Catch Your Death

  ‘I am taking it seriously. I mean my mom’s seen a hippo, my dad thinks he’s seen a hippo, who’s to say you’re not being followed by a hippo?’

  ‘I guess I am,’ said Clancy bluntly. ‘I mean how much sunning do you Redforts do every day?’ Cause I hate to break it to you this way, but you’re all sounding a teensy bit insane.’

  ‘I’m just trying to be open-minded, that’s all. I’m the totally last one to think it’s likely that a hippo is roaming free in Twinford, but I’m beginning to think I’ve been too dismissive. You know Melamare thought she saw some thing which sounded from her description a little like a python and hey, think about it, Del thought Mrs Gilbert’s spaniel Gilbert was eaten by a tiger and, let’s face it, he is missing, and now you think you’re being followed so we have to agree something’s up, right?’

  ‘OK,’ said Clancy, ‘so what now?’

  Ruby pushed her sunglasses back on top of her head and looked at him hard.

  ‘You have a hunch that something is following you, so when did all this start?’ asked Ruby, like she was Detective Despo and the world of Crazy Cops was not a fiction.

  Clancy sat back in his deckchair and looked up at the cloudless sky.

  ‘A couple of nights ago, I just had a weird feeling like I was being watched. Then last night, when I was walking back from the park, I had a really strange feeling like I was being followed.’

  ‘What kind of weird feeling? A weird bad, a weird creepy or a weird unusual?’

  ‘A weird weird,’ said Clancy, ‘and then just now on my way here it happened again.’

  ‘The same weird?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘No,’ said Clancy, ‘sorta differently weird. I mean last night I smelled this smell, a smell I think I smelled before, but I can’t place it.’

  ‘Where did you sense the weirdness today?’

  ‘It was by Cedar Pond. I just sensed someone was watching me.’

  Ruby was concentrating; she sat silently for a few minutes, contemplating what should be done, then she got to her feet and hopped down the open-tread staircase which led from the roof to her bedroom. She came back less than thirty seconds later with her pair of special agent issue binoculars.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘so you leave and I’m gonna watch what happens. I can see pretty far from here, so long as you take the Cedar Street route and make a turn on Faber Drive, I can track you.’

  ‘But what if someone is after me?’ said Clancy. ‘I mean what if they’re waiting to make a move and suddenly pounce while you’re looking through those magnifiers? I’ll be long gone before you can reach me.’

  Ruby went down the stairs again, rummaged around in various drawers and came hobbling back with a pair of walkie-talkies; she handed him one of the receivers.

  ‘I can warn you if I see anything, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ said Clancy uncertainly.

  ‘And if anything does happen and you get grabbed then you can tell me your whereabouts, and Hitch and me will find you. So go,’ said Ruby, pushing him towards the stairs.

  Clancy paused. ‘I was going to climb down the tree and slip out the back gate, less chance of being followed.’

  Ruby rolled her eyes. ‘Being followed is the whole point bozo; you need to leave by the front.’

  Clancy sighed. ‘OK, but if I get snatched and murdered by a psychopath it will be down to you.’

  ‘I’ll plant a tree or something in your memory, OK? Now split.’

  Ruby got into position; she had a great view from up on the roof and could see all the way to the ocean.

  She watched as Clancy made his way down the street. He was walking fairly fast and she could tell he was resisting the urge to run. There was no sign of anyone, not a car, not a bike, not one single psychopath. She followed him round the winding streets as he made his way towards home. Nothing and then. . . something.

  Clancy froze. It was so quick Ruby couldn’t make out what it was. ‘Keep walking buster,’ Ruby muttered. As if he had heard her, Clancy began to put one foot in front of the other; he was acting really nervous and whoever was trailing him was going to sense it for sure.

  Something moved in the bushes, then slowly, very slowly, walked out onto the sidewalk; it was a hundred yards away. Clancy didn’t see, but Ruby did. She thumbed the switch on the walkie-talkie to send him a message in Morse code.

  He didn’t seem to register or maybe was too panic-stricken to decode the message so she buzzed him and watched as he fumbled for the walkie-talkie.

  ‘What is it?’ he hissed into the radio.

  ‘Get up a tree now bozo!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Climb, darn it!’

  Clancy dropped the receiver and lunged towards the nearest climbable thing. He hoisted himself up onto a road sign and continued to climb right to the top, not looking back. Once he had got as far as he could possibly go, he looked down. What he saw was a Sumatran tiger, though he didn’t realise this at the time, he wasn’t counting the stripes or working out how close together they were, he just saw a very large cat with a lot of teeth looking hungrily up at him.

  Clancy watched as the creature crunched down the walkie-talkie.

  Ruby watched from her vantage point. ‘Oh jeez.’

  The authorities were there in no time at all; they had just come from a similar incident involving an entirely different species on the other side of town.

  It was a great coincidence that it happened to be another boy Ruby knew.

  Quent Humbert had been doing some bird watching down by Twinford River when he had spotted a large prehistoric reptile, actually a Siamese crocodile of a very good size.

  Luckily for Quent, he had managed to squeeze himself into a concrete pipe, a drain too small for the Siamese croc which was over thirteen feet long. He was there for some hours because the reptile had decided to wait it out, sure that at some point Quent would make a false move and when he did he would be ready for it. Luckily, a fisherman on the opposite bank spotted the crocodile and called the Sheriff’s Office. Quent Humbert unsurprisingly went into shock and was found to be incapable of verbalising what had happened.

  Clancy was not exactly over the moon about his wildlife experience either.

  ‘Why the Sam Hill did you tell me to climb a tree?’ he exclaimed. ‘Tigers can climb trees you know!’

  ‘Yeah, but they prefer not to because they find it hard to get down,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Hard to get down?’ spluttered Clancy. ‘By the time it started worrying about getting down, I’d already have been devoured.’

  ‘What I’m saying,’ said Ruby, ‘is it probably wouldn’t have chosen to follow you up in the first place – anyway, you didn’t climb a tree, you climbed a road traffic sign, so you were way out of trouble.’

  ‘Yeah, no thanks to you! Why didn’t you tell me to play dead – that’s what you’re meant to do if you encounter a tiger.’

  ‘Because I thought the chances of you pulling that stunt off were next to zero; you’d have been flapping around like a flounder.’

  They bickered on like this all the way back from the police station.

  When she got home, Ruby went directly to her room and pulled out her notebook. Things had got pretty strange. She added the animals recently sighted: most were rounded up and their species correctly identified.

  THE SIAMESE CROCODILE – native to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia – spotted by the unfortunate Quent Humbert at Twinford River.

  THE TIGER – native to Sumatra – chased Clancy on the street outside my house.

  THE PYGMY HIPPO – native to West Africa swimming in our pool.

  BLACK-TAILED PYTHON - native to South-east Asia - seen by Gemma in the school corridor.

  LAPIS BOWERBIRD – native to Australia nesting in Harker Square.

  A POLICEMAN CRITICALLY ILL IN HOSPITAL HAVING BEEN ATTACKED BY SOME WILD ANIMAL (thought to be a wild dog). Animal yet to be identified as no witness to the attack and the officer still in coma.

  Ruby
looked up each animal in turn and discovered that every one of them was either rare, endangered or thought to be extinct.

  Lorelei von Leyden

  hurried to answer

  the phone. . .

  . . .and switched it to speaker; she had been busy sorting papers on her desk, papers that were giving her a headache.

  ‘Tell me some good news,’ she demanded.

  ‘We found it,’ said the voice of the young man. ‘It was pretty easy once we knew how; we trapped it and took it up to the mountain hideaway. No one’s going to discover it there.’

  ‘Not even her?’ asked Lorelei.

  ‘Not even her,’ said Eduardo ‘Quit being so paranoid, you don’t even know if she’s in town.’

  ‘If she’s not in town, then why the messages? She’s getting nearer and she wants me to know it.’

  ‘She’s trying to scare you by getting her flunkies to pass you these threats – it doesn’t mean a thing. The important thing is we have the creature.’

  ‘But what if it does mean something? What if she is here?’

  ‘Look, how about I keep an eye out for her, track her down? What does she look like?’

  ‘That’s just it, I don’t know. I’ve never met her, never even seen so much as a grainy photograph. She could be sitting right next to you for all I know.’

  The man instinctively looked around him, but the square was empty, but for a friendly-looking middle-aged woman in a flowered dress reading and eating an ice-cream.

  Chapter 38.

  THE THEORY THE NEWSPAPERS HAD COME UP WITH was that the animals had been smuggled into the country illegally and were to be sold to a private collector or dodgy circus troupe – somehow the plan had gone wrong, the deal had collapsed and the animals had escaped or been set free.

  Ruby checked in with Hitch; he was drinking his seventh coffee of the day and looked like he had a lot on his mind.

  ‘So what’s new?’ said Ruby.

  ‘Sheriff Bridges and his team have done a pretty good job contacting all the zoos and animal sanctuaries in the Twinford County area.’

  ‘And?’ said Ruby.

  ‘And nothing. They followed up with door-to-door enquiries and led investigations into the many sightings (both real and bogus) of animals seen roaming around the city streets and municipal parks.’

  ‘No leads?’

  ‘Zip,’ said Hitch. ‘No zoo has been broken into and no zoo has accidentally left the gate open – so to speak.’

  ‘So now what?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘It’s not our case,’ said Hitch. ‘We haven’t been assigned to look into it because it’s got nothing to do with the kind of thing we do.’

  ‘But what if there’s more to it than we think?’ said Ruby. ‘Something more sinister than all these theories; maybe it’s not about collectors or animal rights activists or someone who left the gate open.’

  ‘If something comes up that falls into Spectrum’s remit, then we’ll be asked to step in.’ Hitch put down his mug. ‘But for now, I gotta go. LB wants me to head into HQ. I’ll see you later kid.’

  Ruby walked back up to the kitchen where Mrs Digby seemed to be preparing a ton of vegetables.

  Ruby stared at the old lady for a while; a thought had been going round and round, ever since she spoke to Mrs Attenburg: what if he’s alive?

  The housekeeper looked up. ‘What is it child, what’s in that head of yours?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Flemming Fengrove?’ she asked.

  Mrs Digby stopped chopping. ‘Now what put that name in your head child?’

  ‘Someone mentioned him the other day,’ said Ruby, ‘so I wondered if you might have heard of him.’

  ‘I’ve more than heard of him,’ said Mrs Digby, ‘I used to work for him.’

  ‘You worked for him?’ said Ruby. ‘I thought you’d always worked for Mom’s folks?’

  ‘Always have, but now and again – when I was younger – I’d take on extra jobs, sometimes at the Fengrove place. The parties were something to see,’ said Mrs Digby, ‘but it was no easy ticket, I can promise you that; all those guests who needed feeding and all those animals wanting to eat you. Crazy times,’ she added, returning to her carrots.

  ‘Where is his place?’ asked Ruby as if she was merely curious to imagine rather than about to make a mental note.

  ‘North out of town,’ said Mrs Digby, pointing with her carrot, ‘all the way along until you reach the canyon road and then you just drive and drive until you get to a sharp fork to the left and then you head steep up in the direction of Wolf Paw Mountain. Easy to miss if you don’t know where you’re headed.’

  Mrs Digby was getting unusually misty-eyed at this memory of a bygone time; she even went downstairs and took a black and white photograph out of her album to show Ruby. It was of the young Mrs Digby (before she became Mrs Digby) dressed up in a maid’s uniform along with a whole lot of other young women. Behind them and around them and at their feet were a variety of exotic animals. The maids were all laughing, seemingly unaware of the possible danger they might be in.

  Ruby handed it back to the housekeeper who propped it up on the shelf behind her and went back to her chopping.

  ‘So he’s dead now?’ said Ruby.

  ‘Dead?’ said Mrs Digby. ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know, but dead or alive I would doubt he’s smiling.’ She tutted. ‘Strangest man I ever met and I doubt if he ever got less so.’

  Ruby said goodbye to Mrs Digby and set off as if she was heading to school, though she had no intention of making it there. Instead she took the bus to the centre of town – she needed to spend some time checking out a few things and the City Library was a good place to start.

  It was pleasantly cool inside and that, combined with the dimly lit interior, made it feel like a sanctuary, a long way from the sweat and hustle of the city outside.

  She chose a spot at the long library table and slung her satchel over one of the green leather upholstered chairs.

  She looked at the section containing the newspaper archive.

  If the reclusive Flemming Fengrove was still alive, then he would be a very old man by now, but many years ago he had been one of the most celebrated and sought-after individuals on the celebrity circuit. For a small window of time he had been famous for throwing lavish parties at his home dubbed the Mountain Chateau, and for organising ambitious public events and spectacles, but these were all but Forgotten now.

  The public library remembered him in black and white, printed in the pages of heavy bound books; photographs of actors, starlets, politicians and renowned public faces. Old Twinfordites thought of him from time to time, but mostly he was long Forgotten, dead and buried in the local history books.

  But Ruby wondered:

  Is this man actually dead and buried?

  She looked at the public records, the answer came back:

  No.

  Is there a record of the endangered animals Fengrove had been required to return to the state zoo?

  Answer: yes.

  Is there a record of the animals Fengrove had gone on to sell? Answer: yes.

  Does either list mention the Sumatran tigers, pygmy hippos, the Siamese crocodile and the Lapis bowerbird? Answer: no.

  Was there ever a list of every animal Flemming Fengrove had actually owned? Answer: not here.

  Even if there was there was no one who could verify the truth of it.

  Could it be that Flemming Fengrove, unbeknownst to the authorities, kept some of the animals secretly on his estate? Possibly bred them even?

  Answer: possibly.

  What if some of the animals were still up at Mountain Chateau? And what if someone had known about Fengrove’s secret and had decided to release the animals, knowing that the old man could hardly get the police involved without incriminating himself? Perhaps this person or persons had planned to rescue the creatures and relocate them, but something had gone wrong and they had escaped.

  It was a theory anyway.

/>   It seemed like the only way to know the truth was to go up there and Ruby thought she might like a bit of company; it was a long journey after all and it might get boring without someone to chat to. The problem was that Clancy was right now taking his French test.

  So just how was she going to get in touch with him?

  Chapter 39.

  CLANCY WAS SITTING IN A HOT CLASSROOM, trying to remember the French word for elephant. He had opted to write an essay on the circus, having rejected the essay on vacations (because he didn’t know the French word for vacation) and the essay on hobbies because at that moment he couldn’t think of any actual hobbies that he had.

  Now he found himself a good way through the circus essay and he realised that not only was he having trouble bringing to mind the word elephant, he also was having a problem with the word lion, clown and acrobat. It was hard to write an essay on the circus when you didn’t know the word for elephant, lion, trapeze and acrobat. He had wisely decided that he should just get going, leave blanks and come back to them later – he was bound to remember before the time was up.

  Forty-five minutes later, he looked back at his essay to see rather a lot of blanks; he needed to fill them with something, but he wasn’t sure what. He had about fifteen minutes to go when there was a knock on the door. Mrs Bexenheath stuck her head round and said, ‘Clancy Crew, your mother called and she requires you to return home immediately. She’s sent a cab for you, it’s out front.’

  ‘My mother?’ said Clancy.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ said Mrs Bexenheath. ‘It behoves me to inform you that you will not be allowed to retake this exam. Madame Loup expressed herself quite forcefully on this point.’

  ‘Are you sure it was my mother?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. I’ve spoken to your mother often enough to know her voice when I hear it.’

  ‘But my mother is in. . . oh jeez.’ Ruby Redfort, thought Clancy. ‘If it’s all right with you Mrs Bexenheath, I’ll just finish my test.’