Circus of Thieves on the Rampage (13 page)

Hannah woke at the same moment. She woke from what was possibly the exact same dream. A dream of a woman on a trapeze. A woman who was like Queenie Bombazine, but wasn’t
Queenie Bombazine. A woman who was also like Hannah, but wasn’t Hannah. She was wearing a green rubber catsuit with a yellow lightning bolt streaking across the chest and down one leg. She
was beautiful and graceful and elegant, and she swung backwards and forwards through Hannah’s sleeping brain like some kind of angel, or blessing, or promise, or premonition, or something.
Something good, anyway. More than good. Because though the dream woke her in the darkest, loneliest hour of the night, she woke with her heart feeling full and warm. She felt accompanied, protected
and looked after, which was not a new sensation for Hannah, but on this occasion she had a strong sentiment that there was someone close by who was with her in that moment, right with her, not
present in the same room, yet somehow closer than close.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
Hannah wake up in the presidential suite of the Oh, Wow! hotel. This was a room the size
of a football pitch, except without any grass or goalposts. It was so big you could get lost in it, with a bed so wide you could get lost on your way from the middle to the edge, a sofa so plump
you could get lost between the cushions, cupboards so enormous you could . . . I think you get the idea . . .

I seem to have got lost explaining how lost you could get in this hotel room. Where was I again? What day is it? Who am I?

Oh, yes. I’m me and it’s today and I was about to tell you how Queenie had carried Hannah up the night before, from her temporary bed of snotty tissues in the dressing room, and laid
her down on the presidential four-poster, which was a significant improvement, luxury-wise.

Queenie had given Hannah a long lie-in, but she’d eventually been woken by the sound of Binary Tim, who was arriving for a breakfast meeting to discuss anti-Armitage security measures.
Binary Tim was Queenie’s IT
⁴²
consultant and a specialist in high-tech anti-robbery surveillance. He wore strange glasses, which made his eyeballs
look three times their actual size, not because of a particular problem with his eyesight, but because he thought this would make him more alluring to women. In this, he was mistaken. Binary Tim
had only a very sketchy knowledge of female psychology.

Hannah woke to hear Binary Tim outlining the scheme he had devised.

‘We hook up a motion-sensor camera in the box office. I connect that to facial recognition software on my laptop, scan in an image of Armitage Shank, and, if someone with a Shank-like
appearance enters, that will trigger a release mechanism on an ornamental medieval sword which I will install directly above the safe, which is where he’s sure to be doing his dastardly
deeds. This sword should do for him, but just in case he’s in the wrong position when it falls, I can also connect the release mechanism to the office sprinkler system, causing that to be
triggered at the same moment, except that I’ll replace the water in the sprinkler tanks with an extremely powerful laxative fluid. This will cause Mr Shank to need the toilet with quite
fabulous urgency, but he won’t be aware that I have booby-trapped the nearest lavatory with a high-voltage electric current running through the toilet seat. I’ve also ordered some
poisonous spiders on the internet which I have a feeling might come in handy as a fall-back option.’

‘Hmmmm,’ said Queenie, who didn’t want to be discouraging, but who remained not entirely convinced by the plan. ‘Do you think this might be a little
overelaborate?’

‘The sword doesn’t have to be medieval. That’s optional.’

‘It’s not just that. It’s the whole thing.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘I don’t want to cut his head off, I just want to stop him robbing me. I want to catch him in the act and get him sent to jail.’

‘The sword can be blunt. Or we could use a Viking club. That should just knock him out. And the electric current doesn’t have to be fatal. Paralysis would be fine.’

‘Why don’t we just put in a camera to record what he does, and we can tip off security to arrest him on the way out.’

‘That’s all you want?’

‘I think so.’

Binary Tim’s three-times-normal-size eyeballs filled with three-times-normal-size tears. Big, wet golf balls of disappointment. ‘You don’t want the motion-triggered medieval
sword?’

‘I don’t think we need that.’

‘The electrified toilet seat?’

‘I think that might be a hazard for the staff.’

‘I could put an exploding cactus on the windowsill. Just in case.’

‘That’s very kind of you, but I think I’ll pass on the exploding cactus.’

‘Laxative in the sprinkler system?’

‘Just water will be fine.’

‘OK,’ said Tim, looking more than a little crushed. ‘If you’re sure.’

‘I’m sure.’

Queenie gave Binary Tim a kiss on the cheek by way of thank you, which seemed to cheer him up enormously, and he left in good spirits. It was only then that Queenie noticed Hannah was awake.

‘Hannah, dear. You’re up! What would you like for breakfast? Boiled egg, fried egg, poached egg, coddled egg, scrambled egg, devilled egg, eggs Benedict Cumberbatch or omelette? Or
all of them. That’s what I had and quite delicious it was, too.’

‘What’s eggs Benedict Cumberbatch?’

‘It’s poached egg on a muffin with bacon and hollandaise sauce served in a deerstalker hat. Delicious.’

‘You like eggs, then?’

‘Oh, yes. Absolutely. You can live off eggs and water and nothing else. Did you know that? Or maybe that was coconuts. Anyway, we can order you the whole egg medley and, if you don’t
finish it, I’ll polish off your leftovers. Did you hear Binary Tim’s plan?’

‘Yes. He’s very ambitious.’

‘Wonderful man, but works best off a short rein. Wild imagination. Which is normally a good thing, but it’s not what you want in an IT consultant.’

‘So he’s putting a camera in the box office?’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘And that will catch Armitage?’ asked Hannah.

‘I think so.’

‘But what about Billy? What if he’s there, too? Will he get arrested?’

‘We have to find him first. We have to warn him. If we want Armitage to meet his dooooooom, we have to make sure he commits the burglary, but without Billy taking part, and without
Armitage noticing anything strange. It’s a conundrum, and we need someone small and unobtrusive and cunning to get a message to Billy before the burglary takes place. Someone he knows and
trusts who can sneak behind the lines of Armitage’s operation without being noticed.’

‘ME!’
⁴³
said Hannah.

‘Yes,’ replied Queenie. ‘You. Now are you ready?’

‘Of course I am.’

‘Not before you’ve had your eggs you’re not. Now eat up.’

Hannah ate up. The eggs Benedict Cumberbatch was the best breakfast she had ever tasted, though the deerstalker hat was a little chewy.

H
ANNAH BOUNDED OUT
of the presidential suite powered by a surge of egg-fuelled energy. Boy, she was
buzzing.

Then she realised she had Queenie’s alarm clock in her pocket. She switched it off and she stopped buzzing, which was a relief.

Hannah went down in the lift and up again, because she liked lifts, and down again, and out into the Oh, Wow! Centre, which was filled with excited people walking around, wondering why they were
excited and how they had ended up in the middle of nowhere in a huge and pointless tent. They were there for the final night of Queenie Bombazine’s Aquatic Circus, of course, but since it was
just after breakfast time, these people had really arrived preposterously early, which perhaps explained their confusion.

Hannah went off to look for Billy. She hunted and hunted and hunted and hunted and hunted and hunted, but to no avail. He was nowhere to be found. Not even if you hunted and hunted and hunted
and hunted and hunted and hunted.

Hannah’s rampage was not going to plan. In fact, it was proving a little monotonous.

She was so disappointed that she decided to console herself with a stick of candy floss.

Yes! Candy floss!

From the candy floss stall!

Which is when she found him!

Oh, joy!

Oh, rapture!

Oh, bliss!

Oh, stop using exclamation marks!

I can’t help it!

Stop!

I can’t!

You have to!

I’ll try!

The reason why Hannah had been unable to find Billy was because he’d spent the entire morning on the roof of the candy floss stall waiting for Hannah, and the roof of the candy floss stall
was a place Hannah had not thought to include in her hunt.

No sooner had Hannah ordered her candy floss than Billy leapt down from his perch to give her an enormous hug-of-the-century. Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm, Billy failed to notice that his
ankles were tangled in a string of bunting. So his top half leapt down, but his legs didn’t. This happened just as Hannah was passed her stick of candy floss.

The upshot of this simultaneous candy floss delivery and bunting entanglement was that just as Hannah was about to take her first bite, an unidentifiable head plunged down and hung there, buried
inside the cloud of pink sugar.

Hannah’s first thought was that she was being attacked by a cunning, airborne candy floss thief. When she heard the word ‘Help!’ emerging from inside her candy floss, she began
to think maybe this person wasn’t a thief, but she still couldn’t understand why they would choose to dangle inside her mid-morning snack.

‘Hannah!’ said the candy floss. ‘It’s me!’

‘Who?’ said Hannah to the candy floss.

‘ME!’ replied the candy floss aka Billy, who wasn’t thinking straight at this moment, on account of being upside down, tangled up in bunting, suffocating inside a portion of
novelty fairground food.

Hannah decided the best thing to do was to take a large bite of the floss. This bite revealed to her the most joyous and wonderful sight she had ever seen. Billy! Swathed in what now looked like
a fluffy pink balaclava.