by David Alric
‘I hear you have a note from your missing daughter – may I see it?’ He took the note and read it slowly, his brow furrowed. His finger moved slowly but steadily along each line, his lips soundlessly forming the words as he read. When he had finished he read the note once more.
‘Who’s this Tibbles you’ve got to watch?’ he asked guardedly.
‘That’s the cat,’ said Clare. ‘Lucy’s very fond of her and is reminding us to look after her.’ The constable seemed satisfied by this explanation.
‘And what’s this stuff about “Clare knows Al”? Who’s Clare and what’s she going to say to Al?’
‘I’m Clare,’ said Clare. ‘Lucy’s sister, and it doesn’t say “Al” it says “all”: “Clare knows all.” It means that I will explain things.’
The constable looked suspicious.
‘What will you explain?’ he asked. Clare thought quickly. She couldn’t say anything about the animals. She glanced at the note again and then had a brainwave. The constable was holding it up as he looked at it, and on the back she could see the little scribble where Lucy had checked her pencil was working. She took the note and turned it over so the constable could see.
‘You see this symbol?’ She pointed to the scribble and her voice dropped to a confidential whisper. ‘That’s a secret sign we’ve used since we were little. Only the two of us know about it. It proves the note comes from her. That’s what only I could explain.’
The constable was impressed.
‘Very good planning,’ he said. ‘It would make our job a lot easier if more people arranged secret symbols in case they got kidnapped.’
Then he snatched the note away from her.
‘You mustn’t touch this – it may have fingerprints on it. We’ll send it to the lab’. Clare thought that they would be better looking for paw prints but said nothing.
‘But we’ve already touched it,’ said Joanna. ‘That’s how we read it.’
‘Well, you’d better not touch it again,’ said the constable, trying to look important. He folded the note, rubbing the crease firmly between his thumb and forefinger and then slipped it into his tunic pocket, neatly scraping off the blob of marmalade as he did so.
‘Where’s the envelope?’ he asked.
‘There wasn’t an envelope – it just came like that,’ said Joanna. She wondered whether to say it was just something the cat brought in but decided against it. ‘I expect you’ll be getting in touch with the police in Brazil through Interpol,’ she continued.
‘That almost certainly won’t be necessary,’ replied the constable. ‘In fact I’m prepared to stake my professional reputation on the fact that Lucy has never left the country. This note was delivered by hand, and as you seem certain that it was written by your daughter, she must be being kept in hiding near by. I expect we’ll get a ransom note in the next few days. She was forced to write that stuff about Brazil to put us off the scent. It’s an open-and-shut case.’
Clare thought that the only things that had opened and shut in the case were the various beaks and jaws that had carried the note across land, air and sea but she said nothing. She knew now that Lucy would be safe and that was all that mattered. She had seen with her own eyes the immense power that her sister could wield through her control of the animal kingdom, and her quick brain was already imagining the many ways in which Lucy could use those powers to outwit her captors. In her heart she knew that all she needed to do now was to reassure her mother and await further news.
Soon the constable left. On the way out he took a photograph of the letterbox on the front door and said he would send forensics round to dust it for prints.
‘The villains will have touched this flap as they posted the note,’ he explained, opening the flap as he spoke and running his hand along the edge.
At the local police headquarters Chief Inspector Lestrade sat at his desk. His office was on the ground floor with a large window overlooking the staff car park so he could see at what time his staff came and went. His vantage point was particularly useful today as he was able now and then to glance lovingly at his new car – picked up from the showroom that very morning. Noholmes stood on the other side of the desk with the window behind him. The chief studied once again the crumpled, marmalade-stained note in front of him before picking it up with a pair of tweezers and carefully sliding it into a plastic bag. Heaven only knew what Noholmes had been doing to it; it looked as if it had been dragged through a tropical jungle and halfway round the world.
He went over once again in his mind the garbled story he had heard from Noholmes. The fellow had only been working under him for a fortnight and already Lestrade was wondering how on earth the man had managed to get into the force. It was a windy day and the window in front of which Noholmes was standing rattled as a particularly violent gust swept through the police compound. Glancing up from across his desk the Inspector suddenly pointed, apparently at the constable’s shoulder. Noholmes looked at his shoulder. There on his epaulette was his constable’s insignia. Suddenly he understood. He was about to be promoted. Admittedly the case wasn’t quite wrapped up – the kid still had to be found – but he remembered that the chief had a reputation for recognizing early talent and rewarding it. He looked back to the chief, a knowing smile playing round his lips. Nothing was being said in the open at this stage; the finger said it all, he understood the code.
The chief jabbed his finger more urgently.
‘Outside, you fool!’
Noholmes turned and looked through the window. His car, in which, in his excitement, he had forgotten to set the handbrake, was starting to move. The gust of wind seemed to have set his car in motion, and it was now moving slowly down the inclined yard towards the chief inspector’s new car some twenty yards away.
Noholmes rushed out of the office. The inspector picked up the phone and pressed a button.
‘Yes, sir?’ a voice answered immediately.
‘Ah, Inspector Fetterson, Lestrade here. There are several matters that require urgent attention. Can you see to them immediately, please?’ The chief’s tone of voice was not one that invited any reply.
‘First of all, you may know of Noholmes – he’s on a detective training attachment from Uniformed Branch – part of the new joined-up policing plan.’
‘Ye-es’, replied the voice cautiously.
‘Well, I think he’s got as much as he can out of us. I want him to start in your section on the first of next month.’ Through the window came the sound of crumpling metal and breaking glass.
‘Make that first thing tomorrow morning. We don’t want to hold a good chap back and I think he’s ready to move on. The other matters relate to the case of the missing schoolgirl. First, I want you to intensify searches in the local neighbourhood. She is almost certainly alive and a prisoner. Next, have you put in place the protection for the family I asked for?’
‘Yes. Nothing larger than a fox has been near the place in the last forty-eight hours. The fox seemed to be after their cat – in broad daylight too, cheeky beggar! Was there anything else, sir?’
The chief sighed. There was something funny about this case and it wasn’t just Noholmes. The story didn’t yet add up and he could leave no stone unturned in the search for Lucy.
‘Yes. Put me through to Interpol.’
12
Richard Drops in to Stay
‘I think the Miracle Man is coming round, Julian.’ Richard heard the woman’s voice as though from a great distance. He could feel a burning sensation as she dabbed at him with something. The left side of his face felt like a football and when he tried to open his eyes he could not open the left one. With his tongue he could feel gaping holes where his upper left molar teeth used to be. He put his hand up to touch his face and experienced an excruciating jab of pain in his middle finger.
‘Don’t do that,’ said the woman who was now coming into focus. ‘I think you’ve broken that finger.’ Richard was now fully alert and desperately trying to
recall where he was. He could remember being chased by a jaguar and running towards a sunlit gap in the bushes but after that his mind was a complete blank.
‘Where am I – and who’s the Miracle Man?’
The woman laughed. ‘Why you, of course! You just fell nearly a thousand feet down an almost sheer cliff face and are still here to tell the tale – and we’re dying to hear it.’
Richard sat up and managed to prop himself against the wall behind him. Every muscle and bone in his body seemed to ache; he felt as though he had just done three rounds with a heavyweight boxer who wasn’t too fussy about the rules. He was relieved to find he could move all four limbs and if he kept still the only parts that really bothered him were his upper jaw and his finger, both throbbing with pain, and his left side and left arm and leg which were stinging and burning. Gingerly turning his head he saw that his skin was raw and bleeding down that side: the biggest graze he had ever had or was ever likely to have.
He was in a cave, which looked out over a plain stretching to a line of dark hills on the far horizon. Here and there were dense clumps of forest but there was a great deal of open savannah dotted with herds of grazing animals. He had two companions: a man, and the woman who had spoken to him, both in their early forties. She was kneeling next to Richard and dabbing at his torn skin with gauze and spirit from a first-aid box, which Richard recognized as being from a plane – there’d been an identical one in his own plane. Her companion was tall and powerfully built, and his hair and beard were unkempt. He came over, smiling, and shook Richard’s uninjured hand.
‘Hello. I’m Julian and this is Helen, my wife. Welcome – if that’s the right word – to our crater. We never thought we’d speak to anyone else again.’ Richard introduced himself and then started to ask some questions but Helen interrupted him.
‘Sorry, Richard, but we can talk later. We must see if you can walk;we have to get back to the plane before nightfall.’
Julian and Helen helped Richard struggle to his feet and they moved slowly out of the cave. Helen, who was limping badly, was clutching her first-aid kit in her free hand and Julian held a formidable spear fashioned from a three-metre stake of wood. The end had been sharpened to a point and was blackened from being hardened in a fire. Looking back Richard saw that the cave was at the base of an immense escarpment. Julian pointed to a spot a little way along, where some broken trees lay on the ground at the foot of a giant vertical crack in the cliff face and a vulture-like bird walked about poking among a pile of bones.
‘That’s where you were lying. Those trees came down with you – they broke your fall and undoubtedly saved your life.’
‘How on earth did you find me?’ said Richard, looking along the immense cliff stretching into the distance.
‘We’ve found two or three places along the cliff where animals are most likely to fall – we think the edge at the top is hidden by the undergrowth in some way at these places. The place you fell is the nearest one to our plane. We come here because occasionally a wild pig falls down and it’s an easy source of fresh meat. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have survived if it weren’t for this spot. Hunting on my own –’ he glanced at his wife’s foot ‘– with makeshift weapons would be difficult and dangerous, and fishing is out of the question.’ Richard wondered why, but Julian continued without pausing.
‘Searching for fruit and nuts sounds fine in storybooks, but actually finding enough food to live on every day is extremely difficult. Foraging is also dangerous because of the …’ He paused almost imperceptibly and looked again at his wife, ‘… wild animals, and we daren’t go too far from the plane. Fortunately there is a banana grove quite nearby, but to have an occasional gift of fresh meat land virtually on our doorstep has been a lifesaver.’
Soon they topped a small rise and the plane came into view about a hundred yards away on a flat plain. As far as Richard could see it had not crashed but seemed to have used the flat plain as a landing site. A mile beyond the plane was a strip of dense forest which wound its way into the far distance and, as Richard correctly decided, marked the course of a river. The heat haze of the day had disappeared and the evening was still and clear.
Richard looked across to the other side of the valley where in the distance he could see a forbidding and uninterrupted range of cliffs.
‘Wow!’ he said. ‘It’s difficult to judge distances with only one eye working but this valley must be ten miles across.’
‘You’re right,’ said Julian. ‘It is very wide – but it’s not a valley. Remember we’ve had the advantage of seeing it from the air. It’s actually a giant crater – a bit like the one near the Serengeti national park in East Africa.’ Richard nodded. He’d been there as a medical student in Tanzania. The great Ngorongoro crater with its teeming herds of game was like a world within a world on the vast African plains.
‘Except,’ Julian continued, ‘this crater is a very curious shape – that’s why you think it’s a valley. From the air you can see that the place where we are standing now is only one half of a super oval-shaped crater – divided down the middle by that range of cliffs you are looking at now.’
‘That means …’ said Richard, looking along the length of the ‘valley’ in both directions. ‘Yes,’ interrupted Julian, ‘it means that both ends are blocked – but the crater is so large you can’t see them from here. We don’t know how this curious geological formation occurred, but it created twin valleys and we’re trapped in one of them. It’s an enclosed space that looks roughly the shape of a bath from the air – and there’s no way out. The cliff is unscalable at any point so far as we can tell. That’s why we’re still here after three months – not that we could go anywhere even if we could get out; when Helen’s foot got worse we didn’t even think of trying to leave any more. She seems to have picked up some chronic tropical infection following an insect bite and her foot is gradually getting more swollen and painful. There’s nothing but wild dense jungle in every direction outside the crater and we’d be lucky if we lasted a couple of days out there.’
Richard noticed as they made their way to the plane from the cave that both Julian and Helen were ill at ease. They kept a constant lookout and frequently turned as if to check whether anything was following them. At one point on their little trek there was a crashing sound in a stand of trees quite some distance away and Richard assumed it must be a tapir making the noise, pursued perhaps by a predator. Considering how far away the trees were, however, the noise was certainly very loud and both Helen and Julian stopped in alarm and gazed intently in the direction of the noise before continuing on to the plane at a faster pace than before.
Eventually they reached the plane, an unusual design that Richard hadn’t seen before with large pods slung under each wing. Helen and Julian were clearly relieved to be back and they helped Richard into the cabin.
‘Not much room, I’m afraid,’ said Julian with a crooked smile, ‘but we’ll all have to cram in at night.’ He made as much space for Richard as possible and offered him a drink of water, which he took gratefully. His face throbbed relentlessly and he was sure he had fractured his cheekbone.
‘We’ve got some paracetamol too. The first-aid box was full of it – the pilot must have had a permanent headache.’ He handed Richard the painkillers. ‘Then, if you feel up to it,’ Julian continued, ‘we’re dying to hear your story.’
Richard swallowed the tablets and settled himself as comfortably as possible to tell the tale of his adventures. Despite the pain in his jaw and his side, however, the exhaustion of the day was catching up with him. Helen and Julian watched him in amused silence as his head began to nod and within minutes he was fast asleep.
Richard slept for over ten hours and awoke to a gentle shake on the shoulder from Helen. Julian had already been out for water and bananas, which Richard started to eat, slowly and painfully, for his injured jaw had swelled up during his sleep.
‘Where did I get up to last night?’ he said eventually,
as he finished his last banana. The others both smiled.
‘Nowhere,’ said Helen. ‘You fell straight asleep which we thought was pretty rude of you considering we hadn’t spoken to anyone for three months.’ They all laughed and Richard felt himself warming to these nice people.
‘Better late than never,’ he said. ‘I’ll have another go, and try to stay awake this time.’ He then told them about his adventures up to his arrival at the crater. Just as he finished he remembered something that might save them.
‘There’s something else you should know,’ he said hopefully. ‘I know where we are. I recorded the position of our plane almost constantly using a global positioning device. In my notes I still have the GPS fixing co-ordinates for where the plane crashed and I can’t have made more than a few miles on foot through the jungle. Your plane looks OK. If it just ran out of fuel or needs a spare part we can radio my base and get whatever we need dropped to us. Which one of you’s the pilot?’
‘Neither of us,’ Julian replied. ‘That’s the problem. You’re quite right about the plane, it’s fine – we made a deliberate landing here and we’ve got fuel. Those pods –’ he pointed to the wings ‘– are extra fuel tanks for remote explorations.’ He paused and Richard asked the obvious question.
‘Where is the pilot then?’
‘He was eaten –’ said Julian slowly. He glanced at his wife as if seeking reassurance that he wasn’t living in a fairytale and she gave him a nod of encouragement. He looked back at Richard and continued.
‘– he was eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger.’
It was mid-afternoon and the three of them were sitting outside on canvas camping chairs in the shade cast by the plane. Richard was spellbound by the story that he had just heard.