by R. A. Spratt
‘We’re going to catch her because she likes apricot danishes?’ asked the Police Sergeant sceptically.
‘No, we’re going to catch her because she loves apricot danishes,’ corrected Nanny Piggins. ‘She thinks about them, she dreams about them and, most importantly, she is physically unable to stay away from them.’
‘I still don’t see how that’s going to help us,’ said the Police Sergeant.
‘It’s easy,’ explained Nanny Piggins. ‘We will find Anthea wherever you can find the very finest apricot danish.’
‘Hans’ Bakery!’ exclaimed the children. (All his baked products were good, but his apricot danish had just won the ‘Danish by a non-Danish resident’ category at the International Pastry Slamdown earlier that month.)
‘Exactly!’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘If I know my sister, she’ll be at the bakery scoffing an apricot danish as we speak.’
‘Constable, get the squad car,’ ordered the Police Sergeant as he leapt into action. ‘We’ve got a lady pig to arrest! Another one!’
A short time later, the squad car pulled up outside Hans’ Bakery with the Police Sergeant, the Police Constable, Nanny Piggins and the children all squashed inside. (Boris jogged along behind, because the Police Sergeant did not have a sunroof, and he would not agree to letting Boris give him one by ripping a hole in the top of his car with his bare hands.) When they peered in through Hans’ shop window they could see a customer sitting at a table, eating a huge stack of danishes.
‘That’s her!’ declared Nanny Piggins.
‘It can’t be,’ protested Boris. ‘She’s a he. Look at that big bushy moustache.’
‘I know that person looks nothing like me now,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘but I suspect, from the natty little designer dress and perfectly coiffured bob, that he may actually be a she. And that the moustache may be a disguise.’
‘No!’ gasped Boris.
‘You Pigginses are very good at transforming yourselves,’ said Derrick.
‘It is a skill you have to learn,’ admitted Nanny Piggins, ‘when you’ve been banned from as many all-you-can-eat restaurants as we have.’
‘Now you’ve pointed it out, it is obvious she is a Piggins,’ admitted the Police Sergeant. ‘Just look at the way she eats those danishes.’
They watched Anthea Piggins. She was happily waggling her crossed trotters as she munched her way through six danishes at a time.
‘Doesn’t she ever mix it up with a cake or a meringue?’ asked Michael.
‘No,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘It all goes back to when she was a baby and mother accidentally dropped her in a vat of apricot jam. Mother didn’t notice what she had done, so Anthea had to eat her way out. She’s had a passion for apricots ever since.’
‘Okay, so how do you want to handle this arrest?’ asked the Police Sergeant. ‘I’ve got some tear gas in my car.’
‘Good to know,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘but I suppose I had better say hello before you start gassing her and I start biting her leg – she is my sister after all.’
Nanny Piggins started walking towards the shop door, but then turned and gave one more piece of advice. ‘You can all come with me, but stand well back. Anthea is a master pickpocket. I suggest you keep a firm grip on your personal possessions.’
When they entered the bakery Anthea did not even notice they were there, her attention was so fully absorbed in the danishes before her.
‘Hans,’ said Nanny Piggins to her favourite baker as he stood behind the counter, nervous to be in the same shop as two police officers and an exact clone of his most intimidating customer. ‘This is my sister, Anthea.’ Nanny Piggins pointed to her moustache-wearing identical twin. ‘I want you to cut her off. No more danishes for her.’
Anthea’s head snapped up. ‘What–what–what?!’ she exclaimed.
‘But she’s a good customer,’ protested Hans. ‘She’s had nine dozen danishes in the last half hour.’
Nanny Piggins glared at Hans. ‘Who is the better customer?’ she asked.
‘You are, Nanny Piggins, you are,’ admitted Hans humbly, looking down at his shoes. He knew he should be grateful for the day Nanny Piggins moved into his neighbourhood and single-handedly quadrupled the turnover of his business.
‘Sarah?!’ exclaimed Anthea. ‘Why would you cut me off? What have I ever done to you?’
‘Impersonate me and steal a rare and famous jewel worth squillions and squillions of dollars,’ answered Nanny Piggins.
‘Oh yes, that,’ said Anthea, taking off her fake moustache.
Everyone gasped. It was shocking how exactly she looked like Nanny Piggins. If it were not for the fact that Anthea was a blonde, whereas Nanny Piggins was a brunette, you would never be able to tell them apart.
‘I’ll admit that was a little naughty,’ conceded Anthea, ‘but I never expected it to get so out of hand.’
‘Miss Piggins,’ said the Police Sergeant, taking a step towards Anthea.
‘You shouldn’t have done that, Police Sergeant,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Anthea, give the sergeant his wallet back.’
‘Sorry,’ said Anthea, taking the Police Sergeant’s wallet out from under a danish and handing it to Nanny Piggins. ‘It’s a reflex. I can’t help myself.’
‘How did you do that?’ asked the baffled Police Sergeant. ‘I didn’t see you move.’
‘She took it out of your pocket when you glanced at the coffee cream scroll,’ explained Nanny Piggins. ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure Hans will sell you one before we leave. But try not to glance at it again unless you want my sister to get the packet of jelly babies in your left breast pocket.’
‘Okay,’ said the Police Sergeant. ‘Anthea Piggins, I am arresting you for grand theft. You’d better hand over the Giant Mumbai Diamond now.’
‘I can’t give it to you,’ said Anthea.
‘Because you’ve sold it already and that’s how you can afford all these danishes?’ guessed Nanny Piggins.
‘No, I bought all these danishes with cash I found in Hans’ back pocket,’ said Anthea.
‘Hey!’ said Hans, clutching his bottom and realising she was right.
‘Then where’s the diamond?’ demanded the Police Sergeant.
‘I gave it back,’ said Anthea.
‘To the citizens of Mumbai, because you wanted to make a political statement about the oppressive nature of colonial rule?’ guessed Derrick. (He had been studying the effects of colonialism on the sub-continent in history.)
‘No,’ said Anthea. ‘I gave it back to the man who runs the museum because that’s what I was paid to do. You see, I’m a security expert now. It’s what I do for a living. I test security systems to find their faults. In this instance I found if you lubricated the museum’s alarm with apricot jam, the security shutters wouldn’t have enough traction to close, and I’d be able to make it out of the building. But afterwards I took the diamond straight around to the curator’s office and gave it to him. That was the job.’
‘But he didn’t say anything about that in his police statement,’ protested the Police Sergeant.
‘I know,’ agreed Anthea, shoving another three danishes in her mouth. ‘I’m beginning to suspect that he might be a bad man.’
‘There’s no doubt about that,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘Why else would he run a museum? Nasty, boring, dusty smelling places, whose sole purpose seems to be boring poor unfortunate children into a stupor.’
‘Let’s go and talk to him,’ said the Police Sergeant.
And so they all crammed into the now even squashier squad car and drove down to the Natural History Museum. Thanks to the Police Sergeant’s practised ability at bullying secretaries, they were soon ushered into the curator’s office. It was a large room, lined with bookcases full of leather-bound volumes and glass display cases showing specimens from the museum’s collection. The curator got up from his desk to meet them.
‘Good morning, this is quite a surprise,’ said the curator. He was a small neatly dressed man in his
sixties. His eyes almost twinkled he seemed so delighted to be confronted by such a large group of people. ‘Can I offer you anything? A slice of cake, perhaps?’
‘What sort?’ asked Nanny Piggins, sniffing in the general direction of the large brown cake sitting on his desk.
‘Carrot cake. I made it myself,’ said the curator.
‘Yuck!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘You’ll have to come up with something better than that if you want to distract us while you leap out the window and make a run for it.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked the curator, with just a little bit too much amused innocence.
‘This pig –’ began the Police Sergeant.
‘Ahem,’ interrupted Anthea and Nanny Piggins, pointedly clearing their throats.
‘I mean, this lovely young lady …’ corrected the Police Sergeant gallantly.
Nanny Piggins and Anthea smiled.
‘… tells us that she stole the Giant Mumbai Diamond on your orders, and that she handed the diamond back to you,’ explained the Police Sergeant.
‘Really?’ said the curator. ‘But surely you’re not going to take her word for it. The word of a pig and a thief, who I just saw take the watch off your very wrist.’
Anthea handed the Police Sergeant his watch.
‘Sorry,’ said Anthea. ‘Would you like your garters back too?’
‘What?’ asked the Police Sergeant.
‘The garters that hold your socks up,’ explained Anthea. ‘I nabbed them in the police car.’
The Police Sergeant pulled up his trouser leg to see his crumpled socks. ‘Yes, please.’
‘You see, she can’t help herself,’ continued the curator, ‘whereas I am a respected pillar of the museum community.’ He smirked now, he was so delighted with his own cleverness.
‘Would you like me to bite him, Police Sergeant?’ asked Nanny Piggins as she glowered at the curator.
‘I don’t think that would help get a confession,’ said the Police Sergeant.
‘Neither do I, but it might be fun,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘And if I had stolen the diamond I’d be halfway to Venezuela by now,’ added the curator, ‘but I have not left this room since they first informed me of the crime.’
‘Hmm,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘If you haven’t left this room since the robbery, and my sister, who is a perfectly honest pig in all respects that don’t involve apricot danishes, says she gave you the diamond, then we can deduce that the diamond must be hidden somewhere in this room.’ As Nanny Piggins mulled this over she began twirling an imaginary moustache.
‘Oh no,’ groaned Michael. ‘Nanny Piggins has been reading detective novels again.’
‘I have indeed,’ declared Nanny Piggins. ‘I’ve been reading The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe, so I know the best way to hide something is –’ she paused for dramatic effect – ‘in plain view!’
‘It is?’ said Boris. ‘I thought the best way to hide something was to put a lampshade on it.’
‘Oh yes, that is the best way to hide bears,’ agreed Nanny Piggins, ‘but the best place to hide anything else is out in the open. Because that is the last place anybody would ever think to look.’ Nanny Piggins prowled about the office. ‘And so the Giant Mumbai Diamond must be hidden … here! In this display of rocks!’ Nanny Piggins picked up a display case and dashed it on the floor, smashing the glass to smithereens. ‘Behold – the Mumbai Diamond!’
Everyone looked at the grey rocks on the floor.
‘You’ve just smashed a priceless collection of lunar specimens,’ smiled the curator.
‘Well then, the diamond must be here among this display of crystals,’ said Nanny Piggins, picking up a second display case and throwing that on the floor too. The crystals shattered into a thousand pieces (just as a diamond would not).
‘No, that was just a case of unique Amazonian crystals,’ supplied the curator. ‘Our staff go to a lot of trouble to label our displays; you really should take a moment to read them.’
‘But the diamond has to be here somewhere!’ protested Nanny Piggins.
‘You’ll never find it,’ chortled the curator.
‘Perhaps he’s hidden it somewhere traditional like a wall safe or a sock drawer,’ suggested Boris.
‘No, criminal masterminds never do that,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘I know where it is!’ yelped Samantha, more surprised than anybody by her sudden insight.
‘You do?’ said Nanny Piggins and the Police Sergeant.
‘Think about it,’ said Samantha. ‘Something has happened since we came in this room. Something that is not quite right.’
Everyone thought, but nobody could work it out.
‘He offered us a piece of carrot cake that he baked himself,’ said Samantha.
Nanny Piggins was immediately electrified by the importance of this fact. ‘Nobody makes carrot cake for themselves because it tastes disgusting!’ She turned and glared at the curator. ‘The only reason anyone would bake a carrot cake is if they wanted to torture a small child by making them eat it, or if they wanted a cake that they could be sure no-one else would ever eat.’
The curator was not smiling anymore.
‘Therefore,’ continued Nanny Piggins, ‘the diamond is in the cake!’
Nanny Piggins launched herself at the cake. And even though she was standing on the far side of the room surrounded by broken glass, lunar rocks and shards of crystal, she still had her trotters on the cake before the curator could get there. Nanny Piggins then tore the cake apart and found among the cloggy lumps of sugar, flour, butter and grated carrot (the curator was not good at baking) the spark ling perfection of the Giant Mumbai Diamond.
‘Wow!’ said the children.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘Almost as pretty as an apricot danish,’ agreed Anthea Piggins, taking an apricot danish out of her pocket and biting into it.
So the curator was sent away to prison for a very long time, and Nanny Piggins and the children went home. They had been given the $20,000 reward for discovering who stole the Giant Mumbai Diamond, but Nanny Piggins let Anthea keep the money. She had racked up a lot of debt because of her crippling apricot danish habit.
‘Have you been traumatised by your brush with the law?’ Samantha asked her nanny.
‘Not at all,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I thought it was a wonderful April Fools’ Day prank.’
‘But the curator didn’t mean it as an April Fools’ Day prank,’ said Derrick.
‘I know, but we must give him credit where it’s due,’ explained Nanny Piggins. ‘He may be a rotten thief and a terrible cake baker, but if he had intended this whole debacle to be a prank, then it was definitely a jolly good one.’
Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were on their hands and knees under Mrs Simpson’s azalea bushes, looking for insects. For once they were not hunting for bugs to put in a teacher’s handbag or to run up a rude shopkeeper’s leg; their search was purely for academic purposes. You see, Samantha had to do a project on insects for school. And Nanny Piggins reasoned that if a picture tells a thousand words, then an actual jar full of live insects must be a million times better than the 800-word essay the teacher had actually asked for.
They already had the common fly, a ladybird, several dozen cockroaches and a worm (Nanny Piggins refused to believe that a worm was not an insect, because it was creepy and yucky and she thought it should be even if it was not). Now they were on the lookout for something venomous. Despite Samantha’s protests, Nanny Piggins insisted she should try to get bonus marks by handing in something deadly. So they were just about to uproot Mrs Simpson’s prize-winning dahlias to see what they would find when they heard the sound of jaunty whistling.
‘What’s that?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘Someone whistling,’ said Derrick.
‘Hmm,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I distrust whistling. Only men do it. Women are too polite to inflict th
eir bad taste in music on others.’
‘I thought people whistled because they didn’t know the words to the song,’ said Samantha.
‘That too,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘And thank goodness they don’t know the words. It would be unbearable to have men wandering the streets bursting into show tunes. But that’s beside the point. What I want to know is, who would be whistling in the street at this hour? It’s too early in the morning to be that happy.’
‘Shall we have a look?’ suggested Michael.
‘Yes, that’s a good idea,’ agreed Nanny Piggins, ‘but we should stay hidden just in case it’s that naughty Pied Piper of Hamlin.’ (Nanny Piggins had read the story of the Pied Piper with the children the night before, and it had had a big impact on her. She could not believe such a horrific tale of kidnapping and rat massacre could be considered a children’s story.)
Nanny Piggins and the children followed the whistler by crawling along under the hedge. All they could see of him was his shiny shoes.
‘It does not bode well that his shoes are so polished,’ whispered Nanny Piggins. ‘Anyone who takes that much care with their appearance must want something. It’s like he’s trying to hypnotise us with the glare from his footwear.’
Just then the whistler stopped and turned into the Greens’ very own gateway.
‘He’s going to our house!’ whispered Samantha, panicking.
‘It is the Pied Piper of Hamlin!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘Don’t worry, children, I won’t let him lead you off into a cave no matter how well he plays the flute.’
But as he strode up their front path they got a view of the man with the shiny shoes for the first time. He was wearing the distinctive red tailcoat, black top hat and oily moustache that they all instantly recognised.
‘The Ringmaster!’ they all gasped.
‘The Ringmaster is the Pied Piper of Hamlin?’ whispered Michael.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘Why is he carrying a big bunch of flowers and a huge box of chocolates?’ asked Derrick.
‘It’s just as I suspected,’ whispered Nanny Piggins. ‘He must want something. Here, hold my handbag, I’m going to bite him.’