Circus of Thieves and the Raffle of Doom (7 page)

‘And we’ve got some important things to do,’ Hannah continued, encouraged by the camel’s contribution to her argument. ‘So if you’ll excuse us, I’m
afraid we have to go.’

Hannah reached out and grabbed Billy’s hand. It felt cold and stiff, but she gripped hard and pulled, yanking him onto his feet and hauling him out of the cage.

Armitage spun on his heel and sprinted after them, but within seconds a dog leapt out from under a caravan and grabbed him by the leg of his tracksuit, toppling him into a patch of
mud.
¹⁹

‘My tracksuit!’ he yelped. ‘MY TRACKSUIT! MY TRACKSUIT!’

If there was one thing Armitage hated even more than being contradicted by children, gassed by camels and outwitted by civilians, it was getting his clothes dirty.

Hannah and Billy darted across the park, running as fast as they could, out of sight and into the trees. They didn’t stop until they reached Hannah’s secret hideaway high up in the
oak.

From far away, they could hear the distant sound of a tiny voice shouting very loudly.

‘MY TRACKSUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUI I I I I I I I I I I I I IT!!!’

‘I can’t believe you did that,’ said Billy, when he eventually got his breath back.

‘Neither can I,’ said Hannah.

‘I’ve never seen anyone stand up to him before.’

‘Really?’

‘Never,’ he said solemnly.

‘What do you think he’ll do?’

‘What can he do? He doesn’t even know who you are.’

Hannah looked down, her eye drawn by the casual, loping arrival of Fizzer, who had a scrap of pink velour dangling from his mouth.

‘How much of a crook is he?’ asked Hannah. ‘What’s really going on? Why is everyone so scared of him?’

And that’s when Billy told her what was going to happen later in the evening, during the show, revealing to her every element of the dastardly, devious, deceitful, dishonest, devilish plan
Armitage Shank had put into place. Billy had never before told anyone about the circus’s criminal activities, because he knew it was the very secretest secret. If he was caught talking to any
civilian about it, he’d be thrown out on the streets. But he trusted Hannah. There was something special about her. And he had a strange feeling – just a hint of a whisper of an inkling
– that she was the kind of person who might be willing to help him.

Listening to the details of Armitage Shank’s scheme, Hannah could hardly believe her ears. She was amazed. She was horrified. She was gobsmacked and flabbergasted and gobgasted and
flabbersmacked.

Billy knew she’d be shocked, but the thing he didn’t guess was what she would say in response. The words that came out of her mouth were, in fact, the last thing he expected.

‘We have to stop it,’ she said, without even a moment’s thought.

Hannah had an unusually strong sense of what was right and what was wrong, and when one of them pretended to be the other, she never just stood back and watched.

‘We can’t,’ replied Billy. ‘It’s not possible.’

‘Everything’s possible. You should know that more than anyone.’

‘Why?’

‘Think who you work for.’

‘That’s just a name.’

‘Then think what you do. You live in a different place every night and you make a living by amazing people and you ride a camel and you dress yourself in curtains and your mum knew how to
do a back somersault with a double pike and triple flip-flop and quadruple wing-ding!’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘But what?’

‘If you get on the wrong side of Armitage, you’re done for. He’s dangerous.’

‘We can be dangerous, too, if we put our minds to it.’

‘How?’

‘I think I’ve got a plan,’ she said, a mischievous glint sparkling in her eyes. ‘Do you know how to drive a lorry?’

‘A lorry?’

‘
The
lorry. The enormous lorry. Can you drive it?’

H
ANNAH FACED A CONUNDRUM
in four parts.

Tricky. But as you will remember, for Hannah nothing was impossible. And in this case, she quickly realised that her problem had one very simple solution: Granny.

Granny loved outings, particularly outings that gave you an excuse to buy sweets, so the circus was perfect. More important than the fact that Granny liked circuses (and that Hannah liked
Granny) was a particular habit of Granny’s, which on this occasion would come in extremely useful. If you took Granny anywhere and the lights dimmed, Granny fell asleep. Even if you took her
nowhere and just dimmed the lights in the sitting room, Granny still fell asleep.

In bed, the lights trick didn’t work. Granny, oddly enough, was a terrible insomniac. But put her in a chair, more or less anywhere, and if it got even slightly dark, Granny was guaranteed
to doze off.

It was only a short walk to Granny’s house, and when Hannah got there, she could hear the TV blaring through the front windows. Hannah pressed the bell hard, partly because Granny’s
hearing wasn’t the best, partly because she knew she might well be asleep. After several long presses, and a few knocks on the window, Granny eventually came to the door.

‘Oh, Hannah, love! It’s you!’

‘It is,’ said Hannah, giving her a hug.

‘I dozed off!’ said Granny, who was surprised every time it happened. Granny often seemed to think she was twenty-five, as if the last fifty years hadn’t really happened.
‘Come in come in come in,’ said Granny. ‘I’ve got a bag of mint imperials that’s just begging to be finished.’

Hannah came in and politely accepted a mint imperial, even though she thought they tasted like lumps of baked toothpaste.

‘I can’t stay long,’ said Hannah, ‘but I’ve got a present for you. A ticket to the circus. We can go together.’

‘Oooh!’ said Granny. ‘How wonderful! Candy floss!’

‘I have to dash. I’ll come back and get you after tea.’

‘Lovely.’

Then Hannah ran home, to make preparations for the evening’s escapade.

Meanwhile, the circus troupe had gathered round in the Big Top to talk through Armitage’s arrangements. The running order for the show was usually the same, but for every
performance the plan was different.

Why?

Because putting on the show was only half the job.

Or rather, the show the audience saw was only half the operation. It was what they didn’t see that made Armitage Shank his money. And the only thing Armitage loved more than showing off
was money. Money money money, sweeter than honey, cuter than a bunny, funnier than funny. He just looooooooooooooved money. He’d been like that since he was a child. When he was only six, his
pet dog had a litter of puppies, which Armitage had named Cash, Wonga, Dough, Loot, Dosh, Moolah, Spondoolicks and Interest. After a couple of weeks, he sold them.

That afternoon, Armitage had done what he always did when the circus arrived in a new place. After the parade, after selling tickets and signing people up for the raffle, Armitage took a little
tour of the town with a map in one hand and the list of raffle addresses in the other. Where the address looked like a large, or well furnished, or generally prosperous-seeming house, Armitage
marked his map with a red cross.
²⁰

As Armitage went through the running order with his cast, everyone looked carefully at the map he handed out, which had a blue circle for the Big Top in the middle, and in the nearby streets a
cluster of red crosses. Each performer was assigned a house, and a gap of thirty minutes off-stage time when it was their job to nip out, find the house (which of course would be empty, because the
occupants were at the circus), and rob it.

Hank and Frank were assigned 23 Privet Place; Maurice and Irrrrena were given the cat-burglary job on the penthouse apartment in Houghton Mansions; Jesse was in charge of the bungalow on Scunge
Crescent; and the top team, Armitage and Fingers O’Boyle, would be working together to do over the Post Office, using the troupe’s signature trick – a routine so outrageously,
audaciously, courageously mendacious that you could almost, but not quite, describe it as impossible.