“Good man. Good… Now perhaps you’d like Miss Enderby-Beescombe to show you round the laboratory. As you’ll see, we have all the latest equipment. Meanwhile I’ll get on to my team.”
Although Miss Enderby-Beescombe was a little vague about some of the gadgets she showed him, the hum and whirr and flashing lights in the adjoining room were impressive. But what impressed Donald most of all was the fee that MMM charged.
It was six hundred pounds an hour, Curzon told him, and then a fee of fifty thousand once the boy was found.
Donald, returning home, was able to reassure and comfort Albina. At that price MMM had to be not only good, but the best.
When Donald had left, Curzon picked up the internal phone.
“Sprocket?” he barked.
“Yes, sir, it’s me,” said a high voice.
“Of course it’s you, you idiot,” said Curzon. Sprocket was in fact “the team” about which he had boasted to Donald Fenton. “Now listen. We’ve got a missing boy case. I want a hundred flyers and a photo in the usual dailies. There’s a twenty-thousand-pound reward for news of the boy. Fiona’ll bring everything down.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll see to it straightaway.”
Milton Sprocket was a thin, pale young man who was never allowed upstairs because he had a local accent and had not been to the right school. MMM had the use of a basement room and a garage and it was there that he was to be found.
He was a man who took his work very seriously. After rather a sad childhood being bullied at school and failing his exams, Sprocket had taken a correspondence course at the College of Surveillance and Technology and got a Diploma in Detection and Tracking (or DDT for short). It was a first-class diploma because the college didn’t give out any seconds or thirds, and after this his life had changed.
Sprocket was hard-working and neat. In his cubbyhole in the basement was a cabinet with a number of drawers, all carefully labelled, in which he kept his disguises. There was a drawer labelled: moustaches, eyebrows, nose hair. Another said, scabs, wounds, pimples and boils, and another read, spectacles, monocles, ear trumpets. There was a wig stand in a corner, and a compartment for false teeth, and in a locked cabinet on the other wall lived a row of bottles labelled spit, blood, pus and phlegm, which had been a special offer on the Internet.
But though being in disguise and stalking people was what Sprocket liked best, most of the room was given over to the latest technology. The gadgets upstairs were only for show; it was down here in the basement that the real stuff was to be found. There were fibre-optic cables for looking round corners, and underwater cameras with fins, and sat navs which told you where you were going and where you had been, and binoculars with night vision, and ultraviolet heat-sensing devices … and because some of these things were not very easy to understand, Sprocket had a tall pile of instruction manuals over which he pored for long hours, trying to work out exactly what went where.
Not only that, but Sprocket was also a poet. In the MMM garage next to his room was a white van which he used when he was detecting, and on the side of the van was a verse he had written quite by himself.
The poem was written on a board which could slide out and be replaced by others if he was on a secret mission and both he and the van needed to be in disguise. For example, there was one for when he wanted to pretend to be a greengrocer, which went:
He was also working on a completely new verse which he meant to use when pretending to be a plumber, but it was giving him trouble. A poem like that had to be strong and powerful, but of course none of the words in it could actually be rude.
He pressed the repeat button on his phone and listened to the last part of Curzon’s message once again.
“This is a big one, Sprocket. Go to it! No hanging about.”
Sprocket smiled and rubbed his hands. He was just in the mood for an important and tricky case.
14
Nini
Greystoke House was a big stone building on the outskirts of Todcaster. From the street it looked forbidding and grim, but inside the walls had been painted in bright colours. There was a nursery full of toys, and a room where the older children watched TV. Mrs Platt, the house mother who was in charge, was a fat and friendly lady who did her best to be motherly. All the same, to the children who lived there, waiting to be placed with foster parents, it was still “The Home”, a place in which no one wanted to stay longer than they needed.
The small girl who sat up in bed on the morning that the circus opened in Todcaster had no interest in being fostered. She seemed to have no interest in anything. She was a beautiful child with huge dark eyes, thick jet-black hair and golden skin, but she lived in a closed world which nobody could reach.
She had come from an Indonesian island, a place of great beauty with lush forests, crystal rivers and mountains shaped like big green cones, but a place too of sudden earthquakes and terrifying landslides. Nini’s family had died in one of these, and she had been taken to an orphanage to be cared for by nuns.
It was a peaceful place set in the grounds of a temple where the monks prayed and chanted, and the little dogs who guarded them sat on the stone steps keeping evil spirits at bay.
Then one day a rich businessman and his wife had come to the island for a holiday, seen the little girl playing quietly under a jacaranda tree and decided to adopt her and bring her back to England.
For the first few months that Nini was with them they were delighted with their pretty daughter and dressed her beautifully and showed her off to their friends. But then they found that the little girl did not learn to speak English as quickly as they hoped – in fact she did not speak at all. They took her to a doctor and another and another and were given a lot of names for what might be the matter with Nini, but no one could tell them what to do. She was not deaf, and she could see perfectly well, but she was enclosed in a world of her own.
Then one day when she had spent the whole day being tested in a hospital, Nini had a terrifying tantrum.
“They do that in the East,” a friend had said. “It’s called running amok.”
This was too much for the couple who had wanted a pretty, prattling doll, and they took her to the Children’s Welfare Centre and said they couldn’t keep her. Since then she had been in Greystoke House, not misbehaving, not being difficult, just not really being there at all.
Now she got out of bed and ran along the corridor, moving as lightly as a little ghost, and into the room where the older boys slept, and pulled at the duvet on the bed nearest the door.
Mick woke, saw who it was, and sat up.
“Today’s the circus, Nini. We’re going to the circus,” he repeated.
He was a tough Geordie with ginger hair, freckles and a cheerful open face. His grandfather had been a coalminer till the closure of the pits. For some reason Mick had become Nini’s protector and the only person of whom she took any notice. “It’ll be good,” he went on. “There’ll be horses and acrobats and clowns.”
But Nini did not answer, only looked at him. He might have been telling her about a visit to the dentist. Mick sighed and reached for his clothes.