The Ruby Redfort Collection: 4-6: Feed the Fear; Pick Your Poison; Blink and You Die. Lauren Child
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‘How did you even get out here anyway?’ asked Hitch, who was looking around for some clue as to transport.
Ruby opened her mouth, ready to come up with an answer that Hitch might swallow, but before she could speak he held up his hand.
‘You know what,’ he said, ‘don’t even bother to lie because I don’t want to know.’
The figure in black
walked down the side
of the building. . .
. . .not exactly Spider-Man-like, but it didn’t look like it was causing him a whole lot of effort either. That is to say, it looked entirely natural, in the way it looks natural for a gymnast to flick-flack across a mat, or an acrobat to walk on his hands.
Only this guy was walking down a vertical wall.
Not only that, but he looked like he walked up and down walls for a living, and judging by the way he was now running along the narrow parapet, perhaps the balance beam was something he used daily too.
When he reached the ninth floor of the apartment block, its façade decorated with ornate stone carvings, he edged over to a small window, held onto the lintel and – using his feet – pushed at the glass until it gave.
Then he flipped himself inside.
MR AND MRS OKRA WERE PERPLEXED to find paint chips in the tub. They would probably never have spotted them at all had it not been for Mrs Okra’s bad back and her deciding to have a long hot soak in the tub rather than take a shower. She was about to step in when she noticed the flakes of white paint floating on the surface of the water. How had they got there?
She looked up. Of course, the only thing above her, the only thing painted in white, was the tiny window high in the bathroom wall. She found the stepladder and took a closer look. The window, which had previously been painted shut, had clearly been forced open, and this was what had caused the sprinkling of white flakes.
Mrs Okra was mystified. She called her husband and they searched the ninth-floor apartment for missing items. The only thing that seemed to be gone was a first edition poetry book, A Line Through My Centre, by JJ Calkin – which had been on Mr Okra’s nightstand. It was always kept there. Mr Okra had a sentimental attachment to the book and often read a page or two when he was feeling melancholy.
There was a handwritten inscription inside: To my darling Cat from your Celeste, and Mr Okra had always wondered who these people were. It was nice to think of this woman giving the book to someone important to her.
The cops were called and they examined the evidence. There had indeed been a break-in, no doubt about it, but who would be brave enough to climb ninety feet up the outside of the Fountain Heights building to the ninth floor, be strong enough to force a stuck window, be small enough to climb through the tiny opening and be silent enough to not wake the sleeping Mr Okra and discreet enough to not be seen by his insomniac wife and get away undetected with a possession kept so close at hand?
THE GHOST OF SPIDER-MAN, ran the headline in the Twinford Echo.
Ruby Redfort rolled her eyes when she read this; she was not a big believer in ghosts, and ghosts of superheroes even less so. This was even dumber than the article about the Little Yellow Shoes spectre. She tended to opt for the simpler explanation when it came to crimes that couldn’t be solved; 99% of them were pretty easy to crack if one looked at them logically. RULE 33: MORE OFTEN THAN NOT THERE IS A VERY ORDINARY EXPLANATION FOR THE EXTRAORDINARY HAPPENING.
‘Cars and cabs passed by, late-night walkers hurried home, but no one took notice of this human fly,’ the journalist had written.
Spiders? Flies? What next, birds?
Ruby read on.
‘I’m thinking it must have been some type of birdman,’ Jimmy Long, the concierge at the Fountain Heights building explained. ‘He just swooped in from nowhere and dived in through one of the windows; yeah, it was a birdman all right.’
‘Ah, there we go, birds,’ muttered Ruby.
Mr Long went on to explain that he had been asleep at the time of the incident and hadn’t actually seen or heard a peep, a buzz or a chirp from the burglar, but that sort of detail didn’t seem to bother the Echo. If Jimmy Long said it was a Birdman, then that was what it was.
But the Twinford Lark (Mrs Digby’s paper) had something better than Jimmy Long – they had a witness who claimed to have seen the mysterious climber.
Boo White, a guy sleeping rough in a disused shop doorway, thought he had seen a man scaling a building. ‘Like Spider-Man,’ he insisted. ‘I saw him climb from the roof to halfway down the wall and in through a window, but I never saw him come back down.’
‘Jimmy says Birdman? Boo says Spider-Man? Who should I believe?’ said Ruby, imitating the voice of Elaine Lemon. She knew Elaine Lemon would love this story.
There wasn’t a single other person who had noticed so much as an insect crawl up the building and no one had seen the intruder come out of the Okras’ apartment, and though the cops searched from basement to rooftop, there was no sign of the intruder anywhere in the building.
Clancy and Ruby were sitting up in the oak tree on Amster Green. Ruby had risen early that morning and left the house by climbing out of the window and down the eucalyptus tree. She didn’t feel like running into Hitch and had decided to stay out of his way for as long as possible, then maybe he would eventually stop wanting to strangle her.
She and Clancy were perusing various local papers; they were actually meant to be looking for a French polishing service that might visit the Crew’s house pronto, no questions asked. This would save Clancy’s older sister, Minny, from a month of hard labour and evenings in her room. Minny had trashed their mom’s Louis XV dressing table by splattering it with hair dye – she would be suffering a whole lot of grief if something wasn’t done about it before Mrs Crew discovered the wreckage.
Clancy’s mom was out of town but was expected back in 24 hours. Clancy for one couldn’t cope with the stress of the imminent storm and so had decided to take matters into his own hands. However, he and Ruby had got diverted from their perusal of the ad pages by yet another sensationalist piece about the Okra robbery.
‘Was it highly valuable?’ asked Clancy. ‘This poetry book that was stolen?’
‘Ummm,’ Ruby scanned the words, ‘no, unless you call twenty bucks a lot.’
‘I do actually,’ said Clancy, ‘but I wouldn’t climb up or down the outside of a building for it – so what makes this book so special?’
Ruby read on a little more. Mr Okra was describing the book’s importance to him. ‘I found it tucked into the seat pocket of a plane I was on. I guess whoever it belonged to had forgotten it when they disembarked. I was travelling back from LA, I was very depressed at the time, my life was in tatters, but I discovered that book and I began reading – it turned me around. I wrote a piece about it for the Twinford Herald.’
‘Must be some book,’ said Clancy.
‘I guess things don’t have to be valuable to be valuable,’ said Ruby.
‘I guess you’re right,’ said Clancy.