The Ruby Redfort Collection: 4-6: Feed the Fear; Pick Your Poison; Blink and You Die. Lauren Child
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the fridge and took a slug of peach juice. Then she popped a couple of slices of bread in the toaster and climbed onto one of the high stools at the kitchen bar. She glanced at the Twinford Echo, and saw a huge headline:
SHOES GONE WALKABOUT
The townsfolk of Twinford are speculating that the shoe thief might actually be a spectre. Despite the fifty-strong security team, the Little Yellow Shoes, famous for their role in the film The Cat that Got the Canary, disappeared last night from a locked and windowless safe-room at the Scarlet Pagoda. How this pair of size 3s made it out of there alone remains a mystery.
THE NO SHOW SHOES
Stan Barrell (42) was one of the crack security team guarding the door at the fateful moment when the shoes shuffled off.
‘It was like they were there one minute and gone the next. They were totally not there. The only thing that coulda taken them is a living breathing ghost.’
Really Stan? Have you given any thought to what you just said? Stan didn’t sound like he was the smartest security guard in the deck.
Many of the audience apparently agreed with Stan Barrell’s prime suspect suspicions.
SPECTRE UNDER SUSPICION
‘There is no other explanation for it,’ said Mrs Doris Flum from Garden Suburbs, South Twinford, who happened to be at last night’s Scarlet Pagoda costume extravaganza. ‘That theatre is haunted, always has been,’ she stated emphatically.
‘Why are we talking to Doris Flum, what’s she gonna know? And how can the theatre always have been haunted? Someone must have had to die there to haunt it; it wasn’t built haunted.’ Ruby was talking to herself out loud now and Bug the husky was looking confused. Was she talking to him, was she suggesting food? Nothing was appearing in his dog bowl and she hadn’t mentioned the word ‘walk’. Ruby didn’t notice the husky’s hopeful eyes; she was enjoying being irritated by the paper.
The Twinford Echo had a reputation for being a rather sensationalist and silly newspaper; fact wasn’t its strong suit. The only interesting thing it had managed to report concerning the event was that the pair of shoes – otherwise known as prop 53 – was the only thing to go missing, apparently stolen.
So why not anything else?
Ruby pulled her yellow notebook from her back pocket and made a note of this – it sure as eggs had to mean something.
She went back to flipping through the Echo and saw that the second biggest story was about the weather.
WAVE BYE-BYE TO HEATWAVE
Twinford’s heatwave set to end in dramatic style sooner or later
Who writes this stuff?
She read on. It was a fairly overblown piece about the usual storms that fall brought with it, only this year it seemed they were headed Twinford’s way a little earlier than expected. . . but maybe not, the meteorologists couldn’t agree. She turned the page and was faced with yet another picture of the mayor’s statue. The Twinford public were making their feelings known and some wiseguy had dressed it up to look like the Scorpion Spectre. The mayor was not amused.
MAYOR ABRAHAMS DOES NOT SEE FUNNY SIDE
The toast popped, and as Ruby extracted it from the slot and dropped it onto her plate she saw that it was toast with a mission.
Awake?
Good.
Test.
Imminent.
HQ.
Immediately.
‘Cut a kid some slack,’ moaned Ruby, ‘I haven’t had my breakfast yet.’
This was one of the downsides to having a toaster that doubled as a fax machine. Few people wanted orders delivered from their place of work direct to their kitchen table, but for Ruby it was an occupational hazard.
Ruby coated the toast in butter, stuck it between her teeth, picked up her satchel with one hand and her juice with the other and teetered downstairs to the lower ground floor. She could hear one of Hitch’s records playing on the turntable, the melody drifting out of the open door. She knocked and on hearing the ‘come in’ call, she entered.
The tiny apartment was, as always, ship-shape, not a strewn sock or dirty coffee cup to be seen. Didn’t matter what time of day or night, Ruby had never caught Hitch unprepared, asleep or even on the brink of dozing off.
‘Hey kid, you’re up early.’
‘Spectrum called,’ Ruby held up the toast.
‘Ah, the test,’ said Hitch. ‘You ready for it?’
‘My choice would have been to eat breakfast first,’ said Ruby, ‘but yeah, I’m eager.’
‘That’s good to hear, kid,’ said Hitch. He looked like he was going to add something but if he was then he changed his mind.
‘The thing is,’ said Ruby, ‘I don’t have my bike, so I was wondering if you could see your way to maybe driving me in?’ She gave him the Ruby Redfort slow blink and full-on eye hold – but it didn’t work.
‘Kid, it may come as a shock but I’m not actually employed by Spectrum secret services to drive you around. The job’s more complicated than you think.’
‘So how am I supposed to get to HQ immediately? It’s gonna take me three city buses and a twenty-minute walk.’
‘Take the subway from Greenstreet,’ suggested Hitch.
‘Greenstreet is closed for maintenance,’ said Ruby.
‘I’m sure you’ll think of something. Isn’t that what we pay you for? Thinking.’
‘That’s what I was doing, that was me thinking you might give me a lift.’
‘Think again kid.’
‘So how do I make it into the Spectrum elevator, you never gave me the code.’
‘Sure I did,’ said Hitch.
‘You did?’ said Ruby.
‘Think about it,’ said Hitch, ‘I’m sure it’ll come to you. Just add it up.’
RUBY LEFT HIS APARTMENT MUTTERING TO HERSELF about the gross injustice of it and how it was tantamount to child neglect, etc., etc. She picked up her satchel, slung it across her chest and walked out of the front door slamming it behind her. She was working up to being in a bad mood all the way down the front steps, until she caught sight of Elaine Lemon, a woman to be avoided at all costs. Mrs Lemon was always trying to engage Ruby in conversation which was rarely anything but deadly dull and she pretty much always rounded up by saying, ‘So maybe you’d like to babysit for Archie, I know how much you two enjoy spending time together.’
This was not true: Archie was not quite a year old.
Did he even care who he was spending time with? And as for Ruby, was it possible to enjoy hanging out with a baby?
Ruby for one thought not, and so in an effort to avoid Mrs Lemon she completely gave up on her bad mood and ran as fast as she could down Cedarwood Drive. When she got well out of hollering range she slowed her pace