bad. Keep practicing.”
She noticed us coming through the back gate.