The Complete Ruby Redfort Collection

by Lauren Child

  ‘Hey Buzz!’ shouted Ruby.

  Buzz peered at her over her unfashionable spectacles, spectacles that had not become unfashionable, but just never had been and never would be. Buzz responded with a feeble raise of her hand.

  ‘Friendly as ever,’ remarked Ruby.

  ‘Ah, she’s not really a kid-person,’ said Hitch.

  ‘Is she even a person-person?’ said Ruby.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t call Buzz a put people at their ease type; that’s kind of the point of her really,’ said Hitch. ‘LB doesn’t want someone chatty; she wants someone efficient.’

  They walked over to the desk and waited for Buzz to finish her conversation, if you could call it a conversation – it seemed to merely be a whole lot of yeses, noes and the occasional instruction.

  Buzz replaced the receiver and looked up at Hitch. She almost seemed to smile, but it could have been an involuntary mouth twitch caused by the throat lozenge she was sucking.

  ‘LB has requested you wait outside her office,’ she said, picking up a red receiver. ‘She can give you four minutes.’ Buzz began speaking down the phone in Mandarin.

  Hitch and Ruby made their way to the huge door beyond which lay LB’s office. They sat down on the stylish chairs arranged nearby and waited and then waited some more.

  The intercom symbol flashed on Hitch’s watch.

  He spoke into it, the voice came back in his ear and he winced, almost imperceptibly, but he did wince. He looked at her.

  ‘LB,’ he said. ‘She wants a word.’

  Ruby stood up and waited for Hitch to follow, but he stayed right where he was. ‘You not coming?’

  ‘No, you’re on your own kid. She wants to see you alone.’

  ‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ asked Ruby.

  Hitch raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ruby. The eyebrow communicated a lot – it wasn’t going to be good news. ‘Does she want to congratulate me on my work in the training field?’

  ‘That’s what I like to hear, a good positive attitude,’ said Hitch. ‘Think happy thoughts.’

  Ruby beamed him a big fake smile. She turned to go.

  ‘Oh and kid, just remember: don’t make it any worse than it has to be,’ he warned. ‘I.e. I would suggest you lose the limp.’

  ‘Thanks for the advice,’ said Ruby, meaning it. She needed all the help she could get. ‘Wish me luck,’ she sighed, walking over to the large black door.

  ‘I wouldn’t rely on luck,’ said Hitch.

  Ruby knocked, waited for the voice to call ‘enter’ and went in.

  LB was sitting at her white desk, studying pieces of paper covered in dense notes. The all-white office gleamed; there was no colour at all in that room other than the red nail polish on LB’s bare feet, the red lipstick on her lips and the red perspex file on her desk.

  The file related to Ruby – she had seen it before. It contained a lot of information, Ruby’s past and present, her talents, her successes, her faults and her failures, and it was, Ruby feared, her faults and failures that LB wanted to discuss.

  ‘So Redfort, I hear you screwed up.’

  ‘I think you’re putting a very negative spin on it,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Please feel free to convince me that there is a positive spin to your performance – based on the fact that you completed your task arriving thirteen hours late?’

  ‘Twelve hours,’ muttered Ruby.

  LB checked the document again. ‘Oh yes, let’s be accurate: twelve hours, fifty-seven minutes and three seconds late.’

  That sounded worse.

  ‘I rustled the horse OK, I swam over the river, didn’t drown – I was just a little tardy is all.’

  LB looked down at her papers. ‘Let me check that. . . no, here it would suggest, and I quote Agent Emerson’s words: “You completed your mission unnourished, ate nothing for almost two days and arrived bewildered and exhausted.”’ She gave the papers a second glance. ‘Oh yes, and: “You lost some valuable kit.”’

  Ruby was about to speak, but LB held up her hand. ‘One moment,’ she said. ‘I see you are a stickler for accuracy so let me check which items you actually lost.’ LB read through the long list of missing kit before saying, ‘That’s right. Everything you were issued with.’

  There was no mention of having been found injured, bleeding and unconscious by Sam Colt, no mention of him dropping her off just yards from base camp because she was barely able to walk. So Sam bent the rules. Ruby had suspected as much. She owed him one.

  ‘But I arrived, didn’t I?’

  ‘If crawling into camp is arriving, then I guess you did,’ said LB.

  LB raised an eyebrow.

  Ruby opened her mouth to speak, but LB clucked her tongue to indicate she hadn’t finished.

  ‘And, to cap it all, you got sick. How incredibly careless.’

  ‘I appreciate your sympathy,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Cut it out Redfort, and by the way I should warn you that I have a chronic headache so if I were you I’d keep it short and stick to explaining what in the name of stupid was going on.’

  ‘The thing is I wasn’t really hungry,’ said Ruby.

  ‘I think we all know that had there been a donut tree out there it would have been quite a different story,’ said LB. ‘You failed to forage, failed to eat, failed to nourish your brain, you lost energy and you couldn’t navigate your way back to base in the time allocated.’

  ‘Look, I wasn’t going to share this with you, but I sorta lost my glasses.’ Ruby hadn’t meant to bring this up, but she was getting desperate. Perhaps it would bring out LB’s sympathetic side.

  LB looked at her quizzically. ‘Your judgement is way off Redfort, if you think that’s going to put you back in a professional light.’

  ‘Yeah, but the thing is, I’ve learned from my mistakes,’ said Ruby.

  ‘The point of the exercise is to prove that you don’t make mistakes,’ countered LB.

  Ruby sneezed again. ‘But I rustled the horse pretty well. So I caught the flu. I made it back, didn’t I? Isn’t that the whole point – surviving?’

  ‘You nearly caught your death. What’s the point of a dead agent?’

  ‘But I didn’t, I survived.’

  ‘Only because Emerson waited around for twelve hours, fifty-seven minutes and three seconds to bring you in – in my book that’s called getting rescued.’

  ‘Sometimes people need rescuing. You’re telling me you’ve never been rescued?’ said Ruby.

  ‘Not because I lost my glasses,’ said LB.

  ‘It doesn’t have to mean everything,’ argued Ruby.

  LB looked at her hard. ‘In Spectrum’s book it means failure; maybe you’re just not cut out for this.’

  Ruby opened her mouth to protest, but LB raised her hand.

  ‘You want me to make my decision now,’ she said, ‘or after I’ve had a cup of mint tea and swallowed two aspirin?’

  Ruby kept her mouth shut.

  ‘If you’d prefer me to spend time evaluating your rather desperate performance instead of making a judgement here and now, then I’d keep your mouth shut, firmly shut, as in clamped, closed, zipped.’

  Ruby said not a word. LB looked down at her files.

  ‘Oh and by the way,’ she added, ‘I wouldn’t get all smug about the horse rustling. You abandoned a saddle right near the corral, it was spotted and the horse was then presumed stolen.’ With that, she picked up the phone and dialled 8. ‘Buzz, do you know where my Paris paperweight has got to? It seems to have vanished into thin air.’

  Ruby left the room without getting so much as a see you soon from her superior. She couldn’t believe what was happening. She had never failed at anything in her life, unless of course she’d meant to fail in order to get out of something.

  How had everything suddenly gone so bad?

  Chapter 15.

  A bad odour

  HITCH LOOKED UP WHEN THE DOOR OPENED.

  ‘So you surviv
ed,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, it was a breeze,’ said Ruby. ‘I think she’s considering giving me some type of a medal.’

  ‘Always good to keep optimistic kid,’ said Hitch, patting her on the back. ‘I heard optimism is the number-one rule of survival.’

  ‘No,’ said Ruby. ‘Apparently, that’s punctuality.’

  Ruby thought it was probably time to head on home, but it seemed Hitch had other ideas, as he set off down the corridor and beckoned for Ruby to follow.

  RUBY: ‘Where we going now?’

  HITCH: ‘Just calling in on Harper.’

  RUBY: ‘Who’s Harper?’

  HITCH: ‘Someone with a medical qualification.’

  RUBY: ‘Why do you need someone with a medical qualification? You sick or something?’

  HITCH: ‘No. To check out those stitches of yours.’

  RUBY: ‘They’re fine.’

  HITCH: ‘You a doctor?’

  RUBY: ‘I’d just rather leave it, OK?’

  HITCH: ‘You’re squeamish?’

  RUBY: ‘LB, she’ll find out.’

  HITCH: ‘No. She won’t.’

  RUBY: ‘She knows everything.’

  HITCH: ‘What makes you think that?’

  RUBY: ‘She told me she does.’

  HITCH: ‘Don’t believe everything she tells you; she wants you to believe that.’

  RUBY: ‘I do believe that.’

  HITCH: ‘Well, believe me, she doesn’t.’

  RUBY: ‘She’s very persuasive.’

  HITCH: ‘It would seem so.’

  They arrived at a Band-Aid-coloured door – Hitch knocked.

  RUBY: ‘So how can you be so sure this medically qualified person won’t inform LB?’

  HITCH: ‘Because Dr Harper owes me, and Dr Harper is pretty cool.’

  Dr Harper was pretty cool and she dealt with Ruby’s leg almost without referring to it, like it wasn’t actually there.

  DR HARPER: ‘Nice stitching – Colt, I presume?’

  RUBY: ‘Good guess.’

  DR HARPER : ‘Not a guess. It’s obvious.’

  She inspected the stitches to make sure the wound was healing OK and then she rebandaged Ruby’s foot.

  DR HARPER: ‘You have pretty small feet, huh?’

  RUBY: ‘I guess.’

  Dr Harper went to her cupboard and rummaged around until she found a pair of rather small sneakers.

  DR HARPER: ‘These have been in here for years, ever since Bradley Baker was a boy - he barely used them by the way. I doubt they are too odorous.’

  Ruby eyed the sneakers suspiciously. They weren’t as cool as her Yellow Stripes, far from it; they looked very like little kid sneakers.

  RUBY: ‘You expecting me to wear these?’

  DR HARPER: ‘Well, I wasn’t suggesting you put them on your mantlepiece.’

  RUBY: ‘You know what? That’s nice of you and all, but I don’t think I need alternative footwear; my Yellow Stripes are super comfy.’

  DR HARPER: ‘ Ah, stop being so superficial. Put these on and you aren’t ever going to want to wear another shoe again, plus they’ve got other benefits.’

  Ruby slipped her foot into the sneaker.

  RUBY: ‘ You’re not kidding. These are like air or cloud. I can barely feel them. What’s the other benefit?’

  DR HARPER: ‘I’ll let you discover that.’

  RUBY: ‘They’re just comfy, right – there is no other benefit?’

  DR HARPER: ‘ You’re good to go.’

  RUBY: ‘Thanks. . .’

  Pause.

  RUBY: ‘I don’t s’pose there’s any chance of getting a. . .’

  Dr Harper reached for a piece of headed paper and scribbled a few words on it, signed it and handed it to Ruby.

  ‘I’ll leave you to fill the date,’ said Harper. ‘Nice to meet you. See you next injury.’

  Ruby smiled and slipped the doctor’s note into her satchel. It would no doubt come in very handy.

  ‘So how come Dr Harper owes you?’ she asked as she and Hitch walked back down the corridor.

  ‘That’s between her and me,’ said Hitch, tapping his nose.

  Ruby was a little late home and her parents were already sitting at the kitchen table and had got started on their supper – the Redforts were eating casual tonight.

  Sabina was yawning uncontrollably and looked like she might actually fall asleep in her bolognaise.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ruby, ‘got held up.’

  ‘No harm done honey, just good to see you,’ said her father. ‘How was scout camp?’

  ‘Oh, you know, scouty,’ said Ruby, peering into the saucepan on the stove.

  Ruby served herself some bolognaise and slid into her seat. She looked at her mother. ‘You OK Mom?’

  As if on cue, Sabina yawned again. ‘I couldn’t sleep a wink last night. All the time I was hearing this strange sound, a kind of snorting.’

  ‘Sure it wasn’t Dad?’ mumbled Ruby through a mouthful of spaghetti.

  ‘Now Ruby, that’s not nice. Your father doesn’t snort, he snuffles cutely – it’s his adenoids.’

  Mrs Digby coughed meaningfully and started clearing the table. ‘The man snores,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘Call it adenoids if you like, but there ain’t nothing cute about it.’

  Brant Redfort seemed pretty oblivious to this little discussion. He was wearing his tennis shorts and was in a chipper mood – he was pretty much always in a chipper mood, but he was particularly so this evening because he had made mincemeat of Niles Lemon on the tennis court (not actually difficult because Niles Lemon could barely swing a racquet).

  ‘Funny thing,’ he said. ‘Niles told me he and Elaine received their invite to the Marie Antoinette perfume launch a couple of weeks back. Did ours ever show up?’

  ‘No,’ said Sabina, frowning. ‘You don’t think we’ve been blacklisted, do you?’

  Mrs Digby pulled an invitation from the pile stacked on the shelf. ‘This what you’re missing?’ she said, slapping it down on the table.

  ‘You’re a genius,’ said Sabina, clasping her hands.

  ‘If the definition of genius is to open one’s God-given eyes and see what’s under your own nose, then I guess I am.’ Mrs Digby didn’t understand the need for getting all dramatic about things that required no effort whatsoever.

  ‘Smells like a fabulous evening,’ said Brant, sniffing the invitation.

  ‘Sounds like a total yawn,’ said Ruby, yawning.

  ‘I just hope that French pong has a better odour than the stink out in the yard,’ said Mrs Digby, who was standing on the back steps, holding her nose.

  ‘What kind of odour?’ said Brant.

  ‘Farmyard,’ said Mrs Digby.

  Ruby’s parents both got up to take a sniff. Ruby could barely smell a thing, what with her bunged-up nose.

  The telephone rang and Sabina answered it.

  ‘If you’re phoning about the smell, we can’t help it,’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Redfort?’ said Clancy.

  ‘Oh, hi there Clancy. We’re having some odour problems. I guess you’re wanting Ruby.’ She handed the phone to her daughter.

  ‘Hey Clance, how’s things?’ said Ruby.

  ‘Not so good,’ said Clancy. ‘In fact, bad, pretty bad.’

  Ruby pulled up one of the stools at the kitchen bar. ‘How bad?’

  ‘I got a message from Abe at the bike shop; turns out my bike can’t be fixed,’ he said, ‘it’s kaput. Fixing it will cost more than it’s worth. My dad says I can get a second-hand one, but I’m gonna have to pay for it myself because I didn’t exactly look after the other one so well.’

  ‘But didn’t you tell him it was your sister who totalled it?’

  ‘I couldn’t; my dad’s as mad as a coyote at her already. She shouldn’t have been riding my bike ’cause she was grounded at the time so if I tell him how it happened she’s gonna be dead meat – he’ll probably ground her for the rest of her life and I don’t wa
nt that on my conscience. Besides,’ said Clancy with a heavy sigh, ‘my sisters and I have a rule: never sell a fellow comrade out, i.e. don’t tell Ambassador Crew.’

  Ruby could see his dilemma all right; there was nothing Clancy could do but swallow it. Clancy happened to be about the most loyal person in the state and if he made a promise not to rat you out then he never would.

  It was one of the qualities Ruby particularly valued him for.

  If Clancy had a rule to never sell out a friend, then Ruby had her own RULE 6: NEVER HAVE A FRIEND WHO WOULD SELL YOU OUT.

  The phone rang,

  a shrill ring in the dark of

  the apartment

  Lorelei hurried over to the ornate desk and plucked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello? Eduardo?’ A pause. ‘What do you mean he’s gone?’

  She listened, her fingers tapping anxiously on the desk top.

  She took a breath. ‘And what about the creature?’ The question was almost whispered.

  She sank down onto the chair. ‘No. . .’ she said. ‘That can’t be.’

  She closed her eyes, a moment’s pause. ‘Find him,’ she said, her voice clipped and certain.

  ‘Just find him!’

  Chapter 16.

  If pigs could fly

  RUBY WOKE WHEN THE SUNLIGHT TOUCHED HER FACE. She had been so tired the previous night that she had forgotten to close her blinds. She wasn’t feeling so good. Despite both Hitch and Mrs Digby’s efforts with their various flu remedies, nothing was really taking the edge off the joint-ache she felt, or the drilling headache, or the clammy sweating and shivering.

  She stumbled to the bathroom and took a look at her still pale face with its dark panda eyes. She looked not quite as bad as she felt.

  She picked up the conch phone and dialled Clancy’s number.