‘Also his only reporter,’ her aunt added. ‘He’s a fool to let you go.’
‘– yes, and I bet he’s not left the office to interview the victims himself. He’ll have been too busy trying to do the crossword. There’s still time. If I can solve the mystery and publish it myself –’
‘You could use the photocopier in the library.’
‘– then I’ll still get the Big Scoop, and maybe even the Prilchard-Spritzer Medal.’
There was a new glint in her eyes, a new determination in her voice, a new plan in her head.
‘I’m going to go and pay Mr Teachbaddly a visit.’
‘Oh, darling,’ said Aunt Tabitha, clapping her hands together. ‘I’m so proud of you. Bravo, old sport! You are truly a Great Zargo, Greta Zargo!’
Greta went upstairs to have a shower and get dressed.
An investigative reporter will never be taken seriously if they are asking questions in their pyjamas. That was probably rule number one of being an investigative reporter, Greta reckoned. (If ever she were to write a book with tips on being an investigative reporter, that would definitely be in there.)
While Greta was upstairs the doorbell rang.
Aunt Tabitha was crunching toast when she answered it.
On the doorstep was a large silvery robot with flashing lights and robotic arm-like protrusions.
‘Are you The Great Zargo?’ it said, although because of the toast-crunching noise in her ears, Aunt Tabitha only heard the final word.
‘Me? No,’ said Aunt Tabitha, who was a scientist and therefore unflummoxed by robots and flashing lights. ‘She’s having a shower. Perhaps I can take a message for her?’
‘Please may we have your planet?’
‘I’m sorry?’
Something was happening on the pavement behind the robot, which had distracted Aunt Tabitha – a pigeon was arguing with a squirrel over an empty crisp packet that was fluttering down the street (possibly cheese and onion flavour).
‘The message is: Please may we have your planet?’ the robot said.
‘Have your planet?’ Aunt Tabitha repeated, not really listening but staring at the squirrel, which now had the pigeon in a neck-lock and was rubbing the top of the bird’s head with its little squirrely knuckles. ‘I’ll be sure to pass it on. Will you call again later, perhaps?’
‘Very well. We shall call again tomorrow, when The Great Zargo is available.’
‘Excellent, excellent,’ said Aunt Tabitha, as the silvery robot drifted up into the air with a slow, quiet whoosh of unknown energy.
When the smoke cleared the pigeon was sat, slightly stunned, on the pavement and the squirrel was nowhere to be seen. It had been a normal-sized squirrel, Aunt Tabitha noted, with a touch of disappointment.
Twenty minutes later, when Greta was washed and changed and ready to go out and ask Oscar Teachbaddly some hard questions, Aunt Tabitha stopped her in the hallway.
‘I’ve just remembered the other reason I came round,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t just toast and cheering up.’ She’d already forgotten about the robot, which was often the way with Aunt Tabitha’s mind. (It flitted about like a magpie in a washing machine.) ‘I’ve managed to breed an amazing new experimental animal: a giant vegetarian squirrel. I thought it might be useful somehow, if only I can get rid of its peanut allergy. But when I went in on Monday the door to the giant vegetarian squirrel-house was open and the giant vegetarian squirrel wasn’t anywhere in the garden. I looked on the bird table, behind the shed, along the top of the fence, under the settee. Nowhere. I thought he might come back when he got lonely, but he’s not turned up yet. Just keep an eye out, would you, darling? He’s called Jonathon. He’s probably scared and lost and lonely.’
‘Aren’t squirrels already vegetarians?’ Greta asked.
‘That’s the clever thing,’ said Aunt Tabitha, not really by way of any sort of explanation.
They left the house and, at the end of the path, went different ways along the pavement, off into their different days, one to search for squirrels and one to track down a serial cake thief.5
1Wilf Inglebath was Aunt Tabitha’s second cousin by marriage. Upper Lowerbridge was one of those towns where most of the people were related in one way or another.
2It had ‘fallen’ into Aunt Tabitha’s handbag.
3The school exchange party had arrived a week early, due to a funny misunderstanding.
4They were cross because someone kept moving all the flowers a little bit to the right when they were asleep.
5Not, it should be noted, a cereal cake thief. Not a single rice crispie cake or chocolate cornflake brownie went missing during the entire investigation.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Geflu
306 LIGHT YEARS FROM EARTH 34,111 YEARS AGO
THE GEFLUVIANS HAD already begun exploring their own solar system when the Huge Space-Going Cestrypian Robot arrived around their star.
They had moon bases and space stations and Gefluvians had even walked on Boflu, the fifth planet, and plans were afoot for a mission to Bagflu, the third planet.
When the silvery robot knocked at the door of Space Station B, Commander Wrigglesworth pressed the comm-link button and said, ‘Hello? Can we help you?’
‘Take me to your leader,’ said the robot.
‘That would be the President,’ said the Commander, and gave it the President’s address.
* * *
The President and her aides had a secret meeting with the robot. It went a bit like this:
The robot: ‘Please may we have your planet?’
The President: ‘What for?’
The robot: ‘We need resources to continue our mission exploring the galaxy.’
The President: ‘If we let you use our resources, what will we get in return?’
The robot: ‘We can offer you information.’
The President: ‘What sort of information?’
The robot: ‘We can tell you about advanced mathematics and hyperspatial physics and star systems we have explored and aliens we have encountered and we have many pictures of amusingly shaped asteroids and –’
The President: ‘Stop, stop, stop! You had me at “amusingly shaped asteroids”.’
The robot: ‘Then we can have your planet, please?’
The President: ‘Play fair. First give us all that information, the pictures and stuff, then you can get what you need.’
The robot hovered in the air for a moment, lights blinking but saying nothing, and then it settled down again and said, ‘The information has been transmitted into your computers. Now may we have your planet?’
The President was already chuckling at an asteroid shaped a bit like a welfpog and simply said, ‘Yeah, sure, take what you need.’
Commander Wrigglesworth watched with a sinking feeling in his stomach from the window of Space Station B as a thousand silvery robots flew out of the Huge Space-Going Robot and carefully deconstructed his planet.
First the atmosphere was removed, then the crust was broken up and the glowing mantle extracted, and then the core was mined for iron.
The Huge Space-Going Robot used the raw materials to construct a dozen more Huge Space-Going Robots, each one identical to itself.
Commander Wrigglesworth watched as these new Huge Space-Going Robots slowly accelerated out of the system, heading off to a dozen different stars, ones the original Huge Space-Going Robot hadn’t explored yet.
‘Oh,’ he said, as he munched the very last packet of qualf-flakes in the universe. ‘Oh dear.’
The Commander watched as the final Huge Space-Going Robot transformed itself into a round blue space station, half the size of the destroyed planet, covered with images and writing and emitting messages at all different wavelengths.
Through his telescope he saw pictures of Geflu (and of the people living on it) as it had been before the planet was destroyed. This was a Cestrypian Memory Station.
The Memory Station was filled with records of the
vanished planet, and of the people who had been turned into raw materials along with the rocks and oceans. So, now, any space explorer who visits the Gefluvian star system will be able to learn about what was there before it wasn’t there any more, and that the Cestrypippians got there first. (This was, of course, in addition to beaming all the information back to Cestrypip for inclusion in the Harknow-Bumfurly-Histlock Big Book of Galactic Facts™.)
‘Well, I suppose that’s all right then,’ said Commander Wrigglesworth, scooting down a gravity-free corridor on Space Station B. He screwed up the empty qualf-flake packet and let it dangle in gravity-free mid-air behind him as he wondered what to do with the rest of his afternoon.
CHAPTER NINE
Upper Lowerbridge, England, Earth
LAST THURSDAY, LUNCHTIME
OSCAR TEACHBADDLY WAS rearranging his front garden when Greta approached. He kept it in six wheelbarrows for variety and ease of regular rearrangement. (When bored of how it looked, he would simply wheel one barrowful of plants, pond or shubbery into a different position and hey presto! the whole place looked like a new garden.)
‘Mr Teachbaddly,’ Greta said, tapping her notebook with a pen and pressing the button labelled ‘Press’ on her press badge. ‘I’d like to ask you some questions.’
‘Greta,’ he said. ‘How lovely to see you. Are you keeping well? You look well. Enjoying the holidays? Still dancing?’
Oscar Teachbaddly had taught Greta at the Lower Upperbridge Infant School, which Greta had attended some years earlier.1 (He’d been very fond of English country dancing.)
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not still dancing. Although I did very much enjoy it because of your lessons.’ (This was called ‘buttering up’. It’s what a good and clever investigator did, Greta reckoned. She’d been too direct with Mrs Hummock, so now she was being more subtle. Say nice things, put Mr Teachbaddly at his ease … then she could pounce with the hard questions.)
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ he said.
(That was probably enough buttering up, Greta thought.)
‘I’ve come about the Swiss roll.’
‘Swiss roll?’
‘Yes, the Swiss roll.’
‘What Swiss roll?’
‘The missing Swiss roll.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That Swiss roll.’
‘I need to ask you some questions.’
‘The police have already been,’ Oscar Teachbaddly said. ‘They’ve already asked lots of questions.’
‘Do I look like the police?’ she said.
‘No,’ he answered.
(He was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Her voice was serious, her stare unwavering and the kipper he’d had for breakfast off.)
‘Yours isn’t the only cake to have gone missing. Did you know that?’
‘I had heard something. Whispers.’
‘Where was your cake when it vanished, Mr Teachbaddly?’
‘It was on the arm of my armchair.’
‘And where were you?’
‘I was upstairs.’
‘Was there anyone else in the house?’
‘No, it was just me. Julian and Barry and Simon and Clive and Petros and Aaron and Sebastian and Esteban and Andrew and Big Derek and Sarah and Little Derek and Ivan were out at their quiz night. It was Wednesday, after all.’
‘And when you came back downstairs?’
‘They were still out.’
Greta thought she really ought to track down Julian and Barry and Simon and Clive and Petros and Aaron and Sebastian and Esteban and Andrew and Big Derek and Sarah and Little Derek and Ivan to confirm Mr Teachbaddly’s story … or maybe, just this once, she could assume he was telling the truth.
‘What about the cake, Mr Teachbaddly?’
‘Oh. The cake? The cake was gone.’
‘The plate?’
‘On the floor.’
‘Were there any crumbs, Mr Teachbaddly?’
‘Crumbs?’
‘Yes, crumbs.’
‘Some.’
‘Some crumbs?’
‘Yes, some crumbs.’
Greta tapped her pen on her notepad as she thought. Maybe this was the big break she needed. She hadn’t heard about crumbs being left behind at any of the other thefts. Maybe the thief was getting sloppy.
‘Have you read the story of Hansel and Gretel, Mr Teachbaddly?’
‘Maybe,’ he said cautiously, unsure of where this conversation was going.
‘So … was there a trail, Mr Teachbaddly? Was there a trail of crumbs?’
He looked pale. He gulped.
‘Yes,’ he whispered.
She spoke quietly, so that he had to lean close to hear her.
‘Where did they lead?’
‘To the window,’ he said, looking away.
‘Was the window open?’
‘Yes. But only a little. That’s what’s so strange.’
‘Show me the window,’ she said.
He pointed at the front room window, which was just behind them.
‘It was that one,’ he said.
It was a large window, made of a see-through material Greta reckoned was probably glass.2 Along the top was a long, narrow rectangle of window that opened outwards. A fanlight. It was open a little right now.
‘Was it like that?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
The gap was so small the cake thief must have been a tiny person: a little child maybe or someone who had come in contact with a shrink ray.3
She walked over to the wheelbarrow that was directly underneath the window. She pushed leaves and flowers aside and peered at the soft, deep, rich brown earth.
‘What are you doing?’ Oscar Teachbaddly asked.
‘I’m investigating,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t understand. We’re not dancing now, Mr Teachbaddly.’
She was looking for footprints. Someone lowering themselves from the window would have landed in that wheelbarrow and they would’ve left a footprint in the soft, deep, rich, brown earth, surely? But look as hard as she could, there didn’t seem to be a footprint to be found.
Maybe it was a wild goose chase. Maybe the thief hadn’t come out this way. Maybe the trail of crumbs was misleading, a red herring, a clue too good to be true. Maybe Oscar Teachbaddly had eaten the cake then had a brief touch of amnesia, or maybe the thief had gone out the back door (which had been open, it being quite a balmy evening). Oh! There were just too many possibilities and yet she had felt so close.
She looked up at the long, narrow open window.
There was a small red smear on the glass.
She climbed into the wheelbarrow (there were definitely footprints in it now4), up on to the window sill and peered closer.
There was a crumb stuck to the red smear. It looked like a cake crumb.
She made a quick sketch on her notepad and then touched the red smear with her fingertip.
It was sticky.
It smelt like jam.
‘What’s this?’ she said, spinning round and holding her finger out to Mr Teachbaddly as if she expected him to taste it.
‘It looks like …’
‘Jam,’ she declared, licking it.
‘That means …’
‘Yes! The Swiss roll thief definitely escaped through your window, taking the cake with him or her. And then they vanished.’
* * *
Greta sat in her kitchen going over what she knew so far.
She listened back to the conversations with Hari Socket and Mrs Hummock and with Oscar Teachbaddly that her press badge had recorded when she’d pressed the button labelled ‘Press’, and wrote the important bits down.
She was beginning to see patterns here. If only she could put them all together to build the big picture … Soon she’d be able to solve the crime, get the Big Scoop, put the villain in jail and, not only get her summer job back, not only have a brilliant tale to tell back at school in the autumn, but also have a story worthy of winning the prestigious Prilchard-Spritze
r Medal.
She glanced up at the framed copy of her parents’ Last Will and Testament that hung on the kitchen wall.
It wasn’t just about medals, although winning a medal would be one in the eye for the Head, who was always annoying Greta.5 She also wanted to do right by her mum and dad. She didn’t need to reread the important bit of the Last Will; she’d learnt it by heart a long time ago: Greta, darling, try to find out as much stuff as you can. Knowledge is fun and useful. The world needs bright, inquisitive people like you to help it get by. Darling, be brilliant.
And so she unwrapped the carrot cake she’d bought from Doodad’s corner shop and put it on a plate.
She put the plate on the kitchen table.
She opened the kitchen window a couple of inches and hid herself in the empty breakfast cereal cupboard (she knew there’d been something else she’d meant to buy while in Doodad’s).
And then Greta Zargo began her long wait.
1Lower Upperbridge was a nearby town with slightly more inhabitants, a postcard factory and a statue of early aviatrix Cecily Plumb, whose aeroplane had taken the steeple off the church, the weather cock off the pub and toupee off the vicar, back in 1919.
2Her aunt was the scientist; she would know.
3Her aunt was the scientist; she would know.
4And three broken geraniums.
5It wasn’t just the banning her from being on the school newspaper that annoyed Greta. During the last school year she’d also been asked not to attend the after-school wrestling, origami and leopard-watching clubs, and had been sent home halfway through the school field trip to the Lake District for ‘sarcastically commenting’ on the ‘beautiful weather’.
CHAPTER TEN
Faddertyre VI
80 LIGHT YEARS FROM EARTH 8,912 YEARS AGO
THE BAR-TARRY-TUF PEOPLE of Faddertyre VI were one of the angriest species in the galaxy.
It wasn’t that they were violent or war-like per se. It wasn’t even that they argued with one another a lot. It wasn’t as if their anger bubbled up to the surface from time to time with a roaring shout of rage and frustration even.
Greta Zargo and the Death Robots from Outer Space Page 3