“Oh dear, I’m sure we told her it would be an interesting read,” said Fergus.
“I’m very concerned she’s not taking this seriously enough,” said Murdo. “If she starts drooling on that diary I will not be happy,” he added.
As the boys keyed in the last entry, a shadowy figure appeared through the net curtains and at precisely one o’clock the doorbell rang.
Jessie sat up as if she’d been electrocuted. “What?!.. Oh dear, oh my goodness … is that the time? … Must have dozed off … Boys, you should have woken me … Dear me, dear me.” She eased herself out of her chair and walked stiffly to the front door.
The boys could hear a man’s voice as Jessie led the visitor into the hall. “Not at all, Mrs. Jenkins — I remember you mentioning this clock before.”
“I’ve got two of my friends here at the moment,” said Jessie as she entered the living room. She was followed by a small, round man who was using a comb to move an invisible strand of hair over his gleaming bald head.
“Fergus and Murdo, this is Mr. Crockett,” said Jessie.
“Ah the DataBoy,” said Mr. Crockett, pocketing the comb, the buttons on his jacket straining as he did so. Fergus raised his eyebrows in surprise at the shop owner’s ability to remember his customers.
“Has it been as good as you hoped, young man?” he asked, leaning towards Fergus, his eyeballs magnified by his thick round glasses.
Fergus resisted the temptation to say, “Yes, apart from the times it goes backwards when I’m standing on the manhole cover outside.” That wasn’t part of the planned script for this stage of the investigation and he kept his answer to a polite “yes thanks” instead.
“So let’s have a look at this then,” said Mr. Crockett who had spotted the clock on the wall by the fireplace and bustled over to look at it. He had to stand on tiptoes to peer into the workings, which the open sides of the clock casing revealed.
“It’s not worked for years,” said Jessie. “My husband actually bought it at your shop but long before you would remember. I think it might have been your grandfather who was in the shop at the time.”
“Ah, the great inventor,” said Mr. Crockett with a thin smile as he produced a tiny brush from his pocket and dusted carefully at the exposed cogs.
“We’ve been doing a local history project,” chipped in Murdo, “and we read about him in some old newspapers. Did he ever invent anything useful?”
Still peering into the clock, Mr. Crockett gave a short clipped laugh as he continued to investigate the mechanism. “He would say so, but nothing has exactly become a household object.” Distracted momentarily from the timepiece, Mr Crockett removed his glasses to polish them with a large, white hanky. As soon as he replaced them his eyeballs zoomed back to giant size. “Let me see, what were some of his better efforts?” he said. “The telescopic table leg, the vibrating mixing bowl, the spring-loaded bookends and the marmalade dispensing gun. They’re not exactly as famous as the microwave oven or the telephone are they?” he said, turning his attention back to the insides of the wall clock.
“Is it true that he bought vaults from other shops for all of his inventions?” asked Fergus.
“Yes, that’s right,” said Mr. Crockett, his eyebrows rising up his shiny forehead in surprise at Fergus’s level of knowledge. “He bought the vaults from about half a dozen shops I think, and then filled the space with all sorts of junk. I expect my grandmother was quite pleased that it wasn’t in the house any more.”
“So what do you use all that space for now?” asked Jessie innocently.
“Well, we only use a little for storage and we lease the rest to our neighbours,” said Mr. Crockett. “I didn’t carry on my grandfather’s inventing habits so we don’t have much need for those rooms.”
The boys looked at each other, both thinking back to the list of shops they had built up which would tell them who Mr. Crockett’s neighbours were.
“The Copper Kettle?” said Murdo quickly.
“I’m sorry?” said Mr. Crockett momentarily confused.
“You said you leased the vaults to your neighbours,” said Murdo, trying not to sound too anxious for an answer. “Isn’t that the Copper Kettle Café?”
“Oh no, the other side,” said Mr. Crockett. “My grandfather was probably turning in his grave as I signed the papers, but they wanted the extra space for big freezers and things like that.”
“Who’s on the other side?” said Jessie.
“The Fish Shop,” said Mr. Crockett and Fergus at the same time.
“Yes, the owner there and myself are both in the unusual position of taking on our grandfathers’ businesses,” said Mr. Crockett.
“Who’s the owner now?” asked Jessie.
“Davidson,” said Mr. Crockett. “Davidson Stein.”
Ten minutes had passed since Mr. Crockett had left, saying that he would need to order some parts in order to repair Jessie’s clock. There was still a state of high excitement in Jessie’s living room. Fergus wondered how he had ever thought that this room seemed old and dusty because there was now a buzz about the place. As he thought back to the clock shop manager’s visit, he wondered if Mr. Crockett had noticed that they suddenly didn’t seem interested in Jessie’s damaged clock. As soon as he had mentioned that the vaults were leased by a man who was an expert in cats’ eating habits, they had all had difficulty concentrating. Once Jessie had closed the door on the departing Mr. Crockett, Murdo went into overdrive with theories about what a fish shop might want with the vaults under Raeburn Place.
“Just how much storage space does a fish shop need?” asked Murdo, pacing up and down the living room. “Six vaults? Six vaults? You could fit a lot of cats in six vaults you know. A lot more than forty-four,” he said, picking up and waving his file.
“We started asking about the vaults because of the watches, but we’ve ended up with something that points to the cats. Could there be a link between the investigations? Why would missing cats make watches go backwards? It’s not making sense!”
Murdo’s brow was furrowing so deeply that Fergus began to get concerned that he would do himself some permanent damage and decided it was time to change tack.
“What do you know about Stein’s Fish Shop, Jessie?” asked Fergus. “You’ve lived here the longest.”
“Well, I have, but I can’t really help you,” said Jessie. “Stan hated fish, you see, so if there’s one shop that I’ve not been into in Raeburn Place in all my years in Comely Bank, it’s Stein’s.”
“Mum buys our fish at the supermarket so we’ve never been in either,” said Fergus.
“Our prime suspect, the one shop that we need information on and our local sources have drawn a blank!” Murdo slapped his hand to his forehead. “Well, we’ll have to find out about it if we want to go any further at all. If only we could do things properly and pull Davidson Stein in for questioning,” said Murdo thumping a pudgy fist into the palm of his other hand.
“Well, we could do another thing that often happens when you have a suspect,” said Jessie. “I think it might be time for you to stake out Mr. Stein’s.”
Murdo stopped in his tracks and a grin split his large face. Fergus thought that he could hear Murdo’s brain whirring into action.
8. The Stakeout
Murdo’s plans for the stakeout involved as many different ways of being close to the shop at different times of the day as possible and over the next few days the boys got to know Raeburn Place very well in their efforts to learn more about Stein’s the Fishmongers. They spent as much time as near to the shop as they could, without making it too obvious that they were doing so. They walked past on the other side of the road together, they cycled past individually, they pretended to bump into each other outside the shop and they had conversations looking over each other’s shoulders. Jock got quite frustrated with it all as what he thought was going to be a decent walk never seemed to turn into one.
Jessie was in on the stakeout as well.
She was rediscovering a few recipes having missed out on fish dishes for years. She went into the shop three times during the week and struck up conversations with the staff as she bought a variety of seafood. By the end of the week she concluded that the shop sold excellent fish. The only problem she had encountered was a paper clip accidentally wrapped up with a piece of cod that she had bought. “I could have choked on that!” she said brandishing the paper clip, which she had since filed in her cardigan pocket. “Still the cod was rather good,” she added. Fergus found himself hoping that Jessie hadn’t filed the bones away in her pocket for future reference too.
Spurred on by Jessie’s efforts, Fergus couldn’t resist the temptation to go inside the shop too, but he knew that he had made his mum slightly suspicious by suggesting that they ate a fish dish and then offering to go and buy the chief ingredient.
“Why the sudden liking for fish?” asked his mum.
“Come on, Mum, it’s good for you. You should eat what’s put in front of you,” said Fergus with an impish smile.
Jessie had instructed the boys to “switch on their beady eyes” for the week, so they did their best to concentrate hard each day. Murdo even set the alarm on his DataBoy to bleep every hour, at which point he summarized the previous sixty minutes’ activity in a new notebook bought specially for the stakeout. After several days the three investigators had deduced that there were four main people in the shop.
There was a large and fearsome woman who served behind the counter. Murdo began describing her in his notebook as “Beetroot” because of the colour of her face. Fergus had found her rather scary when he had gone into the shop, realizing quickly that she had little patience if you didn’t know exactly what you wanted. Even Jessie, who the boys would have thought could have chatted to anyone, came back talking about Beetroot. “I think these days they would say that she did not possess the people-skills required of a customer service position.”
During the week Beetroot was helped occasionally by a lanky man with a whiskery chin and a long sharp nose, which Murdo thought looked like a runner bean, a vegetable that he particularly disliked. “Beanface,” as the man became known, seemed to spend most of his time carrying large boxes around and bringing fish through to the counter from the back of the shop. The boys had also seen him driving a white van to and from an archway a few doors along from the shop. On investigating more closely they found that this led to a lane and courtyard behind the shop.
Fergus, Jessie and Murdo had seen much less of the other two people, but it was these men who they all agreed that they wanted to know more about.
The straight-backed, dark-haired, suited man with the goatee beard had all the hallmarks of being the boss, as he was only occasionally near the front of the shop and was too smartly dressed to spend any length of time near the smells and splashes of a working fishmonger. Fergus described him as the “least likely-looking person to manage a fish shop.” He was usually seen coming and going in an unnaturally shiny blue four-wheel drive with the registration plate “STE 1 N.” They all decided from Day One that this was Davidson Stein.
The final one of the four was the biggest mystery. By the end of the week they didn’t know his name and had no idea what he did. Murdo called him “Cogs.” “He’s doing all of his work behind the scenes,” he said explaining his choice of name. Sure enough, Murdo’s notebook revealed that the bespectacled young man usually arrived early each day and left promptly at 5pm but was never seen around the shop area. The only other daily sighting was when he nipped out for a sandwich at lunchtime, which he sometimes ate while reading a book in the park. Rather confusingly, at the end of Day Three Cogs didn’t seem to leave the shop or appear the next morning, but at the end of Day Four he emerged as if he had been there all along. The boys were convinced that the stakeout had been thorough but either Cogs had arrived particularly early and left particularly late on Day Three, or he had spent the night in the shop, which they agreed was too bizarre to be possible.
The three concluded that they had built up as much of a picture as they could from the stakeout, and that they had all bought as much fish as was possible in such a short period of time without seeming suspicious.
Murdo had put forward a strong case that the natural next step should involve trying to find out more about Cogs, simply by following him at the end of a working day. This was partly because he was the one they knew least about, but also because he was the only one who left the shop on foot, as Stein swished away in his four-wheel drive, Beanface roared off in the white van and Beetroot was collected by an equally beetroot-coloured and equally large man in a sagging rusty car.
Jessie was only happy with this proposal on three conditions. The first was that the boys would go no further than their parents would normally allow. The second was that they borrowed her old mobile phone, Jessie having just upgraded to a new, slim and silvery one the day before. The boys had to promise her to call at the first hint of a problem. The third was that they had to swear solemnly that they would not climb any walls or try to get into anyone’s garden.
“I don’t think that jumping on walls is Cogs’s style,” said Murdo defensively.
Jessie replied that she didn’t know what his style was, but if it involved scaling any vertical structures the boys were not to follow him.
And so the boys and Jock took up position in the bus shelter close to Stein’s Fish Shop waiting for Cogs to emerge, but found that he was taking longer than they had bargained for. Fortunately, Murdo had brought some entertainment along in his rucksack but after half an hour of hangman and a game of travel chess, they were once again at a loose end.
“Let’s call Jessie,” said Murdo and they used her phone to check in and tell her that there was no progress as yet.
“I bet your sister would be impressed with Jessie’s new phone,” said Fergus.
“Yeah, she’d be dead jealous,” said Murdo with a grin. He then looked thoughtful and said, “Actually we could have a bit of fun here.”
Murdo quickly opened Jessie’s old phone again, checked the memory function of his DataBoy for a phone number and began to text. Fergus leaned over his shoulder for a better view.
Murdo keyed in “Hi how r u” and pressed “send.” Within a minute the phone bleeped and the reply “Who r u?” popped up on the mobile’s tiny screen.
“A secret admirer,” texted Murdo giggling. Again there was a short delay and the response “give me a name.”
“What name shall I put?” said Murdo.
“Who does she really like?” asked Fergus.
“A boy at school called Danny MacKay,” said Murdo sticking two fingers down his throat and pretending to gag. He returned to his texting and keyed in “Danny M” and after a pause added “I think u r really cool.”
This time the phone bleeped faster than it had done before. Murdo chuckled as he read it and held the phone up so that Fergus could see it.
“I think u r gr8” was the message.
“It’s not often my sister has said that to me,” said Murdo with a smile. “I should frame it!” Then he looked suddenly serious. “I will be in so much trouble if she ever finds out that was me.”
Suddenly the boys were distracted. The white van pulled out from the archway and roared past them with Beanface at the wheel.
“Right, back to business. We’d better concentrate. There’s no point being on a stakeout and not progressing the investigation.”
Fergus smiled to himself as the business-like Murdo returned. It was just in time because as Murdo put the phone away Cogs appeared at the shop door.
“Let him get as far as the Post Office before we start following,” said Murdo.
Cogs headed down Raeburn Place, walking briskly and adjusting the weight of a black bag over one shoulder.
“That’s a bag for a laptop,” said Murdo. “Dad has one of those.”
“Why’s he got one of those? I can’t imagine they’re much use when you’re filleting fish,” said
Fergus. “Come on, we’d better go.”
Cogs reached the Post Office and continued to walk away from the fish shop. The boys soon found that following him wasn’t too difficult and the only time they began to worry was when the young man looked around three times in quick succession. At first they thought that he had noticed that he was being followed, but after a moment’s panic they realized that he was just checking whether or not a bus was coming as he approached a bus stop. He paused briefly at the stop but then decided not to bother, and set off again with the boys walking about thirty metres behind. Jock was happy as they seemed to be going a bit further than any other day that week.
Eventually, they approached a residential area where other pedestrians had dwindled to one or two. The boys were feeling a bit more exposed as they continued to follow at what they felt was a safe distance. They began to hang back a bit more, but then disaster struck. Cogs rounded a corner and when the boys reached it, he had gone.
“No way!” said Murdo disbelievingly
“He’s vanished,” said Fergus looking around. The sign above told them that they were in Nelson Street but all that it had to offer were rows of closed doors. The boys looked up at a series of blank windows, trying to spot movement in one of the flats that would show them that someone had just returned home. They gave nothing away except reflections of the buildings on the other side of the road.
“I can’t believe we had him all that way and then lost him!” said Murdo.
“At least we know this street has some sort of connection,” said Fergus trying to find something positive out of this frustrating situation.
Catscape Page 8