The Hangman's Lair

by Simon Cheshire

  ‘Looks like it,’ I said. I was already getting out of breath. (Yeah, yeah, I know, Izzy was right, I need to get more exercise, nag, nag, but I never seem to have the time, blah, blah, blah.)

  ‘Why would he do that?’ said Muddy.

  ‘Remember how he told me that he wanted to join the Herbert Street gang?’ I gasped.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And remember how there was an initiation test, a test he had to pass before they’d let him join?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, something occurs to me. I don’t think stealing the money was the initiation test. I think that was only part of it. I think the real test was to get it back from where the gang hid it.’

  ‘You mean, he’s used us to do his dirty work for him?’ said Muddy. ‘He didn’t have the brains to pass the test and work out how to find it and nick it back from the gang, so he came to you?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said.

  ‘That nasty, gutter-dragging . . .’ Muddy went back to muttering sentences I can’t repeat here.

  A couple of minutes later, Bob Thompson turned the corner into Herbert Street. Muddy and I managed to shadow him all the way to the row of shops, by keeping low behind the dotted line of parked cars on the opposite side of the road.

  We peeked out from behind a battered-looking blue van. We were just in time to see Bob approach the gang. As before, they were slumped around the nearest car. So much for them being in hiding for a few weeks, I thought to myself.

  We were too far away to hear what was being said, but we caught a general tone of friendly greeting as Bob walked up to Moz. As soon as Bob produced the bundle, the gang all sat up, looked at each other and started laughing. Bob launched into an explanation.

  ‘He’ll be going on about how cleverly he’s tricked them,’ I said quietly.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ groaned Muddy. ‘Someone has got the better of you, after all! A rotten bully like Bob Thompson, too!’

  The gang were thoroughly enjoying Bob’s story. They kept shaking their heads and pulling dopey faces. I could imagine what they were saying - ‘So you put those kids up to it, man? Yeah? Aww, that was genius! We totally fell for it, didn’t we? Duh! Didn’t spot that one coming, man, we expected you to ambush one of us and start thumping until you got given the location!’

  Moz, cackling loudly, batted Bob on the shoulder. Bob flipped the bundle into the air for Moz to catch, and as it dropped into Moz’s hands the rest of the gang began to cheer and clap. Moz ripped open the end of the bundle, and pulled out the contents.

  A handful of newspaper, cut to the size of banknotes.

  ‘Is this a joke?’ roared Moz. Ah, now that we could hear. ‘Where’s our money?’

  Bob said something in a high-pitched whine. He started flapping his hands about. He grabbed the bundle back and tore it apart. No money.

  ‘Give me that money!’ shouted Moz. ‘Or you get a pounding! Right now!’

  Slowly, Muddy turned his head to face me.

  ‘Saxbyyyyy?’ he said.

  ‘I told you I think of everything,’ I smiled. ‘I swapped it over last night.’

  A furious row had erupted over the road. Bob and Moz were yelling into each other’s faces, Zippy was shouting at the pair of them, and the rest of the gang were circling like vultures around a dead wildebeest.

  Soon, the shouting became pushing and the pushing became raised fists. Seconds later, Bob was making a run for it, pursued by the gang who were bellowing for revenge.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Muddy. ‘We’d better hurry if we’re going to make it back to school before the bell goes.’

  We scurried back the way we’d come.

  ‘How did you know he was going to double-cross us like that?’ said Muddy.

  ‘Weeelll,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know, but I had a definite suspicion. You see, I could believe his whole story, except for one little detail.’

  ‘Which was . . .?’

  Have you spotted it?

  ‘He said the gang had taken the cash and sent him packing. Something about that didn’t seem quite right. Bullies like Bob Thompson don’t back off that easily. Besides, if it had happened exactly as he claimed, how did he know that the gang had later buried the money in The Hangman’s Lair? He must have seen them go in there.’

  ‘So you suspected him all along?’ said Muddy.

  ‘A bit,’ I said. T suppose I wanted to believe him. After all, the prospect of one less bully is always welcome. But, as it turned out, I was right. What he told me was a pack of lies from the start.’

  ‘And your reputation as a brilliant schoolboy detective remains intact!’ said Muddy.

  ‘Ahhh, yeeeeah, there is that too,’ I said.

  We just had time before Registration to return the money to the school office. Once the Head had stopped thanking me and counted the cash for the umpteenth time, she asked me how I’d managed to track it down.

  I thought for a moment, then asked her if that info could remain confidential. I told her that the person who’d stolen the money was receiving, er, punishment for what he’d done, that justice had been served, and that perhaps in this instance the matter was best left alone. She was clearly reluctant to agree, but in the end her happiness at having the money back won the day.

  That afternoon, I returned home and went straight to my garden shed. I plonked myself down in my Thinking Chair, propped my feet up on my desk and added some notes to my files.

  Case closed.

  CASE FILE ELEVEN:

  DIARY OF FEAR

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  ‘HMM,’ I SAID TO MYSELF.

  I scratched my chin and looked around me. ‘Hmm,’I said to myself again.

  I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do now. So I just said, ‘Hmm,’ again.

  I was standing in the middle of the small back garden behind my house. I was in the middle of the lawn and in the middle of a random pile of boxes, paint tins, the lawnmower, a coil of hose, toolboxes, my desk, my filing cabinet of case notes and my Thinking Chair.

  I was having a tidy-out of the shed. And it wasn’t going well. There must be a way to get a bit more space in here, I’d thought to myself. There must be some way to arrange all these tonnes of stuff so that I’m not having to squeeze around everything all the time.

  So I’d emptied the whole lot out on to the lawn. But now, standing there, staring at it all, I hadn’t the faintest idea where to begin. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t been forced to share my shed with all that gardening and DIY gear, but there was nowhere else for it to go.

  ‘Hmm,’ I said, as if saying it enough times and looking thoughtful would somehow give me the answer. I was sure there was more stuff here than I’d started with . . .

  ‘Hello?’ came a voice from the other side of the garden gate. I looked up to see Amy Parsons, a girl from school.

  Everyone called her Parsnip, which they told her was because of her name, but which was actually because she had a nose like a parsnip. She had her long black hair tied up in a tight bun, and was wearing a pair of high-fashion jeans and a purple longsleeved T-shirt, thick with dust at the knees and elbows. Multi-coloured stripey socks poked up from the tops of her almost-new, polished shoes. Her pockets were clearly full of various odds and ends and, as she pulled a stray strand of hair back into place behind her ear, I noticed that the ends of her fingers were grubby. Her face showed a mixture of worry and weariness.

  ‘Have I come at the wrong time?’ she said, looking at the heaps that were littering the lawn.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you’ve come at exactly the right time. I’m looking for an excuse to leave all this where it is and ignore it for as long as possible. Here, have my Thinking Chair. I haven’t got any other actual seats.’

  She perched on the battered old armchair. It seemed very weird seeing it sitting there in the open air. Out in broad daylight, it looked even more saggy and worn-out than it did in the shed. I pulled up a couple of half empty
paint tins and sat on those. They were extremely uncomfortable.

  ‘I need your help,’ said Amy. ‘But I don’t know where to begin.’

  ‘Well,’ I shrugged, ‘a certain amount is clear to me already. You’ve recently lost a personal item, a small one. After an extensive search, you have - in the last couple of hours - come to the conclusion that it has been stolen. It’s probably not something that’s valuable in terms of money, but it’s very precious to you. You also need to get it back urgently.’

  She stared at me for a moment, boggle-eyed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said at last, ‘that’s right. All of it. How could you possibly know all that?’

  ‘From your appearance,’ I said.

  There was one detail about her in particular that had given me my first clue. And everything else could be deduced from that first clue, in a kind of logical spiral.

  Can you work out how I came to my conclusions?

  ‘There’s a lot of dust on your knees and elbows,’ I said. ‘And your fingers are also grubby. That implies you’ve been mucking around somewhere mucky. It’s not mud or anything like that, just ordinary dust, so you’ve been indoors.’

  ‘How do you know I don’t walk around like this all the time?’ said Amy.

  ‘Those are expensive jeans you’re wearing,’ I said. ‘If you were dusty all the time, like my friend Muddy, you’d wear scruffier clothes. And the fact that you’re not usually dusty tells me you’ve probably been searching for something in dusty places. Under a bed, behind a desk, at the back of cupboards, that sort of thing.’

  ‘And how could you tell I’ve been looking for something small?’ said Amy,

  ‘If you were looking for something large, you wouldn’t have needed to go searching under a bed or in a cupboard, would you? You wouldn’t get dusty elbows looking for a bike or a beach ball.’

  Amy blinked at me, a disconcerted look on her face. ‘And the rest? The fact that I think it’s been stolen? The urgency thing?’

  ‘Well, that’s easy,’ I said. ‘The simple fact that you’ve come here to ask for my help tells me that you can’t find this item and so you now think it was stolen. It must be precious to you, but not actually valuable, because you’ve come to me and not your parents or the police. Getting it back is a matter of urgency because you’ve obviously come here immediately, without bothering to even dust yourself down.’

  Amy half-grinned, half-groaned. ‘Which also tells you that it’s only in the last couple of hours that I’ve given up looking.’

  ‘Exactly. Easy.’

  Amy sat back in my Thinking Chair, gawping at me as if I’d said something clever or unusual. ‘Y’know, James Russell told me how you’d solved a mystery over at the museum. I thought he was exaggerating when he said you’re the best detective ever.’ (She was talking about the case of The Pirate’s Blood - see volume three of my case files for details.)

  ‘Well, umm, it’s always nice to have a recommendation,’ I blushed. ‘But honestly, all I do is keep my eyes open. And my brain switched on. And my mouth shut. Well, sometimes. Anyway, I’m guessing that this item you’ve lost is perhaps jewellery? Or, possibly, judging again from your appearance, an expensive designer shirt?’

  She frowned slightly. ‘No. That’s completely wrong.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I blushed again. ‘Schoolbook?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Phone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Camera?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. MP3 player packed with your complete collection of music and videos?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sorry, you’re going to have to tell me,’ I said weakly

  ‘It’s, er, my diary.’

  ‘Oh yeeees, of course,’ I said, snapping my fingers. ‘That would explain why . . . yes, sorry, carry on. Your diary?’

  Now it was Amy’s turn to blush. ‘It’s about the size of a paperback book. It has a chunky lock on it, and I’ve put my name in big letters across the front cover.’

  ‘So, you’ve lost all your notes about when people’s birthdays are coming up, and when you’ve got appointments at the dentist, that sort of thing? Why would anyone want to steal that?’

  She blushed a bit more, the sort of red that’s usually reserved for peppers and school sweatshirts.

  ‘It’s . . . not that sort of diary,’ she said.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  WHY?WHY? WHY WOULD ANYONE keep a diary? Not the birthdays-and-appointments-at-the-dentist type - that’s OK, that’s no problem. I mean the writing-down-stuff-you-don’t-want-people-to-see type. A diary like that is asking for trouble. You just know that someone, sometime, is going to read it. I mean, if you don’t want the world to discover your innermost thoughts - Don’t. Write. Them. Down. I mean, arrgghhhh!

  Ahem.

  OK, I’ve calmed down again.

  As Amy told me about her secret diary, grumbling thoughts such as those I’ve just mentioned went spinning round and round inside my head like a loose sock in a tumble dryer.

  This diary, then,’ I said. ‘It’s something you keep quiet about?’

  Amy nodded. ‘Only my family know it exists. Not even my best friends know I keep it. I write in it most nights before I go to sleep. I put down all the classroom gossip. I write about all the secrets that my friends have told me and I write about what I think of everyone.’

  She kind of winced as she spoke. I had the feeling that she realised what I was thinking.

  ‘And, er, some of it isn’t very . . . complimentary,’ she said.

  I let out a long, slow breath. I’d have quite liked to let out a long speech too, a speech which included several repetitions of the word ‘why’. But I didn’t.

  ‘OoKaay,’ I said. ‘Tell me why you think it’s been stolen.’

  ‘On Thursday, after school, the other three people I’m doing this Twentieth Century thing with all came over to my house. We were going to get some of the artwork done.’ (To explain: Mrs Penzler, our form teacher, had got the whole year group doing a huge project on twentieth century history. We’d been divided into small groups and given separate tasks to do. Amy’s group was making a timeline wallchart, which was going to be put up all along the corridor outside our classrooms. I’d been given the job of writing some ‘eyewitness’ newspaper reports on various major events.)

  ‘Who’s in your group?’ I said.

  ‘Apart from me,’ said Amy, ‘there’s Nicola Norris, Paul Welles and Kelly Fitzgerald.’

  They were all kids from another class in our year group. I didn’t know any of them very well, but none of these names jumped out at me waving a big sign saying ‘Potential Diary Robber’.

  ‘Whose idea was it to do this homework together at your house?’ I said.

  ‘Mrs Penzler’s,’ said Amy. ‘Or, rather, she suggested we should work together. I volunteered to have the others over.’

  ‘So are these three friends of yours?’

  ‘No, quite the opposite,’ said Amy. ‘Mrs Penzler just stuck us together for this project because we’re all good at art. Paul’s obsessed with his collection of FrogWar figures, Nicola changes her likes and dislikes like the rest of us change underwear and Kelly’s just a miserable moo.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘You think one of them swiped the diary on Thursday?’

  ‘Yes. They all went home at about half past five. Then I went straight out with my mum, my dad and my older sister. We went for a pizza, then we went to the cinema. We didn’t get back until late, so I went straight to bed and didn’t even think about my diary. Yesterday morning, Friday, I was running late, so I never had a chance to notice the diary was gone. But last night, I went up to my room and no diary.’

  ‘Do you always keep it in the same place?’ I said.

  ‘Always. It’s on my window sill, under this sort of wooden pencil case thing I’ve got. I never put it anywhere else, ever. It’s always under that pencil case. Nothing else had moved, the c
ase included.’

  ‘Are you sure one of your family haven’t got it?’ I said.

  ‘They know,’ said Amy sweetly, ‘that if they so much as touch my diary, or breathe a word of its existence, I will tear them apart with my bare hands and rain hellfire and fury down upon them for all eternity.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘So, they’re clear on that, then,’ I nodded.

  ‘I’ve spent all this morning searching,’ said Amy. ‘I’ve covered every square millimetre of my room, and every other room. I’ve even been poking behind the central heating radiators with a ruler. My diary is gone.’

  I stood up and paced around a bit. Those paint pots were far too uncomfortable to sit on any longer.

  ‘Do you still have the key?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Amy. ‘That was in my bedside cabinet. It’s not been touched. The diary’s lock is quite large, you’d have to rip half the cover off to force it open. But you’d only need a screwdriver, or something like that.’

  I tapped at my chin in a particularly detective-y way.

  ‘I still don’t quite get what the motive for stealing it would be. Why would someone want your diary?’

  Amy half-laughed. ‘Well, that’s obvious!’ she spluttered. ‘The contents are absolute dynamite! There’ll be the most incredible rows if what I’ve written in there gets spread around school! Someone wants to cause some major trouble. Kelly would certainly be up for that, and I wouldn’t put it past Nicola either. And Paul’s a complete oddball who doesn’t like me one little bit. Actually, some of the choicest comments in the diary are reserved for those three.’

  ‘Even so,’ I said, ‘I really don’t think that was what the thief had in mind. Well, probably not.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ said Amy. ‘They might even have planned to steal it!’

  I had a logical reason to think that the theft was not carried out simply to create trouble at school. A reason based on the fact that the diary was taken on Thursday, and today was Saturday.

  I also had a logical reason to think that the theft was definitely not planned.