by Lauren Child
He took a deep breath.
He must not fall.
Chapter 25.
RUBY WAS TO ARRIVE WITH HER PARENTS, just like she was one of the invited guests, which indeed she was. Despite declaring that the event sounded like a total yawn, Ruby was kind of eager to go, stake-out or no stake-out – the thing was she had always been into perfume and scents. She had a sizeable collection of fragrances and those who knew her well could identify her by the perfume that lingered after she had left a room, usually a wake of wild rose and bubblegum.
Ruby had made sure the fly surveillance ring was firmly jammed on her finger before getting ready. Ruby didn’t wear a lot of jewellery, it wasn’t really her thing, but the fly ring was different. For a start, it wasn’t purely decorative, and for seconds, well, it was a little bit unexpected, edgy and dark.
She had made an effort with her appearance and had ditched her jeans and T-shirt (emblazoned with the words you’re so dull I have a headache) for a vintage red and black A-line dress with a round collar and deep pockets. Her mother was pleased even though the garment smelled strongly of mothballs.
‘You really clean up well, you know that Ruby?’ Then she caught sight of the Bradley Baker sneakers.
‘Honey, are sneakers really the best footwear with that ensemble?’
‘I think it works,’ said Ruby.
Her mother just looked at her, her hands on her hips – she meant business. Brant made a face at Ruby which suggested he was not going to back his daughter up and it was unlikely to be a fight she was going to win. So reluctantly she dragged herself upstairs to find some alternative shoes.
She chose the sparkly red clogs her mother had bought for her back in April, the same red clogs that she had used as a weapon at the museum launch; the throwing of them had preventing an important statue from being stolen by an undesirable man (this explained why a chunk of wood was missing from the sole of one shoe). The undesirable man was criminal mastermind and murderer Count von Viscount.* The main thing tonight was that the clogs looked good and Sabina was content and off Ruby’s case.
Finally, Ruby picked up the last gadget Spectrum had given her. It was a tiny earpiece, which would allow them to record her conversations and speak to her if they needed to give her instructions.
She placed it in her ear and walked downstairs.
Hitch drove the Redforts to the department store, newly restored to its former 1920s glory. It was an elegant art deco building with carved stone detail and impressive gilt and glass doors. The Italian marble floor gleamed and the huge chandeliers sparkled and all the guests looked kind of delighted with themselves as they floated round the shop, peering into the fabulous curved glass counters, sipping cocktails of all varieties.
The Lost Perfume of Marie Antoinette 1770 was displayed on a Louis XVI table, ornate and a tad vulgar. The perfume bottle was neither ornate nor vulgar, however: it was an object of simple beauty, like the fragrance it contained – at least this was what the label claimed.
All the guests oohed and aahed when they caught a drift of the scent: jasmine and rose petals, and several other unspecified ingredients ‘playfully tumbling together to create in fragrance form a portrait of a young Austrian woman picking up her skirts and running through a French flower garden’. Or so the label said.
Ruby thought the perfume was OK. Despite her cold, she could actually smell it, so that was something. She helped herself to a squirt and dabbed it onto her neck. OK, it was nice, but it really wasn’t worth all this fuss.
Next to the perfume table in a large glass display cabinet were Marie Antoinette’s jewels.
‘Remarkable,’ uttered Brant. ‘What my pa would give to put these jewels under the hammer.’
The security man eyed him suspiciously.
‘Auctioneer’s hammer,’ explained Brant hastily. ‘My pa was an expert in fine antique jewellery.’
‘Talking of which, aren’t those gorgeous!’ Sabina was pointing at the Katayoun & Anahita collection, antique Persian art deco jewellery designed especially for the launch of Melrose Dorff in 1927. Ruby glanced at them; no one seemed aware that any of the jewellery had mysteriously gone missing.
Like most of the guests, Sabina found herself drifting towards them, mouth open and eyes wide with wonder.
Ruby tagged along with her parents and while they talked she listened to the murmurings of the crowd, followed their enchanted gazes and watched their excited gestures.
She saw nothing suspicious at all.
Finally, the announcement came: the mayor’s wife stood on the department store grand staircase and revealed Twinford’s plans to host the Gem Festival in February. It was very much an open secret since the planning had been going on for at least a year and a half, but this didn’t stop everyone congratulating themselves for living in the city that hosted the mostest.
And then it was the turn of Madame Swann, the creator of Let Them Smell Roses: The Lost Perfume of Marie Antoinette 1770, to speak. She took to the floor with great aplomb, her heavy French accent stealing the show from the mayor’s wife, who was no speechmaker.
Madame Swann was tiny, dramatically so. The drama was mainly generated by a dead thing, a mink possibly, which crept round her neck and trailed down her tiny back so its lifeless claws almost tiptoed on the floor. On her head was a bird of some kind, again dead and attached to a perky hat. The shoes she wore were blue silk and encrusted with gems, the soles perched on precariously high heels, but still she was smaller than all the other guests, except perhaps for Ruby. Ruby was unusually small for her age – though she had every intention of growing taller than Madame Swann.
On Madame Swann’s left hand was a ring that coiled round one of her small sturdy fingers, a golden dragon with piercing blue eyes. Ruby noticed that when Madame Swann caressed its head it puffed a cloud of fragrant smoke from its nostrils.
‘Musk,’ she declared when she passed the Redforts after her brief speech. ‘I am a slave to that scent.’ Her voice – a raspy French cliché – added to her theatricality.
‘That’s some ring,’ said Brant. ‘My wife would get a big kick out of that; where did you buy it?’
‘Oh, this ring cannot be bought,’ replied Madame Swann, smiling to reveal slightly greying teeth. ‘This ring was designed by the Hatami sisters many years ago and it is one of a kind: no other ring exists like this one.’
‘Isn’t that always the way?’ said Brant. ‘The best things always are one of a kind.’ Brant turned to see Sabina now at his side. ‘Just like my beautiful wife,’ he said. ‘She’s an original. When they made her, they broke the mould.’
‘Thank you honey,’ cooed Sabina. She kissed him on the nose.
Madame Swann smiled hard – she was trying to convey a charmed delight in these rich-looking people with their fat wallets, but frankly she was struggling.
‘My wife and I adore your perfumes,’ said Brant, picking up one of the elegant Let Them Smell Roses bottles and giving it a long sniff.
Madame Swann battled to retain her distorted grin.
‘I’m forgetting my manners,’ said Brant, extending his hand. ‘Brant and Sabina Redfort.’
Madame Swann’s smile perked up considerably.
‘Oh là là Monsieur and Madame Redfort, what a great pleasure to meet you!’ And of course she meant it. Monsieur and Madame Redfort were, after all, two of the most influential socialites in town.
‘You must come and visit me in my hideaway. I am renting the most beautiful little maison in the middle of the pine forest on the edge of the lake. I have to be in nature – my nose cannot manage the pollution of the big city.’
Further conversation revealed that the ‘little maison’ of which she spoke was in fact Still Water, Arno Fredricksonn’s most famous private building. Designed just before he built the Redforts’ home, Green-wood House, Still Water was a triumph of modern architecture; a house suspended over a lake so it ‘fused effortlessly with the tranquil landscape’, or so the jou
rnals claimed.
Ruby couldn’t see anything particularly unusual about the evening. It was the standard meet and greet and mingle deal. Lots of influential Twinford folk, the press of course, and a few lucky hangers-on who had managed to somehow get their hands on an invitation.
If one was being entirely truthful, Madame Swann’s elegantly bottled fragrance was somewhat outdone by the staggering blue of the Katayoun & Anahita jewels artistically displayed on disembodied velvet hands and slender velvet necks. Every mirror in the store seemed to reflect back these dazzling blue gems and it was impossible for the guests not to be lured away from the lost perfume of Marie Antoinette and gape in awe at the Persian collection.
However, though there was much interest in these stunning pieces, no one seemed ‘suspiciously’ interested and nothing happened to cause any of the security team any sleepless nights.
The stake-out was fun up to a point, but, as the evening wore on, the time began to drag a little. Ruby had taken as many furtive photographs as it seemed worth taking and was by now a little weary from both flu and foot-ache, so sat down on an overstuffed velvet stool. She idly picked up a feather that had no doubt fluttered off some lady’s expensive blue boa and started stroking her face with it. She had almost sent herself off into a trance-like state when she heard a loud hiss in her ear.
‘Little girl! Will you get with the programme!’
The shock of the voice in her ear caused her to topple from the plump purple seat and land in a slightly undignified sprawl on the marble floor.
‘Jeepers Redfort, you’re acting like you’re about thirteen years old. . . oh, my mistake, you’re just acting your age.’
The voice was Agent Froghorn’s, often referred to as the Silent G because the G in his name was not pronounced, making the sound Fro instead of Frog. Ruby rarely bothered herself with this detail. Ruby’s mispronunciation of his name was one of the reasons the Silent G disliked her so much – there were many others.
Not that Ruby cared one little bit: she considered Froghorn a potato head and, though he might have scored high on the Spectrum test and though they regarded him as a highly intelligent agent, to Ruby he would always be a dummy, and she really couldn’t see that changing; once a potato head, always a potato head. As far as she was concerned, Froghorn was one of the stupidest clever people she had ever met and if she never heard his voice again it would be too soon.
So of course it had to be him at the other end of the earpiece.
‘What’s that you have in your hand and why are you rubbing it on your face?’
Ruby stuffed the feather into her pocket – she didn’t need him to see that, it would make his day. By the time she had got to her feet, it was a little late for a smart reply. She was pretty mad at herself. Nice going Ruby.
One thing of interest did occur. The evening had a surprise ending when, just as Madame Swann took to the floor to thank everyone for coming to her ‘little soirée’, she turned white as a ghost, uttered a shrill ‘Non!‘ and suddenly and quite unexpectedly collapsed.
Ruby, little camera clicking away, scanned the faces of the guests and checked the display counters to see what could have caused such a reaction. No explanation was given by Madame Swann, and the guests left in a muddle of uneasy chatter.
So a Frenchwoman had fainted – big deal. Nothing of any importance had been uncovered so it was hardly going to convince LB that Ruby Redfort was some kind of crack Spectrum agent.
Lorelei
unlocked the door
to the warehouse. . .
. . .and her eyes immediately fell on the vacant chair. She stepped in a circle around it as if she expected the man to magically reappear. But the words abracadabra would not suffice to bring him back.
She called out and Eduardo came running. ‘What is it?’ he shouted.
‘He’s gone,’ she said, her voice steady and hushed, not betraying the panic she felt. But her heels tip-tapped and Lorelei reached for her bottle of perfume, wafting Turkish delight into the air to calm her nerves.
Chapter 26.
RUBY’S MOTHER WAS ALREADY ON THE TELEPHONE by the time Ruby walked in to grab some breakfast. It was evidently not her first phone call of the day.
‘As I was just saying to Grace, it was quite an evening what with Madame Swann hitting the deck and all. . . The fragrance was divine of course, but rather old school if you know what I’m saying. I guess very 1770s. . .’ She laughed. ‘For my money, I prefer the Scent Lab counter, you know where they mix all the perfumes for you there and then, so much fresher, more you know, pure. . . modern yet traditional, yet sort of now.’ She nodded. ‘I agree. . . I agree Barbara. . .’ She began to laugh. ‘You just keep on spraying yourself with room freshener. . .’ she could barely catch her breath ‘. . .I agree, who’s to know the difference! Uh huh, uh huh, well, the Katayoun & Anahita jewels really stole the night. . . I know, I know, I’m telling you Barbara, you should get Ed to buy you a pair of those earrings. . . well, tell him to sell the car!’ She doubled up laughing again. ‘Well, the house then!’
Ruby poured herself some Choco Puffles and did the quiz on the back of the packet.
She had figured all the answers out by the time her mom put down the phone and called out:
‘Ruby, you know that pig I saw? I’m ninety-nine per cent certain it was a hippo.’
RUBY: ‘I’m not sure what to say.’
SABINA: ‘It was running pretty fast.’
RUBY: ‘Maybe it’s in training.’
SABINA: ‘Mock me all you want Ruby, but you won’t laugh so much when you find it in the lap pool, possibly doing its business.’
RUBY: ‘So long as it brings its own beach towel I’m not judging.’
Brant Redfort walked in.
RUBY: ‘So Dad, did you hear the news? We’re gonna be sharing the pool with a hippo.’
BRANT: ‘Ruby, I don’t much care for it when you describepeople that way.’
RUBY: ‘No, an actual hippo, as in potamus.’
Brant looked confused. ‘I think I missed a part of this conversation.’
RUBY: ‘Mom, do you wanna fill him in?’
BRANT: ‘Interesting as that surely would be, I need to getto the office.’
RUBY: ‘Me too.’
She grabbed her satchel and headed out into the heat of the morning. As she caught the school bus, she thought about the Madame Swann swoon: was it caused by the heat or a few too many cocktails or was it simply Madame Swann getting all melodramatic? When she arrived at school, she told Red about it.
‘Could it have been, you know, for publicity or something like that?’ said Red. ‘My mom says a lotta celebrity types do a lotta dumb things to get their names in the papers.’
Red’s mother was a costume designer for the movies and so had ‘seen it all’ – as Mrs Digby would say. It wasn’t such a dumb idea. Madame Swann did seem like a person who would be happy to grab the attention any way she could, especially if it looked like the eyes of her guests were wandering in the direction of the famous Persian jewels.
Ruby went to find Clancy who was standing by his locker, trying to close the door before everything he had stuffed in there pushed its way back out.
‘You look like you got a lot on your mind; anything exciting going on?’ he asked.
‘Ah, you know, just the usual,’ said Ruby, yawning. ‘Staking out the city department store, trying to spot a cat burglar, and chatting to my mom about how to pin down a hippo.’
‘What?’ Clancy’s face was all scrunched up; he had skipped breakfast and he felt his brain wasn’t working so well. Clancy was one of those kids who burned energy really fast; without food, he sort of stopped functioning. He didn’t push through and stagger on, he simply conked out. Mouse could go hours without food, days even, she lived on air, but Clancy, well, Clancy was a different kid.
‘How did the stake-out go?’ he asked.
‘Uneventful,’ said Ruby.
‘Oh,’ said Clancy
. ‘Shame.’
He stood for a moment, looking a little glazed.
‘So,’ he said finally, ‘what’s with the hippo?’
Ruby had an unfortunate biology lesson; she had forgoten to do her homework assignment and, without even having read what the assignment was about, she was hard pressed to convince anyone that she had done it, but unfortunately left it at home.
Ruby was rarely in trouble for this sort of thing and it was somehow humiliating to be taking a detention for what she would consider a situation easily avoided. To rub salt into the wound this run-in with Mrs Greg was followed by a run-in with Vapona Begwell who obviously had witnessed Ruby going into the toddler park play area the other day.
‘So what is it with you Little Redridingfort, you regressing or something?’
‘What’s your problem Bugwart?’
‘I saw you crawling inside the caterpillar tubes and don’t pretend you got a little squirt sister or something because I know you don’t.’
‘I didn’t know you took such an interest in my family situation.’
‘So you were just crawling about in there like a duh brain,’ sneered Vapona. ‘It doesn’t surprise me.’
‘Ever heard of snakes Bugwart? The boa constrictor kind?
Ever seen what a python can do to a toddler?’
‘Don’t make me puke laughing Redfort, there’s no way you’re gonna get me to believe you saw a python go into the caterpillar tubes and there’s even less of a chance you’re gonna convince me you went in there after it.’
‘I got no interest whether you believe it or not,’ said Ruby. ‘All I’m asking is that you get your big nose out a my business.’
‘Redfort, you’re full of it!’ jeered Vapona.
Ruby was a little late home since she had the after-school task of writing a 5000-word essay on the importance of Mrs Greg’s biology assignments; she’d had a tough time trying to think what to write.