Читать книгу The Ruby Redfort Collection: 4-6: Feed the Fear; Pick Your Poison; Blink and You Die - Lauren Child - Страница 35

TWO MINUTES LATER, BLACKER WAS STANDING NEXT TO HER – he looked more dishevelled than usual, perhaps due to the sprint from the upper floor.

He looked over Ruby’s shoulder. ‘Well I’ll be. . .’

‘It must have been the heat,’ said Ruby. ‘It was left under this lamp and I think that’s what did it. Boy I could kiss Froghorn.’

‘You OK Ruby?’ Blacker was looking concerned. ‘You sound like you might need to lie down.’

‘It’s a figure of speech, not actually, nah, you know what I’m saying, it’s just if I hadn’t gotten into this fight with him then I wouldn’t have left the card under the lamp so long and then it might not have reacted with the heat. . .’ She was staring intently at the card. ‘So what does it look like to you?’

Blacker didn’t say anything for a few minutes and then broke the silence by saying, ‘Well, on the one hand it looks like how one might draw a window, you know, the rectangle shape with one line down the middle and three cutting across it like glazing bars making six panes of glass.’

‘And?’ said Ruby.

‘On the other hand it looks a lot like a loyalty card.’

‘Exactly what I thought,’ said Ruby. ‘So what if it’s both? The window image is telling us it’s the calling card of the thief who comes in through the window, and the grid markings are also telling us how many things he’s going to take.’

‘So why are the boxes all empty?’

‘You got me,’ sighed Ruby.

‘Give me a minute,’ said Blacker, he walked to the intercom and paged the lab technician.

Two minutes later, SJ was back.

‘Something happened?’ said SJ.

Blacker pointed at the card.

SJ peered at it first with her eyes and then through the magnifier.

‘Very interesting,’ she said. ‘It reacted to heat, so you are wondering what else it might react to?’

‘Yup,’ confirmed Blacker.

SJ wasted no time and began setting up various tests using a number of liquids – mild acids, alkalis, various other substances. Drop by drop they fell onto the card, but revealed nothing.

Black light revealed more nothing.

X-rays revealed nothing too.

Same when they took the card to a dark room and dunked it in a developing bath, as if it was photographic paper.

Finally SJ took off her goggles, peeled off her gloves and sat down. ‘That’s all I’ve got,’ she said with resignation. ‘Not sure what else I can throw at it.’

‘Looks like that’s all folks,’ said Blacker. ‘Rube, go on home and put your head on a pillow, we can look at this again in the morning.’

It was disappointing to make one breakthrough with the grid lines, only to get no further, but since they had hit a dead end, they decided they all might as well head on home.

Once back at Cedarwood Drive, Ruby watched some TV but she couldn’t concentrate. Her book wasn’t holding her attention either.

Finally she gave up and went to bed. But – and not for the first time – she found it difficult to sleep; she just couldn’t turn off that brain of hers. She pulled out her notebook from the doorjamb and wrote down a couple of questions that she really needed answers to.

The first being:

If we are right in our theory that the thief is leaving loyalty cards in place of stolen items, then why has the Okras’ card been left blank?

If this robbery is connected to the shoe theft, then why no loyalty card there?

No answers were popping into her exhausted brain so she went down to the kitchen to find herself a snack. She made herself a pastrami bagel and while she ate she flicked through an ancient copy of the Whispering Weekly which she found in a stack of old newspapers that Mrs Digby used to protect the table when she was polishing the silver. The Whispering Weekly was not a very entertaining magazine, unless you were a person who particularly enjoyed reading about other people’s misery, both public and personal.

In this particular issue there was a feature on famous people who had been spotted wearing hairpieces – not hairpieces worn to add to the celebrities’ general glamour but hairpieces to prevent men from looking bald.

Geez, thought Ruby, why contaminate your mind with this junk. She stuffed the gossip mag back in the pile and went back to her room to find something better to occupy her brain. What she chose to read was one of her encoding books, in the vague hope that she might stumble across some clue as to what this whole mystery was about. She climbed into bed with a copy of Sherman Tree’s Unlock My Brain and read until she nodded off.

It was 4 am when Ruby’s eyes suddenly blinked open and she sat bolt upright, feeling around for her glasses.

Quite out of the blue she felt an urgent need to get hold of the latest issue of the Whispering Weekly.