‘No, you wretched beast, you interfering dinosaur,’ shouted Spratt-Haddock, waving Fizz’s coat at the crocodile.
The noise of those jaws slamming shut was like the thudding stone doors of some dank mausoleum. It sent an electric shock up Wystan’s back, and slivers of ice all through his veins. He covered his face with his beard, not wanting to see what had happened to his friend, but his left eye saw everything, because of the hole the shark had bitten.
The crocodile sank beneath the water, and Fizz vanished with it, sucked down in a froth of bubbles.
And then . . .
. . . the crocodile burst up out of the water, balancing Fizz, not between its jaws as Wystan feared, but on the tip of its snout. It pushed him up, out of the water and dumped him down on the concrete, just at the Admiral’s feet and then, like a particularly ugly ballerina, it spun and sunk back under the water, snapping its jaws twice.
Recovering his wits from where he’d dropped them, Wystan opened the gate and ran round the pool to where the Admiral was stood looking down at the unusually delivered boy.
‘Urgh, argh, splurr,’ said Fizzlebert, leaning over the edge of the pool and coughing up water.
He opened his eyes and saw Wystan kneeling beside him.
‘I’ve come to rescue you,’ Fizz said weakly.
‘What?’
Fizz shook his head. A goldfish fell out of his ear. He looked at Wystan again.
‘Wystan,’ he said. ‘I dreamt I fell in the water.’
‘Um, Fizz,’ Wystan said, ‘you did fall in the water. So did I.’
‘Oh,’ said Fizz.
It was all coming back to him, the conversation he’d overheard, the search for Fish, the chase along the walkways, the sight of the metal hook before his face, the little purple fish like pipe-cleaners. It all came back in a rush, though not in the right order.
‘Where’s that pirate?’ Fizz said, getting to his feet.
‘Here,’ said a cold voice from behind him. ‘And I ain’t no pirate, me lad.’
Fizz looked round and indeed, there was the Admiral, his stupid hat on his head and no beard at all on his big chin. Fizz’s red Ringmasterly coat swayed on the tip of his hook. It looked big and warm and dry.
‘I’ll have that,’ Fizz said, snatching it away and struggling to pull it on over his soggy, cold clothes.
‘So, Admiral, we meet at last,’ he said. (That was how, in all the best adventure books he’d read, the hero always greeted the villain.)
Admiral Spratt-Haddock chuckled cruelly at this. Maybe he hadn’t read the same books as Fizz had. In the books he would have said something sarcastic.
‘Let’s cut to the chase. We came here tonight, risking life and limb in the cause of friendship, because you, Admiral, have got Fish.’
The nautical gentleman looked at Fizzlebert and stroked his chin.
‘This is a ’Quarium, me lad. Of course we has fish.’
‘No, no, no,’ Fizz said, shaking his head. ‘I mean you’ve stolen Fish.’
‘Oh, the calumny,’ the Admiral moaned, looking up to the black night sky and waving his hand. ‘How can you stand there and say that, when it’s you, you circus rat, you, you travelling sneak, who’s broken into my ’Quarium and been off with my fish! And we’s caught you red-handed!’
‘I haven’t stolen anything!’ Fizz shouted, surprised at the Admiral’s gale force outburst.
‘Well, someone has,’ the Admiral snapped angrily.
‘Who’d want to steal fish?’ Fizz demanded.
‘A cat burglar?’ Wystan suggested, since Unnecessary Sid wasn’t there to say it.
The Admiral frowned as if he didn’t get the joke (which, to be fair, was easy enough to miss).
‘No, you’ve kidnapped Fish, our—’ Fizz said, getting back to the point.
‘Kidnapped? Me? You’re the kidnapper,’ blared the Admiral. He prodded Fizz with a pointy flesh and blood finger, and loomed at him, peering face to face, his warm breath and his large chin filling Fizz’s view. ‘And I’ll have you keel-hauled before dawn if you don’t tell me what’s become of ’em. Me lovely fishes, and you . . . you . . .’
‘Just tell us what you did with our sea lion!’ Fizz shouted.
‘Sea lion?’
‘Yeah, our sea lion. He’s called Fish. And you’ve stolen him. Kidnapped him.’
‘What?’
‘It’s no good lying, Admiral Spratt-Haddock. We saw him, here, with you, in your show this afternoon.’
‘Fish, you say?’
‘And, Fizz,’ Wystan added excitedly, tugging his friend’s sleeve, ‘he was here before, when you fell in.’ He pointed at the patch of concrete the sea lion had been lying on. ‘But when the crocodile saved you . . .’
‘What? The crocodile rescued me?’ Fizz felt a shiver of fear run down his spine.
‘Aye,’ the Admiral said thoughtfully. ‘I ain’t never seen her do something like that before. She don’t normally like anyone but me.’ He had a strange look on his strange face. It was hard to spot unless you knew what you were looking for (you’d never have spotted it if I hadn’t pointed it out to you, for instance). It was a puzzled look, a slightly relieved look, a look of hope, perhaps. ‘Blasted nuisance, that beast. Followed me from the Nile all the way back to England. Hasn’t never hardly let me out of her sight.’
‘Why ain’t she eaten you?’ Wystan said. ‘Isn’t that what they normally do?’
‘You’d think, wouldn’t you? But she just likes me company. I was there when her egg hatched, and she saw me and I reckons her little brain said Mummy!’
‘Really?’ asked Fizzlebert, putting the argument they’d been having to one side for a moment, since this was quite interesting, after all.
‘Maybe,’ the Admiral said with a sigh. ‘It’s hard to tell with crocodiles. I don’t know.’
He shook his head and the soft look that had settled on his face slid off, uncovering the scowl that he’d been wearing before. He slid his hook into the lapel of Fizz’s coat and pulled him close.
‘Now what’s this you’re saying about me sea lion, me lad?’
‘Fish,’ said Fizz. ‘Fish is our sea lion and we want him back.’
He looked around, scanning the pool and the poolside but couldn’t see him anywhere.
‘Hang on, lubbers,’ the Admiral said. ‘You don’t mean Pescado?’
‘He’s called Fish and he belongs to us,’ Wystan said.
‘Well, he doesn’t really belong to us,’ added Fizz, ‘but he’s our friend.’
‘Yeah,’ Wystan went on. ‘He lives with us and I do an act with him and now he’s gone missing and I saw you at the circus last night and then we saw him here in your show.’
‘Hang on, hang on,’ said the Admiral, waving his vicious-looking hook to encourage silence. Then he called, ‘Pescado! Pescado! Where’ve you got to, you scurvy old lion, you?’
‘Not Pescado, Fish!’
As Fizz said that, the sea lion slid up out of the water and landed, without a splash or a slosh, on the concrete stage. He barked once, shook water off his head and waddled over to where the Admiral and the boys stood.
‘Gentlemen, meet Pescado.’
The sea lion lifted one of its flippers up as if to shake hands and moved its head from side to side, looking at each boy in turn with its big deep black eyes.
Fizz and Wystan both stepped forwards, and Fizz’s heart sank. He looked at Wystan and saw they were thinking the same thing.
‘That’s not Fish.’
Dr Surprise had been right. There was something wrong with his whiskers. Not wrong, they were perfectly good whiskers, good for whatever whiskers are good for, but they simply weren’t Fish’s whiskers. It was obvious when you saw them up close.
‘Um,’ said Fizz, feeling incredibly small and embarrassed. Wystan was hiding behind his beard, but Fizz had nowhere to conceal his embarrassment, so he tried to get rid of it with an apology. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.
‘
Never mind that, lad. I’ve been ’ccused of a lot worse in my time . . .’
He sounded like he was going to go on and say more, maybe tell them some of the other things he had been accused of, but he was interrupted.
‘Admiral! Admiral!’
It was Mrs Darling. She was waving from the other side of the pool.
‘Yes?’ called Admiral Spratt-Haddock.
‘Oh!’ she shouted, seeing Fizz. ‘You caught the other one? Well done, sir. But you’re too late. You’ve got to come see what they’ve done. There’s more fish gone, Admiral. You hold them there. I’ll get my gloves on, then we can search them. See if we can find what they’ve nicked.’
‘Ah, Mrs Darling,’ the Admiral began, but before he could finish his sentence the chapter came to an end.
Chapter Twelve
In which a crime scene is investigated and in which the Aquarium is left
‘Mrs Darling,’ the Admiral repeated, for the benefit of anyone who forgot what he’d said at the end of the previous chapter. ‘I’m thinking that won’t be needed.’ (He meant searching the boys.)
‘But we caught them . . .’
‘Ah, yes, but I don’t think these are our thieves. I’ve listened to their yarn, and it’s just been a misunderstanding. They thought we were the thundering thieves.’
‘But the robberies?’
‘Someone else. You’re still on the case, Mrs Darling. The game is still afoot.’
‘Admiral Spratt-Haddock,’ Fizz said, raising his hand in the air.
‘Aye, lad?’
‘We saw someone.’
The two boys explained to the Admiral and his guard what it was they’d seen: the masked man and his wriggling coat.
‘Where was that?’ Spratt-Haddock asked.
‘In the green room,’ Mrs Darling said.
Fizz nodded in agreement.
‘You’ve got to come look,’ she said. ‘See what he’s taken this time.’
Admiral Spratt-Haddock tapped on the glass with his hook and peered into the water.
‘Gone,’ he whispered.
There were several empty tanks in the corridor. The one he was stood in front of now had a sign by its side that read GREEN-GILLED MUDSHARK. The tank to the side of that, which he’d looked in first and for a long time, was labelled LESSER GREEN-FOOTED CORAL OCTOPUS. Wystan and Fizz remembered it looking exactly as empty as it did now when they’d seen it that morning and Dr Surprise had been very impressed by its alleged contents, but the Admiral assured them it was really empty now and he seemed upset by it.
‘But how did he steal it?’ Fizz asked, pointing at the mudshark tank. The glass was unbroken. Unless the thief had magic powers, he couldn’t have just reached into the water and taken the fish.
‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘I’ve not been able to work it out. Nothing’s ever broken, the doors are all still locked. It’s a mystery.’
Fizz had spent long enough in the circus, and especially with Dr Surprise, to know that when things looked impossible, there was usually a perfectly sensible explanation behind them. It had to be the same here.
He looked in the empty tank. He tapped on the glass. He looked at the damp floor where the burglar had been stood when they’d first seen him, wrestling something into the inside pocket of his coat, presumably this mudshark. He looked at all these things in just the way a detective in a book would, but none of them gave him a clue. None of them leapt out at him shouting, ‘Aha! It’s me!’
‘I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘I’m stumped.’
‘You’re Stump,’ corrected Wystan.
Fizz raised his eyes to the ceiling at the terrible joke, and saw something that made him think, ‘Aha!’ after all.
‘Look at that,’ he said, pointing up.
It was a ceiling tile, like the ones in Mrs Darling’s office, and it was slightly askew.
‘We surprised him, like you surprised us,’ he said to the security guard. ‘He didn’t have time to put it back straight.’
‘But?’ she said, taking her hat off and running a hand through her short hair.
‘I bet there’s no lid on the tank, is there?’
‘No,’ said the Admiral. ‘I likes to give them fishes of mine a dash of the fresh air, like they’d have out at sea.’
‘Well, then,’ said Fizz. ‘He must’ve had a bendy net or something and poked it up and over the side, through the hole in the ceiling and down into the tank. Then he could watch through the glass as he scooped his fish up.’
‘I reckons you’re right, lad! But that don’t get us no closer to running the roach rustler to ground.’
‘Hang on,’ Wystan said, stroking his beard (which is how you can tell a person with a beard has been thinking about something). ‘In the office there was a telly screen.’
‘Yes,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘It’s linked to all the security cameras.’
‘So how come you’ve not caught the burglar yet?’
‘He’s quick,’ she said, glumly. ‘He’s crafty. He covers the cameras up. Look over there.’
She pointed to the corner of the corridor, where up on the wall a camera was pointing at them. A little red light blinked, but the lens of the camera had been blocked up with something. All she’d see in her little room was blackness.
Fizzlebert’s brain was ticking over. He’d solved mysteries before. Hadn’t he saved the circus from Wystan’s wicked stepmother? (Yes.) Hadn’t he escaped from Mrs Stinkthrottle’s house? (Yes.) Well, surely he could solve this mystery now. All he needed was a dead good clue and this might be it.
‘Wystan,’ he said, ‘can you reach the camera? Get whatever it is that’s blocking the picture?’
‘Sure,’ said Wystan.
In one bound and a bounce (using his acrobatic elasticity) he jumped up and snatched the bit of paper that was wedged into the front of the camera.
Fizzlebert unfolded it, half hoping the thief would have used an old envelope with his name and address on. He smoothed it out on the concrete floor and looked at what it was.
‘It’s just some rubbish, just a bit of random litter,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘That’s no good. It doesn’t tell us anything.’
Fizzlebert’s brain sparkled inside his head (had the lights been turned out it’s possible you might have seen a glow from inside his ear). ‘No, no, it does,’ he said. ‘It tells us a lot. Look at it. It’s the wrapper to a packet of flour.’
‘So, what does that tell us?’ the Admiral said. ‘That the sea-sickening villain is a baker?’
‘No,’ Fizz said. ‘Not that. Not quite.’
Beep beep beep. Beep beep beep.
As the sound echoed between fish tanks they stood in silence and watched the great swaggering brute of a crocodile lurch round the corner, glance at the four of them with its flashing amber eyes, lumber over to the Admiral and flop with a scaly crash down at his feet.
Admiral Spratt-Haddock sighed, and rolled his eyes in embarrassment.
The crocodile yawned hugely, revealing long rows of large yellow teeth and a vast pink tongue.
‘Wow,’ Wystan said. ‘Imagine sticking your head in there, Fizz.’
Fizz tried not to, though now it had been mentioned it was hard to shake the idea.
‘Ignore her,’ Admiral Spratt-Haddock said as the crocodile rubbed its head on his boot and lay down to snore gently. ‘She’s harmless. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Take the leg off an antelope, mind you, but the flies’d be fine.’ He scratched his chin. ‘You were saying, me lad, something about that bit of paper. A clue, d’ya reckon?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Fizz, stepping away from the crocodile. ‘I think . . . I think I’ve got it all worked out. We need to get back to the circus.’
‘The circus,’ said the Admiral, excitedly. ‘I knew this was the squid-juggling circus’s fault!’
‘Not all of us,’ Fizz replied, ‘but I think I know who.’
On their way to the front doors they went past a tank at the end of
the pink corridor. Wystan stopped and looked into it.
‘I think this is the one I fell in,’ he said.
‘Yes, sorry about that,’ the Admiral said. ‘It’s supposed to have a lid on, that one.’
As Fizz looked into the water a dark pink shape (a shark-shaped dark pink shape, mind you) loomed up from between some weeds. He jumped at the sight, but Wystan leant in even closer.
‘She’s not so big,’ he said.
‘She’s a he,’ the Admiral corrected, ‘and he’s only young.’
‘Was Wystan in danger?’
‘Oh no, this is an Austrian Blushing Shark. Very shy. Mostly vegetarians.’
The shark still had a few strands of scraggly black hair caught between his teeth.
‘It’s a hair-bevore,’ Fizz said, slapping his bearded pal on the back. (Unnecessary Sid would’ve been very proud of that joke.)
Wystan felt the hole in his beard and grumbled, ‘I did have hair before, so you can say that again.’
But Fizz didn’t say it again. He thought, quite rightly, that for some jokes, once is more than enough.
Mrs Darling locked the glass doors behind them as the Admiral and the two boys stepped out into the cool of the evening. She was staying behind, because a guard’s work, as she said, is, so long as there is something left to guard, guarding.
As the Admiral and the boys walked along the prom, into the night, the sea, which was off to their right, down in the dark, roared and sloshed up and down the beach. The salt spray sang in their nostrils and Fizz was reminded of what he’d almost forgotten in the excitement of the hunt for the fish burglar.
‘I wish we’d found Fish,’ he said to the Admiral. ‘I really thought you had him. We were certain.’
The evening was cool, and he felt even colder in his dripping clothes. He was leaving damp footprints behind him. With every step his shoes squeaked, his socks squirted water up his ankles and his trousers shthwacked together.
The Boy Who Cried Fish Page 8