‘As for Laura, she has a heart the size of England. Why, she took in Barbara Carson’s three-legged dog when no one else would have a bar of him, and look how he repaid her. They’re talking about some sort of animal medal.
‘Now the Mukhtars, I said from the beginning they were a bad lot, but nobody takes a blind bit of notice of me. It’s the blonde hair and multi-coloured clothes, you see. People think I’m not in possession of all my faculties. “Don’t be taken in by those Mukhtars,” I’d warn people. “They might have the freshest produce, but they’re up to something.” I mean, they were as thick as thieves with Mrs Webb. That alone was evidence of wrong-doing in my book. I’ve known seagulls with better housekeeping skills. But to think the North Star was a front for modern-day slavery, well, it makes your blood run cold. Thank goodness Tariq had a friend in Laura in spite of everything the Mukhtars did to stop it. I was their go-between, you know. One time Tariq gave me a tiger tapestry . . .’
Laura stifled a giggle as she and Skye slipped through Mrs Crabtree’s back gate down the alley behind Ocean View Terrace. None of the reporters noticed her go. They’d been ringing the doorbell at number 28 since the previous afternoon when Laura came home from hospital, but apart from posing with Tariq and Skye for the exclusive they’d given to Erin, the Sunny Side Up waitress who was also a cub reporter for St Ives Echo, she’d ignored them.
‘It’s Skye who’s the hero, not me or Tariq,’ she told her uncle. ‘If it wasn’t for him, we’d both be fish food by now. And you’re a hero for figuring out the code in the invisible letter.’
‘Skye is a pretty special dog and has earned a lifetime’s supply of dog biscuits and pats from me for saving you and Tariq, but the police and I wouldn’t have had the remotest chance of catching the Monk, Rumblefish, Mukhtar and the others if you and Tariq hadn’t done such great detective work,’ answered Calvin Redfern. ‘In months of searching, I’d found precisely nothing. I’ve taken a lot of teasing from my former colleagues in the Force about being outsmarted by a couple of eleven-year-olds and for employing a Straight A gang member as a housekeeper, I can tell you.
‘But you and Tariq are heroes, too, Laura. If you hadn’t risked your lives to save those children, they’d either have drowned or would be embarking on a career of toil and misery. It’s nearly one hundred and fifty years since slavery was abolished, but as shocking as it seems, these things still go on. If the Straight A gang and the Mukhtars had had their way, you, Tariq and the other kids would be starting work today in a factory sweatshop. Kidnapping my niece was to be their revenge on me. You’d have been working round the clock for slave wages to teach English and make tapestries that would be sold for a fortune. The Bengali boys and girls would have been told that the cost of bringing them to Britain and providing their keep far exceeded their earnings. Within days of arriving on these shores, they’d have entered a lifetime of debt-bondage from which there would be no escape.’
Laura was silent for a minute, remembering Mr Mukhtar’s threats on the beach. She’d come within a whisker of meeting the same nightmarish fate.
She asked, ‘What’ll happen to the children now?’
‘A group of local businessmen have agreed to provide them with a free two-week holiday in St Ives, after which they’ll be flown back to Bangladesh and reunited with their families. A local charity is going to ensure that both they and their parents are freed from debt-bondage and given a fresh start in life. Perhaps most importantly, a fund is being set up to give every boy and girl an education.’
He got up from the kitchen table to scoop another few cubes of steak into the husky’s bowl. ‘But, yes, you’re right, Skye has a wide streak of hero in him. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have paid the ultimate price for having a niece who takes after me.’
Walking along Porthminster Beach for the last day of school before the holidays, Laura wore a grin from ear to ear. Skye, loping beside her, had much the same expression. Passersby cast amused glances at the girl with the spiky cap of blonde hair and her three-legged Siberian husky as they played a game of chase on the sand. It would be the next day before Erin’s St Ives Echo exclusive on their adventure appeared on the newstands, so nobody recognised them or commented on their miraculous survival.
‘You’re the best dog on earth,’ said Laura, stopping for the hundredth time to hug Skye. ‘And the coolest thing of all is, you’re my dog.’
According to her uncle, Skye had been howling loudly enough to awaken the dead when Calvin Redfern returned to number 28 Ocean View Terrace with the police two nights previously. An irate Mrs Crabtree had been on the doorstep. He’d guessed immediately that Laura had been kidnapped.
A delay of several hours had then occurred because, although Calvin Redfern had seen the messages from Tariq on Laura’s bed, he’d dismissed the invisible letter as a blank piece of paper. It was nearly 3am when it occurred to him that it might not be. By the time he’d deciphered Tariq’s note, the children were already in the tunnel and the rising tide had made Dead Man’s Cove impassable. The best that he and the police could do was go to the general area of the old tunnel exit, now sealed up, and wait to see when, or if, anyone would emerge.
At 4.10am, Joe the boatman, Mrs Webb, and Mr and Mrs Mukhtar had driven over the horizon. They were handcuffed before they’d even turned off the engine. It turned out that Mr Mukhtar had been an ordinary, law-abiding shopkeeper until he and his wife became addicted to lavish living and shopping. Faced with having their home and business repossessed, they’d resorted to desperate measures to find the cash they needed. When Mr Mukhtar met the Straight A gang while obtaining Tariq’s false passport in Bangladesh, he’d mentioned his idea to start a tapestry and Persian carpet factory in Cornwall using cheap child labour. They’d introduced him to Mrs Webb, recently arrived in St Ives to spy on Calvin Redfern, and the plan had taken wing from there. They all saw it as an easy way to make millions. The twenty children were to be the first of many.
Dawn had been breaking when a sodden Rumblefish, Monk and Dino blasted their way out of the old tunnel exit using dynamite. They, too, were taken into custody. When they confessed to abandoning twenty-two children in the flooded tunnel, Calvin Redfern had to be restrained from strangling them.
All this time, Skye had been getting more and more distressed and excitable.
‘I was on the point of locking him in the police van when it struck me that he might know something, or hear something, that we couldn’t,’ Calvin Redfern told Laura. ‘He led us to a different set of mine workings, over the hill from where we’d been searching. There we found all these freezing, skinny, terrified kids peering into a shaft.
‘Skye reached them before we did. To my absolute horror, he ran straight past them and dived over the edge. How he survived the fall, I’ll never know, but I doubt we’d have found you if it hadn’t been for him. He swam through the catacomb of tunnels and hauled you and Tariq onto a dry ledge. Thanks to his quite remarkable courage, instincts and strength, the emergency services managed to save you both.’
‘What happens now?’ asked Laura. ‘What happens to Tariq? Does he have to return to Bangladesh?’
‘That’ll be up to the Immigration Department,’ said her uncle, ‘but my guess is that, as a thank you from the British Government for his role in helping to rescue twenty kids and bring the Mukhtars and several members of the Straight A gang to justice, he’ll be granted asylum to stay in this country if he wishes. The police are certainly pleading his case. In the meantime, he’s been offered a foster home by the couple who run the St Ives veterinary surgery, one of whom is from Bangladesh. They’re wonderful people and I know they’ll take good care of him.’
All Laura could think as she walked into St Ives Primary was: If Tariq stays in St Ives, he and Skye will be my best friends, and the three of us will have so much fun and so many adventures together. It’ll be perfect.
Mr Gillbert snapped: ‘Don’t get any ideas about bringing that three-legged mena
ce into my class today. Have you any idea how much effort it took to replace the lesson plan files he chewed?’
Laura came back to reality to find her teacher barring the door of the classroom.
‘Oh, please, Mr Gillbert,’ she said. ‘Just this once. You see, our housekeeper turned out to be a wanted criminal and my uncle is at Sennen Cove today helping the police smash a ring of fish-stealing thieves and there’s no one at home to take care of Skye. Anyway, he’s a changed dog since you last saw him. He’s a hero. He saved my friend, Tariq, and I from drowning in a smugglers’ tunnel after the gangsters who kidnapped us abandoned us there. He jumped down a mine shaft to rescue us . . .’
‘Fine!’ cried Mr Gillbert, clutching his head. ‘It’s the last day of term and I can feel a migraine coming on. I simply do not have the energy to argue with you. I might tell you that if you applied the same level of inventiveness to your English essays, your grades would improve dramatically. Take your hairy mutt and sit quietly until your name is called. Today we’re discussing the assignment I gave you earlier in the term: “My Dream Job.” Remember that?’
Laura took the only seat remaining, one row from the back. Skye settled down at her feet. Almost at once, Kevin began pelting her with chocolate peanuts. The husky gave a bloodcurdling growl. The pelting ceased abruptly.
One by one, the children stood at the front of the class and described their dream job. Some wanted to be hairdressers, beauticians or firemen. Others wanted to be scientists or rich businessmen driving Ferraris. When it was Laura’s turn, she took Skye with her for moral support. He fixed his blue eyes on the class and regarded them regally.
Mr Gillbert glowered at the husky before saying: ‘Go ahead, Laura. Tell us what you’d like to do when you’re older. What’s your goal?’
Laura took a deep breath and said, ‘I want to be a famous detective. I want to hunt down international gangsters and bring them to justice.’
There was laughter in the class. Kevin Rutledge mimicked a girl’s voice: ‘I want to be a f-f-famous defective.’
‘That’s a very lofty ambition, Laura,’ said Mr Gillbert, ‘but I did stress that I wanted you to come up with a realistic job. Now there’s no reason at all why you couldn’t be a policewoman. That, I’m sure, is well within your capabilities. I can picture you handing out speeding fines, or fingerprinting burglars. But a detective is in a different league altogether. For a start, you have to have powers of deduction that are certainly not evident in your maths tests. It also helps to be methodical and you, I’ve observed, are quite messy.’
‘Plus you have to be strong and brave,’ Kevin called out. ‘Like me!’
‘I’ve seen detectives on TV and what they do is no fun at all,’ said Sabrina, a prim girl in the front row. ‘You have to follow bad people into dark, creepy places and escape if they try to kidnap you or kill you.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Josh, ‘you have to be willing to risk your life to save others.’
‘And be supersmart at following clues,’ yelled someone else.
‘The point is, Laura, great detectives have to be mentally and physically equipped to outwit cunning and vicious criminals,’ Mr Gillbert concluded. ‘And from what I read in the newspapers, some of those criminals are quite ingenious.’
‘A brotherhood of monsters,’ murmured Laura.
‘Pardon?’ said Mr Gillbert.
Skye cocked his head at Laura and she reached down and rubbed him behind his ears, burying her fingers in his cloud-soft fur. His tail thumped hard on the classroom floor. Laura felt a rush of happiness so intense she could hardly contain herself. In her schoolbag was a new Matt Walker novel - a gift from her uncle. Inside it he’d written: ‘If you want to follow in Matt Walker’s footsteps when you’re older, you have my blessing.’ With her detective idol on her bookshelf and Calvin Redfern, Skye and Tariq on her side, anything was possible.
She gave a secret smile. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can dream, can’t I?’
Look out for more mysteries with Laura Marlin in
KIDNAP IN THE CARIBBEAN
Coming in August 2011
Lauren St. John, Laura Marlin Mysteries 1: Dead Man's Cove eBook
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