The Boy Who Cried Fish (13 page)

‘But how did he steal it?’ Fizz asked, pointing at the mudshark tank. The glass was unbroken. Unless the thief had magic powers, he couldn’t have just reached into the water and taken the fish.

‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘I’ve not been able to work it out. Nothing’s ever broken, the doors are all still locked. It’s a mystery.’

Fizz had spent long enough in the circus, and especially with Dr Surprise, to know that when things looked impossible, there was usually a perfectly sensible explanation behind them. It had to be the same here.

He looked in the empty tank. He tapped on the glass. He looked at the damp floor where the burglar had been stood when they’d first seen him, wrestling something into the inside pocket of his coat, presumably this mudshark. He looked at all these things in just the way a detective in a book would, but none of them gave him a clue. None of them leapt out at him shouting, ‘Aha! It’s me!’

‘I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘I’m stumped.’

‘You’re Stump,’ corrected Wystan.

Fizz raised his eyes to the ceiling at the terrible joke, and saw something that made him think, ‘Aha!’ after all.

‘Look at that,’ he said, pointing up.

It was a ceiling tile, like the ones in Mrs Darling’s office, and it was slightly askew.

‘We surprised him, like you surprised us,’ he said to the security guard. ‘He didn’t have time to put it back straight.’

‘But?’ she said, taking her hat off and running a hand through her short hair.

‘I bet there’s no lid on the tank, is there?’

‘No,’ said the Admiral. ‘I likes to give them fishes of mine a dash of the fresh air, like they’d have out at sea.’

‘Well, then,’ said Fizz. ‘He must’ve had a bendy net or something and poked it up and over the side, through the hole in the ceiling and down into the tank. Then he could watch through the glass as he scooped his fish up.’

‘I reckons you’re right, lad! But that don’t get us no closer to running the roach rustler to ground.’

‘Hang on,’ Wystan said, stroking his beard (which is how you can tell a person with a beard has been thinking about something). ‘In the office there was a telly screen.’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘It’s linked to all the security cameras.’

‘So how come you’ve not caught the burglar yet?’

‘He’s quick,’ she said, glumly. ‘He’s crafty. He covers the cameras up. Look over there.’

She pointed to the corner of the corridor, where up on the wall a camera was pointing at them. A little red light blinked, but the lens of the camera had been blocked up with something. All she’d see in her little room was blackness.

Fizzlebert’s brain was ticking over. He’d solved mysteries before. Hadn’t he saved the circus from Wystan’s wicked stepmother? (Yes.) Hadn’t he escaped from Mrs Stinkthrottle’s house? (Yes.) Well, surely he could solve this mystery now. All he needed was a dead good clue and this might be it.

‘Wystan,’ he said, ‘can you reach the camera? Get whatever it is that’s blocking the picture?’

‘Sure,’ said Wystan.

In one bound and a bounce (using his acrobatic elasticity) he jumped up and snatched the bit of paper that was wedged into the front of the camera.

Fizzlebert unfolded it, half hoping the thief would have used an old envelope with his name and address on. He smoothed it out on the concrete floor and looked at what it was.

‘It’s just some rubbish, just a bit of random litter,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘That’s no good. It doesn’t tell us anything.’

Fizzlebert’s brain sparkled inside his head (had the lights been turned out it’s possible you might have seen a glow from inside his ear). ‘No, no, it does,’ he said. ‘It tells us a lot. Look at it. It’s the wrapper to a packet of flour.’

‘So, what does that tell us?’ the Admiral said. ‘That the sea-sickening villain is a baker?’

‘No,’ Fizz said. ‘Not that. Not quite.’

Beep beep beep. Beep beep beep.

As the sound echoed between fish tanks they stood in silence and watched the great swaggering brute of a crocodile lurch round the corner, glance at the four of them with its flashing amber eyes, lumber over to the Admiral and flop with a scaly crash down at his feet.

Admiral Spratt-Haddock sighed, and rolled his eyes in embarrassment.

The crocodile yawned hugely, revealing long rows of large yellow teeth and a vast pink tongue.

‘Wow,’ Wystan said. ‘Imagine sticking your head in there, Fizz.’

Fizz tried not to, though now it had been mentioned it was hard to shake the idea.

‘Ignore her,’ Admiral Spratt-Haddock said as the crocodile rubbed its head on his boot and lay down to snore gently. ‘She’s harmless. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Take the leg off an antelope, mind you, but the flies’d be fine.’ He scratched his chin. ‘You were saying, me lad, something about that bit of paper. A clue, d’ya reckon?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Fizz, stepping away from the crocodile. ‘I think . . . I think I’ve got it all worked out. We need to get back to the circus.’

‘The circus,’ said the Admiral, excitedly. ‘I
knew
this was the squid-juggling circus’s fault!’

‘Not all of us,’ Fizz replied, ‘but I think I know who.’

On their way to the front doors they went past a tank at the end of the pink corridor. Wystan stopped and looked into it.

‘I think this is the one I fell in,’ he said.

‘Yes, sorry about that,’ the Admiral said. ‘It’s supposed to have a lid on, that one.’

As Fizz looked into the water a dark pink shape (a shark-shaped dark pink shape, mind you) loomed up from between some weeds. He jumped at the sight, but Wystan leant in even closer.

‘She’s not so big,’ he said.

‘She’s a he,’ the Admiral corrected, ‘and he’s only young.’

‘Was Wystan in danger?’

‘Oh no, this is an Austrian Blushing Shark. Very shy. Mostly vegetarians.’

The shark still had a few strands of scraggly black hair caught between his teeth.

‘It’s a hair-bevore,’ Fizz said, slapping his bearded pal on the back. (Unnecessary Sid would’ve been very proud of that joke.)

Wystan felt the hole in his beard and grumbled, ‘I did have hair before, so you can say that again.’

But Fizz didn’t say it again. He thought, quite rightly, that for some jokes, once is more than enough.

Mrs Darling locked the glass doors behind them as the Admiral and the two boys stepped out into the cool of the evening. She was staying behind, because a guard’s work, as she said, is, so long as there is something left to guard, guarding.

As the Admiral and the boys walked along the prom, into the night, the sea, which was off to their right, down in the dark, roared and sloshed up and down the beach. The salt spray sang in their nostrils and Fizz was reminded of what he’d almost forgotten in the excitement of the hunt for the fish burglar.

‘I wish we’d found Fish,’ he said to the Admiral. ‘I really thought you had him. We were certain.’

The evening was cool, and he felt even colder in his dripping clothes. He was leaving damp footprints behind him. With every step his shoes squeaked, his socks squirted water up his ankles and his trousers
shthwacked
together.

‘I dunno,’ Wystan said, wringing a few more drops of water out of his beard. ‘If he don’t turn up, what am I gonna do? I ain’t got no act without Fish.’

Fizz didn’t say anything to that. He knew, even when they did find Fish, that
he
didn’t have an act come tomorrow, not unless Captain Fox-Dingle had found a miracle cure for old age, and since he wasn’t a doctor and miracles are hard to come by, that seemed unlikely.

‘The sea lion,’ the Admiral intoned in his deepest, most wise tones, ‘is a mysterious creature. The sea lion is his own master, we merely borrow his attention for a time. Pescado came to me, me lads, in me hour of need. He just rocked up one evening and brought his act to my ’Quarium. One day, I know, he will wander off, flollop down the beach and be gone, off into the great sea to find himself a new destiny. And maybe, just maybe, this Fish of yours is the same. Maybe he’s heard the call of the ocean singing in his salty veins. Maybe he has been called home.’

Fizz hoped what the Admiral was saying wasn’t true, that Fish hadn’t grown tired of travelling round with the circus. They shouldn’t have come to the seaside at all, not if one whiff of the salt breeze could tempt his friend away. He blamed the Ringmaster, he blamed Bill, the head lorry driver who drove the truck with the Big Top on, he blamed anyone he could, except Fish.

Fizz missed him something rotten at that moment. He wondered if he’d ever see his kipper-flavoured friend again.

Ahead of them they could see the lights of the circus through the row of trees that separated the park from the prom, and when the wind whipped round in their direction they could hear the muted sound of music coming from the Big Top. The evening’s show wasn’t over yet. With any luck the boys wouldn’t even have been missed.

Now, Fizz told himself, was not a time to be sad. There was work to be done. And when there’s work to be done, the best thing to do is to do it. He knew exactly where he could find the Admiral’s nemesis, the burglar, the thief, the robber.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘Even if we’ve not found Fish, maybe we can rescue some fish of yours.’ And with that he ran straight into the next chapter.

Chapter Thirteen

In which fish are found and in which a villain is faced

‘Fizz!’

Captain Fox-Dingle had spotted them sneaking into the circus and was shouting from the steps of his caravan.

He looked miserable. His moustache, small as it was, seemed to be drooping uncombed and unkempt across his top lip.

The show was going on in the Big Top (they could hear the audience applauding and laughing and the band playing) and the Captain was having to miss it all. No wonder he looked sad. And then he caught sight of who Fizzlebert was with.

He stepped off the bottom step, just as the trio of potential heroes came to a stop.

Captain Fox-Dingle looked at the Admiral. He looked at his dark sailor’s coat, at his rather appropriate nautical hat, at the hook on his hand. Took the whole lot in in one slow sweeping look from head to toe.

‘Fizz?’ he asked.

‘It’s all right Captain,’ Fizz said hurriedly. ‘He’s from the Aquarium, we’re helping him find his lost fish.’

‘Admiral Spratt-Haddock,’ the Admiral said holding his hand out to shake (not his hook-hand, but his hand-hand). ‘Delighted to meet a fellow—’

Captain Fox-Dingle interrupted, ignoring Spratt-Haddock’s words and hand and speaking to Fizz instead.

‘Come.’

And with that he turned on his heel and strode off behind his caravan, assuming that the boys would follow.

‘I’m sorry about that, Admiral,’ Fizz said. ‘He’s got a lot on his mind at the moment.’

The Admiral shook his head. ‘Not everyone’s got the knack of making shipmates, Fizz,’ he said.

‘But he didn’t need to be so rude. He’s a lion-tamer, you’re a fish-tamer: I reckoned you’d be friends.’