by Lauren Child
She would take the stairs. A fine plan, until she reached the second floor – here the stairs were all but gone, though the banister was still in place. She shook it: sturdy enough. So she continued by walking up the disembodied rail.
She paused at each landing to listen for sounds of light feet on marble but heard nothing. It was on the twenty-seventh floor that she heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps. She made herself small and silent, flattened her body to the wall and followed the sound. It got louder, but still she could see nothing, no one. Strange because the sound was very close; she could have sworn coming from the same long corridor as the one she stood in.
Curiouser and curiouser, Ruby thought.
Then she felt a breeze, a tiny breath of wind, but no apparent open window to cause such a draught. She shivered; a reflex.
Get a grip, Rube.
RULE 8: DON’T LET YOUR IMAGINATION RUN AWAY WITH YOU OR YOU MIGHT WELL LOSE THE PLOT.
She shook herself to rid her mind of fantasy ghouls and spectres.
Nothing was there.
Continuing down the corridor she looked for clues – disturbed dust, footprints, freshly broken glass, anything. A door banged and Ruby held her breath, waited, and then went in search of the door that had slammed shut. It had to be this one, there was evidence of activity, faint footprints outside the door. She felt a breeze from under the door. . . there was a window open in that room.
Don’t go in, Ruby.
Experience told her not to, wisdom was against it, but Ruby felt no fear, nothing could happen to her. Slowly she turned the handle and eased the door open – it made a horror-movie creaking sound but she was not afraid. There was little light to see by, but she was reluctant to switch on her flashlight; keep it dark, she thought. Her eyes began to adjust to the gloom and as they did she saw what caused the broken blinds to clank to and fro – the window was open.
She edged round the room, feeling for the walls in the gloom to steady herself so she might look out. She was unsurprised to see no one at all – the window was a couple of hundred feet up and although there was a ledge no one was perched on it, though there was the strangest noise, a sort of breathing, a sense of someone. Was it the ghost Red talked of? If it was then it was a long way from its haunt. If it was, then Ruby would take her chances. For now, anyway. Ruby Redfort did not believe in ghosts, ogres, trolls, or things that went bump in the night.
Not yet.
Something clanked, an unmistakable sound, as if someone had knocked into something.
‘Hitch?’ she called.
No reply. Who’s in the room with me?
She spun round, reaching for her flashlight, and as the beam appeared she saw just too late the vast chasm that yawned beneath her – the room at its centre had no floor and the board she stood on began to crumble underfoot. Her hands scrabbled out trying to grasp something solid that might save her and the flashlight tumbled and spun into the void and Ruby lost her grip and fell. . .
Or nearly did.
Because at the moment the floor completely gave way she felt a yank to her arm, a hand gripping her wrist, and then her whole body was heaved out of the hole. She felt herself pulled out of the room and carried through the air, by what were unmistakably human hands.
And then BANG, nothingness.
Ruby wasn’t aware of how much time had passed, probably mere seconds, but the space she was in was utterly dark and when she came back into consciousness it was voices she heard. The voices, two of them, seemed to come from beyond the cold plaster walls that held her. She strained to hear what the voices were saying, and circled the space, feeling the walls with her fingers, trying to move close so she might pick up their words.
It was a woman’s voice she heard. ‘You are all out of time Birdboy. You can run but you can’t hide.’
Her accent was Texan. Her words kept changing in clarity, like the owner of it was moving in circles, turning around and around as if searching for something.
‘You think because you wear that suit you are protected, but don’t feel too safe, I’ll find you, be sure of that. And by the way, no more promises. I don’t need a promise from some circus act. We had a deal and you let me down and now I got a very angry someone on my tail and I don’t see why I should take the blame for your double-crossing. It’s too late for you, Birdboy, you’re about to take a fall like your poor yellow-feathered mama.’
Again the woman laughed. ‘Whole armies couldn’t save you now!’
Ruby held her breath, listening for the other person’s voice, but only the vaguest sound of disappearing footsteps met her ears.
‘That’s it, run!’ shouted the woman. ‘Run for all you’re worth, but I’ll find you and when I do, get ready to fly!’
The woman walked away, sauntering down the echoing corridor in slow deliberate steps. Every now and then she laughed. A laugh that Ruby almost recognised.
The footsteps melted away, and Ruby was alone in a tiny silent space, with just the dark for company.
Again, she moved her fingers along the plaster walls, until she found the crack where the door met the wall. She felt for the handle, but there wasn’t one. She reached into her hair to feel for the fly barrette, but it wasn’t there. She got down on her hands and knees and began to feel around on the dusty, rubble-strewn floor.
It has to be here, she muttered. But after thirty-three minutes she began to lose heart.
OK, she thought. Now is maybe the time to panic.
But as it turned out it wasn’t, because a moment later there was a scraping sound, then light flooded the space and Ruby blinked, blinded. When she could see, it was Hitch who was standing there in the doorway, one eyebrow raised.
‘How did you get locked into a storage room?’ he said.
‘I really have no idea,’ said Ruby truthfully. ‘How did you find me?’
‘Your barrette,’ said Hitch.
‘I don’t have my barrette,’ said Ruby.
‘It’s right there by your feet,’ he said. And she looked down and saw that it was.
‘I think it got damaged,’ he said, ‘the transmitter kept fading out, which accounts for the time it took me to find you. So what happened to you?’
‘I think. . . maybe. . . a ghost happened?’ She was rethinking her take on the whole question of ghosts – the paranormal as an explanation for all these weird encounters suddenly didn’t seem quite so far-fetched. How else was it possible to explain what was going on?
Hitch stared at her. ‘Did you take another bump to the head, kid?’
‘Let me explain,’ she said. So she told him about the footsteps that belonged to no one, the hand that had caught her when the floor gave way. ‘I swear no one was in that room,’ said Ruby, echoing the words of Red Monroe. And then she told him about the voice of the mysterious woman with the Texan accent who kept circling the outside room. ‘She sounded like she was looking for someone, the same someone she was talking to, but where was this someone? I don’t know, maybe she just enjoys talking to herself.’ Ruby sighed. ‘So you see, I don’t get it. I mean. . . I really don’t get it.’
Hitch was concentrating on every word said, but he had no explanation either. ‘So as far as you are aware, you were falling through the floor, grabbed by nothing, carried across the corridor, and thrown into a storeroom. After which you heard some strange Texan talking in the room outside.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘You saw no one.’
‘Uh uh.’
‘But you heard footsteps, before you fell?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anything else?’
‘The woman’s voice, it reminded me of someone.’
‘Who?’
‘Don’t laugh, OK, but it reminded me of Nine Lives.’
‘You’re serious?’
‘Look, I know she’s dead, but I could swear it was her.’
‘So what you’re saying is we are looking for a female jewel thief who died about five months ago?’
>
‘No, I’m just saying, and in any case, what about the someone who wasn’t there, the woman who sounded like Nine Lives called him Birdboy. She was angry with him, said he owed her something.’
‘What?’
‘She didn’t say, but she told him she was going to find him and when she did – well it didn’t sound like he would be breathing too much longer.’
Hitch looked around the large room. ‘So this guy, where was he hiding? I don’t see a whole lot of good cover here.’
‘Nope,’ said Ruby.
‘So you’re saying he was the ghost?’
‘I don’t know, man, maybe they’re both ghosts.’
‘Two ghosts have stolen a paperweight, a pair of shoes, a poetry book, a tie-clip and a rare orchid?’
‘I know,’ said Ruby, ‘it’s kind of a long shot, right?’
‘Stranger things have happened at sea,’ said Hitch.
Ruby looked at him. ‘I’m not sure they have,’ she said.
Chapter 45.
Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap
THE CARD FOUND AT THE SCENE OF THE ORCHID ROBBERY was encoded with the numbers:
25 14 23
Blacker leafed through the poetry book, looking for the 23rd word on the 14th line of the 25th page.
‘Which means that the word on card five would therefore be. . . mar,’ he said.
‘Uh huh,’ said Ruby.
‘So the message reads, you tread stolen steps mar. . . you sure about that? It doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense.’
‘Not until you add the rest of the final word,’ she said.
Blacker looked at her. ‘You’re saying you know what the final word is?’
‘I think we can have a pretty good guess.’ Ruby ran her fingers across the page. ‘I can see only one word in the hidden poem that makes any sense.’
Blacker: ‘You can?
Ruby looked at him hard, willing him to see what she saw. ‘Think of it as a name,’ she urged. She wrote the poem out as one long line of words, to make it simpler for him to see.
you are a poem, Celeste, as you tread a barely there line, stolen in steps am I, transfixed by tiny feet that mar nothing as they go. what is it about their tap tap tap that makes me want to fall?
He was silent for a few minutes before he saw it, then he smiled, very slightly, not a happy sort of smile, but the smile of someone who got it.
‘Go,’ he whispered.
Ruby wrote it down:
You tread stolen steps margo
‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ said Blacker.
‘I think I am,’ said Ruby.
Whatever it meant, it definitely sounded like a threat. A threat directed not at the long-dead George Katsel but the very much alive Margo Bardem.
It seemed like the last item that was going to be stolen. . . was an actress.
Blacker was on the phone to the chief of security. ‘It looks like he’s planning to kidnap Margo Bardem.’ It didn’t take long before there was a plan in place to cancel the actress’s Scarlet Pagoda appearance. The finale of the film festival, the screening of Feel the Fear, could go ahead; there was no need for her to show.
‘Do you think she’ll agree?’ said the chief.
‘Why wouldn’t she?’ replied Blacker.
Blacker had explained to the security team that Margo looked like being the last piece of the puzzle, the last ‘thing’ stolen, but what no one could figure out was why.
‘I mean, what has she done?’ said Ruby, looking at the clues on the wall. ‘I mean George Katsel, I get, he sounds by all accounts an unpleasant guy, but not Margo.’
‘Perhaps she was too pretty, too nice, too likeable,’ suggested Blacker. ‘You know how it can be with some folks? Nice people get on their nerves.’
It was agreed that Miss Bardem had to be told of the security threat; she had to be given the choice to step out of the festival finale premiere party and get out of town. Everyone hoped she would take this option.
The security team spoke to Margo Bardem later that day. ‘It can all be handled, Miss Bardem, you don’t have to go through with the finale night if you have any doubts about your safety – in fact, we would prefer you not to.’
Margo Bardem listened to the experts and considered her options.
‘I would like to go ahead,’ she said finally. ‘People have gone to a lot of trouble and effort on my account and I don’t want to let my public down. Besides, this is a momentous occasion. Feel the Fear is to be screened for the first time, all these many years later, and finally I will have the chance to be seen as the serious actor I always wanted to be.’
‘You’re sure about this, Miss Bardem?’ asked the chief of security. ‘It’s your safety on the line here; no one would judge you a coward for stepping out.’
‘I would,’ said Margo Bardem firmly, ‘if I let myself be bullied by this bozo then I will have let myself down.’ She smiled. ‘The show must go on, that’s what we showbiz guys always say. It’s a cliché but it’s one I live by.’
The chief of security nodded. He didn’t like it one bit but he didn’t really have a choice.
‘OK guys, you heard the lady, let’s get to work.’
She would be well guarded, that went without saying. They would issue a press release to announce that Miss Bardem would be residing at the Hotel Circus Grande, a favourite of the actress, and well known as the showbiz hotel. It would be leaked to the papers that she had decided to prepare for the evening in her hotel rather than in her theatre dressing room. The intention was to fool the skywalker, throw him off the scent.
Meanwhile, Margo would actually be delivered to the Scarlet Pagoda theatre in secret so she could get ready for the ceremony in the artists’ room at the very top of the building. The only access to this room was via the stairs, the windows up there didn’t open, not even with a crowbar, the glass was toughened and, just to be completely sure, steel bars had been added. The room had been checked and double-checked, there was no way in, other than through the door, and there were to be two highly experienced heavy-duty security guys outside for the duration of her visit.
There would be no red carpet walk for Miss Bardem, because it was impossible to make the area 100% secure. Instead, a Margo Bardem lookalike would wave from her balcony room, exit the Hotel Circus Grande via the main entrance and step into a limousine. The lookalike (a highly trained special forces agent) would then be bustled into the theatre. No one would be any the wiser and everyone would feel they had been given the chance to lay eyes on the screen idol. This was the compromise – Miss Bardem didn’t like it, but the security chief would not back down.
‘Miss Bardem, you gotta meet me halfway here,’ said the chief. ‘We handle the crowd outside and you do your thing in the theatre. The theatre can be locked down; the crowd outside – that’s another matter.’
‘Very well,’ said Margo Bardem, ‘we have a deal.’ She shook him by the hand. It was agreed.
Chapter 46.
Yellow
IT WAS THURSDAY AND RUBY WAS LATE FOR SCHOOL. She had in fact arrived in good time as she was planning to catch Clancy before class. She was waiting for him to cycle in around the back of the building, but after twenty minutes he still hadn’t arrived. Kids came and went but still no Clancy, and the longer she waited the more she began to think she must have somehow missed him.
She checked the racks again, this time more methodically, and then she saw it – the bike that had formally been her green bike, gifted to Clancy and painted Windrush blue, was now yellow. Not entirely yellow but streaked with ugly slashes of the colour – the same canary yellow spray paint that Ruby had seen on Mrs Beesman’s shopping cart.
When Ruby made it into class, Mrs Drisco marked her down for detention, but Ruby didn’t really care – she was too busy looking at Clancy Crew, who had a large Band-Aid on his forehead and a distinctly yellow streak to his hair.
Ruby took her detention during recess with the other unfortunates �
�� Beetle sat in front of her, busy writing two sides of A4 on the topic of “respecting school property”, while she wrote a very tedious essay on the importance of punctuality. It was while she contemplated the dullness of the topic that she found herself staring at Beetle’s shoes. His footwear was predictably self-concious, him being the sort of kid who wouldn’t be seen dead without the correct label on his sneakers. The more she looked, the more she saw, and what she saw was – yellow paint on the sole of his shoe.
It was canary yellow and Ruby was pretty sure it came out of a spray can.
When the bell rang and they were finally released from the stuffy classroom, Beetle caught up with Ruby in the corridor.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘so what bad thing did you do?’
‘You have yellow on your shoe,’ she said.
Beetle glanced down at his footwear. ‘Yeah, I guess I do.’
Ruby looked at him – it was an unsettling look and the boy began to sense something was up.
Ruby’s voice gave nothing away, her face bore a look it was impossible to fathom, but the question she asked was very direct. ‘Why did you trash my bike?’
‘Your bike?’ said Beetle, ‘I would never, I mean why would I? I mean, I like you.’
‘That bike was real special to me, that bike saved my life once. Clancy Crew is the only person on this planet I would give that bike to and you trashed it,’ said Ruby.
The boy’s face slowly began to contort, understanding dawning.
‘I didn’t know it was yours,’ he explained.
Clancy, who just happened to be making his way to class, was at that very moment coming towards them, concentrating on not getting bumped by anyone. As a result he hadn’t yet seen his most loyal friend talking to the gorilla kid. It was only when he heard the familiar low-pitched voice that he looked up.
‘That Crew kid is a friend of yours? You have to be kidding,’ said the boy.
‘Why do I have to be kidding?’ said Ruby. ‘Do I sound like I’m kidding?’
‘It’s just you seem like you’re, you know, cool.’