Catch Your Death

  He tried to calm her by keeping his voice low and steady. ‘I told that other guy when he brought me in, I will repay you.’

  ‘And how do you propose to do that when it’s clear that you have been spending my money on little luxuries? Your shoes, for instance, how much did they cost?’ She tapped her foot like she was waiting for an answer.

  ‘I will repay you,’ repeated the man, ‘everything – more than you gave me.’

  ‘I didn’t give you anything, I paid you for something and that something is now mine, only you released it. So where is it?’ She was angry, very angry.

  ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I don’t like what you’re planning. I let it go – the deal’s off.’

  Her face was very close to him now, her perfume quite intoxicating. ‘A bit late for climbing up to the moral high ground, don’t you think?’

  ‘I never would have agreed to it if I’d known what you were up to,’ he said. His eyes held hers and the hatred he felt was quite tangible.

  The elegant woman laughed, a short, sharp, unamused laugh.

  ‘Yet you didn’t think to ask.’

  ‘You should have told me,’ snarled the man. ‘How was I to know you had such foul plans?’

  ‘All that money? And yet it didn’t occur to you something unpleasant might be afoot?’ Lorelei’s shoes click-clacked on the hard floor. ‘A stranger offers you a suitcase of cash and in exchange all you have to do is turn your head the other way, close your eyes, open a gate – and yet you gave the “why” no thought?’

  The man was silent.

  ‘I made a promise – you made a promise. Did no one ever tell you a promise is for life?’ She regained her composure, straightened her jacket. ‘So tell me where I must look.’

  ‘I’ll never tell,’ he said.

  ‘You might want to have a little rethink, unless you really feel death is such a good option.’

  ‘Too late, it’s gone,’ he said.

  Lorelei walked towards the door. ‘Like I said, you might want to think about that. Stew on it, why don’t you?’

  Chapter 19.

  IT TOOK SOME PERSUADING FOR RUBY TO CONVINCE HER PARENTS AND MRS DIGBY that she was well enough to attend school, but, as had often been remarked, Ruby was a very talented actress and arguer so had the ability to convince most people of most things.

  Mrs Drisco was less than overjoyed to see her brightest pupil and possible nemesis back in class again. Ruby had been away for a few days and Mrs Drisco had prayed she would be away for a few more. She had actually secretly hoped that perhaps Ruby would be off until next term with some nasty summer cold or an ankle sprain.

  ‘Ruby Redfort, you’re not late! What a nice surprise. I feel bad for feeling so sure you would be.’ Mrs Drisco smiled a tight and uncomfortable smile.

  ‘If it makes you feel better Mrs Drisco, I almost was; I had planned to grab a waffle before class, but the waffle stand was all shut up – so I guess my loss is your gain.’ She gave her teacher the big eyes; she looked like an angel.

  Mrs Drisco was racking her brain for a really sharp retort, one that would put Ruby Redfort right back in her box, but her sour train of thought was interrupted by a commotion in the corridor.

  Gemma Melamare was screaming. Screaming was actually a polite word for what she was doing: it sounded more like a hyena being strangled.

  ‘What in the world of uncivilised is occurring?’ demanded Mrs Drisco, flinging the door open wide.

  Gemma couldn’t speak because she was too busy shrieking and when she finally did manage to utter words all she said was, ‘I saw this thing slithering down the corridor!’

  Mrs Drisco, who couldn’t tolerate the sound of a shrieking child or teenager for that matter, shouted very loudly in order to drown out the sound of Gemma’s hysterics. ‘Well, no doubt this “thing” – like the rest of us – is partially deaf by now!’

  Gemma was then sent off to the medical room to go and have a lie-down.

  No one knew what she had seen or for that matter believed that she had seen anything at all; Gemma Melamare was just the kind of girl to shriek her head off in order to get out of class or to attract some boy’s attention. She got a lot of attention from boys because she was perfectly pretty, as sweet-looking as her cohort, Vapona Begwell, was not. Like Vapona, Gemma was unpleasant, really unpleasant, but due to being such a perfect portrait of cute, people found this hard to take on-board. Beauty can throw a lot of people off the scent.

  When the bell rang and everyone spilled out into the corridor, Ruby got a chance to chat to Clancy before the next class.

  ‘So what did your dad say?’ she asked. She was chewing on a piece of bubblegum, midway to blowing a bubble, and her voice was somewhat distorted, but Clancy knew exactly what she was talking about. He looked downcast.

  ‘He said, “No way, no day,”’ said Clancy, dragging his bag along the floor.

  ‘Clancy Crew!’ snapped the sharp voice of Mrs Drisco. ‘We do not drag our backpacks along the ground; we are not apes.’

  ‘I didn’t know apes used backpacks,’ said Ruby. ‘I kinda thought the use of backpacks is what separated man from the apes?’

  ‘Miss Redfort, you are this close to a detention. I mean it, this close,’ said Mrs Drisco, holding her quivering hands very close together.

  ‘Oh, that is close,’ said Ruby.

  Clancy yanked his friend round the corner before there was no space at all between Mrs Drisco’s hands.

  ‘So where were we?’ said Ruby. ‘Oh yeah, you were telling me about your father. He said, “No way, no day”?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Clancy. ‘He said, “Smiling for the camera is all part of being the ambassador’s son.”’

  Ruby’s bubblegum bubble popped and she fed the pink string back into her mouth. ‘Well, there’s a surprise. By the time your old man reaches for his wallet, you’ll have grown a beard Clance.’ She gave him a look and slung an arm across his shoulder. ‘Don’t let it get you down Clance my old pal. It’s just a bike, right?’

  Clancy sighed. ‘I guess, if you can call the Windrush 2000 just a bike. By the way Rube, you might want to go easy on the perfume.’

  ‘What dya mean?’ asked Ruby. ‘It’s the same perfume I usually wear.’

  ‘It’s not the smell, it’s how much smell you’re smelling of – it’s like you bathed in it or something.’

  ‘Oh, must be my nose – it’s all stuffed up – I can’t smell a thing,’ said Ruby. ‘This morning I drank a whole glass of bad milk. I nearly puked.’

  They peeled off towards their different classes – Clancy to French with the formidable Madame Loup, Ruby to biology with the Dread Mrs Greg.

  Mrs Greg was called the Dread Mrs Greg because she was one of those people who was absolutely certain that she was right. Unlike Mr Singh or Mr Piper, both inspiring teachers, Mrs Greg was everything that made school a bore. For this reason Ruby generally used the classroom time to do a little of her own reading up on things.

  Humans have lost a lot of their natural ability to easily distinguish one scent from another, though it is possible to tune up one’s olfactory skills. Perfumers and wine experts have to work on this sense to improve their understanding of what they are smelling and distinguish scents, one from another. However, although we may not have the ability some of our early ancestors had, we use this sense more than we think. Subconsciously, we are very aware of people’s odours; we make judgements and decisions based on scent we are not conscious of.

  We react to chemicals both natural and engineered and a person’s odour can be a reason for trusting or not trusting, feeling reassured or not. Sometimes a smell can mislead: we might be inclined to like a person because of the perfume they are wearing or the washing powder they launder their clothes with, even though this is a superficial and applied smell and nothing to do with the individual’s biological scent.

  The way a perfume reacts with the skin of the wearer changes from person t
o person, which is why we might like a perfume worn by one person and not another. We all have our own natural smells, smells our subconscious is aware of, smells animals can pick up on even when we humans can’t. A shark for instance can smell a drop of blood in a hundred litres of water. A dog can pick up the scent of an escaped convict and track him across rocks, woodland and – despite what movies may have us believe – even rivers. The human nose is less attuned to subtleties of smell than the animal nose.

  Ruby considered Bug, how he relied on smell to tell him most of what he needed to know. Sure, he used his eyes, his ears, but it was his sense of smell that was most important. She read on. The book also contained a chapter showing the chemical make-up of smells. It turned out that smelly substances contained ‘aromatic compounds’, circular structures of carbon and hydrogen such as benzene rings.

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

  Benzene

  The right image shows standard chemical notation which omits carbon sand most hydrogens for the sake of space. In this kind of diagram, there is a carbon atom at every corner. Hydrogen atoms are worked out according to how many bonds are shown leaving each carbon atom.

  This was all pretty fascinating, Ruby thought. The idea that the characteristic smell of an ordinary herb, for instance, was often the smell of just one or two chemicals, out of the hundreds which make up that plant – but the ones which we recognise and identify with it. The smell of vanilla is contained in a single chemical the molecular structure of which is a benzene ring with three hydrocarbon branches sticking off it:

  N

  Vanilla

  None of this was exactly relevant to what she was supposed to be learning about today in Mrs Greg’s lesson but it was interesting information and forty minutes later Ruby had finished the book.

  She met up with Clancy at lunch in the queue for the salad counter.

  ‘So what dya think Melamare actually saw?’ said Clancy.

  ‘Her own reflection,’ said Red. ‘My guess is she forgot to put her make-up on this morning and her real naked face gave her a chilling fright.’

  ‘Yeah,’ mused Clancy, ‘I wonder what she does look like without all that pancake.’

  ‘Did I hear someone say pancakes?’ Del Lasco sauntered into the canteen.

  ‘Oh, hey Del,’ said Ruby. ‘We were just talking about Melamare’s face.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Del, ‘I heard she saw something that gave her the chills. It wouldn’t surprise me – I saw something real strange yesterday evening,’ said Del, ‘real strange, I’m telling you, crazy strange.’

  ‘You’re beginning to sound like my mom. I mean jeepers! She swears she saw a giant pig running across the yard.’

  Del looked Ruby hard in the eye. ‘She probably did, ever consider that?’

  ‘A giant pig Del? You seen a whole lot of those lately?’ said Ruby.

  ‘No, but I’ve seen a giant cat, a tiger most probably.’

  ‘A tiger?’ repeated Red. ‘You really saw a tiger?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Elliot.

  Ruby took a slurp of her milkshake and said, ‘Del, you might wanna start calling yourself the exaggerator.’

  ‘Look who’s talking – aren’t you the one that said you saw an alien space craft hovering over the Crews’ house?’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Mouse, ‘you did.’

  Ruby sighed. ‘You’re never gonna let that go, are you Del?’ What Ruby had actually seen was an unusually designed hot-air balloon land in the Crews’ grounds, a mistake anyone with unusually poor eyesight and steamed-up glasses might make.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m just pointing out that as far as exaggeration goes you have your moments,’ said Del.

  ‘OK, well, let’s drop my “moments” for twenty seconds and talk about yours. You see, all I’m saying is that when you say you saw this tiger walking around Twinford how do I know you aren’t talking about some fat old tabby cat?’

  ‘Yeah, right Ruby, tabby cats are likely to swallow Mrs Gilbert’s spaniel – whole, all in one.’

  ‘And who’s saying that’s ever happened?’ said Ruby.

  ‘Only all of everybody,’ said Del.

  ‘Oh and there you go again – I don’t hear myself saying that there’s a spaniel-swallowing tiger on the loose.’

  ‘I think there is,’ said Red.

  ‘You see! Everyone but you is saying it.’

  At precisely the moment where this argument looked like it might turn physical, the school bell went.

  ‘OK, I better get changed for athletics practice,’ said Del, heading off towards the locker rooms. ‘By the way, anyone else here smelling rose bushes?’

  ‘No,’ said Ruby.

  Ruby was going to be sitting out athletics training on account of her foot so she went and found a seat in the shade and watched.

  Clancy was feeling pretty confident, and it wasn’t like him to feel confident. There was only one more training session left before the interschool track and field event. Clancy had always been a good runner, but had never actually won a final because there had always been someone in between him and coming first.

  His main adversary, however, was himself. He could talk himself out of winning very easily by talking himself out of competing, the little voice in his head telling him that he was likely to be humiliated, that he would trip, that he was useless anyway.

  But this time Clancy wasn’t to be defeated, not by himself, not by anyone. Marley Cassolet had got slower, or perhaps she had lost her hunger to win, or maybe Clancy had speeded up? Dean Brice had moved to senior school and Ruby, well, this time Ruby wasn’t in the running.

  The warehouse

  was hot

  It had a corrugated metal roof, glass skylights and not a single window, and the sun was beating down, and yet the woman looked as cool and collected as a catalogue model. The only concession she had made to the heat was to pluck off her jacket and hang it neatly on the hook on the back of the door. The man on the chair, however, looked a little more dishevelled, a little less defiant, a little broken even. He was not doing so well; the bruises to his eyes and nose told the whole story.

  The woman called Lorelei was entirely focused on the job at hand and the job at hand was interrogation. ‘You have put me in a very uncomfortable position, I owe somebody and I don’t like to owe anyone anything.’

  The figure hunched on the metal chair didn’t answer.

  She circled him; not for one minute did she drop her gaze or interrupt it with a single blink.

  ‘I am unable to settle my debt because you double-crossed me. Now all you need to do is tell me where it is.’

  She was wearing him down, like a tiger circling its prey.

  When he spoke, his voice cracked with despair. ‘Lorelei. . .’

  ‘You don’t call me Lorelei,’ snapped the woman, ‘you don’t call me Ms von Leyden, you don’t get to breathe even a syllable of my name!’

  ‘OK,’ murmured the man, ‘I’m just trying to explain that I

  made the wrong choice here. . .’

  ‘Too bad,’ she said. She wasn’t shedding any tears; why should she show mercy to a specimen so pathetic, so hopelessly stupid? He looked as pitiful as the pile of broken metal chairs and the twisted rusting ladder, tangled and hopeless, in the corner of this disused warehouse.

  She changed tack, threw him a bone, her eyes piercingly blue as she said, ‘Repay your debt to me by telling me where it is and then all of this, all of this, will just go away.’ She gestured loosely as if there really was nothing to get upset about, as if with the uttering of a word this wretched creature’s life could be restored to normality.

  The man knew better; he could not be saved by simply “telling”. He knew how it would go, whether he told her or not. The outcome would be the same: he was a dead man.

  ‘Let me repay you,’ he whispered. ‘Let me give you back your money. And then let me go.’
r />   Lorelei laughed and her blue eyes flashed cold. ‘Unless you tell me where it is,’ she said, ‘I doubt very much you’ll be leaving this warehouse with a beating heart.’

  Chapter 20.

  SCHOOL WAS OVER FOR ANOTHER DAY and Ruby was on her way to hang out with Del at Elliot’s place near the beach. In fact, the three of them had got as far as the bus stop when Ruby spotted something written on the wall: a chalk drawing of a fly and a trail line like it was buzzing off towards the centre of town, towards Central City Park. It didn’t take her a whole deal of time to work out what that meant; she was obviously required at Spectrum.

  She faked a pretty dramatic sneezing fit before she broke it to her friends.

  ‘Ah, you know what, I’m not feeling so good. I think I’m gonna have to bail.’

  ‘You what?’ said Del. ‘All of a sudden, in this last thirty seconds, you don’t feel so good?’

  ‘Come on Del, look at her,’ reasoned Elliot. ‘Her nose is all stuffed up she’s sneezing her head off . She sounds like some kinda alien.’ He paused to examine Ruby’s face. ‘She doesn’t look great either, bloodshot eyes and puffy. . . And she’s got a limp.’

  ‘Thanks Elliot. . . well, sorta, I coulda done without the photo-fit description, but anyhow. . . So look, I’m not trying to ruin your life here Del, I just feel lousy.’

  Del shrugged. ‘Yeah Rube, I didn’t mean to be a Grinch about it.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it,’ said Ruby, giving Del a friendly punch on the arm.

  She headed off up the road and, when she spotted a cab, whistled for it to stop, got in and directed it uptown, towards the park.

  As she approached the toddler playground, Ruby thought she caught sight of Vapona Begwell; this was all she needed, a run-in with her least favourite schoolgirl. She ducked down as she entered the playground enclosure, but heard no jeering voice as she bolted marine-style into the caterpillar pipes. Maybe she was mistaken.

  Hitch was waiting for her at Spectrum.

  ‘Glad you recognised my work,’ said Hitch.