by Anna Dale
‘Susan! Susan! Where are you?’ he yelled. His eyes darted from one side of the street to the other, and his heart did gymnastics in his chest. Hearing the squeal of tyres, he raced ahead and was just in time to see the rear of a vehicle vanishing round a corner. Arthur stamped his foot with frustration and felt something soft and gooey under his shoe. He lifted up his foot and saw that three ice creams had been dropped on to the pavement. Their cones had been flattened and their creamy scoops were a partially melted mess. He could see the mark that his shoe had made on them. A second footprint was visible too. It was much larger than Arthur’s and had chunky treads that were commonly found on sturdy footwear. Arthur realised with a jolt of horror that it was the print of a mountaineer’s boot.
Arthur started to run back the way he had come, knowing that he would need to fetch his bicycle to have any chance of rescuing Susan. Now that he had seen the boot-print he was convinced that the vehicle that had sped out of sight had been Mr Hardbattle’s van and he had no doubts that Susan had been bundled into it.
Arthur raced past the shop called Clements and the rear of the library. When he turned into Twopenny Lane, he found that he had to dodge through a cluster of gossiping shoppers to get to Miss Quint. She had hitched her bag on to her shoulder and was holding Scallywag on her lead, a look of agitation on her face.
Not waiting until he drew close, Arthur shouted out the news, ‘She’s gone, Miss Quint! They’ve taken her!’
When Arthur heard the far-off whine of police sirens, he thought for a moment that he must be imagining them. There was a buzzing noise as well. Everyone around him seemed to be talking at once.
‘Yes, isn’t it dreadful?’ said a woman, responding to Arthur’s announcement. ‘Kidnapped in broad daylight, right under the noses of all the local bigwigs. They found a ransom note pinned to the library noticeboard. A hundred thousand pounds, they’ve asked for!’
‘What?’ said Arthur, baffled by what the woman had said. He was amazed that the news of Susan’s kidnap could have travelled so fast, and to ask for a ransom of a hundred thousand pounds seemed incredible. How could the gang have thought that he and Miss Quint could possibly raise that amount?
‘Of course, if they’d known how much her husband was worth, they might have asked for a million,’ the woman gabbled excitedly.
‘A million?’ said Arthur, confused. ‘Whose husband? What has all this got to do with Susan?’
The woman gave Arthur a scornful look. ‘She’s not called Susan,’ she said. ‘Lady Smythe-Hughes’s first name is Felicity!’
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Chapter Twenty-Three
In Hot Pursuit
Those devious old so-and-sos!’ spluttered Miss Quint when she and Arthur had had a quick confab and had started to piece together what had gone on. ‘They never had any intention of robbing the jeweller’s shop. It was all a ruse to throw us off the scent.’
Arthur was filled with anger and his hands were shaking so badly that he could not manage to unlock his bike. ‘I’ll bet they knew that Susan was listening in to their plans,’ he said. ‘They fed her a load of lies when she was hiding in that wardrobe. They’re probably laughing up their sleeves at us!’
Miss Quint tried to help Arthur by holding his bicycle steady while he knelt beside the front wheel and wrestled with the lock.
‘They must have thought that Christmas had come early when they found out that the chief judge of the carnival belonged to the nobility!’ she ranted, gripping the handlebars tightly. ‘If Jimmy and those rotten cronies of his get their hands on that ransom money they’ll be hotfooting it to the Swiss Alps before you can say “Cuckoo Clock”.’
‘There!’ Arthur announced with relief as he twisted a key and his lock snapped open. ‘Now I can get after them!’
‘I wonder why they needed to take Susan?’ reflected Miss Quint. ‘I suppose she might have seen them in the process of shoving Lady Smythe-Hughes into their van. They must have smuggled old Posh-Drawers out of the library’s rear entrance.’
Arthur leaped on to the saddle of his bike and placed his foot on the pedal, ready to speed away.
‘You haven’t really got a hope of catching them, you know,’ Miss Quint felt obliged to point out. She strained her neck and looked towards Swan Street, where people in the crowds were jostling to get a good view of the parade. The carnival procession still seemed to be going on despite the abduction of one of its judges. ‘It’s a shame we can’t find ourselves a better mode of transport,’ she commented.
Suddenly, Miss Quint twisted Arthur’s handlebars, forcing his front wheel to face the crowds at the top of Twopenny Lane. ‘I’ve got it, Arthur!’ she cried, running up the slope towards the sounds of tubas and trumpets belting out a military march. ‘Follow me if you want to save Susan!’
Somehow they fought their way through the crowds of people who were waving Union Jacks and cheering as the first of the carnival floats trundled past. Miss Quint blessed the fact that she had chosen to wear culottes, performing a scissor jump to convey herself over the barriers and into the road.
Arthur happened upon his father and sister in the melee and thrust his bicycle at them with only the briefest of explanations. Then he followed Miss Quint, vaulting the barrier to land in the path of the town’s brass band.
He dashed after Miss Quint, who had caught up with the leading float and was running alongside it. The float was a monstrous lorry with a platform mounted on its trailer. Just as Miss Quint had said, it was carrying the members of the Women’s Institute. Made to resemble an island paradise in the Pacific, the float had been covered with sand and planted with artificial palm trees fashioned from cardboard, chicken wire, felt and crêpe paper. In the centre of the float was a papier mâché volcano, and around it, dressed in grass skirts and garlands of tissue-paper flowers, were the ladies of the Women’s Institute.
In the manner of someone with a death wish, Miss Quint hurled herself in front of the lorry and waved her hands to halt it, causing the crowd to gasp in fear. The driver was forced to come to a stop and once he had applied his handbrake, Miss Quint hammered on the door of the cab until he opened it to ask her what the devil she thought she was doing.
‘Out!’ said Miss Quint, grabbing the startled lorry driver by the lapels of his shirt as he leaned towards her to tell her that she was unhinged. He fell unceremoniously out of the cab and, without wasting a second, Miss Quint picked up Scallywag and sprang into the driver’s seat. Arthur raced round the front of the lorry to the passenger door, which Miss Quint duly opened for him, and climbed in next to her.
The driver tried to jump in front of his vehicle, but Miss Quint was not so compassionate as he had been and almost mowed him down.
‘Idiot!’ said Miss Quint as she wound down the window and shouted to the ladies on the trailer to hold on. Then she put the lorry into a higher gear and roared off up the street.
So many roads were cordoned off that Miss Quint had a fair idea of the route that Jimmy and the gang would have to take to get out of Plumford. Shooting past bemused spectators who had lined the streets to see the parade, Arthur glanced in the wing mirror and saw the hula-hula girls (most of whom were of pensionable age) clinging on to the palm trees with their mouths hanging open in shock.
‘I think we’ll go down here,’ said Miss Quint, grappling with the oversized steering wheel and guiding the lorry through a row of bollards, crushing them under the lorry’s massive wheels.
‘Oops, I think we just lost Mrs Tidwell,’ said Miss Quint, glancing in her mirror and biting her lip guiltily.
Arthur double-checked that he had put his seatbelt on.
The narrow streets of Plumford’s shopping district were not designed for seven-ton lorries to hurtle down them at forty miles an hour. Miss Quint attracted a lot of attention as she scuffed kerbs, whacked the roofs of bus shelter
s and dented the odd rubbish bin or two. The spectacle of twenty or more terrified members of the Women’s Institute, wearing Hawaiian costumes and holding on to handcrafted palm trees, drew even more amazed stares from everyone they passed.
Arthur heard the sound of sirens gradually getting louder and was torn between telling Miss Quint to put her foot down so that they could outrun the police and asking her to reduce her speed so that he did not have to hold on to the door handle to avoid being thrown around in his seat.
At one point, they heard thumps on the roof of the cab, and in their mirrors, Arthur and Miss Quint saw that some of the more sprightly members of the Women’s Institute were hurling coconuts at them.
‘I think we should go a bit slower,’ he said. ‘Our passengers are getting quite cross.’
‘Nonsense!’ insisted Miss Quint, pressing the horn to let an old man on a zebra crossing know that she was approaching fast. ‘If they’ve got the energy to chuck armfuls of coconuts, they’ll have the strength to hang on for hours yet!’
Eventually, having blundered through the heart of Plumford, they chanced upon Mr Hardbattle’s van. Miss Quint attempted a war cry when she saw it and pressed the accelerator to the floor. In her excitement, she lost concentration and the seven-ton lorry weaved all over the road. There were screams from the ladies of the Women’s Institute and a queue of people waiting by a hot dog stand found themselves buried in a heap of sand.
Miss Quint moved up a gear and steamed towards the van, and for the next five minutes, the two vehicles played a game of cat and mouse.
Finally, it seemed as if the gang of kidnappers had managed to get away when they took a turning down a narrow alley that the lorry could not get through without bringing down the buildings on either side. However, it was in this alleyway that the gang’s luck ran out. Swerving to avoid a cat, which had darted into its path, the van ploughed into some dustbins, and its engine stalled. Miss Quint and Arthur heard a throbbing, whining noise as the van’s engine struggled to restart.
‘It won’t fire up!’ said Arthur.
‘We’ve got ’em!’ Miss Quint cried and switched off the lorry’s engine.
Fearing that the stop was only temporary and that Miss Quint would start up the lorry again and continue the nightmarish journey, the ladies of the Women’s Institute who had managed to remain on board deserted the lorry post-haste. Most of them scuttled to a nearby cafe for a much-needed cup of tea, but one or two preferred to nip to the pub next door for a glass of something stronger.
Once the lorry’s engine had died, Scallywag emerged from the footwell where she had spent the entire journey skulking beside Arthur’s feet. When Miss Quint and Arthur jumped down from the cab, Scallywag leaped after them and together they ran up the alleyway, determined to mete out some justice to the gang.
The doors at the front of the van opened before they got to it and Jimmy and his accomplices attempted to flee. Scallywag had got the measure of Mrs Voysey-Brown and, barking crazily, she pinned the woman against a wall. Arthur, who had started to learn rugby at school, performed a well-timed tackle and brought Jimmy to the ground. Then he sat on him so that he could not get away. It was left to Miss Quint to take on Mr Claggitt, but enlivened by the thrill of driving a lorry, she was not daunted one bit. Charging at him with a plastic lemonade bottle in her hand, she battered his broad back with it, then opened its top and sprayed him with its fizzy contents. Mr Claggitt coughed and spluttered and rubbed his stinging eyes, and while he was occupied with that, Miss Quint scooped up the keys of the van, which he had dropped on the cobbles.
When Miss Quint opened the rear doors of the van, Susan was the first to tumble out, shading her eyes against the dazzling sunlight. Before Arthur and Miss Quint could throw their arms around her, Susan held out a hand to the van’s other passenger, who was slim and blonde, and dressed in a pink silk suit, a pearl choker and a fancy hat.
‘Thank you, treasure,’ said Lady Smythe-Hughes, taking Susan’s hand. She alighted from the back of the van with the utmost grace as if such a skill had been taught to her at finishing school.
‘Are you hurt, Your Ladyship?’ enquired Miss Quint. She was unsure whether to curtsy, not having met a lady before.
‘Oh, no, we’re quite all right,’ said Lady Smythe-Hughes. ‘We’re made of stern stuff, aren’t we, Susan, hmm?’
For a member of the aristocracy, Lady Smythe-Hughes did not seem at all stuck up. She insisted that they should address her as Felicity, and when Scallywag ran over to her and was so keen to say hello that she put her paws on Lady Smythe-Hughes’s skirt, she laughed and gave the dog a friendly pat.
Despite Lady Smythe-Hughes’s down-to-earth ways, Arthur was embarrassed to be in her presence with smudges of dirt on his clothes, which he had acquired when he had rolled on the ground to apprehend Jimmy. Leaving Scallywag to guard the gang, Arthur hurriedly brushed himself down and approached Lady Smythe-Hughes and Susan with a beaming grin.
‘You’re quite safe now,’ he told them.
‘Thanks to you!’ said Lady Smythe-Hughes. She reached out to shake Arthur’s hand and made the same grateful gesture to Miss Quint.
As the sounds of police sirens drew closer, Miss Quint took Arthur to one side and they hastily discussed what should be done next. It was decided that Arthur should stay with Susan and Lady Smythe-Hughes to answer any questions the police might have while Miss Quint rounded up Jimmy’s gang and spirited them away. As much as they deserved to be punished for committing a double kidnap, it was better all round if they avoided being caught.
While Arthur and Susan engaged Lady Smythe-Hughes in conversation, Miss Quint slipped away and ordered the gang to get into the back of Mr Hardbattle’s van. Then she opened the bonnet and took a peek inside to try to work out why the engine had stalled. Diagnosing an overheated engine, which Mr Hardbattle had warned her might happen, she cooled it down using water from a bottle kept underneath the driver’s seat. Once this had been done, the engine started up first time and Miss Quint drove up the alleyway, turning the corner with a squeal of tyres.
She was only just in time. Seconds later, a string of police cars screeched to a halt in front of the lorry, their blue lights flashing and flickering. The police were almost beaten to the scene by members of the local press, who swarmed around Lady Smythe-Hughes with their cameras, notepads and microphones.
‘Smile, Suze!’ said Arthur as a newspaper photographer took their picture. ‘I think this might make the front page!’
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Chapter Twenty-Four
Trunk’s Find
Arthur and Susan basked in all the media attention, spelling out their names to journalists and hearing the click of cameras no matter which way they turned. After a few minutes, the police broke up the scrum and Susan and Arthur were whisked away in a police car, to be questioned at the local station about the whole kidnapping affair. The police were desperate to find out the identities of the kidnappers, but Arthur and Susan played dumb, providing vague descriptions that had the constable in charge of photofits scratching his head. When Arthur was asked who had been with him in the lorry, he was even more evasive and insisted that he could not think of her name.
‘Come on, young fellow-me-lad!’ prompted a chief inspector. ‘You were sitting next to the woman! You must have known what she was called!’
‘It’s on the tip of my tongue,’ Arthur said unhelpfully.
Arthur had heard the police officers talking and knew that Miss Quint was in serious trouble, having broken several laws in her efforts to catch up with Mr Hardbattle’s van. She had hijacked a lorry, exceeded the speed limit of thirty miles an hour, and driven like a lunatic or as the police preferred to put it, ‘without due care and attention’. Neither Arthur nor Susan gave Miss Quint away, but because there had been several hundred witnesses (including twenty-seven irate hula-hula girl
s), Miss Quint’s name was soon discovered by the police.
Miss Quint had foreseen that the police would come for her. She had parked the van outside Hardbattle Books, leaving Jimmy, Mr Claggitt and Mrs Voysey-Brown with their hands tied behind their backs, locked inside. Then Miss Quint had changed out of her vest top and culottes into a sensible blouse and skirt and a pair of court shoes, which she felt was a more appropriate outfit to wear inside an interview room. She had also been organised enough to pack a bag with a change of underclothes should she be kept in a cell overnight. When PC Chubb showed up in his police car, Miss Quint was ready and waiting for him.
The telling-off she got was fierce and went on for a long time. Barely allowing her a chance to speak, a grumpy detective sergeant made Miss Quint admit that she had acted recklessly and foolishly, and that she had endangered the lives of some of Plumford’s finest townswomen, not to mention Lionel Sayer, the driver of the lorry, and a Mr Wilfred Tottle, who had barely survived crossing the road.
Eventually, Miss Quint’s severe reprimand came to an end when the station’s chief inspector entered the room. He said that although she had broken quite a lot of laws, she had more than made up for her misdemeanours by rescuing Lady Smythe-Hughes and a child not fully identified, but claiming to be called Susan. Lady Smythe-Hughes, so the chief inspector said, was as pleased as punch with Miss Quint and her young helpers and had asked that they should receive the highest praise for displaying such courage and quick thinking.
The result was that Miss Quint got off scot-free.
Arthur, Susan and Miss Quint were driven in a police car to Hardbattle Books, and at the end of the journey, PC Chubb asked all three for their autographs. Arthur and Susan were happy to scribble their signatures in his pocketbook, but Miss Quint turned down PC Chubb’s request with the words ‘Don’t be so ridiculous!’