The Boy Who Cried Fish (12 page)

Then, there was Fizz on the surface of the water, but he was floating face down, his red hair plastered round his head and his arms weakly flapping. Wystan shouted his name as a great dark shape rose beside him, and shouted it again as those heavy jaws opened, water pouring off them.

‘No, you wretched beast, you interfering dinosaur,’ shouted Spratt-Haddock, waving Fizz’s coat at the crocodile.

The noise of those jaws slamming shut was like the thudding stone doors of some dank mausoleum. It sent an electric shock up Wystan’s back, and slivers of ice all through his veins. He covered his face with his beard, not wanting to see what had happened to his friend, but his left eye saw everything, because of the hole the shark had bitten.

The crocodile sank beneath the water, and Fizz vanished with it, sucked down in a froth of bubbles.

And then . . .

. . . the crocodile burst up out of the water, balancing Fizz, not between its jaws as Wystan feared, but on the tip of its snout. It pushed him up, out of the water and dumped him down on the concrete, just at the Admiral’s feet and then, like a particularly ugly ballerina, it spun and sunk back under the water, snapping its jaws twice.

Recovering his wits from where he’d dropped them, Wystan opened the gate and ran round the pool to where the Admiral was stood looking down at the unusually delivered boy.

‘Urgh, argh, splurr,’ said Fizzlebert, leaning over the edge of the pool and coughing up water.

He opened his eyes and saw Wystan kneeling beside him.

‘I’ve come to rescue you,’ Fizz said weakly.

‘What?’

Fizz shook his head. A goldfish fell out of his ear. He looked at Wystan again.

‘Wystan,’ he said. ‘I dreamt I fell in the water.’

‘Um, Fizz,’ Wystan said, ‘you
did
fall in the water. So did I.’

‘Oh,’ said Fizz.

It was all coming back to him, the conversation he’d overheard, the search for Fish, the chase along the walkways, the sight of the metal hook before his face, the little purple fish like pipe-cleaners. It all came back in a rush, though not in the right order.

‘Where’s that pirate?’ Fizz said, getting to his feet.

‘Here,’ said a cold voice from behind him. ‘And I ain’t no pirate, me lad.’

Fizz looked round and indeed, there was the Admiral, his stupid hat on his head and no beard at all on his big chin. Fizz’s red Ringmasterly coat swayed on the tip of his hook. It looked big and warm and dry.

‘I’ll have that,’ Fizz said, snatching it away and struggling to pull it on over his soggy, cold clothes.

‘So,
Admiral
, we meet at last,’ he said. (That was how, in all the best adventure books he’d read, the hero always greeted the villain.)

Admiral Spratt-Haddock chuckled cruelly at this. Maybe he hadn’t read the same books as Fizz had. In the books he would have said something sarcastic.

‘Let’s cut to the chase. We came here tonight, risking life and limb in the cause of friendship, because you, Admiral, have got Fish.’

The nautical gentleman looked at Fizzlebert and stroked his chin.

‘This is a
’Quarium
, me lad. Of course we has fish.’

‘No, no, no,’ Fizz said, shaking his head. ‘I mean you’ve
stolen
Fish.’

‘Oh, the calumny,’ the Admiral moaned, looking up to the black night sky and waving his hand. ‘How can you stand there and say that, when it’s
you
, you circus rat,
you
, you travelling sneak, who’s broken into
my
’Quarium and been off with
my
fish! And we’s caught you
red-handed
!’

‘I haven’t stolen anything!’ Fizz shouted, surprised at the Admiral’s gale force outburst.

‘Well,
someone
has,’ the Admiral snapped angrily.

‘Who’d want to steal fish?’ Fizz demanded.

‘A cat burglar?’ Wystan suggested, since Unnecessary Sid wasn’t there to say it.

The Admiral frowned as if he didn’t get the joke (which, to be fair, was easy enough to miss).

‘No,
you’ve
kidnapped Fish,
our
—’ Fizz said, getting back to the point.

‘
Kidnapped?
Me?
You’re
the kidnapper,’ blared the Admiral. He prodded Fizz with a pointy flesh and blood finger, and loomed at him, peering face to face, his warm breath and his large chin filling Fizz’s view. ‘And I’ll have you keel-hauled before dawn if you don’t tell me what’s become of ’em. Me lovely fishes, and you . . .
you
. . .’

‘Just tell us what you did with our sea lion!’ Fizz shouted.

‘Sea lion?’

‘Yeah, our sea lion. He’s called Fish. And you’ve stolen him. Kidnapped him.’

‘What?’

‘It’s no good lying, Admiral Spratt-Haddock. We saw him, here, with you, in your show this afternoon.’

‘Fish, you say?’

‘And, Fizz,’ Wystan added excitedly, tugging his friend’s sleeve, ‘he was here before, when you fell in.’ He pointed at the patch of concrete the sea lion had been lying on. ‘But when the crocodile saved you . . .’

‘What? The crocodile rescued me?’ Fizz felt a shiver of fear run down his spine.

‘Aye,’ the Admiral said thoughtfully. ‘I ain’t never seen her do something like that before. She don’t normally like anyone but me.’ He had a strange look on his strange face. It was hard to spot unless you knew what you were looking for
(
you’d
never have spotted it if I hadn’t pointed it out to you, for instance). It was a puzzled look, a slightly relieved look, a look of hope, perhaps. ‘Blasted nuisance, that beast. Followed me from the Nile all the way back to England. Hasn’t never hardly let me out of her sight.’

‘Why ain’t she eaten you?’ Wystan said. ‘Isn’t that what they normally do?’

‘You’d think, wouldn’t you? But she just likes me company. I was there when her egg hatched, and she saw me and I reckons her little brain said
Mummy!
’

‘Really?’ asked Fizzlebert, putting the argument they’d been having to one side for a moment, since this was quite interesting, after all.

‘Maybe,’ the Admiral said with a sigh. ‘It’s hard to tell with crocodiles. I don’t know.’

He shook his head and the soft look that had settled on his face slid off, uncovering the scowl that he’d been wearing before. He slid his hook into the lapel of Fizz’s coat and pulled him close.

‘Now what’s this you’re saying about me sea lion, me lad?’

‘Fish,’ said Fizz. ‘Fish is
our
sea lion and we want him back.’

He looked around, scanning the pool and the poolside but couldn’t see him anywhere.

‘Hang on, lubbers,’ the Admiral said. ‘You don’t mean Pescado?’

‘He’s called Fish and he belongs to us,’ Wystan said.

‘Well, he doesn’t really
belong
to us,’ added Fizz, ‘but he’s our friend.’

‘Yeah,’ Wystan went on. ‘He lives with us and I do an act with him and now he’s gone missing and I saw you at the circus last night and then we saw him here in your show.’

‘Hang on, hang on,’ said the Admiral, waving his vicious-looking hook to encourage silence. Then he called, ‘Pescado!
Pescado!
Where’ve you got to, you scurvy old lion, you?’

‘Not Pescado,
Fish
!’

As Fizz said that, the sea lion slid up out of the water and landed, without a splash or a slosh, on the concrete stage. He barked once, shook water off his head and waddled over to where the Admiral and the boys stood.

‘Gentlemen, meet Pescado.’

The sea lion lifted one of its flippers up as if to shake hands and moved its head from side to side, looking at each boy in turn with its big deep black eyes.

Fizz and Wystan both stepped forwards, and Fizz’s heart sank. He looked at Wystan and saw they were thinking the same thing.

‘That’s not Fish.’

Dr Surprise had been right. There was something wrong with his whiskers. Not
wrong
, they were perfectly good whiskers, good for whatever whiskers are good for, but they simply weren’t Fish’s whiskers. It was obvious when you saw them up close.

‘Um,’ said Fizz, feeling incredibly small and embarrassed. Wystan was hiding behind his beard, but Fizz had nowhere to conceal his embarrassment, so he tried to get rid of it with an apology. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.

‘Never mind that, lad. I’ve been ’ccused of a lot worse in my time . . .’

He sounded like he was going to go on and say more, maybe tell them some of the other things he had been accused of, but he was interrupted.

‘Admiral! Admiral!’

It was Mrs Darling. She was waving from the other side of the pool.

‘Yes?’ called Admiral Spratt-Haddock.

‘Oh!’ she shouted, seeing Fizz. ‘You caught the other one? Well done, sir. But you’re too late. You’ve got to come see what they’ve done. There’s more fish gone, Admiral. You hold them there. I’ll get my gloves on, then we can search them. See if we can find what they’ve nicked.’

‘Ah, Mrs Darling,’ the Admiral began, but before he could finish his sentence the chapter came to an end.

Chapter Twelve

In which a crime scene is investigated and in which the Aquarium is left

‘Mrs Darling,’ the Admiral repeated, for the benefit of anyone who forgot what he’d said at the end of the previous chapter. ‘I’m thinking that won’t be needed.’ (He meant searching the boys.)

‘But we caught them . . .’

‘Ah, yes, but I don’t think
these
are our thieves. I’ve listened to their yarn, and it’s just been a misunderstanding. They thought
we
were the thundering thieves.’

‘But the robberies?’

‘Someone else. You’re still on the case, Mrs Darling. The game is still afoot.’

‘Admiral Spratt-Haddock,’ Fizz said, raising his hand in the air.

‘Aye, lad?’

‘We saw someone.’

The two boys explained to the Admiral and his guard what it was they’d seen: the masked man and his wriggling coat.

‘Where was that?’ Spratt-Haddock asked.

‘In the green room,’ Mrs Darling said.

Fizz nodded in agreement.

‘You’ve got to come look,’ she said. ‘See what he’s taken this time.’

Admiral Spratt-Haddock tapped on the glass with his hook and peered into the water.

‘Gone,’ he whispered.

There were several empty tanks in the corridor. The one he was stood in front of now had a sign by its side that read GREEN-GILLED MUDSHARK. The tank to the side of that, which he’d looked in first and for a long time, was labelled LESSER GREEN-FOOTED CORAL OCTOPUS. Wystan and Fizz remembered it looking exactly as empty as it did now when they’d seen it that morning and Dr Surprise had been very impressed by its alleged contents, but the Admiral assured them it was
really
empty now and he seemed upset by it.