Wilma Tenderfoot and the Case of the Frozen Hearts (15 page)

“Captain Brock isn't a detective!” spluttered Inspector Lemone.

“But he produces results, Inspector!” shouted the Curator. “Results which I'm not seeing from you!”

“I've got some results!” shouted a small, panting voice from the road behind them. “And before you tell me off, Mr. Goodman, I'm not chasing after you or anything. But I have something I should have given you before. Pickle found it at the workshop. I wanted to make some deductions of my own before I gave it to you. But I guess I'm not allowed to do that now. And what with it being a vital clue and everything, it's only right that you should have it. Anyway, here it is.” She held out her hand and opened it. As she did so, Miss Pagne screamed.

“A spider?” asked the Curator, staring at the insect in Wilma's hand.

“Argh!” yelled Wilma, flicking the squashed thing back into her pocket. “No. Not that. This. It's a piece of broken dart.”

“Let me see,” said Theodore, striding forward to take a look, his magnifying glass in hand. “Look at that, Mr. Curator. Lightly feathered with a pointed wooden shaft. A blow dart. Quite crudely made.”

“But effective,” said the Curator, taking the dart shaft and peering at it.

“So someone,” said the Inspector, rubbing his chin, “blew a poisoned dart at Visser? Presumably to avoid being seen. But from where?”

“There was an air vent,” pondered Theodore. “Up on the right-hand wall. The angle from there would have been perfect to dispatch the dart. But that's not all this means. It now seems likely that whoever beat Visser up—and I'm beginning to recognize the handiwork of Barbu D'Anvers here—WASN'T the one to poison him . . .”

“So someone came in the door and someone else must have crawled down the vent!” urged Wilma. “Not that I'm deducting or anything. I'm too busy getting this picture reframed. Pickle broke it. Mrs. Waldock's sent me out.”

“Mrs. Waldock?” asked the Curator with a squint.

“She's my mistress,” explained Wilma, pointing at her in the broken picture. “Although, to be honest, she looks a lot different from that these days. Still, I'm definitely doing my chores now, Mr. Goodman! All the same, I bet if you followed that air vent to where it started, there might be a whole bag of clues!”

“It's a basic deduction, Wilma,” said Theodore. “Vents can start in many places. But have you seen that feather, Mr. Curator? Pale blue with golden flecks. Very unusual. This is an excellent clue.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Well done, Wilma.”

Wilma flushed with delight. At last she had managed to find a proper clue. Even if it was more Pickle's doing. She gave the beagle a grateful wink. And more importantly, Detective Goodman was pleased with her! She'd show him she could be his apprentice yet!

The Curator looked distastefully down his stubby nose at Wilma, who gave him one of her stares. “Yes, well,” he said, putting the dart down on a plate of corn crumbles that Inspector Lemone had left resting on the side arm of the buggy. “I suppose this is something approaching a development. But we still don't have our man, Goodman!”

“Despite this young girl's efforts,” whispered Miss Pagne, shooting Wilma a sideways glance.

Wilma looked up at the glamorous assistant and felt a little uncomfortable. She wasn't used to the company of attractive ladies. She was more accustomed to battleaxes and heffalumps. Wilma glanced down at herself. Her pinafore was creased and grubby and she had some tufts of grass sticking out of one sock. “I've been catching spiders,” she explained with another defiant stare, catching Miss Pagne's unimpressed eye.

“Never fear, Mr. Curator!” enthused the Inspector. “Now we've got that dart, Goodman will have this wrapped up quicker than a Christmas present! He'll work out how it was made and where it came from and so forth. That dart will give us some answers! Just see if it doesn't!”

“No, Pickle, no!” yelled Wilma suddenly. As they had all stood about, the resourceful hound, sniffing a half-eaten corn crumble, had crept up to the edge of the buggy, jumped onto the footplate, and snaffled the abandoned biscuit, and with it the shattered dart shaft, lying on the plate next to the biscuit, had vanished. Pickle had eaten the evidence.

“Why is it,” wailed Wilma, “that every time I try to do something right, it always ends up going wrong?”

But no one had an answer to that.

“
Y
es!” declared Barbu, throwing a hand into the air. “I think those colors suit you perfectly!”

Janty, in a pair of bottle green shorts and a custard yellow sweater, was standing on a box looking miserable, his mass of dark curls hanging low over his eyes. “Add them to the pile, please,” Barbu yelled at the hunched-over shop assistant already laden with clothes. “And get changed, Janty. Then we shall buy you an ice cream. Or milkshake. Or whatever it is that young people like. Tully, what do young people like?”

“Smoking cigars, Mr. Barbu?”

Barbu gave his henchman a penetrating stare. “Smoking cigars ...” he mumbled, shaking his head. “Honestly, I don't know why I bother.”

 

The Bravura department store was the Farside's most magnificent shop. Shaped like a giant Twizzler, from the floors and the pillars to the counters and the tills, everything was made of glass so that you could stand on the second floor and see all the way up to the fifth and back down to the basement. Barbu had brought Janty to children's clothing on the third floor, past the glass Fountain of Fizz, where bubbly drinks shot out at passersby at random intervals. Tully had just been sprayed with a particularly sticky splodge of raspberry and chocolate cola and was still trying to scrape the gloopy mess from the inside of his nose. It was exactly the kind of chirpy place that Barbu hated, but he had a plan and knew what he was doing. Charm the boy and he would get what he wanted: the secret of who had ordered the fake Katzin Stone.

As a general rule, children should never trust grown-ups who want to buy them lots of gifts. Adults are selfish creatures and despite their having access to things children don't, like bank accounts, sudden displays of generosity should be treated with nothing but suspicion. In most cases they just want you to shut up, but sometimes, as here, they're after something more sinister.

“I know these trinkets are an inadequate recompense for your loss,” trilled Barbu softly, putting a black-clad arm around Janty's shoulder, “but if there is anything I can do for you . . . anything at all . . .” He trailed off and, turning his head away, sniffed a little. “Your father was a good man and a great forger. The best. If only there was some way of continuing his work . . . of honoring him . . . to maybe have some sort of memorial ... for all those he knew. But it's no good. He was so secretive. Nature of the business,I suppose ... but if I could just find out who his clients were . . . if there was, oh I don't know . . . an order book . . .”

Barbu snapped his head back around to stare at Janty. The boy looked up. It was the first time he had ever heard anyone talk fondly of his father, and his watery gray eyes flickered with gratitude. “Did you really like my dad?” he asked.

“Oh!” exclaimed Barbu, throwing back his head. “Like him? I ADORED him! And so brilliantly talented! He could make anything from . . . well, anything!”

“What did he make for you?” continued Janty.

“What did he make for me?” whispered Barbu with a blink. “What DID he make for me? Well. He made ... umm ... he made ... no! I can't speak of it! It's too painful! Let me just remember it in my own mind. Yes. There. I've remembered it. Sort of funny-shaped. With a thing. Good.”

“My father wanted me to be a forger too,” said Janty. “He was teaching me everything he knew before he . . . ” But the words caught in his throat and his chin fell back down onto his chest. “I can't believe someone killed him! Who would do such a thing? And why?”

“There, there,” said Barbu, pushing his bottom lip out. “We must be strong. We both miss him. TERRIBLY. Of course your father would be delighted that I am now your guardian. Thank goodness we arrived in time to save you from the dreadful do-gooder Theodore P. Goodman. Awful man, isn't he, Tully?”

“Well, I've only met him a few times,” answered the big idiot, putting a finger to his lips to help him think. “And to be honest . . . oww!” The silver fist of Barbu's cane thwacked off Tully's forehead.

“Never mind,” snapped Barbu. “All Janty needs to know is that we are his new family now. And family shares things. What is mine is yours. Except the things in the blue cupboard in my study. They're not yours. But everything else—fine. And what is yours . . . is mine. So you said your father had an order book . . . ?”

“Did I?” sniffled Janty, rubbing his eyes dry. “I don't remember.”

“Well, think again,” replied Barbu, his tone hardening. “It's very important. Your father would have wanted me to keep his secrets safe. Just as he trusted me to look after you. And I suspect,” added Barbu with a cunning snarl, “that whoever killed your father is probably in it.”

“My father did have an order book, yes,” answered the boy eventually, a little stunned by the sudden revelation. “But he told me to hide it and never let anyone see it.”

“OBVIOUSLY that doesn't apply to me!” guffawed Barbu, thumping Tully in the chest. “As if! Ha ha ha! No. What he meant was, only show it to people you trust. And you trust me. Don't you, Janty?” The villain had crept in close, his words slithering like snakes. “And you do want to find your father's killer . . . ”

Janty looked down at the bags he was carrying. “Well, you did buy me all these clothes ... and I do want to find out who did it. More than anything.”

“Yes,” whispered the black-hearted villain. “Yes, you do.”

“And you did save me from the police.”

“Yes,” whispered Barbu, closing his eyes and tilting his head. “Yes, I did.”

“And if my father arranged for you to be my guardian, then I suppose he trusted you.”

“Oh, he did, Janty. He trusted me very much.”

“Well, all right then,” said Janty, his head lifting. “My father's order book is in a building on the edge of Under Welmed, on the Lowside. But I've hidden it. And only I know where it is.”

“Then we must find it before it falls into the wrong hands, my boy,” said Barbu with a sense of triumphant urgency. “Because THAT would never do!”

And off they swept, with Janty in the dark shadow of Barbu's cloak.

W
ilma was standing in the waiting area of Miss DeChrista's Framing Emporium with her arms folded. She had a ticket in one hand and was deep in thought. Pickle, head slumped, was sitting on the floor emitting occasional puffing noises. The pair of them were in trouble. And they knew it. “Seeing as we've really mucked things up this time,” Wilma began, tapping the ticket against her top teeth, “we ought to try to make things right.” Pickle hung his head to one side in an attempt to look penitent, but it was tricky—that biscuit had been extremely tasty.

“I mean, for a minute there, Mr. Goodman was impressed, I know he was. But now he'll never have me as his apprentice if I don't fix things!” Wilma's eyes lit up. “I really need to have another look at my Clue Board. Because we've got the dart stuff to add. Even if you did eat it.”

Wilma looked down at Pickle. He had tensed and had one paw in the air pointing toward the lane outside the shop. “Pickle!” saidWilma, giving him a nudge. She followed his line of sight. There, striding toward them, was Janty, closely flanked by Barbu and Tully. Wilma gasped. “Remember Mr. Goodman's top tips? Number three: Keep a sharp lookout for suspects and sometimes creep around after them! This is our last chance to put things right! We have to follow them, Pickle. We can come back for the picture later.” The hound let out a small snort that sounded remarkably like “Agreed.”

It was clear from the start that Janty was heading for the Lowside of the island. The cart depot was a short walk from the border village of Measly Down, and the shortcut the boy had taken from the Bravura department store had led the rotten troupe straight into Wilma's path. Luckily for Wilma and Pickle, the depot was always busy in the early evening, packed with people waiting for carts to take them back to the Lowside, and so the pair of them were able to blend into the crowd while still keeping an eye on their targets. Barbu, who wouldn't be seen dead in a public cart, booked his own private carriage to travel in. It was parked to the left of the depot, and seeing them climb in, Wilma realized she had to think fast.

“If I remember rightly,” whispered Wilma, bobbing behind a donkey, “there's a lot of ducking and also diving involved in creeping around after suspects. It might help if we're slightly in disguise too. There's a couple of sacks of potatoes over there. If we put them on and things get precarious—that's a word that detectives use when situations take a turn for the worse, I found it in Mr. Goodman's dictionary—we can just lie down and pretend to be bags of vegetables.”

Wilma snuck over to the potato bags and undid the tops. Tipping out the potatoes, she dragged the sacks to the nearest cart and, taking a small iron pick hanging on a hook at the back of the tailgate, poked out some eyeholes, slipped one sack over Pickle's head, and lifted him into the back of the empty cart. “Lie still,” she whispered as she tugged the other sack over her own head and climbed in behind him. “They're just ahead of us. When we get into the Lowside we can jump out and follow them again. But for now, pretend you're a potato.” Pickle gave a little huff. He'd never been a potato before and couldn't shake the feeling that imitating a small muddy tuber was a little bit undignified for a hound. Still, he had eaten that dart.