by Lauren Child
She went over to a bookshelf and came back with a heavy book. Scents and their Basis in Organic Chemistry was the title.
‘Thyme. . .’ said Madame Swann, flicking through the pages. ‘That’s Thymol, or 2-Isopropyl-5-methylphenol as they call it in the lab.’
She showed Ruby a diagram: as Ruby had expected, it was a benzene ring with twigs coming off it.
Thymol
‘OK,’ said Ruby. ‘And the others?’
Soon Ruby had copied out, next to the name of each scent, its molecular structure. Her sheets of paper were now a mass of hexagons and little twig shapes and chemical formulas.
As Ruby studied more and more of the pictures she began to come up with a theory for how the smells could encode messages. What if each of the twigs coming off the hexagonal ring encoded a different letter? CH3 might be Z, for example, and OH might be K.
Question: were there twenty-six of these twigs to allow one for each letter of the alphabet?
Answer: yes.
She began to feel that she might be on to something.
Each different twig shape corresponded to a different letter. Now she just needed to do a frequency analysis on the twig shapes like she’d done on the survival test code. Whichever twig came up most often would be E, then T, and so on.
Quickly she noted down the different twigs by order of most commonly occurring, and cross-referenced it with her mental crib sheet of English letter frequencies.
Thymol. . . that was a benzene ring with three twigs coming of it. If Ruby was right, the smell of thyme encoded three letters.
But which? She checked against her frequency crib and came up with the most likely candidates: H, W and Y.
Mentally rearranging the letters, she got the word: WHY.
So, it’s a substitution code and an anagram.
This was looking promising.
The next smell was vanilla, or 4-Hydroxy-3-methoxybenz-aldehyde. Ruby looked at the shape of the molecule on her sheet of paper. Again, that distinctive benzene ring with three more twigs. One was the same as last time and two were new. Referring to her crib she got the letter H again and then T and E.
THE.
Her confidence was growing as she decoded the other three smells and rearranged the letters. Finally, out came the last word: DELAY.
Ruby wrote down the message in full:
Why the delay
Deciphering the Chemical Codes
Chemical code alphabet
‘Mon dieu,’ said Madame Swann. ‘They taught you this in school?’
‘I sorta picked up along the way,’ said Ruby.
Soon she had a list:
Leave no loose ends
Why the delay?
Take the creature to Wolf Paw
I trust you won’t disappoint sweetie
I will be arriving sooner than expected
Make him talk
‘There seems to be no order to them,’ said Madame Swann. ‘They could read many ways.’
‘Not if you look at the writing paper.’ Ruby pointed to the top of each piece of paper. On every one was a letterhead naming the hotel it came from: some of the letterheads were blind embossed and barely visible, some were just watermarks and only seen when held to the light, others printed very clearly, but the thing in common was that each paper held the name of a hotel and a place. The stationery would be in the drawer of each room for the use of the hotel guest. The person who had sent them was likely therefore to have been a guest in each of the hotels.
The Avenue Boutique Hotel: Upper East Twinford
The Conch: Suva, Fiji
The Grand Twin: Central Twinford
The Aloha: Honolulu Hawaii
The Dolphin: Perth Australia.
Surf Motel: West Twinford.
Ruby began to lay them out in the order she saw.
‘The Australian hotel comes first,’ she said.
‘What makes you think that?’ said Madame Swann.
‘Because it’s the furthest from Apartment 9, East Twinford.’
Rearranged in descending order of distance from East Twinford, the messages now read:
Why the delay?
Make him talk
Leave no loose ends
Take the creature to Wolf Paw
I will be arriving sooner than expected
I trust you won’t disappoint sweetie
‘The messages are more than instructions, they’re also warnings: the sender is telling the recipient that he or she is getting nearer. i.e., “Watch out, I am on my way.” The sender wants her to feel fearful.’
‘Why do you say her?’ asked Madame Swann.
‘The apartment seemed to be occupied by a woman and the sender doesn’t trust her. I think he or she believes the resident at apartment 9 might be double-crossing.’
‘We missed one,’ said Madame Swann, pointing to an envelope which had slipped from the table.
They set about deciphering this one final message, sent from The 23rd Street Hotel, a mere stone’s throw from apartment 9. It read:
Kill him
Chapter 56.
Think like Ruby
THE TRUCK PULLED UP ALONGSIDE, but Clancy didn’t move; he didn’t want to in any way confuse the person holding the gun.
He heard the truck door clunk open. Clancy turned, but he fixed his eyes on the ground – he did not look at the driver, the owner of the voice, the person holding the weapon. Ruby had told him that in a hostage-taking situation it was a good idea not to look at the hostage-taker; this way you couldn’t identify them; this way they were less likely to shoot you.
‘Get in,’ said the voice.
Now what he needed to do was to focus on living, surviving this ordeal, and his immediate concern – other than trying to do as little as possible to aggravate them – was to work out where in all the world they were taking him since he was going to need to escape if he wanted to have a chance of living to a ripe old age.
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.
A dead man's shoes
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 t
he 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.