by Iva Ibbotson
Ten minutes. Was there time for a small snifter? A whisky before an interview often made things go smoothly. But before he could open the drinks cabinet, the bell rang and Donald Fenton was shown in.
Donald and Albina had had a sleepless night. The kidnappers had not rung and the police were useless – plodding and slow. But the head of the MMM agency was a reassuring sight. The office was in the most expensive block in the city, the sign outside the door in gold letters so small and discreet that it had taken Donald several minutes to find it. Everything, in short, was of the best.
Curzon rose from his chair. His large red face was amiable. As they shook hands he said, “Now, how can I help you? I gather your son is missing.”
“Yes. Yes.” Donald was a sorry sight. There were dark rings under his eyes; his hands shook. “We’re sure he’s been kidnapped but there’s been no word. The police had the nerve to suggest he might have run away, but that’s nonsense. Hal had everything he wanted in the world. My wife and I tried to gratify every whim of his. You should see the toys in his nursery.”
“Quite. Quite so. Now if you’ll just tell me the whole story.”
So Curzon switched on the recorder and Donald told of the night they thought Hal had gone to stay with his friend and the awful discovery that he had never turned up there, while Curzon nodded his head in an understanding sort of way.
“I came to you because I heard how you found Mackenzie’s wife’s diamonds. It was an amazing piece of work,” said Donald.
Curzon smirked modestly “Yes … yes. That took a bit of doing. A very tricky case … but it came out all right in the end.”
Actually what had happened to Mackenzie’s wife’s diamond necklace was not quite what Curzon pretended. A few days after the necklace went missing, Curzon went round to a cocktail party at the Mackenzies’ house and drank so much that he wandered out into the garden to look for a place where he could be sick. He had decided on the compost bin and was just lifting the lid when he saw the glint of diamonds inside. (Mrs Mackenzie was a keen gardener and had been cutting roses before she set off for the opera.)
So Curzon slipped the necklace into his pocket and two days later he rang Mackenzie and told him that after a very difficult and secret piece of detection he had managed to find it.
“I’ve brought the photos of Hal of course and…” here Donald’s voice faltered, “his toothbrush for DNA samples and a few clothes…” He turned away to gather himself together.
“Good man. Good… Now perhaps you’d like Miss Enderby-Beescombe to show you round the laboratory. As you’ll see, we have all the latest equipment. Meanwhile I’ll get on to my team.”
Although Miss Enderby-Beescombe was a little vague about some of the gadgets she showed him, the hum and whirr and flashing lights in the adjoining room were impressive. But what impressed Donald most of all was the fee that MMM charged.
It was six hundred pounds an hour, Curzon told him, and then a fee of fifty thousand once the boy was found.
Donald, returning home, was able to reassure and comfort Albina. At that price MMM had to be not only good, but the best.
When Donald had left, Curzon picked up the internal phone.
“Sprocket?” he barked.
“Yes, sir, it’s me,” said a high voice.
“Of course it’s you, you idiot,” said Curzon. Sprocket was in fact “the team” about which he had boasted to Donald Fenton. “Now listen. We’ve got a missing boy case. I want a hundred flyers and a photo in the usual dailies. There’s a twenty-thousand-pound reward for news of the boy. Fiona’ll bring everything down.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll see to it straightaway.”
Milton Sprocket was a thin, pale young man who was never allowed upstairs because he had a local accent and had not been to the right school. MMM had the use of a basement room and a garage and it was there that he was to be found.
He was a man who took his work very seriously. After rather a sad childhood being bullied at school and failing his exams, Sprocket had taken a correspondence course at the College of Surveillance and Technology and got a Diploma in Detection and Tracking (or DDT for short). It was a first-class diploma because the college didn’t give out any seconds or thirds, and after this his life had changed.
Sprocket was hard-working and neat. In his cubbyhole in the basement was a cabinet with a number of drawers, all carefully labelled, in which he kept his disguises. There was a drawer labelled: moustaches, eyebrows, nose hair. Another said, scabs, wounds, pimples and boils, and another read, spectacles, monocles, ear trumpets. There was a wig stand in a corner, and a compartment for false teeth, and in a locked cabinet on the other wall lived a row of bottles labelled spit, blood, pus and phlegm, which had been a special offer on the Internet.
But though being in disguise and stalking people was what Sprocket liked best, most of the room was given over to the latest technology. The gadgets upstairs were only for show; it was down here in the basement that the real stuff was to be found. There were fibre-optic cables for looking round corners, and underwater cameras with fins, and sat navs which told you where you were going and where you had been, and binoculars with night vision, and ultraviolet heat-sensing devices … and because some of these things were not very easy to understand, Sprocket had a tall pile of instruction manuals over which he pored for long hours, trying to work out exactly what went where.
Not only that, but Sprocket was also a poet. In the MMM garage next to his room was a white van which he used when he was detecting, and on the side of the van was a verse he had written quite by himself.
Have you lost it or misplaced it?
In a jiffy we will trace it!
The poem was written on a board which could slide out and be replaced by others if he was on a secret mission and both he and the van needed to be in disguise. For example, there was one for when he wanted to pretend to be a greengrocer, which went:
When your appetite’s on edge,
We will bring you fruit and veg.
He was also working on a completely new verse which he meant to use when pretending to be a plumber, but it was giving him trouble. A poem like that had to be strong and powerful, but of course none of the words in it could actually be rude.
He pressed the repeat button on his phone and listened to the last part of Curzon’s message once again.
“This is a big one, Sprocket. Go to it! No hanging about.”
Sprocket smiled and rubbed his hands. He was just in the mood for an important and tricky case.
14
Nini
Greystoke House was a big stone building on the outskirts of Todcaster. From the street it looked forbidding and grim, but inside the walls had been painted in bright colours. There was a nursery full of toys, and a room where the older children watched TV. Mrs Platt, the house mother who was in charge, was a fat and friendly lady who did her best to be motherly. All the same, to the children who lived there, waiting to be placed with foster parents, it was still “The Home”, a place in which no one wanted to stay longer than they needed.
The small girl who sat up in bed on the morning that the circus opened in Todcaster had no interest in being fostered. She seemed to have no interest in anything. She was a beautiful child with huge dark eyes, thick jet-black hair and golden skin, but she lived in a closed world which nobody could reach.
She had come from an Indonesian island, a place of great beauty with lush forests, crystal rivers and mountains shaped like big green cones, but a place too of sudden earthquakes and terrifying landslides. Nini’s family had died in one of these, and she had been taken to an orphanage to be cared for by nuns.
It was a peaceful place set in the grounds of a temple where the monks prayed and chanted, and the little dogs who guarded them sat on the stone steps keeping evil spirits at bay.
Then one day a rich businessman and his wife had come to the island for a holiday, seen the little girl playing quietly under a jacaranda tree and decided to
adopt her and bring her back to England.
For the first few months that Nini was with them they were delighted with their pretty daughter and dressed her beautifully and showed her off to their friends. But then they found that the little girl did not learn to speak English as quickly as they hoped – in fact she did not speak at all. They took her to a doctor and another and another and were given a lot of names for what might be the matter with Nini, but no one could tell them what to do. She was not deaf, and she could see perfectly well, but she was enclosed in a world of her own.
Then one day when she had spent the whole day being tested in a hospital, Nini had a terrifying tantrum.
“They do that in the East,” a friend had said. “It’s called running amok.”
This was too much for the couple who had wanted a pretty, prattling doll, and they took her to the Children’s Welfare Centre and said they couldn’t keep her. Since then she had been in Greystoke House, not misbehaving, not being difficult, just not really being there at all.
Now she got out of bed and ran along the corridor, moving as lightly as a little ghost, and into the room where the older boys slept, and pulled at the duvet on the bed nearest the door.
Mick woke, saw who it was, and sat up.
“Today’s the circus, Nini. We’re going to the circus,” he repeated.
He was a tough Geordie with ginger hair, freckles and a cheerful open face. His grandfather had been a coalminer till the closure of the pits. For some reason Mick had become Nini’s protector and the only person of whom she took any notice. “It’ll be good,” he went on. “There’ll be horses and acrobats and clowns.”
But Nini did not answer, only looked at him. He might have been telling her about a visit to the dentist. Mick sighed and reached for his clothes.
Greystoke House was not far from the common where the circus was encamped. The children walked there, shepherded by plump Mrs Platt and a nursery assistant called Doreen. They danced along, excited by the treat to come. Only Nini, clutching Mick’s hand, walked along in silence.
The circus was gearing up for the start. On a platform outside the big top a small man with a moustache was juggling a mass of coloured balls. Another man in spangled tights was beating a big drum.
“Come and see Henry’s Circus, the eighth wonder of the world!” he shouted.
The Greystoke children were early. They filed into the front row. Mick sat down next to a boy of about his own age, with a white dog on his knee. Nini was beside him. Her legs, too short to reach the ground, stuck out in front of her.
“It’s going to start,” Mick told her.
But nothing moved in the beautiful mask-like face.
Hal, holding on to Fleck, was sick with nerves. In half an hour The Dog Family Murgatroyd would do their turn, and if it went wrong they would be banished from the circus. All the same, he turned to smile at the boy who had just come in with a group of children and was sitting next to him. He had ginger hair and looked friendly.
The house lights dimmed, the band struck up. Mr Henry, in his ringmaster’s clothes, cracked his whip.
The procession came first. The horses, the clowns, the tumblers and acrobats, Pauline’s Parrots all sitting on her shoulders. There was a burst of clapping – and the show began.
The Texas Terrors galloped in first – a string of horses ridden bareback by three men who leapt from one gleaming back to the other… The Dainty Danielas – a group of girls in shining costumes who climbed on one another’s shoulders and threw each other up in the air… The Comedy Horse, a pony who followed his master round the ring trying to get sugar lumps out of his pockets… A stupendous display on the high wire with men and women pretending to push each other off…
Hal was holding his breath. The time had come. Fleck whined once and Hal shushed him.
“And, now Elsa’s Fabulous Dogs in ‘The Murgatroyd Family Go to Their Wedding’,” announced the ringmaster.
The clowns came on first. They wheeled in a huge bath filled with water, and carried buckets and a ladder. They were trying to get ready for the wedding feast, but everything kept going wrong. The legs came off the table they were scrubbing; the balloons they were trying to blow up burst in their faces or floated out of reach; one of the clowns fell backwards into the bath…
A tent with a big notice on it saying “The Church” had been put up near the entrance, and Rupert appeared and sat in front of it in his bow tie and silk waistcoat. Another lot of clowns came in on stilts, carrying trays of wobbling jellies and coloured streamers in which they got entangled, and they threshed about and pretended to cry.
And now, to a fanfare from the band, the cart pulled by Otto made its entry.
Otto was wretchedly nervous but Francine had given him a good talking-to and he managed to trot steadily three-quarters of the way round the ring. Li-Chee in his little bonnet and Honey in her frilly hat sat in their seats, but Francine was standing up on her hind legs. With her white wreath and the enthusiastic little yaps she gave, she was obviously an eager bride.
But now something happened which the children had not bargained for. The audience broke into a storm of clapping and as the sound grew louder, Otto began to tremble. He had faced all sorts of dangers in Switzerland, climbing up rock faces and plunging into dangerous crevasses to rescue trapped climbers, but this noise was horrible; it was not to be borne. His eyes rolled and he stopped dead.
And Li-Chee, who would have done anything for Otto, jumped down from the cart with his bonnet askew and reappeared beneath Otto’s legs. He meant only to reassure his friend, but it looked as though he was trying to pull the cart, and everybody laughed. Not at the clowns now, but at the gallant little dog.
It was at this moment that Mick turned in amazement to the little girl beside him. Nini was leaning forward intently, her whole face alight, her eyes fixed in wonder at the Peke.
In the ring, no one, for a moment, knew what to do. Otto was standing stock-still, his head hanging. There was no way he was going to pull the cart as far as the church.
And once again it was Francine, that old trouper, who took over. She leapt from the cart but she did not run towards her bridegroom. She charged in the other direction, making noises of terror. She had changed the plot and become a dog who did not want to be married, who wanted to be free – and Rupert caught on at once. He jumped to his feet and gave chase, barking angrily – a bridegroom who wasn’t going to be done out of his bride.
The two poodles rolled over together, but Francine escaped and ran up a ladder, and took a flying leap into the arms of one of the clowns. Rupert followed her. But now the clowns understood the game. They pretended to catch Francine; they grabbed her and lost her and hit their foreheads in despair. Round and round the ring went the fleeing bride, between the legs of the clowns, flying over the table, hiding behind the bath, yelping in mock terror – and round and round went Rupert, the thwarted bridegroom, following her trick for trick.
The slapstick grew wilder and wilder. The clowns stepped into the buckets, fell on the balloons and burst them… Li-Chee left Otto and joined in, yapping at the top of his voice.
Meanwhile, Fleck, on Hal’s lap, had been getting more and more excited. All his friends were down there and he wanted desperately to be brave and join them but he couldn’t quite do it. Then, in a sudden burst of courage, he jumped off Hal’s knee, leapt over the barrier – and landed in the bath of water. For a moment he paddled up and down, then he scrambled out, shook himself, and joined in the chase.
But now came Honey. She was, after all, the mother and she couldn’t bear the mess and muddle any longer. She leapt from the cart, still in her frilly hat, and began trying to herd the clowns, the dogs, the balloons – everything she could see – towards the exit.
Round and round they went, Francine and Rupert in the lead, then Li-Chee, Fleck and Otto with the cart. And round and round went the clowns.
But they still hadn’t left the ring and Honey now called on all her ol
d sheepdog skills. She turned and ran in the other direction to meet Francine, her runaway daughter, head on. The music grew to a crescendo, everyone disappeared through the exit – and the lights went out.
And the audience roared and stamped and clapped and cheered, while behind the scenes, Mr Henry and George looked at each other and grinned.
Performing dogs are valuable, but dog clowns are pure gold.
“Well, we did it,” said Pippa triumphantly. “I reckon we can stay till Berwick and then it’s hardly any distance to your grandparents’. Even if they do something quite different next time, Mr Henry won’t send us away.”
They had taken the dogs back to the lorry and were helping out in the tent where the performing animals were housed. For a small sum the audience could visit them in their cages after the show.
“Excuse me.” Hal turned to find the ginger-haired boy who’d been sitting next to him.
Clutching his hand was the tiny girl with jet-black hair. “I was wondering if there was any chance of seeing the little dog that tried to pull the cart. The Peke. She’s nutty about him.”
Nini looked up. “Small dog,” she said.
“I think she’s seen dogs like that where she came from. Temple dogs they were, guarding the monks and chasing away evil spirits and all that stuff. But it’s amazing because she’s never taken notice of anything up till now. I’ve got permission from our house mother, as long as we’re not too long. She’s taken the others to look at the liberty horses.”
“Small dog,” repeated Nini, who never spoke.
“He’s in the lorry with the others – just across the grass,” said Hal. “Come on, we’ll show you.”
They were greeted by a chorus of friendly barks. Mick lifted Nini up on to the hay bales and she disappeared into the huddle of dogs. When they looked at her again, they saw something unexpected. Nini had not picked up Li-Chee or hugged him. She was sitting cross-legged in front of him, not touching him, murmuring to him in her own language while Li-Chee stood very still, his face lifted respectfully up to hers. It was obvious that he understood every word.