The Fangs of the Dragon Read online

  Praise for Saxby Smart

  ‘Talk about being involved in a book! Sharp reads written in a lively and snappy style.’

  Liverpool Echo

  ‘Wise-cracking, engaging style, reminiscent of the Sherlock Holmes stories, so that the reader is expected to act as Watson.’

  School Librarian

  ‘If you have a boy who is losing enthusiasm for books, try tempting him with Saxby Smart … It is hard not to be engaged.’

  Daily Mail

  First published in Great Britain in 2008

  by Piccadilly Press Ltd,

  5 Castle Road, London NW1 8PR

  www.piccadillypress.co.uk

  Text copyright © Simon Cheshire, 2008

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  The right of Simon Cheshire to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978 185340 983 7 (paperback)

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the UK by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon CR0 4TD

  Cover design and illustration by Patrick Knowles

  CONTENTS

  CASE FILE FOUR:

  THE TOMB OF DEATH

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CASE FILE FIVE:

  THE TREASURE OF DEAD MAN’S LANE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CASE FILE SIX:

  THE FANGS OF THE DRAGON

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  INTRODUCTION:

  IMPORTANT FACTS

  My name is Saxby Smart, and I’m a private detective. I go to St Egbert’s School, my office is in the garden shed, and this is the second book of my case files. Unlike some detectives, I don’t have a sidekick, so that part I’m leaving up to you – pay attention, I’ll ask questions.

  CASE FILE FOUR:

  THE TOMB OF DEATH

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  I’M NOT VERY GOOD AT making things. If I ever do one of those plastic construction kits (you know, fighter planes, sports cars, etc.), I always end up with it covered in patches of glue. And a piece stuck on backwards. And another piece that falls off as soon as I put the finished model on my shelf.

  So I should have known better than to try to fix my Thinking Chair. As readers of Volume One of my case files will know, my Thinking Chair is a vital part of my work as a brilliant schoolboy detective. It’s a battered old leather armchair, and in it I sit, and I think, and I mull over important facts about whatever case I happen to be working on.

  My Thinking Chair had developed a slight rip on one of the arms. One afternoon during the spring half-term hols, I was in the garden shed trying to patch it with a piece of super-tough heavy-duty repair tape. Guaranteed 100% Bonding Power! it said on the roll. The trouble was, it was one hundred per cent bonding my fingers together.

  Just as I was wishing I’d asked my very practical friend ‘Muddy’ Whitehouse to do the job for me instead, there was a knock at the shed door. Immediately, I heard the sign fall off (the sign I keep nailing up outside, which says Saxby Smart – Private Detective). I sighed to myself.

  ‘Come in!’ I called.

  In came Charlie Foster, a boy in my year group at school. He was an owlish kid, the sort of person who gives the impression of being tubby even when they aren’t. He wore tiny round glasses, and had a habit of sniffing a lot.

  He looked around the cluttered interior of the shed. Half of it, as always, was crammed with old gardening and DIY stuff of my dad’s (I’d found that super-tape in amongst it). The other half of the shed was crammed with my desk, my files and my Thinking Chair.

  He handed me the sign from outside. ‘Hello, Saxby. Is this yours?’ he said.

  You can tell he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, can’t you? He was also looking a little scared, and carrying a slightly crumpled handwritten note.

  ‘What can I do for you, Charlie?’ I asked. ‘Who’s told you to come and see me?’

  He sniffed in amazement. ‘How did you know it wasn’t my idea?’

  ‘People who need my services don’t normally turn up looking as if they don’t want to be here,’ I said. ‘Besides, that note you’ve got there is written in an adult’s handwriting. My guess is that someone has written down some specific information.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlie, with another sniff. ‘My big brother Ed. He’s nineteen.’

  ‘And why does your brother Ed need my help?’

  ‘His comic’s been stolen.’

  My eyes narrowed. ‘Hmmm. Yeeees, I can see that would be annoying. I don’t want to sound rude, but, umm, wouldn’t this be filed under Not All That Important? Or possibly under I’ll Go And Get Another Copy?’

  Charlie suddenly remembered the note, smoothed it out a little and double-checked something written on it. ‘This comic is worth one hundred thousand pounds.’

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  ‘HOW MUCH?’ I GASPED. ‘What’s it made of, solid gold?’

  I fell back into my Thinking Chair. This made the rip in the arm worse, but right now I was more concerned to hear the details of Charlie’s problem. Or rather, his brother Ed’s problem. Charlie blew the dust off an old crate full of paint pots and sat down.

  ‘Ed is a collector of comics,’ said Charlie. ‘He buys and sells them, and he’s got shelves full of really old and valuable ones.’

  ‘As it’s a weekday afternoon, and he’s sent you here rather than come himself, I deduce that he normally needs to be somewhere at this time of day. So trading comics is his hobby, not his job?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Charlie, ‘he works at the restaurant in Frizinghall Street. He’s a chef. But he’s hoping to become a full-time trader. Or he was, until this comic was stolen.’

  I settled down in my Thinking Chair, trying to ignore the low ripping noise that was still coming from the arm. ‘So, tell me all about this comic, and what exactly has happened.’

  ‘It’s Issue 1 of The Tomb of Death,’ said Charlie. He consulted Ed’s note again. ‘Published in America in 1950. There were only a few thousand copies made, and there are less than six known to still exist.’

  ‘And what’s so special about Issue 1 of The Tomb of Death?’

  ‘Dunno, never read it,’ shrugged Charlie. ‘But comic collectors dream of owning a copy. It’s one of the most valuable comics in the world, so Ed says.’

  ‘And when was it stolen?’ I asked. ‘Give me every detail you can.

  ‘Ed keeps it . . . er, kept it . . . in the wall safe downstairs at our house. Dad had the safe put in because he sometimes has a load of money in the house, if he can’t get to the bank after his shop’s shut. But Ed uses it mostly. The Tomb of Death was in a see-through plastic case, propped up at the back of the safe.’

  ‘And how long had it been there?’

  ‘Ed inherited it a couple of years ago. Our granddad used to be an avid comic reader when he was our age, and when he died he left two big boxes of old comics to Ed. And in amongst them was The Tomb of Death.’

&nbs
p; ‘It was always kept in the safe?’

  ‘Always. Ed hardly ever took it out. It was far too valuable and delicate to handle. It stayed in the safe twenty-four-seven!’

  ‘Why didn’t Ed sell it?’

  ‘I think he was going to. I’m not sure, you’ll have to ask him.’

  ‘And when was it stolen?’

  ‘Last weekend. Dad opened the safe on Monday morning, and it was gone.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘The safe had been cracked? You’d had a burglar?’

  ‘Ed and Dad say not. We have an alarm system, and that hadn’t been tripped. The safe has its own alarm, and that wasn’t tripped either.’

  ‘Was it there on Sunday?’

  ‘Yes. Dad put the weekend’s takings from his shop in there. The comic was still in the safe then. Definitely. I saw it myself.’

  ‘So there was a lot of money in the safe that night?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why the safe was opened on Monday morning: to get the money out so Dad could take it to the bank.’

  A couple of important points had already become clear to me. One of them was about the safe, about how someone had gained access to that comic. The second important point was about the comic itself, about why the thief had stolen that, rather than the money that was also in there. Can you work out what I was thinking?

  Point 1: If two alarms weren’t tripped, and no burglar was involved, then the safe was almost certainly opened by someone who already knew the combination to it!

  Point 2: If the thief took an old comic, but left a pile of cash untouched, then the thief was almost certainly someone who already knew the value of the comic. They knew that the comic was worth more than the pile of cash!

  ‘This is all very puzzling,’ I mused. ‘Didn’t Ed go to the police?’

  ‘Yes, but they say there’s nothing they can do. There was no break-in, or anything like that. It’s as if the comic simply vanished into thin air, overnight.’

  I stood up decisively. ‘OK, here are the two things I’m going to do, in reverse order: Number Two, I’m going to examine the scene of the crime; Number One, I’m going to try and get this wretched super-tough heavy-duty repair tape off my fingers. Tell your brother that Saxby Smart is on the case!’

  A Page From My Notebook

  Question: If the comic was so valuable, why did Ed keep it? Why not sell it and get enough money to set himself up as a full-time trader, which is what Charlie says he wanted to do?

  Question: What kind of thief steals a comic, but not money? Even if a thief saw a comic book in a safe and thought, Aha! I bet that’s valuable, they’d surely have taken the money TOO. Why was this thief ONLY interested in the comic? I’m sure this is significant.

  Question: Will I be scraping these gluey bits off my hands for the rest of time?

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  FIRST THING THE NEXT MORNING, I boarded a bus to Charlie’s house. As it rumbled its way through town, I phoned my super-brainy friend and all-round research genius, Isobel ‘Izzy’ Moustique.

  ‘How much?’ she gasped.

  ‘That’s exactly what I said,’ I said. ‘I’m on my way to the scene of the crime right now.’

  ‘A comic book so rare and valuable would be very hard to sell without attracting attention,’ said Izzy. ‘This must be a pretty stupid thief! There’s no way they could do anything with that comic without being noticed.’

  I shrugged. ‘They could read it.’

  ‘What? You’re telling me that the contents of a comic like that wouldn’t have been reprinted and republished in a dozen books by now? No, nobody would steal it just to see what was printed in it.’

  ‘I guess not,’ I said. ‘Anyway, see what you can come up with. Information on recent sales of rare comics, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Already on it,’ said Izzy. ‘Come and see me later.’

  As the bus chugged and bumped along the town’s main shopping streets, something struck me about what Izzy had said. She was right – the thief would find it almost impossible to sell that comic without being noticed.

  Unless . . .

  Unless they didn’t plan to sell it at all. Suddenly, I jumped up with a cry! It startled the old lady sitting in the seat behind me.

  ‘Have you missed your stop, luvvy?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I’ve missed an obvious suspect!’ I replied.

  She gave me a funny look. I think she thought I was a bit barmy.

  But there was an obvious conclusion to be drawn here. What sort of person would steal that comic book and not intend to sell it at all? Only one sort of person, as far as I could see! Can you see it too?

  Another collector, like Ed! Someone who might want to keep the comic just for its rarity alone.

  At last the bus reached my stop. The old lady clutched her shopping and watched me nervously as I raced to get off. I hurried over to Charlie’s house. He took me up to Ed’s room first, so I could finally meet his brother.

  They say that the clothes you wear say something about you. If that’s true, then the clothes Ed wore said something rather rude. With a hand gesture added in as punctuation. He was without doubt the scruffiest person I’d ever seen in my life. He looked as if he’d bought his T-shirt and jeans from the local rubbish tip, and he had a scrubby beard that reminded me of those scatterings of sugary bits you get on cakes. Apart from all that, he was simply a larger version of Charlie.

  His room, tucked away in a converted attic at the top of the house, was his exact opposite. It was amazingly neat and clean. One entire wall was covered in white shelving units, and housed on these units were hundreds – no, thousands – of plastic envelopes. Just visible inside each envelope was the outer edge of a comic book, and most of the envelopes had handwritten sticky labels attached to them.

  Ed was sitting in front of his computer. As soon as Charlie and I came in, he bounded over to me and shook my hand so enthusiastically I thought my teeth would come loose.

  ‘Hi!’ he said. ‘You must be Saxby. Charlie’s told me all about your exploits, kid. I hope you’re as good as your reputation suggests.’

  ‘Better!’ I declared with a grin. ‘Now then, tell me more about this comic.’

  Over a glass of fruit smoothie and some rather posh chocolate biscuits (‘Ooh, yes, I’ll have another one of those,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’), Ed told us the tale of The Tomb of Death with a wild gleam of eagerness in his eyes.

  ‘Way back in the 1950s,’ he said, ‘The Tomb of Death was the first in a new style of comic book in America. Full of grisly stories about murder plots, evil curses and tentacled monsters. These comics were a smash. Kids loved them. And within a couple of years, they were banned!’

  ‘Banned?’ I said. ‘Were they really horrible, then?’

  ‘Naaah,’ said Ed. ‘They were funny! With a few scares thrown in, mind you. The thing is, parents started saying they were a bad influence on kids, and they were all banned: The Tomb of Death, The Valley of Slime, all of them.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘They weren’t published for long, and parents would get rid of them wherever they could. Result: they end up as rare collector’s items.’

  ‘Precisely!’ cried Ed. ‘There are certain comics that are legends in the world of collecting. Like, for instance, the Action Comics issue in which Superman first appeared in the 1930s, or Batman’s arrival in Detective Comics a little later. Or Issue 15 of Marvel’s Amazing Fantasy – that’s the origin of Spider-Man; that comic’s worth a fortune.’

  ‘And The Tomb of Death is as famous as those?’

  ‘Weeeell,’ said Ed, pulling a face and rocking his head from side to side. ‘It’s less sought after, but it’s so unusual that its value is at least their equal.’

  My earlier thoughts about another collector being the thief sprang to mind. ‘Did you keep the comic a secret? Did other collectors know you had it?’

  ‘Of course they knew!’ cried Ed.
‘I mean, what’s the point of having Issue 1 of The Tomb of Death in your collection if you don’t tell the world?’

  ‘You weren’t worried one of them might try to steal it?’

  ‘To be honest, no,’ said Ed. ‘It was in that safe, locked away.’

  ‘And it never came out of the safe?’

  ‘Never. Well, except on special occasions, and on those occasions it never left my sight.’

  ‘What sort of special occasions are we talking about?’

  ‘Er, let’s see,’ said Ed, wrinkling his nose up in thought. ‘Comics UK magazine did an article on my collection about a year ago. They took a picture of me holding the comic. Then I took it to a trade fair shortly after that.’

  ‘What’s a trade fair?’ I said.

  ‘A kind of comic convention,’ said Ed. ‘Lots of traders, lots of buying and selling goes on, comic publishers show off their latest stuff, that sort of thing.’

  ‘An ideal opportunity for a thief!’

  Ed shook his head. ‘That comic was in a sealed, see-through case that never left my hand. I even took it to the loo with me! It was perfectly OK.’

  ‘Was that the last time the comic was taken out of the safe?’

  ‘No, there was one more time, about four months ago. I took it out to show to Rippa. He’s another collector. He’s got a shop in town, right opposite the restaurant I work at. That’s how I got to know him. Odd bloke. Not really someone you’d trust.’

  ‘I see,’ I said quietly.

  Ed could see what I was thinking. ‘I can see what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘No, he never even touched it. You shouldn’t touch comic books that old, anyway.’

  ‘Not touch them? Why?’

  ‘They were printed on very cheap paper. High acidic content in the wood pulp, you see, so after a few years the paper literally starts to crumble. That’s another reason why certain comics are so rare. Most copies have simply fallen apart. You’ve got to keep the air off them, and keep them out of sunlight. Like vampires.’ He pointed to the neatly stacked comics on his shelves. ‘Why else do you think I keep all of those in plastic wallets?’