Catch Your Death

by Lauren Child

  OK, thought Clancy, I’m in the back of a truck going who knows where, what’s my next move?

  Clancy was thinking about Despo from Crazy Cops, a show he and Ruby loved to sit in front of every Saturday night. Despite the stupid name, Crazy Cops wasn’t a stupid show and Despo, despite his failed relationships and dependency on black coffee, was a pretty good detective. Clancy was fairly sure that Despo would stay stock-still, cool as a cucumber, until the answer came to him. He knew Ruby would.

  So that’s what Clancy did.

  All the time they drove, Clancy was thinking. The kind of thoughts he had were the following:

  These guys were pretty confident and they were in one heck of a hurry. If they weren’t, then they would have thought to tie his hands. Perhaps they didn’t feel they needed to – what was this weedy kid going to do out here in the middle of nowhere if he did escape?

  The fall from the moving car would probably kill him.

  By the time they reached the forest’s edge, Clancy was beginning to feel a little queasy, a combination of the bumpy track, travelling backwards and the fear of death. His mouth was so dry, he put his hand in his pocket to find a piece of gum, but instead he felt the ground glow dispenser, a neat, palm-sized tube. One click and a ground glow was released and dropped invisibly to the ground.

  Clancy did exactly what he knew Detective Despo would do.

  ‘I think I’m gonna throw up,’ he moaned.

  ‘Not in here you’re not buster!’ shouted the driver.

  ‘We’re not stopping,’ said the one in charge. ‘Wind the window down and stick your head out.’

  ‘Can I at least face forward?’ asked Clancy in such a pathetic-sounding voice that no one would imagine he had any kind of plan up his sweat top, other than puking.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said the man with the gun, ‘but no funny stuff.’

  ‘And no puke in my vehicle,’ said the driver.

  Clancy switched seats, wound down the window and stuck his head out, at the same time he pulled his hand from his pocket; the ground glow canister was concealed in his palm. From behind it simply looked as if he was using his arm to steady himself. No one saw him release the glows, one every several yards. They fell small and invisible onto the parched ground.

  Ruby was staring at the broken code.

  ‘Who would be capable of creating these messages?’ she said.

  ‘Any skilled perfumer could create them; any skilled perfumer could decipher the scents,’ replied Madame Swann. ‘The question is not who is capable, but who would use fragrance to convey such dark desires, issue such dreadful orders?’

  ‘And who would make perfume their code?’ mused Ruby.

  ‘I can think of one,’ said Madame Swann slowly.

  ‘You can?’ said Ruby.

  Madame Swann nodded. ‘That night at the 1770 launch. . .’ She twisted the dragon ring coiled round her finger before continuing. ‘That night I smelled a fragrance I haven’t smelled in a long, long time.’

  ‘A perfume?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘A perfume I created many years ago.’

  Ruby shrugged. ‘So?’

  ‘Only one person in the entire world has that perfume; it is very particular – and once it combines with the wearer’s natural skin smell it becomes unique. I would know that fragrance anywhere.’

  ‘Who does it belong to?’ asked Ruby.

  But it was as if the very utterance of the name would cause the poison odour to drift into the air and contaminate everything like a genie escaping from its bottle. Instead of answering this question, Madame Swann said, ‘I gave it to her, as a gift for her work in my perfumery. She was a gifted student: so young, but with such an excellent nose, she became my apprentice. ‘

  Ruby waited for her to continue.

  ‘This girl, she turned out to have a very dark heart. In the end I banished her from my lab and when she left I hoped I had seen the last of her. . . but now she has come back to destroy me.’

  ‘Destroy you? How?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘By killing my reputation.’ She left a long pause before adding, ‘She is blackmailing me you see.’

  ‘With what?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘She knows a secret no one in this whole world knows, a secret that if spilled would mean no one would ever trust me again. It would stain my reputation and wash away the thing I love most.’

  And suddenly Ruby saw everything. ‘The Lost Perfume of Marie Antoinette. . .?’

  ‘All fake,’ said Madame Swann. ‘The formula I paid so much for turned out to be a forgery.’

  ‘How did your apprentice know?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘Because she was the one who forged it.’

  The truck lurched and Clancy lost his grip on the ground glows and that was that. Darn it, he thought. What was the point now? A big risk and for what?

  He would just need to remember everything he could see from this point on, look for every possible landmark, anything that could identify his path. Not easy when one is in a dense forest. One pine looked a whole lot like another. But he needn’t have worried since the guy with the gun suddenly said, ‘Maybe we should think about blindfolding the kid.’ And seconds later he was plunged into darkness.

  ‘What exactly did your apprentice want in return for keeping her mouth shut?’ Ruby asked.

  ‘She wanted me to tell her how to extract the scent from the Cyan wolf.’ Madame Swann put her head in her hands. A single tear spilled from her eye, rolling down her check onto her ring so that the golden dragon appeared to be sharing her grief.

  ‘You told her?’ said Ruby.

  Madame Swann barely nodded. ‘She wanted one vial; enough to create a thousand bottles of the rarest of perfumes, she will become unimaginably rich. No one could resist such a fragrance.’

  Suddenly it was all clear to Ruby. The messages, the wild animals roaming the streets of Twinford, the Fengrove zoo. Someone had released all those creatures just as cover. As camouflage, for stealing the Cyan wolf and getting their hands on its scent.

  What about the zookeeper? she wondered. Ivan, what had happened to him? Her best guess was that he’d been paid off, bribed to release the animals and hand the Cyan wolf over to Madame Swann’s blackmailer. It would seem he had been paid well for this service if the gold watch was anything to go by, but had he double-crossed her, changed his mind?

  ‘What will happen to the wolf?’ asked Ruby, her eyes full of questions.

  ‘One vial quickly taken is risky for the animal; if she extracts too much, it will die.’

  ‘So you still haven’t told me what her name is. Your assistant I mean.’

  ‘Lorelei von Leyden,’ said Madame Swann with a shiver.

  ‘I’ve never heard of her,’ said Ruby.

  ‘That does not surprise me,’ said Madame Swann. ‘She goes by many names.’

  ‘And you think Lorelei sent these messages?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Madame Swann. ‘It’s not her voice. She would never use a term of endearment like sweetie, not even to be patronising or cruel. No, I think she was the recipient. It was her apartment you were in, but they were sent by someone more powerful than her.’

  So someone else wants the scent of the Cyan wolf, thought Ruby.

  ‘Find Lorelei,’ said Madame Swann, ‘and perhaps you will find the real threat to this beautiful creature.’

  Ruby took the launch-night photograph from her satchel and handed it to Madame Swann. It was the picture Ruby had snapped just one second after Madame Swann’s collapse. A jumble of colourful evening gowns and manicured hands holding glasses, perfect faces turned towards the steps as they watched their host fall to the floor.

  ‘Do you see her here?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Madame Swann.

  ‘But you barely even looked.’

  ‘I don’t need to, I won’t see her there: disguise is her genius. You never see her unless she wants you to; her scent is what will betray her.’

  ‘And what is her scent
?’ said Ruby.

  Madame Swann glanced down at her dragon ring and hissed, ‘The scent of Turkish delight.’

  Chapter 57.

  THE WAY HOME WAS MUCH EASIER – Madame Swann pointed Ruby towards the woodland track – and much, much quicker. Even so, by the time Twinford was coming into view, the sun was beginning to sink in the sky and, as Ruby reached the bike park at Fir Edge, she was feeling pretty weary and certainly relieved that she was nearly home. She’d taken the short cut from the lake through the forest that skirted the mountain. It was quicker for sure, but it was hard work to cycle since there was no actual road.

  When she got home, she would pass the deciphered codes onto Hitch. She knew he would be waiting for her at the house because he would want to brief her on the survival test. LB was such a hard case that she would doubtless expect Ruby to take the test regardless of the fact that she’d cracked a code and uncovered a plot to steal a creature on the very edge of extinction. A plot that no one, including Spectrum, was even aware of. Whether her discovery would actually prevent the criminals from succeeding was an unknown, but that was Spectrum’s problem, not hers.

  Poor Clance, she thought. He was going to have to endure Camp Wichitino after all.

  As soon as she reached the bike park, Bug stopped still in his tracks and began to sniff the air.

  ‘Come on Bug,’ she moaned, ‘we don’t have time for chasing raccoons. We gotta go.’

  But the husky wasn’t listening. He zigzagged back and forth across the path, checking out every bench, letting the smell he had picked up lead him. He paused by a tree with branches that hung low, nosing around in the bushes behind it, and then barked and barked and wouldn’t stop.

  ‘What have you got there?’ called Ruby. The dog didn’t turn his head, he just continued to bark.

  ‘You found something?’ said Ruby, cautiously stepping towards the thick bushes, pushing aside the tangle of branches.

  It looked like it had been thrown in because it was all caught up in the undergrowth, suspended in the twisting briars. It was a little kid’s bike with a tiny pink basket.

  The blood in Ruby’s veins seemed suddenly very cold, for the bike was one she recognised well. It was Olive’s and the last person seen riding it was Clancy Crew.

  He could hear feet on the earth pacing round and round, like a horse might pace, but not so heavy. This animal didn’t have hooves, it sounded more like a dog. He wondered to himself what kind of dog was it. He liked dogs, depending on the breed; he liked the small ones best, and the well-trained ones. He felt woozy, like he had been drugged, and he was disorientated. What had happened earlier? Was it last night or last week? He had no way of knowing.

  He shut his eyes.

  Ruby stood in the bike park, staring into the distance, but she wasn’t looking, she was thinking and what she was thinking about were shoes.

  Niles Lemon, her father, the man in the canal, the guy Clancy had seen collapsed under the tree. They all had shoes in common, expensive shoes. When he’d got the call, Hitch had specifically said deck shoes. If the guy he had seen pulled out of the canal was wearing Marco Perella deck shoes, then she would know almost for certain.

  She would be as sure as she could be, without actually knowing, that the dead guy in the canal was the zookeeper, and that this same zookeeper was the guy who Clancy had seen slumped by a tree, and that Clancy had been a witness to his murder – or more accurately had witnessed his murderers moving his already dead or nearly dead body. The woman who had claimed to be the man’s neighbour and friend was neither: she was Lorelei von Leyden, killer. And she would kill again; she would kill Clancy because he knew too much. There was no time to lose, there was no time to go back to find Hitch, there was no time to take a survival test.

  ‘Which way did they go? Where did they take Clancy?’ asked Ruby. She was talking to herself, to the dog, to birds, to the rocks and trees, but Bug seemed to understand. He headed off down the path into the trees and beyond to the desert.

  As they raced across the valley, Ruby’s hopes began to rise. She saw the bicycle tracks: had he got away? If he had, he would have tried to make it to the Boulder Valley caves, then she knew he would be safe. No one knew those caves like Clancy did. Up ahead she could see something shimmering in the desert heat, discarded, abandoned in the middle of nowhere. What was it? As she got nearer, it began to come into focus. She could see it was blue, she could see it was metal and she could see it was a bike: not any bike, a Windrush 2000.

  Clancy woke up to

  the smell of Turkish

  delight. . .

  . . .And, for just a moment, he forgot he was tied up and locked inside a stranger’s outbuilding. The smell was so sweet, so restful, but then he heard the cut-glass voice of the perfume assistant and it all came back to him – he was glad of the blindfold. He didn’t want to look into her cold blue eyes.

  ‘So what were you doing in my apartment?’ she demanded.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ stammered Clancy. ‘How could I have been in your apartment? I don’t even know where you live.’

  ‘You were there, I smelled your bubblegum.’

  ‘But I don’t even like bubblegum.’

  ‘Really?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, really, so tell me why would I be in your apartment when I have no idea where you live, chewing bubblegum which I don’t like?’ said Clancy. He was a little irritated by now; whatever they had drugged him with had robbed him of his inhibition and had made him decidedly crabby.

  The woman who called herself Lorelei reached into his sweat-top pocket and pulled out the Hubble-Yum. ‘Have it your own way, but I find it strange that you would have bubblegum about your person if, as you say, you don’t even like it.’ She was turning to go, ready to let him stew for a while, admit defeat and spill the beans.

  ‘Would you listen to me? You’ve got the wrong sucker here. This isn’t even my gum. I found it in my sister’s bicycle basket. It belongs to Ruby Red—’

  Lorelei stopped, her hand on the door handle, and turned. ‘You were saying?’ she said.

  She came over and pulled the blindfold from his eyes.

  Clancy looked at her, knowing that everything had changed.

  ‘And who is Ruby Red?’ she said. ‘And where can we find her?’

  But Clancy said not another word.

  Chapter 58.

  THE ABANDONED WINDRUSH WAS NOW WAY BEHIND HER. Ruby had crossed the desert valley and was now cycling up the forest track. It was getting dark and as Ruby rode she saw tiny glow-worms light up their lights. Bug was ahead of her and nosing the route. They had travelled about a quarter-mile when Ruby checked behind to see if she was being followed. The tiny illuminators had disappeared and suddenly Ruby realised her mistake; she had Forgotten all about the activator, still at attached to her Bradley Baker sneaker – these were no glow-worms, these were ground glows and the only person who could have dropped them was Clancy Crew.

  She rode back, collecting each glow, and slipped them into her saddlebag – her gut told her that she might need them. Looking back at the distant Twinford lights, she took her notebook from her satchel and scribbled a message to Hitch.

  GO SPEAK TO MADAME SWANN, SHE WILL EXPLAIN – DON’T DELAY

  Then she slipped it into the canister attached to Bug’s collar and told him to head for home. The dog looked at Ruby, his eyes telling her that he thought this a bad idea – that he did not want to leave her out here in the middle of nowhere. But he also recognised that look in Ruby’s eyes, the one that told him her mind was set.

  He sniffed her face and gave her cheek a lick before turning and setting off for Twinford at surprising speed. Only when he was about to disappear down into the valley of rocks did he stop, turning just once to see where she was. The husky was silhouetted against the moon like some classic wolf image on a tacky poster. Ruby did not turn; she was concentrating hard on the trail, hopeful that the ground glows would not run out before she made it t
o the place where Clancy was held. How would she find him otherwise? Almost at the same moment that she thought this thought, the ground glows disappeared.

  The trail was gone.

  ‘Ah, kill him – he’s no earthly good to us,’ said Eduardo. ‘He knows nothing. Shoot him and feed him to the wolf: two birds with one stone. One less boy, one less hungry animal.’

  ‘Do you want to come?’ asked the man with the gun.

  ‘No,’ said Eduardo, ‘I can’t deal with the whole chewing thing, it really puts me off my food. I’m a vegetarian.’

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Lorelei, holding up her hand. ‘Before you get all carried away throwing the wretch to the wolves, don’t you think we ought to consider his usefulness?’

  ‘That scrawny kid? Useful?’ said the man his hand on the gun holster like he couldn’t wait to wrap his finger round the trigger.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be wondering who this girl is, this Ruby Red? She must be more than just any girl: she broke into my apartment, she was sniffing around, like she was some little detective, some little Nancy Drew. It wouldn’t surprise me if she was working for Madwoman Swann. No, something smells fishy here, a little off. If I’m right, then we need to track the little spy down. Get the boy to talk. Find out where she lives.’

  ‘How are you gonna do that?’ asked Eduardo. ‘Torture?’

  Lorelei shook her head and laughed. ‘Torture? Have you seen the little squirt? He’ll be crying for his mommy in no time; he’ll tell us what we want to know soon enough.’

  But Lorelei von Leyden had no idea who she was dealing with. Clancy Crew would die a thousand deaths before he gave up even one syllable of Ruby Redfort’s address.

  Mistake one: underestimating the resolve of a very loyal friend.

  ‘Do you want a guard on the boy?’ asked the trigger-happy fellow.