by R. A. Spratt
The current round of Murder in the Dark that Nanny Piggins and the children were playing had been going on for some time. About forty minutes. It is not that they were particularly good at the game. They had simply forgotten to elect a murderer before they started. An easy mistake to make when you are excited to start a new round and it's two o'clock in the morning. Nevertheless, they were all enormously enjoying sneaking around the pitch-black house not getting murdered. The silence occasionally punctuated by someone crying out 'ow' when they bumped into something, or 'oops' when they knocked something over.
Finally, at about the forty-minute mark, it did occur to Nanny Piggins that she could not remember drawing cards to see who would be the murderer before they started the game. And when all was said and done, she was the nanny, which meant she had the leadership role. Much as she naturally disliked doing anything selfless, she took it upon herself to become the murderer. So instead of sneaking around the house from one hiding spot to another, she started to sneak around the house looking for one of the children so she could scare the living daylights out of them.
The problem was that the children were very good at this game. They played it whenever Mr Green went away or if he had eaten turkey for dinner and fallen into a really deep sleep. So Derrick, Samantha and Michael were all very good at avoiding being murdered. Nanny Piggins considered this to be one of the most important life skills. The only downside was the children were very difficult to find when Nanny Piggins wanted to murder them herself.
She crept around the house listening for breathing, chocolate eating, breaking porcelain or any of the other peculiar little noises children make. But the children must have been breathing exceptionally quietly because Nanny Piggins could hear nothing above the tick of the clock and the whirr of the VCR. (Which had been set to record a gory horror film, in case the children got tired and thought they wanted to go to bed. It was the type of film that was guaranteed to make them incapable of sleep for days.)
This is when the jiggling started. At first it was very quiet and tentative. But then the jiggling became louder and continuous. One of the children was being noisy. Nanny Piggins could not imagine what they were doing. Perhaps disassembling the toaster or trying to slide coins out of a moneybox with a knife. Nanny Piggins kept moving towards the noise. It was coming from somewhere near the front door. Nanny Piggins crept closer, staying near the wall because the floorboards were less likely to creak there. (It is important in Murder in the Dark that your victim does not know you are coming. That way they scream a lot louder and it impresses the other players.)
As she got near the front door, the jiggling gave one last final jiggle then stopped. Nanny Piggins stopped too and listened to hear what her victim would do next. She heard the doorknob turn and the door open. None of the children had ever dared go outside before in a game of Murder in the Dark. She had to give them bonus points for initiative. But, in this instance, because she was the murderer, she was not about to let them get away with it. Nanny Piggins hurled herself forward, leaping high into the air in the general direction of the doorway. She met with instant success. Nanny Piggins soon found herself slamming into someone's chest, head and shoulders, then falling with them to the floor.
'You're murdered!' she whispered conspiratorially in her victim's ear.
'Aaaaaagh!!' screamed her victim. Just as a good victim should when playing Murder in the Dark.
Nanny Piggins immediately sprang back to pretend that the murderer was not necessarily her, although she was not able to hide the smug grin on her face.
The lights flicked on throughout the house as Derrick, Samantha and Michael emerged from their various hiding places in different rooms and raced towards the direction of the scream.
Then they all screamed, Nanny Piggins included, when they realised it was not one of them lying dazed on the floor, but a fully grown hoodlum wearing a black balaclava as though he were a burglar.
Fortunately Nanny Piggins quickly recovered from her screaming and had the presence of mind to hit the hoodlum over the head with an umbrella. (Which is why it is so very important to have an umbrella stand right by the front door – you must always have something at hand to beat people over the head with.) She then tied him up with a roll of string she happened to have in her pocket. Nanny Piggins had been the hog-tying champion of her circus seven years in a row. (If you are a pig, it is best to compete in the hog-tying competition just so that nobody gets funny ideas about competing on you.) She had the hoodlum trussed up in under 12 seconds. Michael timed her with his watch.
They dragged the hoodlum into the living room and tied him to a chair. Nanny Piggins rather enjoyed tying knots once she got started. Then they all stood back and took a good look at him.
'Do you think he's a murderer?' asked Michael. 'You know, a real one.'
'Or a kidnapper?' asked Derrick.
'Or a . . .' Samantha struggled to think of something more exotic than a kidnapper or a murderer, 'a kidnapping murderer who steals jewels?'
'I don't know. It's hard to tell from just looking at him. That's the thing about these criminals. They're very good at disguising themselves,' said Nanny Piggins.
'Oi! I'm not a kidnapping murderer,' said the hoodlum suddenly.
Nanny Piggins and the children leapt back in surprise.
'My goodness, he speaks English!' exclaimed Nanny Piggins.
'Course I do,' said the hoodlum as he wiggled about trying to escape the tightly knotted string.
'There's no "course" about it. If you were an assassin hired by a foreign government to kidnap Mr Green in his sleep, who knows what language you might speak,' said Nanny Piggins.
'Why would anyone want to kidnap father in his sleep?' asked Samantha. She was not necessarily against the idea but she was curious if Nanny Piggins knew something she did not.
'To get to me, of course,' said Nanny Piggins. 'To try to force me to give up my sticky date pudding recipe. You'd be amazed at the desperate lengths people will go to for my baking secrets. Once a domestic science teacher chained herself to my cannon for a week. She didn't get my recipe but she learned a lot about ballistics.'
'I haven't been hired by any foreigners and I've never met the bloke that lives here, I swear,' protested the hoodlum.
'You're not allowed to swear in this house,' said Michael. 'You'll get one less piece of chocolate at dinnertime if you do.'
'It's all right, Michael,' said Nanny Piggins. 'There are two types of swearing and one of them is okay.'
'Really?' asked Michael.
'Yes, really,' Nanny Piggins assured him. 'It's just another confusing thing about the English language, invented to baffle us all.'
'Why don't we pull off his balaclava,' suggested Derrick.
'He might bite,' warned Nanny Piggins. 'I know I would if I was wearing a balaclava and someone started tugging at it.'
'It's all right, I won't bite. I'd like it if you took it off because I'm getting a bit hot,' the hoodlum assured them.
'That'll serve you right for breaking into homes while wearing winter clothes in the height of summer,' said Nanny Piggins unsympathetically.
Nevertheless, Derrick tugged the hoodlum's balaclava off and they were all disappointed to discover that their hoodlum was not very impressive at all. He was about seventeen years old, skinny, and he had spots. To Nanny Piggins' mind a kidnapper should at least grow a moustache. That way they have something to twirl when they are laughing evilly over their wicked deeds.
'Just our luck,' bemoaned Nanny Piggins. 'We're not even attacked by a proper scary hoodlum. We're attacked by a juvenile spotty one.'
'I'm not a juvenile,' the hoodlum protested. 'I turn eighteen next month.'
'Mozart was the toast of Europe by the time he was eighteen. Something tells me you're not going to be,' said Nanny Piggins.
The children all stared at him. They were almost disappointed that their game of Murder in the Dark had been interrupted by someone so unimpressive.
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'If you weren't going to kidnap or murder anybody, what are you doing here?' asked Nanny Piggins.
'I've been watching this house for months. This was the first time all the lights were off. I thought there was nobody home or that the insomniac was cured. So I picked the lock and was just going to take a few things,' admitted the hoodlum.
The children all gasped in horror.
'But stealing is wrong,' said Michael. He was deeply shocked.
'I wasn't going to steal much. You rich people always have insurance. So I was just going to take a couple of valuable things,' explained the hoodlum.
'Like my bicycle?' asked a shocked Samantha.
'Or my new cricket bat?' asked a shocked Derrick.
'Or my ant farm?' asked a shocked Michael.
'Or my collection of romance novels?' asked a shocked Nanny Piggins.
'Nothing like that. I was just after cash or jewellery,' said the hoodlum.
'Is that all?! You should have just knocked on the front door and asked,' said Nanny Piggins, rolling her eyes. 'We could have told you we don't have any of that here.'
'You've got to. Every house has them,' argued the hoodlum.
'Not this house. Father doesn't approve of spending money or leaving money anywhere other than in a high-interest savings account,' explained Samantha. She had heard her father go on about this many, many times.
'Typical. I've never been able to pick them,' admitted the hoodlum.
'Pick what?' asked Derrick.
'Which house to rob by looking at the front garden,' said the hoodlum.
'You mean you've done this before!' exclaimed Nanny Piggins. Now she was really shocked.
'Maybe,' admitted the hoodlum cautiously.
'But you're so rotten at it, I assumed it was your first time,' declared Nanny Piggins.
'I'm not that bad. I got in all right, didn't I? Not just anybody can pick a lock,' he protested.
'Yes, but someone with a good deal more sense would have walked around to the back door and found that it was wide open,' said Nanny Piggins.
'I didn't think of that,' admitted the hoodlum and for the first time, he actually did look ashamed.
'So what are we going to do with him?' asked Derrick. This was an interesting question. It had not occurred to Nanny Piggins that she would get to 'do something' with her newfound hoodlum.
'I suppose we should hand him over to the police,' said Samantha. That was certainly what girl detectives always did in all the novels she had read. And Samantha would have quite liked to be a girl detective if it wasn't for all the violence and creeping into caves in the middle of the night.
'Hand him over to the police?' said Nanny Piggins, aghast at such a ridiculous suggestion. 'Why on earth would we do that?'
'That is what you're meant to do when you catch a criminal,' explained Derrick, 'so the authorities can punish him properly.'
'But that's just not fair!' protested Nanny Piggins. 'We caught him. We should get to do the punishment. Why should we let the proper authorities have all the fun?'
The children could see that Nanny Piggins had a very good point. And since she was meant to be the responsible adult, and she was paid to be in charge, they were not about to argue with her.
'You aren't going to beat me, are you?' asked the hoodlum, sounding genuinely worried. 'I know my rights,' he protested the way people always do when they know their rights are about to be violated.
'Don't worry, we're not going to beat you,' Nanny Piggins assured him with a wistful look on her face. Her mind was already churning over the possibilities. And it turned out that Nanny Piggins had a wonderful imaginative idea of what punishment should involve.
* * *
The first punishment Nanny Piggins came up with was forcing the hoodlum to go into the kitchen and bake a double-choc-chip-chocolate mud-cake with chocolate icing and chocolate sauce in the middle. To really teach him a lesson she made him make it from scratch, using actual flour and eggs, not a packet mix from the supermarket.
The hoodlum found this very arduous and difficult. It involved doing one of the things he personally enjoyed least in the world – reading. He had to read all the amounts from the recipe book and measure them out exactly, which he complained was just like being back at school and studying maths again. But Nanny Piggins had no mercy. She watched him like a hawk, making sure he followed the recipe to the letter. If you are going to eat a double-choc-chip-chocolate mud-cake with chocolate icing, it might as well be a really good double-choc-chip-chocolate mud-cake with chocolate icing.
By the time he had finished, the poor hoodlum was covered in flour and drenched in sweat. Beating butter into sugar is not as easy as it looks. It takes a surprising amount of upper body strength. But Nanny Piggins was not prepared to let him rest on his laurels. She had more punishments in mind.
Next she got him to sand back the wall in the bathroom and repaint the whole room entirely. She had been meaning to do this herself for weeks, ever since she accidentally set fire to the paintwork when she was having a candlelit bath. It had been a pain persuading Mr Green to go to work every morning without going to the toilet.
The hoodlum had never done any painting before and it seemed he was not very gifted at it. He kept bumping things, tripping over things and flicking specks of paint into his own eyes at crucial moments. By the time he was done, the walls were not the only thing covered in periwinkle blue paint – he was as well.
'Can I stop now please?' he begged. 'My arms hurt, I've banged my shin and I've got a headache from the paint fumes.'
'Of course you can stop painting,' said Nanny Piggins. 'As soon as you've finished the second coat.'
The hoodlum looked as if he was going to cry as he trudged back into the bathroom. The punishment did not stop there. Nanny Piggins came up with all sort of interesting chores for him. She made him chop wood. And not just from big logs into smaller logs. She made him climb over into Mrs McGill's garden (Mrs McGill was a nasty old lady who never gave a ball back if you accidentally hit it into her yard) and cut down her tree. She also made him re-tile the roof, catch every cockroach in the basement, prune Mr Green's rose bushes, re-wire all the lights, learn to dance the tango, mow the lawn, unblock the kitchen sink, hand sew five thousand sequins onto an evening dress and vacuum the house.
Then Nanny Piggins made the hoodlum do the most awful job of all. She made him do all the children's French homework. He begged to be allowed to go back to handwashing Mr Green's smelly socks but Nanny Piggins was very strict with him. He was not going anywhere until he conjugated all the verbs.
And so, as the sun started to peek above the horizon in the early hours of the morning, the house was beautifully clean and painted, the children's homework was done and they all sat around the kitchen table eating chocolate mud-cake. Everyone, especially the hoodlum, agreed that he had been thoroughly punished.
'You certainly know how to put a young man off a life of crime, Nanny Piggins. I'm going to have dishpan hands for a month,' said the hoodlum sadly as he looked at his chafed and blistered fingers.
'I hope you've learned your lesson. You should never ever break into a house and steal things. Because you never know when you might be attacked by a flying pig,' said Nanny Piggins.
'You've got that right. I've learned my lesson,' the hoodlum assured her. 'I'm going straight now.'
'Straight where?' asked Michael.
'I mean, I've gone off a life of crime and I'm going to get a proper job,' explained the hoodlum.
'Doing what?' asked Samantha, not believing that anyone in their right mind would actually pay the hoodlum to come into an office wearing a suit and tie and do paperwork like her father.