He pointed his pen at her. ‘Are you one of those timid pet-sitters who can only cope with kittens and hamsters? If that’s true, you’ll be no use to Mr Bojangles. None at all.’
‘I’m not a timid pet-sitter,’ Kat said indignantly. ‘My mum’s a vet and I’ve been around animals all my life. I like the challenging ones best of all. It’s a sign of intelligence.’
His shoulders relaxed. ‘If that’s your attitude, you shouldn’t have a problem. Any questions, give me a call.’ And with that, he jogged off down Summer Street.
Kat was about to count her windfall when Tiny crept meowing from under a bush. He was bedraggled and skittish, his leopard-patterned fur standing up on end. She wondered where he’d been. He allowed her to carry him home, but it took a lot of loving and treats before his confidence returned. She left him washing himself on a sunny windowsill in the living room, restored to his old self.
Upstairs in her room, Pax had made herself at home on the futon. Kat was glad that she hadn’t been foolish enough to attempt to reintroduce Tiny to the gentle collie. As she petted Pax, it struck Kat that Mario hadn’t mentioned Mr B’s breed. It mattered because some types of dogs were more vicious than others.
Stuffing the tiger key card and bundle of cash under her mattress, she messaged Harper.
A man just offered me a crazy amount of money to babysit his ‘misunderstood’ dog. Should I do it or not? xx
The reply was instant.
‘Misunderstood’ could mean mad, bad or sad. When something seems too good to be true, it pretty much always is xx
‘Two cappuccinos and two fried egg rolls, as requested,’ said Harper, setting a cardboard tray on an upturned crate and handing her father and Ollie a couple of warm foil-wrapped parcels. Her own breakfast was a hot chocolate and a banana nut muffin.
‘Thanks, Harper.’ Professor Lamb took a grateful gulp of coffee. ‘No offence to Ollie, but you’re my favourite assistant ever.’
‘None taken,’ said the student, demolishing his roll in two bites. He wiped runny egg from the corner of his mouth and gave Harper a thumbs-up. ‘Thanks, mate. Top stuff.’
Theo Lamb said mildly, ‘Oliver, my late wife and I named our daughter after one of America’s greatest novelists for a reason. I’d appreciate it if you’d call her Harper.’
Ollie reddened. ‘Yes, of course, Prof. Sorry, Harper. No offence.’
‘None taken,’ said Harper, forcing a smile. It was her first day of working on the dracoraptor find, and she didn’t want to start out on the wrong side of the student. All the same, she was suspicious of him. When she had a minute, she planned to find out the name of Ollie Merriweather’s lunch companion. It was possible that the restaurant booking had been made under the name of his friend – the friend who’d trusted him with some mysterious assignment. And if the restaurant receptionist refused to help, she might just have to hack into their website.
It never entered Harper’s head that penetrating the Grand Hotel Majestic’s cybersecurity system might pose a challenge. Coding and languages were her special gifts. She hadn’t always appreciated them. There’d been times during Wolfe and Lamb’s last investigation when she’d felt positively feeble just sitting on the sofa with her laptop while Kat pursued, or was pursued by, dangerous villains in the real world.
But Kat always insisted that there were different kinds of bravery. Harper knew now that her own skill set – honed by her mentor, Jasper, a hacker who helped the FBI – was as vital as Kat’s when it came to cracking the case.
Today, though, her main focus was the dinosaur. Thanks to the combined efforts of her father, a Natural History Museum team and a couple of British Army engineers, the block of sandstone containing the dracoraptor had been cut from the hollowed-out cliff and transported to a disused rowing club on the harbour.
The hall was musty and, courtesy of the next-door fish market, had a distinct odour of cod. But at least the dinosaur was safe from the sea. For now, that was all that mattered.
Whatever Harper’s misgivings about Ollie, there was no doubting his passion for his subject. He was like a kid at Christmas as he helped her father lift the protective sheet off the dracoraptor. Harper felt the same way. Waiting to see the Jurassic Dragon again was as magical as watching the curtain go up on a Broadway play.
She’d not been able to stop thinking about how alive the beautiful little dinosaur had seemed when she first glimpsed it, as if it were already free of its sandstone tomb. In its day, it had been a leopard or cheetah-type creature, quick-silver fast, with a long tail and steak-knife teeth. In death, it appeared to be mid-pounce.
It also appeared to have wings, which is why it so strongly resembled a dragon. Those wings were not attached to its skeleton, but to a trace fossil on the slab of limestone in which it was embedded.
Expecting to see both now, Harper was bemused when the raising of the sheet revealed blocks in protective jackets. Then she remembered that sections of the skeleton had been covered in plaster moulding to protect it during the excavation. The Jurassic Dragon had been cut from the cliff, together with the rock that encased it, and some 500 kilos of it were airlifted to the hall by helicopter. In the coming weeks, Professor Lamb and his team would peel off the jacket and use scrapers, knives and dental picks to dig through the sandstone to the bones underneath.
As the professor unfurled a high-resolution life-size poster of the dinosaur, Ollie said: ‘Prof, are you sure it’s just a coincidence that the wings of some pterosaur or other flying reptile seem as if they’re sprouting from the dracoraptor’s shoulders? What if we’re wrong, and they belong to our dinosaur. What if it’s another species entirely?’
‘You mean like the Zhenyuanlong suni, the winged dinosaur found in China in 2014?’
‘Exactly!’ Ollie enthused. ‘Or the Beibeilong sinensis dinosaur, “Baby Louis”, that made the cover of National Geographic a couple of decades back. They call it the “Baby Dragon of China”. It was a cassowary-type thing that laid eggs the size of monster-truck tyres.’
Professor Lamb smiled. ‘Ollie, as romantic as it is to think that we’ve uncovered a unique winged dinosaur, I’m certain that when the rocks are carbon-dated we’ll learn that these are separate species that lived millions of years apart.’
‘Or we might learn that a monsoon or mudslide struck just as our Jurassic Dragon was stalking a pterosaur,’ countered the student. ‘Or maybe the pterosaur was dive-bombing our dinosaur to stop it stealing its eggs or killing its young.’
‘That really would be a coincidence,’ was Professor Lamb’s cutting response. ‘I’m sure it would put you on the cover of National Geographic if fame’s your aim, Ollie.’
Harper was taken aback. It was so unlike her father to be sarcastic. The sleepless nights must be catching up with him. He was under immense pressure to do everything perfectly. Every five minutes, some expert from Cambridge University or Outer Mongolia was on the line, offering unsolicited advice or criticizing his methods.
Even as she thought it, his phone rang again.
There was no caller ID, and Professor Lamb hesitated before picking up. Harper was alarmed to see the colour drain from her dad’s face. ‘Sorry, sir – wrong number,’ he snapped, switching off his phone as if it had suddenly become red hot.
‘You’ve been getting a lot of those crank calls, huh?’ probed Ollie.
Sensing that her father didn’t want to discuss it, Harper changed the subject. ‘It’s like an ice box in here, Dad. Thanks for reminding me to wear a fleece. It’s hard to believe that it’s summer outside – or that the Jurassic Coast was once like a Caribbean paradise!’
Her father laughed. ‘It’s true that it was tropical, but it was hardly a paradise.’
And with that, he and Ollie immediately forgot their differences as they launched into a favourite topic of many palaeontologists: the extreme conditions endured by dinosaurs.
Between them, Theo Lamb and the student painted such vivid pictures of life o
n Earth in the days of the dracoraptor that Harper had no trouble picturing it hunting among the forests and lagoons. Back then, the warm seas of the Jurassic Coast had teemed with life. In water often blood-red with plankton, porpoise-like ichthyosaurs had glided among coral reefs busy with lobsters, starfish and sharks. More terrifying were the plesiosaurs – giant crocodiles that were the mega predators of their time.
Inland, the dracoraptor would have been dodging the ‘butcher’ allosaurus and herds of diplodocus, thirty-metre-long sauropods weighing fifteen or twenty tonnes. Harper couldn’t get her head around the amount of lush fern forests and cycads they must have munched through as they roamed the landscape like Boeing 747-sized lawnmowers.
‘The common myth that dinosaurs were lumbering failures of evolution, extinct because they were too big and too stupid, is just that – a myth,’ said Professor Lamb. ‘They survived for millions of years by adapting to cope with volcanoes, mega-monsoons, fearsome predators, deserts . . .’
Ollie was staring out of the window. ‘Prof, those protesters are back. Some of their placards make me laugh.’ He read one out: ‘GO AWAY! STOP DESTROYING BLUEBELL BAY! As if we made the cliff fall to bits! My personal favourite is Harry Holt’s sign. It’s covered in fake blood and says, LET SLEEPING DRAGONS LIE.’
‘The only way to win over the doubters is to keep doing what we’re doing to the best of our ability,’ Professor Lamb said. ‘And that’s what we’re going to do, Ollie – our very best. Let’s get to work.’
He began selecting tools and instruments as reverently as a surgeon preparing to perform an operation. His team would use an air-powered engraver and medical instruments such as small scalpels to separate the rock from the bones, one grain at a time. Cracked and broken bones would be glued using an eyedropper. Slicing through the plaster with a cast-cutter – the same sort doctors used to take casts off broken arms – would create a virtual sandstorm of dust, so a dust extractor was primed and ready to suck it up. The floor had been spread with oily sand and sawdust to help absorb some of the fine grit.
‘Harper, while Ollie and I begin the laborious process of investigating a two-hundred-million-year-old mystery, you get to do the fun stuff in a dingy back room. Just what you always wanted to do with your summer holidays, huh? Ready to search for buried skeletons – oops, I mean, treasure?’
She giggled. ‘Ready, Dad.’
By early afternoon, Harper looked as if she’d run the Marathon des Sables across the Sahara. Despite spending hours up to her elbows in beach sand and rubble and filling four cardboard trays with waste rock, she’d barely made a dent in the stack of sandbags that lined the room. They’d been hastily salvaged from the foot of the cliff before the tide came in. Using a pneumatic air scribe tool, which was shaped like a pen but had a pointed, vibrating tip with air pulsing through it, Harper had been able to shave, cut and blow scraps of sandstone or dirt away from potential fossils.
It was slow and grubby work, but Harper enjoyed it. It was somewhere between treasure-hunting and detecting. Over the summer, experienced adult volunteers would sift through the rubble found at the foot of the cliff for any scraps of bone, teeth or claws that might provide clues to the life and habits of the dracoraptor. Until they arrived, she had the place to herself.
Her dad stuck his head round the door. ‘Harper, love, I have to go to Wool station to pick up a couple of volunteers, and Ollie’s off out to get sandwiches. Are you all right on your own, or would you like to come with me? You’re quite safe here. Mike’s guarding the gate.’
Harper, who had headphones on and was learning Mandarin Chinese while she probed at lumps and rocks with her fossil incisor air brush, mimed that she wished to stay.
After he’d left, she kept thinking about the unwelcome call her father had received. It wasn’t a wrong number, she was sure of it. What did the caller want? And why had her father reacted so strongly?
A breeze lifted her hair, as if someone had entered the adjoining hall. Harper took off her headphones. ‘Dad, is that you? Did you forget something?’
There was a scuffling and skitter of claws. Rats. The dilapidated building was overrun with them. Harper made a futile attempt to clean her glasses. With each bucket of grit and grime, the world had become more blurry. She didn’t mind rats, but if one scampered her way, she’d prefer to be able to see it.
Standing up to stretch, she saw through the cracked window that the security gate had been left unguarded. She spied Mike leaning against a fence post some way off, chatting up a pretty girl. Harper was annoyed. An entire team of dinosaur thieves in stripy burglar suits could have strolled past and he wouldn’t have noticed.
Judging by the footsteps suddenly echoing around the hall, the burglars were already here. Before Harper could react, there was a volley of yaps in the passage. A Pomeranian came flying into the room, lead trailing.
‘Come back, you minx!’ shrieked Rosalyn Winter, tottering in after it. She was startled to see Harper. ‘What are you doing here?’
Harper eyed her coolly. ‘I belong here. I’m helping my dad. What are you doing here? Mike’s not supposed to let anyone in.’
The Fast News reporter scoffed. ‘If the professor wants to keep the dinosaur safe, he might consider employing a guard with a brain bigger than a walnut. Anyhow, I’m only here because I’m trying to track down Wolf Girl. Until I do, I’m Xena’s doggy day care, and I’m not happy about it, I can tell you.’
She held up a thumb encased in a bloody plaster. ‘Don’t try giving that red menace a treat. This is the thanks you get. If I have to have a digit amputated, I’m going to sue Alicia Swann for her home in the Hollywood Hills.’
Harper giggled. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to laugh, but it’s hard to believe that Alicia’s adorable little bear could hurt a flea.’ She smiled indulgently at Xena, who was sniffing at the heap of sandbags. ‘If you don’t like Mrs Swann’s dog, why are you looking after her?’
Rosalyn plonked herself in Harper’s chair. ‘I keep asking myself the same question. One minute, I was about to film an exclusive interview with Alicia in her suite at the Majestic. Next, she received a message requiring her to drop everything and dash. She was so sweet and apologetic, I didn’t have the heart to be upset when she asked if I’d mind taking “darling Xena” to her “dear friend Kat Wolfe”. She didn’t warn me that Miss Cutie-Chops was a Rottweiler in Pomeranian clothing. Where is Wolf Girl? I was told I might find her here.’
‘Kat’s coming over as soon as she’s finished pet-sitting,’ said Harper. ‘You’re welcome to leave Xena with me until then.’
‘That’s kind, but what if you get bitten? And won’t the professor mind?’ Rosalyn cast a critical eye over Harper’s appearance and the fossils in a bowl on the table. ‘I gather you’re his daughter. What the devil does he have you doing? You look like the loser in a mud-wrestling competition.’
Harper couldn’t decide if Rosalyn was bracingly rude or refreshingly honest. ‘Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m searching for buried dinosaur treasure. Fragments of bone, teeth or claws. Anything that might help Dad piece together the life of the Jurassic Dragon.’
‘If that’s what you’re up to, then Xena’s your ideal assistant! We’ve been here for all of three minutes and she’s won the bone lottery.’
The Pomeranian’s teeth were fastened around a mottled beige object poking from a bag. She was tugging at it with all her tiny might, snarling like a sabre-toothed tiger. As Harper braved a nip trying to get her to drop it, the bag split, ejecting something heavy.
It hit the tiles with a crack and rolled under the table, grinning ghoulishly as it went. Harper grabbed Xena’s lead to stop her going after it.
‘I’m no expert,’ drawled Rosalyn Winter, ‘but that’s no dinosaur.’
At that exact moment, Kat was cycling to the holiday park near Durdle Door, trying to process a morning beset by unsettling events.
First, she’d had to deal with Tiny going missing and re
turning looking as if he’d been mauled by a sea lion.
Then Mario Rossi had made her uneasy with his eagerness to hand over three times her normal fee for taking care of a pet, which, he’d informed her, only ate defrosted food after some undisclosed incident. ‘Safer all round,’ he’d said. Kat regretted not pressing him on the matter.
Breakfast had been interrupted by an emergency call from a nearby farm. ‘A lamb has been mauled by an unknown creature,’ Dr Wolfe had told Kat when she got off the phone. ‘“Sheep worrying”, they call it. Every farmer’s nightmare.’
‘Fox or dog?’
‘It was dark, but Bob Carmichael thinks neither.’ Her mum looked over at Tiny, sleeping with one green eye open on the windowsill. ‘He believes it was a huge spotted cat.’
For ten tense seconds, they both stared at the Savannah cat. Dr Wolfe didn’t ask if Tiny had an alibi for the previous night, and Kat didn’t tell.
Ellen Wolfe picked up her veterinary response bag. ‘Like I said, it was dark, and the sheep were milling about. Could have been a zebra for all Bob knows. I’ll keep you posted. Have a good day, honey.’
Next on Kat’s pet-sitting agenda was the horses. As she pedalled through the country lanes to Paradise House, she convinced herself that Tiny was innocent. No question. He was big enough to pounce on a three-month-old lamb, but she couldn’t imagine him doing it, even if he were starving. It’s not that he wasn’t capable of lashing out if he felt threatened, as he had when Pax invaded his space and Kat made the mistake of getting between them. But that was rare. Beneath his mean and moody surface, he was supremely gentle. Kat had never known him to harm so much as a sparrow. He chased butterflies. That was the extent of his hunting prowess.
Even so, there was no denying he had been missing overnight. Kat planned to keep him locked in her room that evening, no matter how much he complained. She didn’t want anyone seeing him out wandering and falsely accusing him.
Kat Wolfe Takes the Case Page 5