Hide and Seek (7 page)

Connor was in his pyjamas, sitting on his father's lap, reading from a thick book. Blake was lying on his stomach on the floor, colouring in. His hair was still wet from his bath. Shelby could see the comb marks.

'William the conkwee . . . conkwee-err . . .' Connor read.

'Conqueror,' corrected his father.

'Conqueror arrived in one thousand and . . .'

'Ten sixty-six,' Dad said. 'It's a year.'

Connor rubbed his eyes.

'You're tired. I think that's enough for tonight.' His father smoothed a hand across Connor's forehead.

'One more paragraph!' Connor insisted.

'One more sentence.'

As Shelby approached she could see the title,
A Guide to London
. She huffed and dropped into the armchair with a thud.

'Why don't you want to go to London, Shel?' asked Blake, leaning on one elbow and chewing the end of his pencil.

'I do want to go to London. I just don't want to live at Aunty Jenny's house for a year and a half beforehand.' She glared at her father. 'So you've decided then. Nice of you to let me know.'

'No, we have not decided and you watch yourself, missy. You might officially be a teenager now, but that's not an excuse to be rude.'

'Fine!' Shelby stood up and stomped into the kitchen.

'What's that face all about?' her mother asked.

'Just my whole life is falling apart and nobody cares!'

'I care. Truly!' Shelby's mum held out a bag of potatoes and a peeler.

'You just want a slave!' Shelby complained.

'How about an exchange? Clearly we need to launch an investigation about this whole Diablo business. I'll help you plan your operation if you help me cook the dinner.'

'Really?' Shelby grinned. 'You would do that?'

Her mother nodded. Shelby's mother was a part-time store detective. She was also doing a course at TAFE in surveillance and investigation, so she pretty much had a degree in solving mysteries.

'I know what we need!' Shelby put down the potato she was peeling and jogged down the hall-way. In a moment she was back with her brothers' blackboard under her arm. She placed it on the kitchen bench, leaning it against the splashback. Then, with the chalk, she drew a horizontal line in the middle like she had seen on
Without a Trace
.

She drew a short vertical line at the beginning. 'I fed Diablo on Good Friday. He was definitely there then!' Next to her mark she wrote, 'Last seen by SS @ 4.45 pm.'

Her mother scraped some vegetables from the cutting board into a saucepan. 'We know he was gone on Easter Saturday morning when you went in to give him his breakfast. What time was that?'

Shelby drew another mark in the timeline and wrote, '7.30 am – gone!'

'Then I saw him in the stable at the Equus Caballus place today at about three thirty.' She drew a new mark at the end of the timeline and wrote, 'Tuesday 3.30 pm – Found'.

'Now we just need to figure out what happened in between,' her mother said.

Shelby threw the piece of chalk in the air and caught it. 'How do we do that?'

'Interview people. Find out if anyone saw anything suspicious.'

'Marie and Shelby Shaw – Private Investigators on the case!' Shelby grinned.

'Don't tell people that you're investigating a case, Shel,' her mother said as she looked in the fridge for the next ingredient.

'Why not?'

'Because people will either make things up, because they want to be helpful, or they will withhold information because they have a guilty conscience, or because they decide that what they saw is not impor-tant, when in context it's actually significant. Worse still, they will make things up
and
lie about real things, and then you're worse off for talking to them than if you hadn't.'

Shelby blinked. 'But why would people do that? Why don't they just tell the truth?'

'Very few things people say are about truth, Shelby,' her mother told her.

'You're saying I should lie to people to stop them lying to me.'

'No.' Her mother sighed. 'I don't want you to sneak around, or spy on people – just ask questions. If you can find out what happened – the bare facts of the case – you might be able to help resolve a dispute between your friends, but it's possible that you may not get to the bottom of it, honey.'

Shelby frowned thinking. 'Like hide and seek.'

'What do you mean?' asked her mother.

'When you play hide and seek one person's job is to hide and the other person has to find them. We're playing the same game except with the truth, and they don't know we're playing, so that makes it easier – like how easy it would be to find someone in hide and seek if they weren't actually hiding.'

'Except, of course, if someone really does have something to hide then they
would
be playing the game,' her mother said, rinsing the chopping board.

'I think I get it now,' Shelby smiled.

Her mother divided the meat into portions. 'An operation like this needs a name. What shall we call it?

'Operation Diablo?' suggested Shelby.

'That might be a bit obvious. How about we look on the internet and see if there is a word that means the same thing as Diablo, but other people wouldn't know what that is?'

'Can we have code names?'

'Code names are essential!' her mother answered. 'But first you have to finish peeling those spuds.'

'I thought you might have forgotten about that.'

'Not much escapes me, Shelby.'

While the meal was cooking they looked on the internet and decided on 'Operation Beelzebub' and their code names were 'Cherub' for Shelby, and 'The Seraph' for her mum.

After dinner Shelby sat at her desk and wrote a list of people she needed to interview. She decided to start with Erin. They had a Science assignment to do over the holidays, so she could use that as her cover story for ringing.

'Have you started your assignment?' Shelby asked when Erin answered the phone.

'Are you kidding?' Erin answered.

'Neither have I,' confessed Shelby. 'So how do you reckon those people stole Diablo?' Shelby held her pen over the notepad, ready to record any information that might be useful.

'I've been thinking about that,' replied Erin. 'During the storm, those circus people ran across the Gully, knocked down the back fence, ran up to Diablo's enclosure, took him, ran back to their place and put him in the stable.'

'That's your theory?'

'Yes. What's wrong with it?'

Shelby snorted and put her pen down. 'If they are going to come in the back way, wouldn't it have been easier to steal one of the horses from the back paddock? There are broodmares in there that are pretty valuable, and that are actually in foal to Diablo, which is like a two-for-one. Why didn't they steal
all
the horses in the back paddock? Why Diablo? Why would they put a big branch on the fence to cover up the fact that they knocked the fence down when they could have just used the gate? Doesn't that seem like a lot of trouble to go to? You know, Erin, the more I think about it, you couldn't have come up with a dumber theory!'

'OK, Miss Smarty-Know-Everything, how do
you
think they did it?'

'I don't know. I can't figure out why they would want him.'

Erin scoffed. 'Diablo was a champion dressage horse, Shel. Don't you know anything?'

Shelby swapped the phone to the other ear. 'Yeah, but he's old now, Erin. He's the equivalent of about sixty in human years. What good is he to them? A circus is not going to lug around an animal that doesn't perform. I don't get it.'

'Maybe they didn't know he was old?' Erin sug-gested. 'It was dark and stormy, remember?'

'Maybe,' Shelby mumbled. Even if it was dark and they couldn't tell how old he was, that didn't explain why they went past so many good quality horses to single out the stallion.

If they did steal him, why didn't they try to hide him? They could at the very least have put a hood over his head! They had made no attempt to even disguise him.

One interview down, and Shelby didn't think she was any closer to what really happened – if anything, she had more questions.

Lindsey wasn't much more help than Erin in solving the mystery of Diablo's disappearance, although Shelby did find out some things she didn't know before.

In the morning, before any of the trail riders arrived, Shelby, Lindsey, Erin and Hayley wormed the riding school ponies. All the horses were in the small triangular yard in the far corner of their paddock, which had once been a cattle race. It was a funny shape so they didn't use it very often.

The girls worked in pairs – one holding onto the halter while the other squirted the worming paste into the horse's mouth. Once they were sure the horses had swallowed the paste the girls let them back into the larger paddock.

'Wow, your horses are heaps easier to worm than mine!' Hayley remarked.

'That's because your mum comes at them with the worming plunger as though it's a weapon,' Lindsey answered. 'It's no wonder they freak out. You can tell just by looking at her face that she expects a war.'

Hayley shrugged. 'My mum attacks everything like it's a war.'

'But she gets lots of things done,' Shelby added. She liked Mrs Crook, even though she could be aggressive.

'How much do you think he weighs?' Lindsey asked, tilting her head towards the roan gelding Shelby was holding.

'I'll get the measure.' Shelby fetched the weight/height tape that the girls had brought with them and passed it around the horse's girth. 'Three hundred and seventy-five kilos,' she told her friend.

Lindsey wound the measuring dial on the tube of worming paste to the appropriate mark.

'I heard those people who found Diablo got arrested,' Shelby said, trying to sound casual.

'Where did you hear that?' Lindsey asked.

'Mum told me,' answered Shelby.

'I reckon they're gypsies, like in
Famous Five
,' said Erin.

'They're not gypsies! Besides, those people call themselves "Romany", you ignoramus!' Shelby told her.

'Nobody says "ignoramus". That is so 1985,' Erin retorted.

'How would you know?' Shelby snapped. 'You weren't even born then!'

'I do have pay television, for your information,' Erin replied, raising her chin.

'Romany,' repeated Hayley. 'Maybe I'll call Smarty's foal Romany?'

Not long ago Hayley had bought a pony from the other three girls. She'd called the pony 'Quicksmart', and now the pony was being agisted at a stud with a view to being put in foal the next spring.

'This one's done.' Lindsey passed Shelby the roan's lead rope so that she could take the newly wormed horse into the paddock. Outside the gate Shelby slipped off the halter and the horse sauntered away to graze. He still had white paste on his lips and poked his tongue out, as if he was thinking, 'Yucko!' Shelby stepped back into the yard to catch another.

'So what do you think, Lin?' Shelby asked, trying again.

'Think about what?'

'About those people who had Diablo.'

Lindsey bit the cap off another worming plunger and spat it into the dirt. 'I think there are good, strug-gling poor people, like your family, and then there are bad, drug-taking, stealing, no-fixed-address poor people,' Lindsey said.

Shelby felt her mouth open with surprise. She had never heard her friend speak like this before. It made her uncomfortable. She had always thought that Lindsey's situation was the closest to her own.

Hayley's parents gave her everything she wanted and Erin was pretty spoiled too. Neither of those girls knew what it was like to have to ask for things when you knew it would be a struggle for your parents.

Lindsey and her mother worked hard every day. They didn't buy new things when a second-hand item would do the job. The Edels' house was small. It had old threadbare furniture in it, and it was untidy a lot of the time, with horse gear draped across the table, or rugs needing repair folded on the floor.

'And what kind of a poor person are you?' Shelby asked.

'Lindsey's not any kind of poor person!' Hayley laughed.

Shelby frowned, confused.

'Don't you know that?' Hayley grinned.

'Shel, you know that property up on the corner that was for sale? It sold for two and a half million dollars a few weeks ago. It's five acres.' Erin smiled knowingly. 'Lindsey's mum has one hundred and seventy-five acres.'

Shelby's eyes widened.

'And that's just the value of the property. Think about how much this place rakes in. A service from Diablo is worth two and a half grand. You've seen how often mares go through here,' Erin said. 'How many trail riders are there every day? Twenty? At forty-five dollars a pop, that's what . . . twelve and a half grand just over this school holidays!'

'And what about agistment?' Hayley added. 'People pay fifty dollars a week each, just to keep a horse in the very back paddock. That's not even counting all the horses in the front paddocks, or in the stables. And what about those ones like Ajax on full board? They pay a hundred and fifty dollars a week
each
! Lindsey is a multi-squillionaire, Shel!' Hayley laughed again.

Shelby stared at her friend. 'Is this true?'

Lindsey didn't answer. Instead she squeezed another tube of paste into the horse's mouth.

'What do you do with it all?' Shelby whispered.

'It's actually really hard to make money out of a horse business,' Lindsey said. Hayley groaned, but Lindsey ignored her. 'I know you guys think we charge a lot, but we're constantly upgrading the equipment, there are always fences that need doing, or mainten-ance to machinery, and we buy the best quality feed. Then there are clients who don't pay, or who leave us with vet bills. Half the riding school ponies are aban-doned agisters. People run up thousands of dollars in debt – way more then their horse is worth, and then just leave it here. We never hear from them again.'

'Really?' Shelby was shocked.

'We use them for the riding school, or we sell them. It happens all the time. That's why I'm riding Lyrical – the Arab. The guy said he was into endurance riding, but we haven't seen him for six months. If she's any good we'll tell him to post over her papers and we'll be square.'

'Wow,' said Shelby. 'Free horses.'

'No, they're not free,' Lindsey snapped. 'They owe us more than they're worth.'

'Don't change the subject!' Hayley said.

Shelby led the horse out and then caught another horse, Beaumont – affectionately known as Blockhead

– a big, grey Percheron, and one of Shelby's favourites. 'Mum has a fair bit in managed funds,' Lindsey

admitted.

'What's that?' Shelby asked.

'You've heard of shares, haven't you? Basically you pick a company that you think looks good and you buy a little part of it. With the extra money the company tries to make more money, and if it does, then all these other people want to own a little bit of it as well, so that means your share is worth more. Then you can sell your share and start again with a different company.'

'Kind of like buying a horse at the sales and educating it,' Shelby said.

'Or gambling,' Hayley joked.

'Yeah, but Mum has this guy that runs it all.'

'A
professional
gambler,' Hayley teased.

Lindsey continued, 'Except sometimes just for fun we'll pick something random, like a goldmine or something.'

'Just for fun?' Shelby repeated.

Lindsey nodded.

'You could buy whatever you wanted!' Shelby said. 'Why don't you buy more stuff?'

'Like what?' Lindsey asked. 'What don't I have?'

Shelby led Beaumont out to the yard, frowning while she thought about it. 'Nice new furniture for your house?' she suggested.

'Are you kidding? All that stuff is antique! One-off collector's items. Besides, I only go in there to sleep.'

'More horses then,' Shelby said.

Lindsey looked around. 'How many more horses do you think I need, Shelby?'