Blink and You Die

by Lauren Child

  ‘Rube, are you sure that butler of yours is actually a butler?’ asked Elliot, as he pulled on his hat.

  ‘He’s a house manager,’ said Red.

  ‘Yeah, but he behaves like some sorta secret agent,’ said Del Lasco.

  Mouse turned to Ruby. ‘Hey, maybe you should become a secret agent, you might be good at that stuff.’

  ‘What, with my eyesight?’ said Ruby.

  When the others had gone, Clancy and Ruby climbed up the old oak on Amster green and sat for a while looking at the passing traffic and chatting about all sorts.

  ‘So how did Olive react to you scribbling on her doll’s head?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘Surprisingly well,’ said Clancy. ‘She was very excited about it, she thinks Buttercup is trying to communicate with her.’

  ‘Because she has the words, “follow me back to Clancy”, scrawled all over her face?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Clancy.

  ‘People will believe anything,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ sighed Clancy. ‘Now she’s following me around like I’m some kind of superhero.’

  ‘You’re welcome to come and stay with us any time you like,’ offered Ruby.

  ‘Great,’ said Clancy. ‘I’ll get the removal company to bring over my stuff.’

  They sat there until the stars came out and it was time to say goodbye.

  ‘Hey, Clance,’ called Ruby, ‘thanks for saving my life!’

  ‘Any time!’ shouted Clancy.

  ‘And I forgive you for blabbing!’ she yelled.

  ‘I never blabbed!’ shouted Clancy. ‘I was truth-serumed!’

  ‘I know it! Don’t get your underwear in a bunch – I was kidding.’

  ‘You could dangle me over a pit of wolves …’

  ‘Feed your toes to crocodiles,’ added Ruby.

  ‘And I still wouldn’t blab,’ shouted Clancy.

  ‘And you know why?’ yelled Ruby. ‘Because you’re some friend!’

  ‘It takes one to know one,’ shouted Clancy.

  When Ruby walked into Spectrum 8 she was greeted by a friendly wave from the young man sitting in the middle of the round telephone desk.

  ‘Go on in, Ruby,’ he said, ‘LB’s expecting you.’

  Ruby entered the office to find her boss sitting there in white, her feet shoeless. The only colour in the entire space: the red of her nail polish.

  LB took no time getting to the point.

  ‘Spectrum is very appreciative that you didn’t give up the code.’

  ‘That wasn’t really down to me,’ admitted Ruby. ‘It’s thanks to our housekeeper.’

  ‘Yes, and how exactly did she come to be there at precisely the right moment?’

  ‘You’d have to ask Bug,’ said Ruby.

  ‘You’re suggesting I talk to your dog?’

  Ruby shrugged.

  ‘So this housekeeper of yours, can we trust her?’

  ‘I think you can trust her with your life,’ said Ruby.

  ‘She won’t blab?’ asked LB.

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Ruby. ‘But if you want to keep her sweet, then send her a subscription for Poker Chips Quarterly.’

  They discussed the case, the events, the outcome.

  The Lucite tag had been recovered but it was now nothing more than a key-tag; its fall from the rooftop had damaged it beyond readability. As for the Count, there was no sign of him at all. He had quite simply vanished.

  ‘Is he alive, is he dead?’ mused LB. ‘I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.’

  And just as Ruby thought the debrief was coming to a close, LB threw her a curve ball.

  ‘You seem to have a hard time managing rule number one. Why is that, Redfort?’

  Ruby was caught off guard. ‘Are you talking about Clancy?’

  ‘I am indeed talking about Mr Crew.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Ruby began to explain. ‘The thing about Clancy is he knows things without knowing things; he has this sixth sense.’ She looked up at LB. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ said LB, ‘as a matter of fact I do.’

  ‘You’re saying you knew about him,’ said Ruby. ‘That I talk to him? How come you never said anything?’

  LB held her gaze, unblinking. ‘I had a best friend too, I know how it is.’

  ‘But you stuck to the rules,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Quit looking at me like a dog who’s lost a bone, Redfort.’ She reached into the drawer of her desk and pulled out a circle of white tin. ‘Here, it’s yours, you deserve it.’

  ‘Deserve what?’ asked Ruby.

  LB held out her hand. ‘You made Larva, kid, the second child to ever make the grade.’

  ‘But I thought I just broke rule number one.’

  ‘Let’s not be dramatic, Redfort. After all, rules are just rules and I think we all know, rules are made to be broken.’

  Hitch was waiting for her when she exited the ice rink on Bowery.

  ‘How did it go?’ he asked.

  ‘I got a badge,’ said Ruby.

  ‘For good behaviour?’ he said.

  ‘Something like that,’ said Ruby. ‘By the way, sorry for mistaking you for a psycho.’

  ‘Perhaps it was my cologne that was throwing you off.’

  Hitch was surprised that she had not figured out the part he had played in getting her into the Prism Vault. The access to Froghorn’s code maps, the scytale cylinder, the clues he had given to her.

  ‘What do you think that trip to the planetarium was all about?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I thought you just liked it there.’

  ‘Kid, I’m beginning to think you might be losing your edge.’

  Ruby wondered why he hadn’t just told her. ‘Why be so cloak and dagger about it?’

  But he only replied, ‘I had to keep it all under the radar. I kept an eye on you though.’

  ‘I felt like someone was watching me,’ said Ruby.

  The other surprise was how Hitch had come to realize that Buzz was Morgan.

  ‘You know it was Froghorn who figured it all out, if he hadn’t gone into the files that night and put two and two together, then you would have been toast.’

  ‘I underestimated him,’ said Ruby. ‘I guess I owe him one.’

  ‘I guess you do,’ said Hitch. ‘Give him a break why don’t you, buy him a donut or something.’

  ‘I might just do that,’ said Ruby. ‘I might even give him the whole box.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ said Hitch.

  And as they pulled up in front of Green-Wood House, Ruby said, ‘You know, Hitch, you’re some agent.’

  And he gave her one of his winning smiles and said:

  ‘Right back at you, kid.’

  From the Twinford Hound …

  Mrs Myrtle Digby and Ms Ruby Redfort are all the richer for appearing on hit quiz show, Thirty Minutes of Murder. The pair achieved an unprecedented perfect score when they answered every single question correctly.

  ‘I was raised on horror movies,’ said thirteen-year-old Ruby, by way of explanation, ‘and I was watching TV Crime Night before I could run.’

  The big cheque was presented by the show’s producer Jovis Van Straubenzee in front of an excited studio audience. Myrtle commented, ‘like my old Pa always said, crime does pay.’

  Ruby has to break several codes in order to gain entry to the Prism Vault, all of them set by her arch-nemesis at Spectrum, Miles Froghorn.

  *The grid

  Ruby is faced with two 10x10 grids of black and white dots. So how does she figure out that the grids encode a four-digit code number? Here they are:

  What she spots is that the grids have a rather interesting property, which reminds her of a book she saw in Froghorn’s office about error correction codes. Ruby notices that if there is an odd number of black dots in the first nine boxes of each row then the last dot is black. If there is an even number, then the last dot is white.

  The same is true of the columns.
If there is an odd number of black dots in the first nine boxes going down a column, then the last dot is black. If it is even then it is white.

  For example, there is an odd number of black dots in the first nine boxes of the first row so the last box in that row contains a black dot. But there is an even number of black dots in the first nine boxes of the first column so that last box at the bottom of the column has a white dot.

  This type of code is called a parity bit code. It belongs to a family of codes known as error-correcting codes, which are used by computers to detect errors that might have crept in when they are sending messages via the internet or beamed between satellites. Error correcting codes like this are used in everything from encoding digital photographs to helping you talk to your friends on the internet.

  You’ve probably experienced, when trying to talk to someone on a phone, that you can’t always make out everything the other person says. When computers talk to each other, they have the same problem, but using clever mathematics we’ve managed to come up with ways to encode data that can get rid of this interference.

  In real life, due to its simplicity, the parity bit code in particular is used extensively in computer-to-computer communication where large amounts of data are being transmitted.

  This is because computers send most information in the form of binary data – a sequence of 1s and 0s. Parity bit codes are attached to these streams of data, telling the receiving computer whether there should be an odd or even number of 1s or 0s in the message. If the parity bit says odd but there is actually an even number, or vice versa, then the receiving computer knows that something has gone wrong.

  That property of the parity bit code is key to how Ruby cracks it. Like a computer receiving a transmission, she notices that there seem to be mistakes in the grid: in one of the rows and one of the columns. Can you spot which row is wrong?

  Look at the fourth row. It has an odd number of black dots in the first nine boxes but the last box has a white dot. It should be black! Also, the ninth column is wrong because there are an odd number of black dots and again the last box has a white dot.

  Ruby realizes the mistakes are deliberate are are telling her that the first two digits of the four-digit code are 4 and 9.

  Can you work out the other two digits from the second grid? Which row and which column are wrong?

  *The chromatic code

  Later, Ruby is faced with a code that involves listening to a sequence of musical notes, then playing a response on a keyboard.

  The input device she sees looks like this:

  This code relies on the fact that there are twelve notes in a chromatic scale: a sequence of 12 white and black notes on the piano that are repeated.

  If you number them from 1 to 12 then what Ruby hears are the notes:

  6 7 5 8 4 9 3 10

  She realises that the four missing notes are:

  2 11 1 12

  Which she has to play on the keyboard in order to access the files.

  But how does Ruby know which notes to play? Well, in this case, she has noticed that the notes she heard belong to a famous mathematical sequence, and that the last four are missing.

  The permutation of numbers is in fact a well-known card shuffle called the Mongian shuffle. If you have a pack of twelve cards numbered 1 to 12 in your right hand, then by continually taking top and bottom cards and placing them on top of a new pile of cards in your left hand you get this sequence:

  6 7 5 8 4 9 3 10 2 11 1 12

  Having identified what she is hearing, all Ruby has to do is play the four missing notes, shown here in bold.

  This sequence of notes was used by French composer Olivier Messiaen in his piano piece ‘Ile de Feu 2’. Interestingly, Messiaen, like Froghorn, was synaesthetic: he experienced musical notes and chords as particular colours, and used this in composing his music. Perhaps this is why Froghorn thought of him when setting his chromatic code.

  Hey Buster! Don’t miss out on the previous Ruby Redfort adventures!

  Don’t miss the previous Ruby Redfort adventures:

  Ruby Redfort: Look Into My Eyes

  Ruby Redfort: Take Your Last Breath

  Ruby Redfort: Catch Your Death

  Ruby Redfort: Feel the Fear

  Ruby Redfort: Pick Your Poison

  Footnotes

  Chapter 14

  fn1 BELIEVE IT OR NOT, SNURFING WAS THE ORIGINAL NAME FOR SNOWBOARDING WHEN IT WAS INVENTED IN 1966.

  I have been working on the Ruby series for the past seven years and have been extremely lucky to be surrounded by so many generous and inspiring people throughout. First I would like to thank some of those who worked directly with me to create the books and to produce, promote and sell them:

  AD, Ruth Alltimes, Carla Alonzi, Martin Brown, Mary Byrne, Kate Clarke, Emily Faccini, Rachel Folder, Thomas Gardner, Nick Lake, David Mackintosh, Kerrie McIlloney, Lily Morgan, Phil Perry, Tanya Brennand-Roper, Alice Lee and the ID Audio team, Alison Ruane, Sandro Sodano, Marcus du Sautoy, Rachael Stirling, Geraldine Stroud, Sam Swinnerton, Nicola Way, Danny Webb, Sam White and all the HarperCollins team.

  I would also like to thank the many booksellers, librarians, teachers and reviewers who have been so supportive.

  Many friends contributed ideas, gave me feedback or generally helped me to get on with things. There are more than I can thank here, but in no particular order, thank you Marcia, Natalka, Neyla, Ilona, Aneta, Abi, Cress, Maisie, Jo, Quincy, Pete, Trisha, Simon, Ben, Richard, Conrad and Enzo.

  Special thanks to the following for being readers: Lucy Grosvenor, Lucy Lardle, Georgie, John, Molly, Delfina, Bay, Louis, Lorelei, Matilda, Alice, Peps, Inaara, Isaac, Sarah, Stanley, Claudia, Albie, Vincent, Hal, Sasha, Beatrice, Josey, Sophia, Nell, Rachel W, Jenny, Cousin Lucy, Cousin Phoebe, my father, my mother, and, especially, Tuesday, who although too young to read or listen to the stories, still tells me she enjoys them.

  Most of all, thanks to you for reading the books. I am very touched and grateful that you do. I have had some lovely letters about Ruby and seen some inspired Ruby T-shirts, drawings, phrases, and further adventures, so thank you.

  Finally, huge thanks to my publisher, AJM, the LB of HC.

  About the Publisher

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