Circus of Thieves and the Raffle of Doom Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Simon and Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor, 222 Gray’s Inn Road, London, WC1X 8HB

  A CBS COMPANY

  Text copyright © 2014 William Sutcliffe

  Illustrations copyright © 2014 David Tazzyman

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. The right of William Sutcliffe and David Tazzyman to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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

  HB 978-1-4711-2255-2

  PB 978-1-4711-2023-7

  eBook ISBN 978-1-4711-2024-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  www.simonandschuster.com.au

  For Saul, Iris and Juno,

  with love and gratitude – WS

  To my Awesome Mel x – DT

  Contents

  One: A boy on a camel

  Two: The exact thing Hannah wanted to be more than anything else in the world

  Three: Whatever you do, don’t enter the raffle

  Four: Death by carrot

  Five: The tragic tale of Esmeralda Espadrille

  Six: Two plans take shape

  Seven: Are you . . . by any chance . . . ready?

  Eight: The burglarising begins

  Nine: We trust no-one

  Ten: This is where things get interesting (not that they were boring before (at least I hope not))

  Eleven: Fluffypants McBain saves the day (almost)

  Twelve: The worst thing Armitage had ever seen

  Thirteen: Dawn breaks (then somebody fixes it)

  A boy on a camel

  IT STARTED WITH A RUMBLE and a clatter and a faint trembling of the air. At first, only the animals noticed.

  Fluffypants McBain, the tabby cat from the Post Office, moved one ear towards the noise, thought for a second, and having established that the sound did not indicate the arrival of food, went back to sleep. Magnificat, the far-too-pleased-with-himself Bengal from the pub, who had stolen all of Fluffypants’ territory except for half a windowsill, turned his head towards the unusual noise and immediately calculated that it was being made by a large group of humans travelling in unusually shaped vehicles. The real puzzle was a faint clip-clopping, to the rhythm of hooves, but without the hardness of a horse or a cow. This was something else. Something loping and tall. Magnificat raised his tail in a look-how-beautiful-I-am way and looked around, to see if anyone else had noticed or interpreted the sounds wafting into town.

  Of course they hadn’t. It really was tedious to live in a place where everyone else was so much less intelligent (not to mention less beautiful) than oneself.

  He yawned and stretched – for a second feeling the urge for a doze, a meal, a cuddle and a fight, all at once – then prowled on down the high street, in search of something else to do. This large, mysteriously-hooved creature, he decided, was probably best avoided.

  Fizzer was the next to notice. Fizzer ought to have been an astronomer or a nuclear physicist or at the very least a university professor, but unfortunately these career paths hadn’t opened up to him, so he had to settle for being a dog. He knew something big and important was arriving, and he suspected it might change the whole town forever, but at this moment there were several trees on his morning walk that he’d not yet sniffed, and this vital task simply had to be finished before he could set about researching the identity of the intruders. It’s amazing what you can find out from sniffing a tree, specially if you happen to be Fizzer. He considered himself to be the town’s unofficial police dog, and the trees of the high street were his private CCTV network. Just half an hour of careful sniffing, and Fizzer knew exactly who had been where and when (and what they’d eaten for breakfast).

  Hannah was the first human to notice that something was up. She was busy doing an experiment with flying fish (not real ones, paper ones) to see whether big ones or small ones fly furthest when you drop them out of your bedroom window,1 when she felt the trembling of the air and heard the clatter and rumble that had twitched Fluffypants’ ear, raised Magnificat’s tail and diverted Fizzer from his tree sniffing. Hannah, being just a human, didn’t have any idea what this sound might indicate, but being a human in possession of an unusually perceptive and curious brain, she knew it was her task to find out. She also knew this job was urgent, far too urgent to leave time for such boring things as breakfast and getting dressed.

  She ran downstairs in her pyjamas, jumped into a pair of wellies, shouted to her Mum something along the lines of, ‘Mumble mumble mumble shop mumble mumble BACK SOON BYEEE!’ and darted out of the front door.

  Almost immediately, she passed Fizzer, who looked up from a particularly rich and fascinating tree trunk, noticed Hannah’s speed and unusual outfit, and gave her a quizzical but knowing look which seemed to say, “Are you going to check out that noise?”

  She paused and scratched him between the ears,2 a gesture which Fizzer took to mean, ‘Yes. Do you want to come, or are you too busy reading your pee-mails?’

  Fizzer raised his head, reluctantly withdrawing his nostrils from the quite exquisite odour left by Princess (the precious, prancing, primped poodle who presided over her prized pack of panicky puppies in a palatial parlour on Privet Place) and shook his bottom, which in Fizzer’s language meant, ‘Why not?’ or, more specifically, ‘I wasn’t going to bother but I like a spot of company, so let’s go.’

  They headed off together, along the high street, through the rows of small red-brick houses that circled the town, then out into open fields, with Hannah running as fast as she could and Fizzer walking as slowly as he was able without feeling like he was going backwards.

  Fizzer often felt sorry for humans. It must be incredibly frustrating to have to do everything so slowly, and to be practically blind, nose-wise, not to mention half deaf and totally ignorant about everything of any real importance. If it wasn’t for their ability to open tins of dog food, humans would be almost completely useless. He liked Hannah, though. She was much less dumb than the rest of them.

  Just past the level crossing, Hannah and Fizzer saw something that made them stop dead, almost as if they had both crashed into an invisible glass wall. Weaving down a narrow, rutted road that was normally only used by tractors, rabbits and lost hikers was the strangest and most extraordinary procession of vehicles and animals either of them had ever come across.

  At the front was a camel. On top of the camel was a boy dressed from head to toe in purple velvet, singing at the top of his voice. Behind the camel was an elephant, which was being ridden by a man who was lying on his back, fast asleep. Behind that was a camper van with two deck chairs on the roof, containing a man in a leotard who seemed to be waxing his moustache, and a woman wearing what was either three thimbles tied together with string, or a very skimpy bikini. The camper van was towing a caravan, which was towing another caravan, which was towing another caravan. It was, you could say, a caravan of caravans. Behind that was a huge articulated lorry,3 painted with rainbows and butterflies and flowers and ice cream and smiley faces and shooting stars and dancing puppies. Emblazoned on the side in chunky 3D letters were the words SHANK’S IMPOSSIBLE CIRCUS.

  ‘It’s the circus!’ cried Hannah.

  ‘Myuuu,’ replied Fizzer, sarcastically, meanin
g, ‘Thanks for explaining.’

  Hannah spun round on the heel of her wellies and began to run back towards town, shouting, ‘It’s the circus! It’s the circus! It’s the circus!’

  Fizzer stayed put, knowing she was about to change her mind.

  Hannah stopped. An amazing, incredible thought had just popped into her brain. The camel! The boy! One camel, one boy, two humps. She could ask for a lift! OK, so the pyjama and welly combo wasn’t exactly ideal for hitchhiking, but the boy was basically dressed in a pair of curtains, so she didn’t think he’d be too bothered. And as for the rest of the town, who on earth would notice your clothes when you were riding a camel?

  She turned and ran back to tell Fizzer about her fantastic idea, but saw immediately in his eyes and the tilt of his head that he’d figured it all out already. Hannah didn’t like feeling patronised by a dog so, as they stood and waited for the camel, she decided to make up a fact designed to impress him.

  ‘Circuses are famous for picking up hitchhikers,’ she said in a school-teachery voice. ‘It’s an ancient custom of the circus community.’

  Fizzer raised one eyebrow. He was unconvinced.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Hannah. ‘I read a book about it.’

  Fizzer lowered the other eyebrow. It was almost impossible to impress Fizzer with anything, least of all with made-up facts, which his encyclopaedically intelligent nose seemed to sniff out with unerring accuracy.

  ‘Here’s the camel!’ said Hannah, who had realised it was time to change the subject.

  As the procession approached, three things became clear. First, that the boy’s song was about an ant from Antarctica, a cat from Catalonia and a phoenix from Phoenix; second, that his singing voice was so loud and out-of-tune and lacking in any sense of rhythm that it was enough to make nearby plants wilt in horror; and third, that despite the plant-wilting tunelessness of his melody, this boy sang with all the joy and gusto of an operatic maestro performing to a thousand adoring fans. As a result, there was something weirdly, uglily4 beautiful about it.

  Only when the boy was directly in front of Hannah and Fizzer did he stop singing, much to the relief of the local plant life, which quickly pinged back upwards towards the sun.

  ‘Ho, there!’ he said to his camel, pulling the reins, halting his big beige bulbous beast. The boy looked Hannah up and down slowly, starting with her wellies and working his eyes upwards. ‘Nice pyjamas,’ he said, eventually.

  ‘Thanks,’ replied Hannah. ‘Nice camel.’

  ‘He’s called Narcissus,’ said the boy. ‘And if I made a list of a hundred words to describe him, I reckon “nice” would be at the bottom.’

  Narcissus raised his droopy lips, showing a murky keyboard of long yellow teeth, and spat out a blob of camel goo which landed with a splat on Hannah’s left welly.

  ‘See?’ said the boy. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t love him. Why be nice when you can be a camel?’ He patted its hairy neck and the camel farted appreciatively. At that moment, like a strange echo, the enormous lorry let out an enormous honk.

  ‘That’s my dad,’ said the boy. ‘Driving that lorry turns him into a total … oop.’ The lorry’s second honk drowned out a mysterious cluster of syllables, but it was pretty clear to Hannah that the boy wasn’t complimenting his dad’s driving.

  ‘Do you want a lift?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Hannah. ‘How do I get on?’

  ‘Willpower, strength and good luck,’ he replied, from his high perch.

  ‘Oh, I’ve got all of those,’ said Hannah. ‘Watch this.’

  With that, she turned, ran a few steps, climbed the nearest tree and edged along a branch that overhung the road. ‘You step forward, I’ll jump on,’ she instructed.

  ‘That’s not how we usually do it,’ the boy said, hesitantly, ‘but I’ll try anything once.’

  Fizzer raised one eyebrow again and stepped back, away from the fall-out zone.

  Narcissus yawned as Billy edged him into position. It took a lot to surprise Narcissus. A girl dressed in pyjamas and wellies was about to jump out of a tree and use him as a landing mat – so what? Even if this was the most ill-advised, badly-planned and likeliest-to-end-in-injury attempt to mount a camel that he had ever encountered – big deal.

  While Hannah prepared herself for the jump, Narcissus drifted off again, back to his favourite daydream, which was, as always, about taramasalata.

  ‘Ready?’ said Hannah. ‘3 … 2 … 1 …’

  The exact thing Hannah wanted to be more than anything else in the world

  THE MANOEUVRE didn’t exactly go to plan, what with Hannah landing backwards on top of the boy’s head, flattening him and wedging his face into a camel hump with her bum on his right ear. As Hannah tried to squirm herself into position, she heard a muffled voice say, ‘The thing you’re sitting on isn’t a saddle. It’s my head.’

  Eventually, she got herself up onto the rear hump and the boy, looking only slightly squashed-faced, congratulated her on her inventiveness.

  ‘Thanks,’ she replied. ‘Sorry I sat on you.’

  ‘That’s OK. Hold on tight,’ he said, advice which wasn’t strictly necessary, since riding this animal was like sitting on a seesaw strapped to a supermarket trolley rolling around the deck of a boat on a stormy day in the middle of the Atlantic.

  ‘Just feel the motion with your legs, and go with it,’ said the boy, whose body swayed gently from side to side, while Hannah’s flipped and flopped and lurched and jounced, like a puppet in a washing machine.

  ‘You getting the hang of it?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. No sweat,’ said Hannah, relieved that he was staring calmly ahead, rather than looking back at her, in which case he might have noticed that she was now upside down, doing the splits, clinging on to a lump of camel hair for dear life, with her legs in the air and her nose in a far smellier part of the camel than any sane person would normally approach without a face mask.

  ‘Fun, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah. Great.’

  Without turning round, the boy reached backwards, grabbed one of Hannah’s ankles, and gave her leg a flick which sent her body spinning upwards, back onto the rear hump.

  ‘I’d work on your stunt moves later if I were you,’ he said.

  ‘Good idea,’ Hannah replied, enjoying the feeling of right-way-upness, a delicious sensation which she now realised was far too often taken for granted.

  ‘I’m Billy,’ said the boy. ‘Billy Shank. Junior member of Shank’s Impossible Circus, heir to the Shank Entertainment Empire.’

  ‘I’m Hannah,’ said Hannah. ‘Like Anna, but hiding between two “H”s.’

  ‘I like you,’ said Billy.

  ‘Oh,’ said Hannah.

  For a moment she couldn’t think how to reply to this strange comment, and she knew ‘Oh’ was not a sufficient response. Then she heard herself say, ‘I like you, too.’

  Only as these words came out of her mouth did she realise this was a perfect description of how she felt. It seemed odd to say this kind of thing out loud when you’ve only known someone for a few minutes, but also kind of exciting, like finding a good short cut, or skipping the main course and going straight to dessert. Using somebody’s head as a camel saddle, she reflected, was clearly a quick way to form a friendship.5

  ‘Narcissus is a good judge of character, and he thinks you’re OK, so you must be,’ said Billy.

  ‘How can you tell he thinks I’m OK?’

  ‘Because he only spat on your wellies. If he didn’t like you it wouldn’t have been your wellies. That’s about as affectionate as he gets.’

  ‘Wow. I’m flattered.’

  ‘You’re not a wimp like all the others.’

  ‘All what others?’

  ‘Civilians.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Civilians. People who aren’t in the circus.’

  ‘Oh. I see,’ replied Hannah, feeling a rush of pride tingle in her chest at Billy’s asse
ssment of her character. ‘Not a wimp’ was the exact thing Hannah wanted to be more than anything else in the world.

  ‘I think Fizzer likes you,’ said Hannah, more out of a desire to return his friendliness than from any real evidence.

  ‘I know,’ said Billy.

  ‘How do you know?’ said Hannah, slightly affronted.

  ‘Because it’s obvious.’

  Hannah looked down at Fizzer, who was trotting companionably alongside Narcissus. He looked back up at her and said, ‘Nyumnyapupupu,’ with a subtle but definite nod. There was no doubting that this meant, ‘He’s right. I like him.’

  Now Hannah was really impressed.6

  ‘Are you going to come tonight?’ asked Billy.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To the show. We’ll be on this evening.’

  ‘Er . . . I hope so. I mean, I’d love to, but I didn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Nobody knows. We never announce our shows in advance.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That’s not our style.’

  ‘But wouldn’t it be better if people knew you were coming?’

  ‘It would be a disaster.’

  ‘How could that be a disaster?’

  ‘Nobody can know where we are.’

  ‘Nobody?’

  ‘Nobody official.’

  ‘Official? What does that mean? Who’s official? Am I official?’

  ‘Are you?’ Billy span round to face Hannah and eyeballed her fiercely.

  ‘Am I what?’

  ‘Official.’

  ‘I don’t know. What’s official?’

  ‘Police.’

  ‘Police!?’ shrieked Hannah.

  ‘SHHHHH!’

  Hannah lowered her voice. ‘Of course I’m not police. I’m a child.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Billy. ‘I suppose you are.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Billy leaned towards Hannah and whispered, ‘Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but we’re on the run.’

  ‘From who?’