Kat Wolfe Takes the Case

by Lauren St. John

  ‘Your being here has given me hope, Kat,’ he told her. ‘Reminded me that there’s light beyond the darkness. Oceans of it. Your being here makes the fight worth it.’

  A red light blinked on his watch. He cursed. In one swift motion, he pressed the button that brought down the shutter and tugged her to her feet. ‘Kat, the perimeter fence has been breached. Not a sound now. You must get back to the house. You’ll be safe with my bodyguard.’

  The dark bay she’d seen racing across the field earlier was waiting beside the Clydesdale. Its boyish rider was clad in black, masked by the shifting shadows. The chauffeur had assumed its rider was probably a guest. Now it turned out that this was her grandfather’s bodyguard, in which case he was older than he had at first appeared. As Kat tried to grasp what was happening, her grandfather’s watch flashed green. A message scrolled across the screen.

  He let go of her hand. ‘False alarm. A bunny burrowing under a fence apparently. Apologies for scaring you, Kat. It was always going to be a risk bringing you here. I shouldn’t have done it.’

  ‘Yes, you should,’ Kat declared fiercely. ‘I’ve loved every second.’

  The bay and the bodyguard melted away into the forest, like phantoms. It chilled her to think that they’d rehearsed the possibility of an assassin striking in this peaceful place. Or perhaps the bodyguard was always nearby. Kat had, after all, heard the faintest echo of hoofbeats as the Clydesdale made her way through the forest.

  ‘Grandfather, does this happen often?’ she asked. ‘Are you always in danger?’

  ‘Only from rabbits! Now, Kat, shall we ask Faith if she’ll carry us home? I’m not sure about you, but I could use some sleep.’

  Harper adjusted her sunbed, tilted the umbrella so it shaded her laptop screen and took a sip of fresh pineapple juice.

  ‘OK, Kat, I’m diving in.’

  Kat smothered a yawn. ‘I thought you said the pool was too cold.’

  ‘Not that kind of diving,’ said Harper. ‘I’m going for a paddle in the murky currents of Johnny Roswell’s life. If there are any sharks in cyberspace, they’d better watch out.’

  Kat lay down and covered her eyes with a baseball cap. She’d had three hours’ sleep, followed by an archery lesson in the woods, a horseback tour of the estate, and a picnic hamper by a pond starred with pink waterlilies. Both girls had loved the target practice and picnic, but Harper had politely declined the horse riding. Even watching Kat set out on a cheeky Welsh mountain pony gave her heart palpitations.

  The Dark Lord (as Harper couldn’t help thinking of him) had shown up as Kat cantered over the horizon, asking if he could interest Harper in a game of chess. She suspected he already knew that she’d been a junior chess champion in the States.

  They were hunched over a board, locked in battle, when he was summoned to the North Wing to see a visitor. When Harper heard Freya tell him the name of the person insisting on seeing him, he’d gripped his knight as if he might crush it.

  ‘Forgive me, Harper,’ he’d said. ‘We must have a rematch another time.’ With a stiff bow, he’d stalked away, broad shoulders rigid with anger.

  Freya watched him go. ‘I don’t blame him for getting into a mood. ‘Sir Haslemere is being a prima donna again. Money to burn, but I’ve met frogs with better manners. Unfortunately, he’s the prime minister’s best friend and biggest donor, so His Lordship and the rest of us have no choice but to put up with him. The staff dread him coming to stay because he always has a list of bizarre demands as long as your arm.’

  Harper’s interest was piqued. ‘Such as?’

  ‘Let me see. Once, it was a first edition of The Hobbit. That took some finding and cost a king’s ransom. Oh, and he has an obsession with clocks. Has to have a digital one and an analogue one for every time zone in the world, in case the power goes off. Heaven knows how he sleeps with all that ticking and blinking. Last time he came, he was thin and weak after some ghastly operation on arrival, yet he came down to breakfast each morning looking as if he’d spent a month at a health spa.’

  Freya looked worried. ‘Forgive me, Harper – I’m not usually so indiscreet. You won’t mention anything on social media, will you?’

  ‘Never use it,’ Harper had assured her. ‘Too insecure. Scout’s honour.’

  Now, as she sat beside the pool with Kat, who was back from her ride, Harper wondered whether there was more to the Dark Lord’s dark mood than the demands of a spoilt rich man. During their game, he’d received a message that seemed to unsettle him. She’d glimpsed three words of it: Threat Level 6.

  That told her nothing. Six could be medium or severe. And the threat could refer to almost anything. Travel in a war-torn country, or his own security. She could hardly ask him.

  She was reluctant to mention it to Kat. Her best friend had been fizzing with happiness since her moonlit flit to the hide. Harper didn’t want to bring her down by suggesting that there might be more to the ‘rabbit under the fence’ incident than her grandfather had let on.

  Putting it out of her mind, Harper turned her attention to the laptop. She was determined to make progress on their Bluebell Bay investigation.

  ‘Do you have any questions about our latest case, Detective Wolfe? Detective Lamb will try to find the answers for you.’

  Kat pushed back her baseball cap. ‘Questions about Johnny’s non-accidental death? Yes, I do, Detective Lamb. Hundreds.’

  Harper’s hands were poised over her keyboard. ‘Ready when you are, Detective Wolfe.’

  ‘What time of day was the cliff fall two years ago, when Johnny was supposedly crushed by rocks?’

  Harper did a search. ‘Easy. Around one in the morning.’

  Kat sat up. ‘When it was dark, then?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Who in their right mind goes fossil-hunting on cliffs in the middle of the night? Surely that proves that Johnny was murdered.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Harper. ‘He might have discovered some priceless fossil and wanted to dig it up under cover of darkness.’

  ‘It would have to have been a fossil worth dying for. Or worth killing for.’

  ‘Agreed. Next question.’

  ‘Sergeant Singh said he’d found evidence that explosives caused the cliff collapse, and I saw a flare of light over the sea when I was rescuing Pax. At the same time, you noticed the shadow of a giant shark. What if the shadow was really a grey or navy-blue boat that blended in with the sea? Or . . . is there any such thing as a glass canoe?’

  Harper’s fingers flew. ‘No glass canoes, but there’s this . . .’ She spun the laptop.

  ‘A camouflage kayak! Of course. Hunters use them. So does the navy.’

  As she spoke, Kat was struck by a disturbing thought. On his coffee table, Mario Rossi had a photo of himself smiling beside an upturned camouflage kayak. Could he have blown up the cliff?

  Sergeant Singh had told them that a possible motive for causing a landslide might have been to help a local business get rich quick when the tourists came flooding in to see the exposed dinosaur or other fossils. Could Mario be in league with the Italian owner of Taste of Tuscany, whose restaurant had been struggling due to a mouse-in-the-Parmesan incident but, thanks to the Jurassic Dragon, was now packed to the rafters every night?

  Kat decided not to say anything to Harper until she was sure. She liked Mr B and was reluctant to think that his owner might be a criminal. Innocent until proven guilty and all that.

  Then a new, disquieting thought came to her. ‘What if the person in the camouflage kayak first tried to dynamite the cliff two years ago, killing Johnny by accident?’

  ‘A serial cliff blower-upper? Seems unlikely.’ Harper brought up a newspaper story from the time. ‘Says here that the landslide was caused by days of heavy rain. The reporter describes the cliffs as being about as solid as a digestive dunked in tea. If Johnny risked his neck on them, he was either desperate to find something or he trusted the wrong person.’

  ‘Someo
ne like his friend, Harry Holt?’ said Kat.

  ‘Let’s find out.’ Harper began typing in code. ‘Look away now if this makes you nervous.’

  ‘Is it legal?’ fretted Kat.

  ‘Legal schmegal,’ teased Harper. ‘I’m what’s known as a white-hat hacker – always on the side of the angels.’

  ‘Who’s the lucky angel today?’ Kat teased back.

  ‘Johnny’s sister, JoJo. She says her brother’s computer disappeared when he did. I’m going to attempt to find if there’s any trace of the story he was investigating in a cloud account or file-hosting service like Dropbox.’

  Kat didn’t look away. She couldn’t. Watching Harper ‘walk’ through walls on the internet was riveting.

  The results arrived in seconds. Three links to stories about bluefin tuna located in a popular and, it turned out, not very secure, file-sharing archive.

  ‘Tuna fish?’ Kat wrinkled her nose. ‘I can’t see Johnny being murdered over a tuna fish sandwich.’

  ‘Or a California roll,’ added Harper. ‘Bluefin is highly prized for sushi.’

  She skimmed an article. ‘Wait, this is interesting. Ten years ago the Independent newspaper did a report on how a Japanese conglomerate was stockpiling hundreds of tons of bluefin in giant freezers. Yet every year, they kept buying more from across the world to sell in Tokyo fish markets.’

  ‘Bluefin tuna are one of the planet’s rarest species of fish!’ exclaimed Kat. ‘Why did the company keep fishing for more when they had tons in the freezer? Didn’t they care that they were driving the bluefin out of existence?’

  ‘Sounds as if they did care,’ said Harper. ‘But only about the money. There’s another article here saying that as bluefin plunge towards extinction, their price has rocketed. Apparently, in January 2019, a single bluefin tuna – one fish – was sold for 3.3 million dollars in Tokyo. Some bluefin are farmed, but everyone wants to eat wild ones. I guess that means that if wild bluefin do vanish from the oceans, those in the freezers will be worth tens of millions.’

  Bluefin stored like gold bullion. It was a horrible thought.

  Kat broke the silence. ‘That’s sick, but I can’t believe Johnny was murdered on the Jurassic Coast because he was angry about tuna piling up in a freezer in Japan. See if you can find anything else about him.’

  Every search came up blank. ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ said Harper, trying again. ‘Almost everyone leaves traces of themselves in cloud accounts. If Johnny’s only footprint is three tuna stories, that’s pretty fishy. Makes me wonder if his personal online history was professionally wiped.’

  Kat stared at her. ‘Could Harry have done that?’

  ‘Nope. It would have to be someone with serious hacking skills. Someone from the intelligence services or maybe a black-hat hacker. They’re criminals, by the way.’

  An email alert flashed across her screen. ‘Message from Edith. She’s remembered that, as a boy, Harry hero-worshipped Mary Anning.’

  Kat was horizontal again. ‘Who?’

  Harper’s mouth dropped open. ‘You’ve never heard of Mary Anning, legendary nineteenth-century fossil collector? She’s my hero, too. She and her brother Joseph grew up in Lyme Regis, not far from Bluebell Bay. She was only twelve when she found her first Sea Dragon. That’s what they called ichthyosaurs in those days.

  ‘Back then, women were shut out of science. The best male palaeontologists and museum buyers on earth made pilgrimages to Lyme Regis to buy Mary’s fossils or ask for her advice. She was supposed to have been able to identify a dinosaur’s exact species just from one glance at a single bone. But men took all the credit for her discoveries, and she died poor and unrecognized.’

  ‘Do you think Harry felt he was unrecognized somehow, too?’ asked Kat. ‘It seemed as if he taught Johnny everything he knew about fossils. If Johnny became a better collector than he was, or made more money from his finds, maybe he got jealous.’

  Harper was reading Wikipedia. ‘Spooky coincidence. Harry’s idol, Mary Anning, also nearly died in an 1833 landslide while out fossil hunting. It killed her dog, Tray, who went everywhere with her.’

  ‘Oh no!’ cried Kat, thinking again of Pax on the cliff. ‘Is that why Edith emailed – to say that Mary Anning was in a landslide too?’

  ‘No, she wanted to tell us about an article Harry wrote for a science magazine a few years ago on Mary Anning. He was devastated when it was rejected and showed Edith the letter from the editor. He didn’t want it back. She’s attached it here in case it’s significant.’

  Dear Mr Holt,

  Thank you for submitting your article ‘Mary Anning’s Lost Letters’ to Fossils Forever. If we specialized in pulp fiction, it would make for fun reading, but we are a serious scientific journal.

  It is preposterous to suggest, without evidence, that the great Mary Anning hinted at ‘dragons’ concealed beneath the cliffs at Bluebell Bay, or that the letters that might prove your claim were stolen over a century ago by the fantastically named Order of Dragons.

  If I published your conspiracy theories, I’d be laughed out of town. I wish you the best in your future career as a novelist.

  Regretfully,

  Walter Block

  Editor-in-Chief

  Kat said tiredly, ‘Everywhere we turn, there are dragons. What’s the Order of Dragons, Detective Lamb?’

  But as Harper hit ‘Enter’ on the search, a flashing scarlet banner filled her screen.

  ACCESS TO THIS SITE IS

  RESTRICTED. PROCEEDING MAY

  RESULT IN CRIMINAL PROSECUTION

  AND THE CONFISCATION OF ANY

  AND ALL COMPUTER DEVICES.

  Hastily, she shut the page. ‘Whoa, that was unexpected. Guess we won’t be finding out about the Order of Dragons any time soon.’

  Kat shut her eyes. ‘Can’t say I’m sorry. I’ve had all the dragons I can take for one day.’ She was asleep in seconds.

  It was hot enough to bake a cake on the pool deck. Without a device to divert her, Harper was bored and restless. She picked up Kat’s mystery novel but was too agitated to focus. The Minister of Defence had entrusted her with his spare laptop. What if she’d brought trouble to his door by accessing an illegal site? Kat would never forgive her.

  She was about to wake Kat when a disembodied voice thundered, ‘Don’t you just loathe children? So sticky, smelly and unruly.’

  It took Harper a moment to work out where it was coming from. There was an air vent in the tiles beneath her sunbed. Below it were the basement offices of the North Wing. A conversation rose up clearly through an iron grille.

  A second speaker said, ‘I have three children of my own. I must say, I’m rather fond of them.’

  ‘Three! However do you cope? I suppose you have nannies. Apologies for any offence. It’s just that, apart from their hygiene, or lack of it, kids have this disturbing way about them. It’s as if they see things.’

  There was a throaty chuckle. ‘See into your soul, you mean? Have you dusted the cobwebs off yours recently?’

  ‘Very funny. There’s this boy – the son of that doctor we’re having trouble with. He’s up to something, I just know it. He has this watchful quality about him, like he’s scheming. No matter. When he and his dad have outlived their usefulness, they’ll be eliminated.’

  Goosebumps rose on Harper’s arms. It sounded like a Level 10 threat, not a joke.

  The man continued: ‘As I was saying, Hamilton Park is the last place one would expect to see kids, but there are two here. Who do they belong to? Any chance we can evict them?’

  ‘Good luck with that. His Lordship’s granddaughter and her friend are staying. From what I’ve heard, he dotes on Katarina.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I forgot he has a tiresome weakness for children and animals. Do you recall the time he banned us from using that terrace for three months because the swifts were nesting? But I digress. I’m putting in a new order tomorrow. Want anything?’

  ‘Certainly do. My arthrit
is has been playing up. Two black T-shirts for me and a striped one for my wife. She’s redecorating. If there’s any white plastic available, I’d like to order a fancy carving for her birthday.’

  ‘Consider it done.’

  Harper’s curiosity got the better of her. She slid the sunbed aside and put an eye to the grille. All she could see were the shoes of one of the men. Black brogues with sky-blue laces.

  ‘Who are you spying on?’ enquired Kat.

  Harper jerked up guiltily, bumping the table. A full pitcher of pineapple juice tipped over and poured through the grille.

  ‘What the . . . ?’ spluttered one man. ‘Is someone up there?’

  ‘Kat, code red! Code red!’ hissed Harper, which was their agreed way of communicating an emergency requiring action first, questions later.

  Snatching up the book, laptop and towels, they sprinted past the tennis courts and through an archway that led to the South Wing. Only when they were safely in the Tower Room did Harper realize she’d left her sunglasses beside the pool.

  That night, Kat dreamed she was lost in the Hamilton Park maze. Tiny was there as well. Yet no matter how swiftly she ran or how loudly she called, he was always just out of reach, his spotty tail slipping around the next bend in the yew hedge. Then his tail morphed into a scaly red dragon. When it turned on Kat, blasting flames in her direction, it wore a mask.

  ‘Coward!’ she screamed silently. ‘Show yourself! Who are you?’

  ‘It’s just a dream!’ said Harper, shaking her out of the nightmare. ‘I’m calling Freya or your granddad.’

  ‘No, don’t!’ Kat didn’t want a fuss. She wanted to be back in her own bed in her own home, ideally with her cat cuddled up beside her. If she could have fled the creaking manor, with its unsmiling portraits and shifty guests, now, in the middle of the night, she would have packed her bags without hesitation.

  It didn’t take a psychologist to spell out why she was having bad dreams. She was anxious about Tiny. On the face of it, she had nothing to be concerned about. If Dr Wolfe’s texts were to be believed, Tiny was fine, Xena was fine, Janey’s cat was fine, Charming Outlaw was fine, and so was Orkaan. That was the problem. There were too many fines. It made Kat suspicious.