Vote at Toad Hall

by Eddie Saint

  ‘So, this clever operation of yours. How… legit is it?’

  Pincer cut him short.

  ‘Now, little buddy, I’m going to stop you right there.’ He handed Stoat a glass of water and leaned up against the front of his desk.

  ‘Basically, I’m here to help you win, right? If that is what you want then happy days, because that is what you’ll get. However, there are some folks who… well, let me put it another way, are you wearing a wire?’ He squared up to Stoat and looked him straight in the eyes. ‘Anyone who comes here to see how well-oiled my machine is, well… they’re very welcome. Very welcome. Everything above board here, if that is what your hidden camera is hoping to catch.’

  Stoat was suddenly taken aback. He was absolutely convinced that he was on the side of animals that bent the laws and tried to get away with it. There was no way that he was ever going to be a mole.

  ‘Mr Pincer, I d-d-don’t know what you mean,’ he stuttered.

  His overriding feeling was that he might have come so close to seeing Pincer’s inner circle and then not quite get over the line. At that moment he would have given anything to have a magic pass that would convince Pincer he was exactly who he said he was: a semi-successful business-Stoat with a keen desire to take the Wild Wood out of the LEAF League so he could make some of his moderately profitable financial dealings a bit more lucrative. He accepted that he wasn’t ever going to re-write the rule book on how to get rich quick, but he did appreciate his good fortune at having found himself in such an influential position.

  Pincer gave Stoat a firm pat down, from his toes to the top of his head, before staring him straight in the eyes again.

  ‘Oh Mr Stoat,’ he said, in a disappointed tone. ‘You have a little secret you have been hiding from me.’ He grasped Stoat’s cheeks in his large paws and held them firmly. Stoat gulped, the panic as clear as day in his eyes.

  ‘No, no, no, I have no secrets. Ask Weasel,’ he pleaded, desperately. ‘I am rubbish at keeping secrets. If you have a secret, then tell me last. Honestly. Or don’t tell me at all. I am THE worst person at keeping a secret.’

  Pincer squeezed Stoat’s cheeks just a little tighter and stared deep into his eyes.

  ‘Do you know, Mr Stoat,’ he said, never losing eye contact, ‘I believe you!’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness for that!’ said Stoat, relieved, but still a little perturbed that Pincer still had his head in a firm grip. ‘I thought that you thought that I was a mole… which I obviously am not!’ he added, for clarity.

  Pincer kept the direct eye contact a little longer.

  ‘I hadn’t finished,’ he said, with dark menace.

  ‘You… er… whaa…?’ said Stoat, as eloquently as ever.

  With the same menacing tone Pincer said, ‘I believe you…’

  Stoat gulped. He had always been a good Stoat. Well, not a good Stoat, but he had always tried to help those who had helped him, and had never knowingly defaulted on a debt (unless it was a government loan, in which case it was fair game, surely?). He looked back at the American Bulldog, resigned to meet his fate, whatever that might turn out to be.

  ‘I believe you have been keeping a secret from me. I believe you… want to see my favourite magic trick!’

  Stoat wasn’t sure which of ‘relief’ and ‘horror’ was the more helpful response. He opted for an ineloquent grunt, which coincidentally turned out to be the only noise he could still make with Pincer holding his jaw firmly in his mighty paws.

  Not for the first time that day Stoat suddenly felt that his personal wheel of fortune had landed on a winning number. Pincer released his head with an innocent grin and whirled away behind the desk, only to lean across it with a full deck of cards in his paw.

  ‘First, we need a wager. Shall we say a tenner each, in the kitty? If I guess your card, I win. If not, the money’s yours. OK?’ Pincer put a crisp tenner in the middle of the table. Stoat pulled out his wallet and added a note of his own.

  ‘Now,’ said Pincer. ‘Pick a card, any card.’

  The befuddled Stoat did as he was commanded, no longer sure what was going on. Or even what day it was, but relieved at least that his head was no longer captive between a predator’s paws. He took a card from the offered deck.

  ‘Ok, don’t tell me what it is. Have a look at it. Memorise it. Then place it face down on the desk.’

  Stoat looked at his card, made a mental note of the six of spades, and slid it onto the glass desktop between them. Then he sat back patiently in his comfortable armchair and waited for the trick to unfold. Pincer was right. He did like a good card trick.

  Pincer gave Stoat the rest of the deck and asked him to arrange the cards in alternate red black order. Suits didn’t matter. Just red then black. Stoat did as he was told, but while he was busy doing so he saw Pincer get off his chair, crouch under the desk and have a look at the face-down card through the glass top. Then he resumed his seat, with a satisfied grin on his face.

  ‘Right, that’s probably enough fiddling with the deck. Now, pick up your card, put it anywhere in the deck and shuffle.’

  Stoat wasn’t sure what to say. He’d seen Pincer cheat, despite being distracted with rearranging the deck. He decided to play along until the end. Maybe there was a twist…?

  Pincer took the deck and started dealing out cards face up until he came to the six of spades.

  ‘Was this your card?’ he asked with a flourish.

  Stoat nodded meekly and Pincer grabbed the two tenners with delight.

  Despite the hero status that Stoat had recently elevated Pincer to in his mind, he still stared at him blankly, unsure how to raise the key factor on which the success of the ‘trick’ had turned.

  Pincer wore a disappointed face. ‘What’s up? Didn’t you like my trick?’

  ‘You cheated,’ Stoat braved. Money was money after all.

  ‘Did I?’ asked Pincer, his face a picture of innocence.

  ‘You know you did. You made me focus on the deck and then you got under the desk and looked through the glass. That’s cheating!’

  Pincer wore a confused look. He turned to consider the contents of his left paw. ‘But I seem to have the kitty. I correctly identified your card. Isn’t that sufficient?’

  Stoat was starting to get frustrated. He had been bullied enough in his early years to recognise the symptoms.

  ‘But you looked!’ he said, exasperated.

  Pincer pocketed the money and sat back with a serious face on.

  ‘Now. The trick has been done. There is no point us going back and doing it again until you win.’

  ‘But… but you cheated!’

  ‘Oh come now, Stoat. Are you just a bad loser? I won. Get over it.’

  Stoat was about to get as angry as he dared with an American Bulldog with more power in one ear than Stoat had in his entire body. But then, something deep inside his brain slowly turned…

  ‘And is…that…how we win the vote?’

  Pincer grinned back.

  ‘Stoatey, I believe we will make a campaign winner of you yet!’

  Chapter Fifteen

  So the Mole wasn’t dead. That was not good. Although, at least there was no way he could identify Ivan. By the time the Mole had opened the door Ivan had already hidden himself away.

  Now he needed to make amends for calling the police. It had been a close shave with Commander Reynard. Time to show he was a good agent after all.

  He had been put back on the Jay J Cottontail case and now he had a new target to follow too: the Badger known as ‘Melody Higgins’. The trouble was, the other Fox agent who had been assigned to trace Cottontail had so far drawn a big blank.

  The only place where any of his own previous investigations had led him was, though it pained him to remember it, RootShoot. So, in the absence of any other line of enquiry he logged back on and checked his Friend Requests.

  No replies.

  ‘OK,’ thought Ivan, ‘that is just about all my ideas used up. What
now?’

  He wanted to stare out of the window and think, but he was back in the basement Computer Room, so he had to stare at the radiator instead. His mood began to darken, and even the thought of Ivan the Whys’ ‘patient fox’ couldn’t raise his spirits.

  When Commander Reynard’s neatly brushed face appeared on his monitor it made Ivan jump. He feared the worst: the Commander had reconsidered and decided it was the Far Northern Forest after all.

  Which made what the Commander had to say even more surprising.

  ‘Fairy,’ he began, a computerised fox face in a quarter square of Ivan’s monitor. ‘I’ve just had intel that might be of interest to you. We keep an ear out for intel direct from Service HQ, and I have had it from a very senior source that two agents, one being Melody Higgins, the other unknown, were discussing attendance at the Comic Con event in the city this afternoon. Unless you have any stronger leads I want you to head over to Comic Con and see if you can get close to Higgins. See who she goes with and who she talks to, in particular if it is a Rabbit. We may yet be able to contain this can of Hornworms, as it were, before it spreads too widely.’

  Ivan was delighted, not only to have a new lead to follow up, but to have the chance to go to Comic Con. They had nothing like that back in his home forest. He couldn’t work out, however, just how the Commander had got such intel in the first place. He himself had been searching all the usual channels and had come up with nothing. In the interests of becoming a better agent, he plucked up the courage to ask the Commander a direct question.

  ‘Sir, permission to ask a question, sir? How did you manage to gather intel from inside Service HQ, sir?’ asked Ivan.

  ‘Oh, that is very straightforward,’ replied Commander Reynard. ‘One of our companies supplied them with bugged chairs.’

  The Felix Sports Complex was almost unrecognisable, the familiar façade having been transformed into a replica of the Carrington 5ive spacecraft, in honour of the show’s 25th Anniversary. Huge cut-outs of the show’s stars smiled out from behind the curved glass front wall, flanking an arch of helium balloons that garlanded the main doors to Comic Con.

  ‘Not really my sort of event, but I suppose it is as good a place to hide as any,’ said a black cloaked character whose eye-mask made it difficult for her to keep her half-moon spectacles on her long nose.

  ‘I still think coming as Zena would have been a good idea,’ I said, trying gamely to carry off a Hunter costume.

  ‘Just because I have black and white stripes doesn’t mean the Zebra is my favourite character. And anyway, Carrington 5ive passed me by. It was in my ‘having cubs’ phase.’

  ‘Well I was too young for it, but I still know the main characters.’

  ‘And you make a very appealing Lion. Now, shall we go in?’

  Mel swept a caped arm forward with more swagger than was normal for her, and I padded ahead of her, under the balloon arch and into the foyer.

  Immediately the scale of our task slowed us to a halt. We had come to look for someone dressed as Roadblock, the ‘act-first-think-later’ Rhino whose C5 uniform was always in need of repair. Standing in the large entrance hall we could see maybe seven Rhinos, mingling in with a whole herd of Elephants, Zebras, and Lions, and that was just the Carrington 5ive cosplayers. The rest of the room was a motley mix of alien heads, mythical weaponry, robotic limbs and a bit more bare fur than was probably advisable in the current weather conditions.

  ‘And this is just the foyer,’ I said, recalibrating the job in hand.

  ‘You found Tony, didn’t you?’

  I shrugged as well as any Rabbit could while balancing a Hunter Lion’s full mane headdress on small shoulders.

  ‘Take these to the stage!’ commanded an officious Hedgehog in a stripy scarf, thrusting two helium balloons at us before swiftly moving on.

  Without a better plan, and seeing that everyone else was being given a balloon, we sniffed around to get our bearings and seek out the stage. The venue map resembled a spider. The stage was like the spider’s body, in the main arena, along with the main exhibitor booths, and there were seven other themed rooms, and the foyer, coming off from there.

  ‘It looks like we go through that doorway that says ‘Say Hello to the Universe’.’

  ‘May old Father Badger save me. Whatever would my cubs say if they saw me?’

  ‘My guess is, ‘Why didn’t you come as Zena?’ ’

  The main arena was more used to hosting sports finals than trade shows, although thankfully the roof had been left closed for the Comic Con event. We took our balloons and waded through a throng of curiously costumed animals until we reached the central stage. Three steps led up to the platform where we found an excitable Porcupine welcoming newcomers and proudly showing off the canopy of helium balloons trapped in a large net arching over the stage.

  ‘Write! Yes, c’mon. Write your m… m… messages for the Universe. Qu… Qu… Quick as you can. Ch… Ch… Chop, ch… chop!’ The Porcupine was brandishing blank white labels at anyone standing on the stage with a balloon. Mel was looking overloaded by the whole experience, and I think she was glad that I was there to get some sanity restored.

  ‘What is going on exactly?’ I asked.

  The Porcupine turned on his heels and scampered to where we stood.

  ‘ ‘C… C… Carrington 5ive, we are l… l… losing contact. You are on your ow… ow… own. Sssssssay hello to the universe f… for us…’ ’ he said, mimicking a deep, canine accent despite his stammer. He wiggled his eyebrows at me to see if I understood. I just pulled off another Lion-headed shrug.

  ‘N… n… never mind, never m… mind, we all… all… all have to l… learn somewhere,’ said the Porcupine, with a patience at odds with both the mayhem of the crowds around him and the shortcomings of his own vocal demon. ‘We are d…doing a b… , a b… , a balloon launch to… m… morrow night. You wr… write your message on one of these and l’ll… let it j… j… join those others up there. We’ll open the roof and sss… send them out to the universe. Bit of a g… gimmick, but hey…’ He gestured around the room.

  ‘No, its nice. I like it,’ I said. ‘And why the net?’

  ‘To be honest,’ said the Porcupine in a quiet, conspiratorial voice, ‘it sh… should add to the drama when they g… get released, but really its j…, its j…, just insurance. The v… venue doesn’t want balloons sss… stuck in the roof mechanism. I’ve got the release rope tied up to my d… desk and I’ll ffff…forfeit the whole insurance per… p… per… p… premium if I pull it before the roof is ffff… fully opened. That was the only way they’d l… let me have ‘em.’

  I thanked him and let him get back to his label deliveries. I wrote, ‘HORNWORM’ on a label, tied it to my balloon and let it drift up to nestle with the growing cloud of others.

  I figured it couldn’t do any harm.

  Then I turned to Mel and said, ‘Now, let’s you and me dive in and find our Roadblock.’

  Direct intel from Commander Reynard? The flow had always been the other way around! As a consequence Ivan had spent the next couple of hours in a dream, slowly imagining himself as a more and more integral part of the Commander’s elite force, and telling the tale to his grand-cubs of when he got his first commission.

  He propped the shiny purple ticket against his monitor and researched Comic Con. His first discovery was that it was common, if not compulsory, to go in costume, and that this year the main theme was Carrington 5ive, which he was sure was a typo but couldn’t quite see why. He searched for Comic Con costumes, and found a word he didn’t recognise: ‘cosplay’; which led to another word just as unfamiliar: ‘portmanteau’. His next image search brought him too many confusing pictures, mostly involving different animals who all had the name ‘Angel Delight’, and which collectively stirred in him a longing to, at the very least, buy himself a patch of forest and start raising a family.

  After a search longer than was entirely necessary he made himself write a list of things
he could wear to help him blend in with a Comic Con crowd. He only had an hour before the doors opened, so his costume items needed to be easy to get, and quickly, between his base and the Felix Arena. He settled on three items: a very long stripy scarf; a utilikilt (which seemed to be some kind of manly skirt with pockets on the outside); and, because he was feeling daring, a Scoots head-dress. His reasoning went that if he was going to a Carrington 5ive event to look out for his target then it would be quite cunning to go dressed as the look-out from the show. It would be what Wild Wooders called a ‘double bluff’, and it made him feel very clever to have thought of it.

  Time was against him so he ran to the costume shop in his army gym kit and walked out wearing his new costume, complete with the periscope version of the Scoots head-dress. It was the premium model but, he figured, if he was going to walk around with a giraffe’s neck and head on his shoulders then he might as well pay the extra and take advantage of the enhanced vantage point it gave him.

  Aside from banging his giraffe head on the balloon arch on the way in, he got into the Comic Con event without a hitch. A Hedgehog ran past him, handing him a balloon as he went. Ivan intended to grab it. He really liked balloons, but he hadn’t quite got the hang of his periscope vision and the balloon drifted up into the concrete rafters of the foyer. The Hedgehog noticed what had happened and came back to him.

  ‘You’d better not do that in the main arena, Scoots,’ he said. ‘The boss’ll go mental if any of the balloons get free.’ But he was sympathetic, and he carefully held Ivan’s unbandaged paw and wrapped the string of another balloon around it before closing Ivan’s fingers on it. ‘There you go Scoots. Take it into the main arena and go to the stage. Spike’ll tell you what to do with it.’

  Ivan took a moment to get his bearings. Periscope vision took some getting used to, he realised. Particularly odd was the sensation of having a balloon on a string that simultaneously appeared to be a long way above him but also at his eye level. He decided the best thing to do was to follow the Hedgehog’s instructions, deliver the balloon to someone called Spike, and then find somewhere to stand where he could get used to his periscope without drawing attention to himself.