Catch Your Death

  There was a drawing of a man being devoured horribly by the creature. The words underneath read: The wolf using its scent to lure a hunter into its trap and so to his death. There wasn’t a whole lot of backup evidence to suggest this was true.

  The final word on the subject read:

  This savage creature was better known as the Blue Alaskan even though they were often regarded as two different breeds of wolf, one fact, the other myth. Few now believe the reports written about the wolf scent, and Jacob Holst (Mr Wolf as he became known) was later discredited as a fantasist.

  The book went no further.

  Ruby picked up the black and white photograph of young Mrs Digby and the other maids smiling broadly at the camera, surrounded by rare creatures. The one to the left of Mrs Digby looked very much like a wolf, a wolf with dark-tipped ears and dark-ringed eyes. Could it be a Cyan wolf? But if so then why had it not attacked the smiling people in the photograph? The answer would have to wait until the housekeeper returned home – for now one question was on Ruby’s mind: was there more to the scented papers than met the eye?

  The only way to find out was to seek out an expert on the subject of smell, someone with a remarkably good nose.

  The bike was even better than Clancy had first thought; the tyres, the suspension, the steering – he felt like he was part of the machine, that he was the Windrush and nothing could catch him. He had a good head start; he knew the truck would have to drive back up the road and take the desert exit before it could even begin to chase him. If he could just make it to the boulders, he could hide out in the warren of caves, some of which he knew like the back of his hand. He would hide out until they gave up looking.

  He turned to see how far they were behind him – nowhere as it turned out; they weren’t even a speck on the horizon. All his fear evaporated as he travelled over the rocky terrain and headed towards the rock valley, the faraway forest of Wolf Paw looming in the distance.

  He was going to outrun these guys. He might even get as far as the forest and, once there, he was going to lose them entirely, with or without the bike. He could hide out or he could walk on back to Twinford. His scouting days had trained him well and he had a good sense of direction. He even smiled at the thought; he felt fearless and in control, and that’s when it all went wrong. He was so taken up with reaching the forest that he was not observing the large stones littering the route. It was merely a matter of time before he hit one.

  Clancy felt the full force of the rock as his wheel came down hard on it.

  He let go the handlebars and was flung off sideways. He got to his feet, a little shocked but unhurt, and stumbled towards the bike and climbed back on; instantly, he knew something was wrong.

  The Windrush 2000, with its unpuncturable tyres, had a puncture.

  Chapter 53.

  RUBY CYCLED OUT ALONG MOUNTAIN ROAD. It was the long way round, but it was the way she knew and she didn’t want to risk getting lost on Little Bear Mountain. Once she reached the track turn, she veered up Lake Road and cycled towards the forest; the track took you round the three Little Bear lakes and then on up the mountain.

  As she passed the biggest lake, known as Emerald Lake, she could hear the Wichitinos calling out to each other. Ruby stopped for a moment and took a look at them through her binoculars: they seemed to be having fun, unconcerned about their dorky yellow uniforms, busy constructing rafts that they hoped would float. She scanned the camp, hoping to catch a glimpse of Clancy Crew, but she couldn’t see him. Probably on latrine-building duty, she thought.

  The Wichitino Camp was a fairly long way from Autumn Lake, which was where she needed to get to; she had gone way too far west, but at least she knew where she was: better to be safe than sorry.

  The Swann retreat, Still Water, was a house designed as shelves of stone jutting out across Autumn Lake, wide glass windows sandwiched between each layer so light could flood in. It was impossible to see the steel pillars that pinned it to the lakeshore so it appeared to be hovering magically over the water, several tons of rock deceiving the eye.

  Ruby rode her bike up the wide raked wooden gangplank. The wind chimes turned slowly in the light breeze that blew in from the lake; there was no entry phone, no doorbell, no doorknocker, no door handle. She banged on the heavy wood with her small fist and just like that the door gave and Ruby stepped inside, Bug padding behind her. The floors were a mixture of smoothed rock and polished wood planks, the corridor a cool sanctuary leading to dappled, sunlit rooms which in turn opened out onto the glittering lake.

  ‘Hello?’ called Ruby. ‘Sorry to walk in like this.’

  No answer.

  ‘But you know you have no doorbell?’

  No answer.

  ‘No lock either.’

  She continued down the passage, Bug in front.

  ‘Anyone home?’

  Nothing, just the gentle lapping of water and sound of bird life and. . . a piano.

  Ruby followed the music and found herself in a large room full of flickering light. A small woman wearing a simple black dress was playing a grand piano; the huge windows were all slid back into the walls and so the outside was inside and the inside, outside.

  Madame Swann stopped playing.

  ‘Who is it?’ she said, but before an answer could be given she had figured it out for herself. ‘Rose petals and bubblegum. . . Brant and Sabina’s daughter,’ and then she turned to look at Ruby.

  ‘Hey, how dya know that?’ said Ruby.

  ‘I never forget a fragrance,’ trilled Madame Swann.

  ‘You’re pretty good,’ said Ruby. ‘You know everyone by smell?’

  ‘I have a good memory for scent,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘My nose never forgets.’ She held out her hand. ‘A pleasure to see you again, but what has brought you to the edge of nowhere?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind, I need you to take a look at something for me,’ said Ruby.

  The perfumer nodded. ‘If you think I can help.’

  Ruby took the scented papers from her satchel and laid them on the table. Each was in its own plastic sleeve to prevent them from contaminating each other.

  Madame Swann took one at random and shook it from its case and picked it up very carefully between her gloved fingers. The first thing she did, the very first, was to bring it up to her face and inhale.

  ‘You sniff everything before you read it?’

  ‘It is the way I look at things,’ said Madame Swann. ‘I see with my nose. Smell is the most important sense: it tells you all you need to know about a person or a place, even a piece of writing paper.’ She looked at Ruby sideways. ‘Besides, you surely came here for my nose?’

  ‘I’m not going to lie to you Madame Swann, I am here for your nose. So what’s the perfume? Where does it come from?’

  ‘It’s not perfume.’

  Ruby was puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

  Madame Swann shrugged. ‘It’s scents, lots of scents. There’s pine and orange, sandalwood, vanilla. . .’ She inhaled again. ‘Thyme and anise.’

  ‘But not a perfume?’ said Ruby.

  ‘No, just individual scents.’

  One by one Madame Swann took the envelopes from the table and carefully now, with gloved hand, pulled out the slip of plain paper inside each envelope.

  She wrote down the smells captured in each. ‘Where did you get these?’ she asked.

  Ruby paused before answering. ‘From someone’s apartment. I’m not sure whose apartment exactly.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Madame Swann.

  ‘I don’t officially know the occupant. I just had an address and, well, these were there,’ said Ruby. ‘I wasn’t exactly invited in – you know what I’m saying?’

  Madame Swann nodded. ‘I think so.’ She smelled each one again, very carefully.

  ‘I cannot understand why anyone would scent paper like this; it is not a good combination of smell. This one has vanilla, as does this and this, but this one is the onl
y one to have sandalwood. It has something unpleasant too, something I would not put in perfume.’

  Ruby was thinking of her biology class, the textbooks she had read on smell as communicator, how everything has smell and how everything communicates via smell.

  ‘If I suggested these papers held a code, would you think I was crazy?’ asked Ruby.

  Madame Swann looked at her, a glint in her eye. ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I think that is the only thing that makes any sense.’

  Chapter 54.

  THE PROBLEM FOR CLANCY, among a whole forest of problems, was that he was utterly visible: he was a boy standing in the middle of a rocky desert terrain with not a shrub, not a tumbleweed to hide behind. He let the bike fall to the ground and began to run; he was a great runner, an even better long-distance runner than he was a sprinter; he had stamina and speed, but what use were stamina and speed when racing against a speeding car? Who can outrun a motor vehicle?

  It was utterly pointless, but it wasn’t in him to give up. Clancy Crew would run until they caught him and killed him because that was obviously what they had in mind. He’d seen too much, he knew that now. Why didn’t they want him to call the paramedics? How could he have been so naive as to think that man was sick? It was clear to him now: the man had already been dead. Clancy could hear the roar of the truck growing louder and louder, coming closer and closer, but he would not stop, could not stop.

  The truck slowed as it neared him; he could feel the engine vibrating through the rock and up into every single one of his bones, but still he ran. The sweat poured off his brow and traced down his cheeks; he stumbled on, determined, his eyes fixed on the horizon.

  ‘Stop boy!’ shouted a voice. But he couldn’t; his legs were moving of their own accord and nothing could make them stop, nothing could make him stop, at least not until he heard the sound of a bullet ricocheting off the rock somewhere to the left of his head.

  ‘You have a chance to live. I would take it if I were you. Unless you want to die. Do you want to die?’ said the voice.

  Clancy stood still; he didn’t think he needed to answer. Who answered that kind of question?

  ‘I take it the answer is no.’

  Chapter 55.

  THEY CHOSE ONE OF THE SCENTED NOTES AND MADAME SWANN CAREFULLY DECIPHERED EVERY SMELL while Ruby wrote the perfumer’s findings on separate sheets of paper.

  Thyme.

  Vanilla.

  Anise.

  Cinnamon.

  Orange.

  Ruby looked at the list. What were these scents telling them? How was this working? What was the key?

  Thinking back to the survival test code, she played for a moment in her mind with anagrams, taking the letters of THYME and VANILLA and ANISE and so on and jumbling them up – but it didn’t throw up anything meaningful.

  Ruby stared ahead across the water and into the forest, her eyes unblinking, unfocused, letting the thoughts swim.

  Molecules, names, types of smell, masculine, feminine, associations, what were the connecting factors?

  Then she stopped. She was approaching this the wrong way round. She needed to remain logical.

  The code was made up of smells.

  But the message that the code masked would be made up of letters.

  Conclusion: she needed to think of a way to get from smells to letters.

  Smells to letters. . .

  Leters. . .

  She sat up straight.

  She was remembering the book she’d read in Mrs Greg’s class when she was supposed to be studying something else. She remembered the chapter that dealt with benzene rings.

  Benzene, C6H6, is a ring of six carbon atoms, connected by alternating single and double bonds:

  Carbon and hydrogen, she thought. C and H.

  Letters.

  She turned to Madame Swann. ‘This is a long shot,’ she said. ‘But you wouldn’t happen to know the chemical formulas for these smells?’

  Madame Swann thought for a moment, clearly puzzled. ‘I. . . Yes. I have a book which lists the formulas for most of the aromatic compounds.’

  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. r />
  ‘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.

  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.