The Pirate's Blood and Other Case Files Page 4

  “Why’s that?” I said.

  “Pie or stew?” barked the server. I looked at the two metal trays in front of me, full of brownish stuff. They both appeared to be identical.

  “Pie, please,” I said.

  Splat. Brownish stuff. I caught up with James as we looked for somewhere to sit.

  “So, why’s today full of surprises?” I said.

  “Dad thought he was going to be back pretty late tonight, from assessing that anomalous benefactor’s stuff—”

  “Anonymous.”

  “—so I was going to go over to my cousin’s after school. But Dad called to say he’s back at the museum already.”

  “Why’s that?” I said.

  James shrugged. “No more stuff to assess. He said there was just a note waiting for him at the office he has to go to, saying that’s all, thanks very much. He’s fuming. There wasn’t one single item worth buying.”

  An alarm bell suddenly sounded. Nothing to do with lunchtime, this was in my head.

  “Today of all days,” I muttered to myself.

  “Looks like you were wrong about that being a decoy,” said James. “The gold’s safe and sound. Maybe the ghost of Captain Blade will settle down now. Maybe that’s why the handprint disappeared. It’s just such a shame about Mrs. Pottersby.”

  “Mrs. Pottersby?”

  “Yes, that’s another of today’s surprises. When Dad got back, Mrs. Pottersby handed him her resignation. She’s leaving the museum at the end of the week. She’s retiring.”

  Now I had two alarms clanging away in my head. “She’s what?”

  “Dad’s fuming about that, too. Like I said to you yesterday, she’s been there thirty-odd years. Dad says it’ll cost a small fortune to hire another—”

  “That’s it!” I cried.

  I almost dropped my tray. I bustled James over to the nearest table and told him to get his food down his neck, fast.

  “Why?” he said.

  “I know exactly what’s been going on,” I said, shoveling mashed potato into my mouth. “Call your dad back, tell him to shut the museum. Now! He mustn’t let anyone in or out!”

  “He won’t do that!” cried James with a laugh. “You obviously weren’t right about that anomalous benefactor being a decoy, so he’s not going to start closing the museum on your say-so, is he?”

  “Tell him if he doesn’t, he might find that the police will soon be wanting to question him about that bank robbery!”

  James blinked at me. “What? That’s crazy.”

  “I’m serious!” I cried, flipping down a couple of quick mouthfuls of greenish stuff. “Oh, tell him whatever you like, but it’s vital that the museum is locked up right away! Come on!”

  I stood up to go.

  “We must hurry to the school office,” I said. “We’ve got to get permission to go out of school and over to the museum right this minute. There’s not a second to lose!”

  “But I haven’t finished my pie yet,” wailed James.

  I almost had to drag him away. He kept his plate and fork with him all the time we were dashing to the office.

  The whole Captain Blade/bank robbery situation was now crystal clear. It was a complex scheme carried out with ruthless efficiency. And the entire case hinged on three things:

  The vanishing of the handprint.

  The stockroom of the museum gift shop.

  That sawdust I found on the museum floor.

  How much of it have you pieced together?

  Chapter Seven

  Thanks solely to my reputation as a detective, the principal (reluctantly) let us out of school, and James and I got to the museum about half an hour later. We ran most of the way there. By the time we arrived I was even more exhausted and breathless than I had been the previous afternoon! Oh, come oooon, it was another very warm day!

  “Wow, you really are unfit,” said James.

  “Shut yer face,” I gasped, wheezily.

  “Seriously, you should get more exercise,” muttered James.

  The area around the bank was cordoned off with lengths of striped blue and white tape. Two police cars were parked at the roadside, and several officers were milling about, talking into radios and sipping mugs of tea.

  We hurried into the museum. As James had predicted, the museum was still very much open for business. Mrs. Pottersby was pottering about in the gift shop, as usual, cardboard boxes piled up higher than ever.

  “Are there any visitors in here?” I wheezed.

  “Not at the moment, luv, but I’m expecting an afternoon rush,” said Mrs. Pottersby.

  “Right,” I said to James, “shut the front door.”

  “You can’t do that!” cried Mrs. Pottersby suddenly. “I’m expecting a delivery of novelty pencil sharpeners at any minute!”

  “Are there any other exits?” I said.

  “Well, no,” said James, “not unless you climb out of a window.”

  “What’s going on?” said a deep voice, approaching from the direction of the exhibition rooms. James’s dad appeared, duster in one hand and clipboard in the other. He was a large man, in a brown jacket with leather patches on the elbows. He had a mustache like a sad and hairy caterpillar, and a fleshy neck that cuddled up tightly to the collar of his smart shirt.

  “Dad, this is Saxby,” said James.

  “Ah!” said James’s dad, eyeing me as if I was a shard of ancient pottery. “So, you’re Saxby Smart, are you? I wanted a word with you about all these wild accusations you seem to be throwing around.”

  “Listen, please!” I cried, still slightly out of breath. “Just give me a few minutes. Close the museum, stop anyone from coming in, and I’ll give you a complete explanation of what’s been going on, I promise. If, after that, what I say turns out to be wrong, or you don’t believe me, then fine. March me back to school, complain to the principal, anything you like. Just please give me the benefit of the doubt for a few minutes.”

  He stared at me for a moment or two, as if I was a shard of ancient pottery that needed the mud scraped off it. Then he let out a long sigh. “Oh, very well. Shut the door, would you, please, Mrs. Pottersby?”

  “If I miss my delivery, I will not be pleased,” grumbled Mrs. Pottersby, unhooking her bunch of keys from her waistband.

  Two minutes later, we were assembled in the Captain Blade exhibition room. Mrs. Pottersby stood close to the window, keeping an eye out for delivery vans.

  “Now then,” said James’s dad. “What exactly is all this about?”

  “It’s about that bank robbery,” I said.

  “That bank robbery is a very serious business,” said James’s dad, “but it can’t possibly have anything to do with this museum.”

  “On the contrary,” I said. “If this museum wasn’t here, that robbery would never have happened.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said James’s dad quietly. “What sort of accusations are you making now?”

  I felt I was skating on thin ice, sailing close to the wind, and whatever other metaphors there are for risking disaster. “I’ll start,” I said, “by simply saying that you don’t, I’m afraid, know this building as well as you think you do. Underneath us, right here, where we’re standing, there is a large cellar.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, Saxby,” said James. “When are you going to let that one go?”

  “You’re utterly mistaken,” said James’s dad.

  “Just move that big exhibition case,” I said. “And I’ll prove to you I’m right.”

  “I told you,” said James. “The only thing under that case is the floor!”

  “And I’m telling you, there is an entrance to a cellar,” I said. “Let’s just move this case and see. If I’m wrong, then feel free to tell the whole school and I’ll be the butt of everyone’s jokes for the rest of the term.”

  James’s dad sighed again. “Fine. If it’ll put an end to it, then fine. Mrs. Pottersby, would you do the honors and unlock the bolts?”

  “The poor
luvvy sounds a bit soft in the head, if you ask me,” said Mrs. Pottersby.

  “Quite possibly,” said James’s dad. “But let’s clear this up once and for all.”

  “Send him packing, I would,” grumbled Mrs. Pottersby. She fiddled with her mass of keys. “I don’t think I’ve got the right ones with me.”

  “That’s them,” said James, pointing to a clump of keys with red plastic tags attached to them. “Here, I’ll do it if you like.”

  He took the hefty key ring and, one by one, unlocked the metal catches that held the enormous exhibition case in place. Then he disabled the case’s alarm system with a separate key slotted into the side.

  James’s dad took a firm grip on the case and heaved it aside. His face rippled through various shades of pink and purple as he slid the case away from the wall. Behind the glass, the relics of Captain Virgil Blade’s life of piracy—his clothes and gold, his sword, the bottle of his blood—wobbled around a bit, but stayed in their positions. After a minute or two of grunting effort, he’d swung it around almost ninety degrees, exposing the area that had been beneath it.

  And there, in the floor, was a makeshift hatch. The floorboards had been cut through, and a small hole drilled to provide something to pull the hatch up by.

  “What…the…?” cried James’s dad. He also cried one or two other things, but I won’t repeat them here.

  He bent down and hooked two fingers into the drilled hole. He raised the hatch, and it bumped open against the nearby wall. Below the hatch was a set of stone steps leading down into absolute darkness.

  “I…I…I had this case out only the other week,” spluttered James’s dad. “When we put all the Captain Blade exhibits in it. This wasn’t here. This was not here!”

  “Someone’s cut into the floorboards,” said James. “Saxby, how could you possibly know this was here?”

  “For the simple reason that it had to be,” I said. “I should have realized the moment I spotted that scattering of sawdust, over there by the floor molding. Obviously, someone had been cutting up wood in here. But I didn’t understand the significance of it until the rest of the crooks’ scheme fell into place.”

  James’s dad waved his hands around in confusion. “Hang on a minute. Start at the beginning. What does this hatch have to do with the bank robbery?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Imagine you’re a bank robber. You’ve hit on a brilliant idea for breaking into the strongroom at Boyd’s Direct Bank, two doors down from here. Next door to the bank, there’s a house that’s empty. And, like all the addresses in this block, the empty house has a cellar. In this case, a cellar that is just one connecting wall away from that strongroom.

  “The plan? To sneak into the house one night, blast through the connecting wall, and make a run for it with as much loot as possible before the cops arrive. A kind of underground smash and grab.

  “But then, something put a monkey wrench in the works. As today’s news article made clear, the police got to know—through an informant, possibly—that this robbery was being planned. They put the empty house under surveillance. They could catch the bad guys red-handed.

  “So it looked like the whole deal was off. Until the crooks hit on an even better idea. They worked out a way they could rob the bank right under the noses of the police and, what’s more, they could vanish into the night leaving nobody with a clue as to how they did it. Instead of getting into the bank through the empty house’s cellar, they’d get into the bank through the empty house’s cellar and the museum’s cellar.

  “What do they do? They go down into the museum’s cellar, then tunnel under the wall between the museum and the empty house. Up they pop in the cellar of the empty house. From there, they can set to work on the connecting wall into the strongroom. After the robbery takes place, they come back through the tunnel with the cash, filling in the tunnel behind them as they go, so that it’ll be very hard to detect that it was ever there in the first place. They’ve also left the empty house’s cellar floor knee-deep in rubble from the demolished wall, so that the police will take even longer to discover the way they got out. Result? They can get away through the museum, making it appear as if they’ve simply vanished from the cellar of the empty house.”

  “But,” said James, “how did they break down that wall without being heard? And how did they even know there was a cellar under this museum in the first place?”

  “And how did they get access to this room?” cried James’s dad. “And how did they manage to cut a hole in this floor without my noticing it?”

  “Ah!” I said. “That’s the even sneakier part of an already sneaky plan. You see, the crooks realize that having to go through the museum as well as the empty house actually lessens their chances of a clean getaway. It’ll take longer to get out on to the street, for one thing. The problem is the noise—and the vibrations—that demolishing the wall will cause. Someone is going to notice immediately. They won’t have long before the police turn up to find out what’s happening.”

  “So, what do they need to do? They need to find a way to get through that connecting wall quietly. Not quickly, but quietly.”

  “Why not quickly?” said James.

  “Because they can work away in secret,” I said. “Over the space of several weeks, they can come in here, down into the cellar, through the tunnel, up into the cellar of the empty house, and work away, bit by bit, chipping that connecting wall to the bank to pieces. They can remove all but a thin section of the far side of the wall, so that from the other side, the bank’s side, nothing appears to change. Then, on the night of the robbery, they just pull the last layer of brick away and they’re into the strongroom.”

  “But that’s impossible,” said James’s dad. “Even to cut this hatch in the floor, let alone to come and go through it for weeks, they’d have to move that display case—which is bolted and alarmed.”

  James suddenly went pale. “Oh, crumbs,” he said quietly.

  “I think James has spotted the next link in the chain,” I said. “The crooks could manage to move that case easily…if they had an accomplice, if they had someone with a set of keys who could watch out for them as they worked on the connecting wall.”

  James, his dad, and I all looked slowly in the direction of Mrs. Pottersby. She was still standing by the window, but her attention had switched to the three of us. The expression on her face was a mixture of anger and defiance.

  “But…” gasped James’s dad, “surely…I mean…No, I can’t believe it! Mrs. Pottersby, you can’t have…I mean, there’s no way you’d…”

  “I told you,” said Mrs. Pottersby quietly, “that boy’s a bit soft in the head. He’s got no proof. No proof at all.”

  “Actually,” I said, equally quietly, “I have. The handprint.”

  “But that was a man’s handprint,” said James. “And it’s gone!”

  “Yes,” I said. “You see, it’s the very fact that it vanished that is the proof. When you first came to see me, James, only you knew about that handprint. You told me about it. And together, the next day, we showed it to Mrs. Pottersby. Only three people knew it existed. You and I didn’t—in fact, couldn’t—get access to it to clean it away. So who did?”

  “But,” said James, “Mrs. Pottersby couldn’t even see it when we showed it to her, not with her eyesight.”

  “Oh, she said she couldn’t see it,” I declared, “but the moment she realized it was there, she knew how it got there, and she knew she’d have to remove it. For days and days, the crooks had been coming into this room, moving the display case once Mrs. Pottersby had unlocked it for them, and going down through that hatch to continue their work. But one day, one of the crooks, heaving the case aside, dislodges the relics and needs to rearrange them. He puts his hand against the inside of the glass, leaving a print. It was a reddish, pinkish color. Why? Brick dust. Picked up from the work being done in the cellar next door.

  “Now, Mrs. Pottersby saw at once that one of the gang had left
a clear fingerprint. Indisputable evidence, if the police found it. So at the first opportunity, the next day when the case was shifted aside again, she had to wipe off the handprint. It was a risk, since a couple of schoolboys had already seen the print. The thing is, she didn’t reckon on one of those schoolboys being Saxby Smart.”

  “I still don’t understand,” said James’s dad, pulling his fingers through his hair. “Are you saying all this happened every night, while James and I were asleep in our beds upstairs?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Nothing happened at night. Someone would have noticed. Someone living in this block would have seen suspicious comings and goings, or at least heard the sounds of digging, which would have carried farther at night. No, everything happened in broad daylight, during normal museum opening hours.”

  “Those spooky sounds!” cried James. “People were hearing the crooks, digging away at the connecting wall!”

  “Exactly!” I said. “And since the sounds happened during the day, most of those who heard them simply put them down to their neighbors’ everyday noise.”

  “That’s crazy,” said James’s dad. “How could a gang of crooks, even with Mrs. Pottersby’s help, come in and out of this hatch undetected? This is a public place!”

  “Umm, yes,” I said. “A public place that gets half a dozen visitors a day. The crooks could turn up dressed like ordinary members of the public. They could carry tools with them in their pockets, or in backpacks, or anything. And when they’d finished working on the wall, they could leave, one by one, the same way they came. They’d simply blend into the shoppers out on the street. From the outside, nobody would be any the wiser. Even if real visitors started turning up, all Mrs. Pottersby had to do was turn them away, or close the front door for a while. There was nobody here to check up on her.”

  Now it was James’s dad’s turn to go pale. “That anonymous benefactor,” he said. “All that business really was a decoy, after all?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. “The trouble is, I made the mistake of thinking that it was Captain Blade’s gold that the thieves were after. You see, the whole Captain Blade exhibition was perfectly timed, as far as the crooks were concerned. It was all set up a few weeks ago, and it’s due to stay here until September. Which gave them weeks and weeks in which they knew the floor area under the display case would be hidden from your sight. Of course, once September arrived and the exhibits had to be returned, then you’d find the hatch. But it would no longer matter: the crooks would be long gone.