As they waited, Jessie remembered to tell the boys about her progress with her research. “I must admit I’ve struggled a bit with that book and I do wonder if Stein has it on his bookshelves just because MM is his girlfriend. Her research is all about which bits of the brain do which things and she’s invented some scanner that shows where memory cells are in the brain. I can’t really see the connection with cats or fish shops. In fact it all seems like a bit of a red herring to me, if you’ll excuse the joke.”
“Well, the van is a good new line of enquiry,” said Murdo, “so let’s put our resources in that direction.”
They didn’t have to wait long as shortly after eleven o’clock the familiar white van pulled up outside Beryl’s flat.
“That’s it now,” said Jessie, the binoculars fixed firmly to her face. “It’s Beanface,” she confirmed as the lanky man hopped out of the van. “And he’s not locked it,” she said triumphantly as she watched him kick the driver’s door shut and head for Beryl’s front door carrying a low-sided box. “He’s ringing the bell. Okay, boys … on your marks …” said Jessie.
As if a blue light had been switched on, Beryl Scrimgeour appeared at the door and welcomed Beanface like a long lost son. Before he could say “forty-four cats” he seemed to have been sucked inside, and as Beryl closed the door she gave a deep nod which she knew would be seen by Jessie.
“Right boys, off to work.” said Jessie. “You’ve got fifteen minutes. And remember when I say ‘time up,’ I mean ‘time up.’”
The boys hit the stopwatches on their DataBoys and sped out of Jessie’s flat with Jock hot on their heels. They crossed the road bouncing the ball as they went. As they approached the van, Murdo let go of the ball, letting it roll towards the van and under the back bumper.
“Good shot,” said Fergus as the ball disappeared. He bent down to see where it had got to and found that he would have to lie down and stretch an arm or a leg under in order to get it out. Murdo meanwhile went to the driver’s door and peered in before cautiously opening it and climbing in with Jock nosing in behind him. Fergus tried to reach under the van with his leg to get the ball but found that he couldn’t quite stretch far enough.
“Is the handbrake on?” said Fergus.
“Yep it’s on,” said Murdo.
“Here goes!” he thought to himself as he went headfirst and began to crawl under the van. He hadn’t got very far when there was an excited shout from Murdo.
“I can see you!”
“What?” said Fergus seeing no sign of his friend.
“There’s a screen here and there must be wee cameras close to where you are!” Murdo’s voice bellowed.
“Keep your voice down a bit!” hissed Fergus spotting the tiny eye of a camera lens about two feet from his head.
“WHAT? SPEAK UP I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” shouted Murdo even louder.
“SSSSHHHHHH!” said Fergus.
“Oh, yeah, right enough, sorry.”
“Cameras under a van that delivers fish. Very strange,” thought Fergus although there was now little that would surprise him about Stein’s Fish Shop.
Buzzzzzz whirrrrrr.
Fergus edged his head around trying to locate the low purring mechanical sound.
A large flat metal plate on four rods like an upside-down table with extending telescopic legs was descending from the floor of the van and came to rest on the road beside where he lay.
“What did you do?” asked Fergus.
“Pressed a button,” said Murdo.
“Which one?”
“It’s called ‘Capture Plate,’” said Murdo.
Fergus thought for a moment, “So why would a cat step on to this?”
Sensing that they were near to an important discovery, he called out to Murdo, “Press some more buttons!”
A low soothing voice said “puss puss … puss puss,” close to his right ear. He eased his head round to find a tiny speaker on the underside of the van. “What was that button?”
“‘Sound,’” said Murdo.
“Try another,” said Fergus. Seconds later with another low whirring noise, two panels descended from the underside of the van. They began to move in like bookends coming together and stopped to form walls along the side of the Capture Plate. Fergus noticed that the panels were vibrating slightly and as he tentatively put his hand out to touch them he found that this caused a ticklish sensation.
“Touch — another sense,” said Fergus to himself.
“Are there another three buttons?” asked Fergus beginning to realize why the van was so appealing to cats.
“Yes. How did you know?” said Murdo. “I’ll try them all,” he continued just as Fergus shouted, “Don’t press any more!”
“Yikes!” yelped Fergus as a mouse landed on the road right beside his head and disappeared again. Suddenly it was there again and he realized that it was a very effective imitation mouse on some very thin wire, released and then recaptured like the bird from a cuckoo clock from a tiny box on the underside of the van.
“Yeeuk!” cried Fergus as he got a faceful of fish odours blown out from a small vent above him.
Whoosh splat!
“Eeurgh!” choked Fergus as he was hit in the face by a spray of soggy fish flakes fired from a small dispensing pipe near to his head.
“That’ll be sight, smell and taste then,” he said pulling his hand around in the tight confines to wipe his face. “No cat could resist something that appealed to each of its senses. Beanface has every option covered.”
Unperturbed by the onslaught, Fergus went for a closer look at the hole in the van’s floor that had appeared when the Capture Plate was lowered. By crawling on to the plate and squeezing his body upwards Fergus was able to get himself through the narrow gap and into the van — something that anyone of Murdo’s size could only have dreamt about.
As he poked his head through the floor and into the inside of the van, Fergus silently apologized to his friend as he realized that sometimes even his wilder ideas might just have the possibility of being true.
“I can see you, I can see you,” said Murdo’s now muffled but clearly excited voice through the van wall. Fergus could certainly see why Murdo could see him. There were tiny cameras in every corner of the van. Most of the inside was taken up by rectangular cages which were stacked five high against the walls. At a quick guess Fergus reckoned there were about fifty cages in total.
Along the edge of the cages ran a small conveyor belt and there was a hoist which sat in one corner like a tiny crane. Fergus could see that the cages could be moved around the back of the van on the conveyor belts to fit over the Capture Plate. This meant that from the driver’s seat Beanface had complete control not just of driving the van but of what went on in the back of it too. He could tour the streets, attracting cats to come under the van by appealing to each of their senses. A quick press of the right buttons and any cat would be captured by the closing walls on the side of the plate, lifted up and caged in the van in a matter of seconds. The fish shop van was a one-man cat-capturing machine.
“This is amazing. Anything else of interest where you are?” called Fergus. Murdo’s voice came back through the van wall. “Not really, although there is a number on a bit of paper stuck to the dashboard that might be useful. If you’d let me bring my notebook and pen I could have written it down. Can you remember it? You’re better than me at those things. It says ‘Access Code: 51329.’”
“I’ll use my watch,” said Fergus, keying the number into the memory of his DataBoy. Fergus had just finished when the phone rang loudly in his earpiece.
“Boys, your time is nearly up, I want you to get out in the next sixty seconds,” Jessie’s voice crackled.
“Jessie says time up and no buts, Murdo.”
“But …” began Murdo before realizing that Jessie had anticipated his reaction.
“I’ll go back the way I came in,” said Fergus through the wall to Murdo, “then you’d better raise the Captur
e Plate again and leave everything as you found it.”
Fergus squeezed himself through the gap in the floor of the van as quickly as he could, edging his way onto the Capture Plate and back to the road. As he crawled out from under the van, the mechanism for the Capture Plate began to buzz and whirr again and the device disappeared back into the underside of the van. Fergus hooked his left foot around the football which was still wedged waiting to be rescued. Anyone who had been watching might well have wondered why it had taken a boy fifteen minutes to get his ball out from under a van.
As Fergus brushed himself down, Murdo hopped out of the van, closing the door behind him. The alarms on the two DataBoys went off in unison.
“Time up! A perfectly executed operation!” said Murdo looking at his watch and grinning from ear to ear.
Fergus waved the ball. “Game of football, Murdo?”
“Don’t mind if I do, Fergus!” replied Murdo.
“Let’s just see if Jessie wants a game first,” said Fergus trotting back across the road to Jessie’s flat.
Over the next few minutes they recounted the tale of the successful operation to Jessie who remained in position at the window to keep an eye on the last stage of events. Murdo described the findings at the van as “cast-iron evidence” that linked the fish shop to the cats’ disappearance. Fergus meanwhile kept rubbing at his face which he was convinced stank of fish.
Jessie interrupted them, as Beanface finally emerged from Beryl’s front door looking distinctly hot and bothered. The boys crowded in to peer through the net curtains with her. According to Murdo’s DataBoy, he had been in there for twenty-three minutes and forty seconds and his face was almost the colour of his colleague Beetroot’s. Beryl gave a heavy wink in the direction of Jessie’s flat as she waved him off. Beanface accelerated away angrily, the white van roaring off down Comely Bank Avenue.
As they speculated on just how many cats might have been captured in the van over the last few months and taken to the fish shop, Fergus realized that Murdo had drifted out of the conversation. In fact he was sitting very quiet and was somehow looking smaller, almost as though he had shrunk in on himself. He had also gone very pale.
“Murdo, are you feeling all right?” asked Fergus.
“Er, I don’t think this operation has been quite the success that we thought,” said Murdo.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” said Jessie.
“Did we miss something?” asked Fergus.
“I left something important in the van,” said Murdo.
Fergus looked expectantly at Murdo and waited to hear him mention a piece of equipment. He was certainly not expecting what Murdo said next.
“Jock.”
12. The Rescue Attempt
“He must have fallen asleep. He just curled up on the passenger side when we climbed in. When the call came to get out I completely forgot that he was there.” It was Murdo’s turn to pace the room looking utterly perplexed. His arms were one wave and a clutch away from tearing his hair out.
Fergus swallowed hard. It wouldn’t have taken Beanface long to realize that there was a dog in the van and even less time to make a connection with the recent dog incident in the shop. It seemed that each time they found out more about Stein’s shop they gave something else away about themselves.
Jessie looked equally concerned. “I feel that this takes us into new territory. We certainly mustn’t do anything rash. I think that it may be time to call your friend Gill again. After all we need to tell her about that van and what it’s being used for.”
“I’ve got to go and find him,” said Murdo completely caught up in his own world. “It won’t do any harm just to have a look around down at the shop. He might be wandering about looking a bit lost. I mean maybe he hid from Beanface and he’s escaped. He’s very resourceful you know.”
Fergus smiled weakly. Smart though Jock was, it seemed more likely that he would have started some frenzied barking rather than made a cunning decision to hide when Beanface got back into the van.
“I’ll call Gill,” said Fergus feeling a bit more confident about using his contact now and keen to do anything to help Murdo calm down. The message he got a minute or two later however put the dampers back on the day.
“She’s not at work for another three hours,” he said glumly as he put the phone down.
“Boys, I think you should sit tight until then. She is the main person that could help to negotiate with this one. You can call her in a few hours and tell her all about the van and get her to help with Jock. Now I’m going to have to get ready. I’ll be heading off soon as my lift arrives in about half an hour. You keep that mobile phone for now, Fergus, and listen to me carefully …”
The two boys sat on the settee looking up expectantly at Jessie. She leaned forward in her armchair and looked at them firmly. “You boys must not do anything until you get hold of Gill. We don’t know for sure what Stein is up to, but I know he’s someone not to be trifled with. Do you hear me? You need to promise me you won’t go marching off and start something that you can’t predict the finish of.”
“Yes,” mumbled Fergus, conscious that Murdo seemed to be looking in a different direction, intent on not taking part in this conversation and certainly avoiding promising Jessie anything.
A few minutes later Jessie showed them out of her flat past two bulging bags in the hall. “Sorry, I’m leaving you to it, but this trip has been booked for a long time,” she said. “Now remember what I said.”
“Well that’s that until later,” said Fergus as they headed out on to Comely Bank Avenue. “I’m sure that Jock will be alright for a few hours,” he said, trying to convince himself as much as Murdo.
“I can’t leave him there with that animal thief! He likes an adventure but that’s taking it too far!” cried Murdo. “We have to do something. I’m not waiting around for half a day!”
“Jessie told us not to do anything until later. You heard her. She thinks it’s getting too risky. Don’t forget she met Stein. She seems to think he’s got a nasty streak.”
Fergus’s words seemed to go nowhere as Murdo said flatly, “I’m going to the shop, Fergus. You can come if you want to and you can stay if you want to, but I’m going to find Jock.”
Murdo began to walk off, his rucksack bobbing on his back as he went.
Faced with the choice of letting Murdo down or going against Jessie’s wishes was not a place that Fergus wanted to find himself in. He had heard people talking about “going with their head or their heart.” He found that his head was definitely saying “You don’t know what you’re getting involved in and you can’t be sure where it will lead,” but his heart was telling him convincingly, “Murdo needs all the help he can get and you can’t leave Jock anywhere near a shop where animals have a bad habit of going missing.” He ran to catch up with his friend.
After some debate, Fergus managed to convince Murdo that the best plan was to keep it simple. This meant having a look around near the shop to see if the van was there and seeing if there was any immediate sign of Jock. So, with a feeling of trepidation rather than excitement, they headed off once again, as quickly as they could, to the fish shop. Fergus glanced back as they went almost expecting to see Jessie wagging her finger disapprovingly at them.
There was a buzz of shoppers around when they arrived and it seemed to be a normal working day on Raeburn Place with Stein’s doing a steady trade.
The boys slipped through the archway and round the lane to the back of the shop. There was no sign of the van or any other vehicle. The metal shutter was down and locked and the only other thing of note was a neat pile of large white plastic boxes stacked up on one side of the courtyard.
“Let’s see if that door is locked as tightly as it was on Sunday morning,” said Murdo. Before Fergus could caution him about going too close, Murdo was off and running, and seconds later was rattling the door, finding it unsurprisingly shut tight.
As Murdo turned away disappointed, the r
oar of a rapidly approaching engine began to fill the courtyard. There was a split second as the boys stared at each other wide-eyed before they dived for cover behind the stack of white containers. A second later the boys peeked out to see the familiar white van pulling up to the metal shutter.
“That was close,” whispered Fergus.
“Very,” said Murdo, large beads of sweat breaking out on his round face. He squeezed out of his rucksack straps and wafted his shirt in an attempt to cool down.
The boys could hear the sound of the van’s engine idling and the driver’s door being opened and closed. The next noise was the rattle of locks and then the protesting scrape of metal on metal. The boys nodded in silent agreement that the shuttered door had just been rolled back. Then the van engine cut out, there were some footsteps and all became quiet. The boys looked at each other and shrugged. The only sound now was the distant buzz of cars on Raeburn Place.
“Was it Beanface driving?” asked Murdo.
“I suspect so,” said Fergus adjusting his crouching position, “although I couldn’t see properly. I was too busy going headfirst to get out of the way.”
“Why’s it so quiet?” said Murdo.
Fergus took a deep breath and peeked around the corner of the stack of white containers. The van had reversed up to the shuttered door which was now open. Everything was still.
“There’s no one there and the doors are open.” Even as he said it Fergus realized that he had made a mistake in giving such an accurate description.
Murdo’s eyes lit up. “Right, I’m going to have a look.”
“That’s not a good idea,” said Fergus firmly. “Beanface would never leave that door open for long. He’ll be back any minute.”
Catscape Page 12