Chop-Chop, Mad Cap!

by Juliette Saumande

  The noise was clearer, nearer now, but she could tell it was still some way away. She kept going towards it.

  While she paused to think where she had heard this rhythm before, she leaned against the wall.

  ‘I know this code! If only … Oh no! It’s …’

  The wall she was leaning against suddenly swung away from her and she landed on her rabbit bum. The wall came swinging back and dropped down on top of her.

  Ouch! It wasn’t a wall, then … It was a dead body.

  But that was not as frightening as it seemed, she told herself hurriedly, because, as Norbert had pointed out, that’s what you get in cold-rooms. Dead bodies. Of sheep and cows and stuff. Right?

  Suddenly she wasn’t so sure.

  The cold meat muffled her scream.

  Norbert sat speechless on the kerb outside the butcher’s and tried to think.

  He had no idea how to get Mad Cap out of there. If she was stuck in that cold-room …

  He was about to go back inside and tell everything to Mrs Fitzmarcel when he heard the shop’s metal shutters coming down with a furious racket.

  What could he do about Madgie now? He quickly ran through his options.

  1. He could go to their parents and confess everything. But he couldn’t really, because it would be the end of Rent-a-Hero if anybody found out about their snooping around people’s shops and houses.

  2. He could go to the police. But see 1.

  Or

  3. He could just go on.

  Mad Cap was well capable of looking after herself. Wasn’t she? Surely she would find a window or something and get out of there as fast as she could. They’d meet at the den later and have a laugh.

  Norbert considered option 3 again. He couldgo on. Because there was a plan D that came after C+. And that was to investigate their prime suspect: Manic Mudrick.

  He glanced at the time on his multi-task digiwatch. He’d have to be quick. The audition for the panto was due to start in about an hour and he had promised his mother he’d be there in his rabbit costume to try to get the main part. How exactly she had made him promise that, he wasn’t quite sure now.

  He took a deep breath, got up and made his way towards Mrs Mudrick’s house.

  Madgie scrambled frantically under the sheep’s corpse. Retching and panting, she eventually managed to roll it off to one side. Her heart in her mouth, she stood up again and ran as hard as she could.

  As she ran, she tried not to think. She knew the cold-room was full of dead animals, but there was every chance that one of these dead things was Mr Fitzmarcel. Where else would you hide a dead body if you were a butcher’s evil wife who preferred plumbing tools to meat (Mrs Fitzmarcel) or a butcher’s evil neighbour with a definite wish for the death of said butcher (Mrs Mudrick)?

  Was she (whichever ‘she’ it might be) planning to feed poor Mr Fitzmarcel to people? Or to cats?

  Then Mad Cap heard the knocking again. In her fright, she had forgotten where she knew that sound from, and she decided to follow it.

  There was a thin crack of light behind what seemed to be a huge ham. Gingerly, Madgie tiptoed around the ham and – oh, yay! – there was a door. She ran her fingers along the door frame and found a switch.

  The cold-room light came on with a series of flickerings that went on and on and on. The bulb must be faulty, thought Mad Cap, blinking like a mole on a sunbed. Then it hit her: this was the flashing she had seen from Colm’s bedroom window. Someone had been in this cold-room in the middle of the night. They hadn’t been signalling to her. They’d just turned on the stupid neon and it had blinked on and off for ages.

  What were the Fitzmarcels doing in here at midnight when honest people were snoring in their beds (or, let’s face it, stealing their brothers’ diaries)?

  Mad Cap tightened her rabbit costume around her.

  She opened the door out of the cold-room and saw a dusty staircase ahead, lined with bricks and cobwebs and plunging into what must be a basement. The sound was coming from there, so Madgie followed it carefully.

  Now she could hear some sort of music as well as the tapping, like a hundred shivering penguins playing the violin. It could have been in a horror movie. One with madwomen stabbing innocent people in the shower, Madgie reckoned.

  ‘Let’s finish this!’ she announced to the unknown. ‘Mad Cap forever and beyond!’

  She went on creeping carefully down the stairs. Finally, she came to another door. She pushed, and it opened with a creak. In the room beyond was the most horrible thing Madgie M. Cappock had ever seen in her life.

  She screamed.

  8

  SAPPHIRE AND THE MAGIC SPUDS

  Mrs Mudrick’s front garden looked like a minefield. Mould was licking at the door step and, worst of all, the old net curtains in the front window had cats embroidered on them. Norbert shuddered.

  This time, the sign on the door said:

  Of course the door was locked. As Norbert walked around to the back, he thought he saw a movement at the window. The curtains had twitched, he was sure of it. Pretty sure …

  The back garden wasn’t in much better condition than the front. A forest of mutant dandelions with stems as thick as tree trunks was eating away at the patio. Wooden crates marked ‘Top Quality Wool’ were piled high against the crumbling shed, probably holding it upright. But on the back door, Norbert found what he was looking for.

  ‘Bingo!’

  He rummaged in one of the crates until he found a piece of wool long enough, tied a stone at one end, then went back to the door. It had no knob on the outside, but it had a cat flap. Norbert pushed the flap inwards and plunged his hand inside and up. With one lucky flick, he managed to lasso the string around the handle.

  ‘Ouch!’

  Someone – something – had grabbed his wrist. Someone or something with claws and sharp teeth. And possibly called Sapphire.

  ‘Oy! Let go!’

  But Sapphire wasn’t letting go. She bit and scratched and hissed until Norbert had to remove his arm if he ever wanted to play air guitar again.

  While he nursed his injured hand, he could hear the cat having a go at the string inside the door.

  There was a sudden click. The cat’s playful pouncing on the wool had managed to unlock the door from the inside, even though Norbert hadn’t been able to do it. But he’d been the genius who’d thought of the plan, so that was fine.

  ‘Yes!’ he cried and threw himself at the door. He tumbled into the kitchen, but immediately leapt to his feet again in case Sapphire was planning another attack.

  She wasn’t, though. She had got completely tangled up in the wool.

  Norbert sighed with relief. That was one less problem. But when he breathed in again he nearly gagged.

  ‘Holy Mildred! It pongs in here! Did you do that?’ he asked Sapphire.

  The cat gave him such an innocent look that for a second he thought, What a nice little kitty! But the next moment, the piece of wool broke. Sapphire landed on the grimy tiles with a bump, struggled free from the wool and rushed at Norbert.

  There was nothing he could do. He fell over, dropping his shopping bag as he did so. The bag! The cat made a beeline for it. She ripped it open, sniffed at the chicken breast inside and let out a terrifying screech.

  Norbert simply couldn’t move. He stared, amazed and scared to bits, as Sapphire, instead of tucking into the juicy meat, picked it up and carried it to a dark corner of the kitchen where a heap of potatoes were rotting away.

  She rummaged around the spuds for a while … and then she disappeared.

  ‘What?!’

  Norbert was up again. He ran to the pile of spuds. Here, the smell was even worse. Like loo perfume mixed with old mince. One hand on his nose, he started pulling the potatoes aside. Where was this cat? It was impossible!

  A few kilos of gone-off potatoes later, sweating and panting, he unearthed Sapphire’s hidey-hole – and, on the ground, he spied the edge of what must be a trap-door.
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br />   Ignoring the cat, who he could now see hidden behind more potatoes piled high in the corner and who was doing something awful to the chicken breast, he shovelled through the spuds again until the spot was clear. They were getting heavier and heavier, and the work was tiring, but there was no doubt about it. It definitely was a trap-door.

  He knelt down and opened the panel.

  ‘Stainless steel,’ he muttered. ‘Perfectly oiled. Hmmm.’

  It’s light enough even for an oldie like Mrs Mudrick to lift easily, he thought. But how does she manage to move the spuds to get at it? She must be in training. He hadn’t reckoned that knitting was so physical.

  He pinched his nose and went down through the trap-door.

  At first, Norbert thought he had stepped into a badly run graveyard. It reeked of dead bodies and was pitch black except for the faint light coming from the kitchen above him. He just had time to catch a glimpse of stairs going down and a mountain of meat abandoned by Sapphire – this cat must be a hoarder! he thought – before the trap-door shut with a deafening bang over his head and he was plunged into darkness. Very smelly darkness.

  Then came another noise. Click, click, click.

  Norbert checked but it wasn’t his teeth chattering, or his knees. He was too scared even for that. He pricked up his ears. Click, click – click, click – meow. It was Sapphire, clicking her claws on the concrete steps. She must have followed him inside and now he was trapped in a hellish hole with a mad cat who stored her excess meat underground!

  He listened again. The click-click was more distant and the meowing more insistent.

  ‘I see,’ muttered Norbert, feeling sick. ‘She wants me to follow her down the stairs.’

  And because there was nothing else he could do, he did.

  He went deeper and deeper into the bowels of the Earth, slowly at first, and then at rocket speed when he tripped on the cat and went rolling and rolling. He landed with a crash and an ouch and a meow and gingerly got off poor Sapphire.

  It took a while for Norbert’s brain to stop spinning inside his skull.

  ‘I can see fairies! This is not good …’

  There was a little glowing dot of light in front of him. Norbert put his hand up to it and pushed. Light!

  A bright neon tube lit up above his head. So much for the fairies. It was only a light switch.

  Sapphire flicked her tail as if to say, I told you it was fine down here, and trotted deeper into the basement of Mrs Mudrick’s house.

  Again, Norbert, half-blinded and covered in bruises, followed. He had to bend a few times to avoid leaky pipes and he had no idea where he was going. Not to mention that it was nearly time for the flipping panto audition and his bunny act!

  Maybe it was because he had just been thinking about the rabbit thing. Maybe it was because he had gone gaga. Or maybe it was real. But when he pushed the steel door at the end of the corridor and heard a horrible yell, he could have sworn it was a fluffy yellow bunny that was screaming.

  9

  KILL THE BRATS

  Mr Fitzmarcel had never had bad hair days. Because Mr Fitzmarcel had never had hair, good or bad. So it took Madgie a while to recognise him with his wig on. And his tutu.

  This was the terrible sight that made her screech when she opened the door in the basement under the butcher’s shop, at precisely the same moment that Norbert opened the door that led from Mrs Mudrick’s basement into Mr Fitzmarcel’s.

  Mrs Mudrick, however, recognised Mad Cap instantly, bunny costume or not.

  ‘That evil brat again!’ she shrieked.

  She was standing behind the butcher, a knitting needle in one hand, beating the rhythm on an old pipe.

  ‘Oh, Clotworthy!’ she wailed. ‘Our secret has been found out! We’re doomed!’

  She made as if to stab herself with the needle. Madgie stared, motionless, as the big butcher (Clotworthy?!) ran to her with a weird clickety-clack. He seized the needle and threw it away, knocking the bare lightbulb sideways. In the moving light, Mad Cap noticed all at once that the butcher was wearing tap dancing shoes, that Sapphire was nibbling heartily at his calves and that Norbert (how had he got here?) had just arrived in the room, his hands clapped over his ears.

  At last, she realised she was still bawling.

  She stopped.

  ‘Wow!’ said Norbert, once he had tiptoed around the adults and joined Mad Cap. ‘If it doesn’t work out for you as a superhero, you can always apply for a job as an ambulance siren!’

  He blinked.

  ‘Nice outfit!’ he added.

  ‘Oh, Norbert, you’ll never believe it,’ Mad Cap spluttered. ‘I was in the cold-room and the light was the exact same light I saw before and there was a door hidden behind a dead body and then some stairs and then a basement and then a rabbit and then –’

  ‘And then I think I can see for myself,’ Norbert cut in. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m here too.’

  What he could also see, in his mind’s eye at least, was how the two houses must be sharing the same basement, how they must be interconnected. A very clear map of the buildings was taking shape in his head, but he could tell this wasn’t the time for a lecture on the quaint architecture of Barnaby Street. By now, Mr Fitzmarcel had clobbered Sapphire over the head and Mrs Mudrick was petting the dazed cat between her wrinkly arms. Together, they turned on Mad Cap and Norbert, a mean, bad, ugly look in their eyes. Or actually, two mean, bad ugly looks, one on each of their nasty faces.

  ‘So, you’ve discovered our little secret, then?’ snarled the butcher.

  ‘No, what do you mean?’ said Madgie, as if she hadn’t noticed that Mr Fitzmarcel was wearing a wig and a tutu. She was wearing a bright yellow bunny costume herself – who was she to talk?

  Or maybe that wasn’t the secret after all.

  ‘Clotworthy isn’t such an unusual name,’ she said reassuringly. ‘No reason to keep it a secret, really. Look at Norbert, he’s very brave about his name.’

  Norbert kicked her on the shin.

  ‘Thanks for that,’ he hissed. ‘Madgie Madonna.’

  ‘Don’t play the innocent with me, lass,’ Mr Fitzmarcel was saying. ‘You’ve seen it all. Yes!’ he shouted. ‘Yes! I never really wanted to be a butcher! I always wanted to be a tap dancer! I’ve been practising down here for days. The leading role in the panto should be mine, MINE, MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!!!’

  Mad Cap and Norbert each took a step back and managed to wedge themselves stuck in the doorway. Meanwhile, Mrs Mudrick had picked up the knitting needle and was advancing towards the broad back of the tutued Fitzmarcel.

  ‘Mind!’ Norbert screamed. ‘Look out behind you!’

  ‘You think I’m going to fall for that one?’ snarled Mr Fitzmarcel. ‘Pah!’

  Madgie gulped. ‘Mad Mudrick’s gonna kill you!’ she shouted. ‘She’s coming at you with a knitting needle!’

  There was a pause.

  Then Fitzmarcel began to chuckle. Soon, he was laughing his wig off, and there was also a worrying noise like one of the pipes was about to burst. It took them a minute to realise that the burst-pipe-type noise was Mrs Mudrick’s laughter.

  ‘Why would such a fine woman as herself want to do me in? She’s the one who’s been helping me all week to rehearse for the audition, the one who shared my secret all along,’ he panted, wiping away a few laughter tears.

  ‘But she was nasty to you in the shop,’ Norbert argued. ‘You had such a row, she couldn’t even go in there any more. Mad Cap – I mean, Madgie – has had to do her meat shopping for her all week.’

  ‘Oh, that was all just a cover-up,’ Mrs Mudrick explained. ‘A subterfuge! People still remember, you know. The Glamorous Gisella and her Ballet Flotilla! That’s me, see?’

  For a moment the not-so-glamorous Gisella was lost in the mists of her youth. Madgie tried to picture it, but all she could come up with were black and white images of a wrinkled lady wearing a leotard and comfy slippers.

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nbsp; She shook her head. None of this made a whole lot of sense. But at least Mr Fitzmarcel was not dead and hanging up in the cold-room, waiting to be carved into rashers. That was something. Wasn’t it?

  ‘And if the nasty gossips of Barnaby Street guessed that Clotworthy and I shared a passion for dancing …’ Mrs Mudrick tailed off.

  Mr Fitzmarcel shuddered. Madgie wasn’t quite sure what was wrong with a dancing butcher, but she had heard the gossips before (Mrs M was one of them) and she could see why you wouldn’t want to catch their attention.

  ‘If people thought I was helping dear Clotworthy with his dancing,’ Mrs Mudrick went on, ‘they might think … well, they might think anything. And then he might not get the part in the pantomime, see? People are so envious, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s because of the panto that we have been training so hard. The night-time practice wasn’t enough any more. We needed to rehearse during the day, too. That’s why Clotworthy had to leave the shop to that plumber creature and I had to get Madgie to buy my Sapphire’s meat for me. It was a mistake, I know now. You horrible little …’

  The night-time practice! That explained why the cold-room light flickered in the night. Fitzmarcel had been sneaking down to the basement late at night to practise his tap-dancing and he’d had to go through the cold-room to get there.

  But Mad Cap had had enough. She knew Mrs Mudrick was lying through her dentures. And she could prove it.

  ‘Don’t believe her!’ she yelled at the butcher. ‘I saw her blanket! It said “Fitzmarcel die!” She knitted it herself. She must want you dead very badly.’

  At that, the butcher became very serious and turned to the old woman, who was scratching her ear with the needle.

  ‘What’s that, Gisella?’

  Mrs Mudrick’s face turned as purple as her hair.

  ‘You! You rotten kids! You’ve been nosing around where you had no business to be! If you’d stuck to the rules, none of this would be happening.’