Circus of Thieves and the Comeback Caper Read online

  Armitage leaped to his feet, banging his head on the ceiling. You have to be careful in caravans. Leaping is not advised. Unless you are very short. Or are standing under an open skylight. Or are wearing a helmet. Or have applied foam padding to the ceiling.

  If you’ve done all these things, you can go ahead and install a trampoline.

  Armitage sat down again, rubbing his head with one hand and twirling his moustache with the other. Moustache-twirling was a sure sign that Armitage was a-plotting.

  Ernesto Espadrille! His circus nemesis! The man who had stolen the love of his life! The man who was a superlative ringmaster and effortlessly popular and objectionably handsome and generally brilliant at everything except toenail-clipping chess! The man who’d had the audacity to steal Billy off him just because he happened to be his real father!

  Armitage hated many things, but there was nothing and nobody he loathed more than Ernesto Espadrille.

  Circus legend, eh? Returns to the stage, indeed?

  Well, well, well. Not so fast, Mr Espadrille. Because Armitage Shank was making other plans.

  Prepare to be amazed, huh?

  Oh, yes. Amazed and bamboozled and swindled and stunned.

  Once and for all.

  This time, Ernesto would get what he deserved.

  You might think Armitage had already taken ample revenge on Ernesto. He had, after all, taken over his entire circus, and for a long time had even adopted his son. Not only that, but Ernesto’s first attempt to make a comeback after the tragic death of his wife had been curtailed when he’d come off stage to find his dressing room filled with piles of money he’d never seen before and a neat array of mementos from the Retired Police Dog Benevolent Fund. Seconds later, following a tip-off from You Know Who, officers had burst in, and that was that. Jail. Two years of toenail-clipping chess with Magwitch Intertextuality McDickens. Without winning even once.

  For most people, that would have been revenge enough. But not Armitage Shank. He could never recover from the wound of Esmeralda choosing Ernesto over him, and felt that he would never be happy until Ernesto had been banished from circusry for ever. (The fact is, Armitage would never be happy whatever happened. He was not a happy person. He didn’t even like being happy. But he was stuck with the idea that making Ernesto unhappy gave his life meaning.)8

  Armitage paced and twirled, twirled and paced, all night long. The one-handed twirl left him appearing rather lopsided by the time dawn began to glimmer through the misted-up caravan windows, but if you had seen him, before you noticed that half of his moustache was coiled into a spiral, you would have been struck by the gleam of devious cunning that was burning in his eyes, like two cauldrons of flaming Ribena.

  Yes, Armitage had a plan! This time it was truly his most despicable plot ever! Hockney Marshes on 1st January was going to be in for a surprise. It was going to find itself playing host to something entirely unprecedented in the history of circus, criminality, vengefulness and general nasty behaviour. Armitage wasn’t just going to steal Ernesto’s money. That wouldn’t be nearly enough to exact the revenge that was required. Armitage was going to go one step further. He was going to hit Ernesto where it would really hurt. He was going to steal his money and his audience.

  Armitage picked up his phone (a mobile which, to Armitage’s embarrassment, was already two months out of date), searched for a number, and dialled.

  ‘Hellooooooo,’ said Armitage in his pretending-not-to-be-a-revolting-human-being voice. ‘Is that advertising sales for Pointless Expensive Gadgets You Must Buy? I’d like to place an ad. It should say, “ROLL UP, ROLL UP! A CIRCUS LEGEND RETURNS TO THE STAGE! ARMITAGE SHANK’S VERY EXTREME IMPOSSIBLE CIRCUS. FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY! 1st JANUARY! HOCKNEY MARSHES! PREPARE TO BE REALLY AMAAAAAAAAZED!!!” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! . . . No, the cackle isn’t part of it. That was just me cackling . . . No, thanks . . . Just cut the cackle! . . . OK. Bye . . . HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!’

  Armitage was happy again. Ernesto Espadrille would finally get the comeuppance he’d been asking for. Armitage would finally show him the dismal fate that awaited if you went around being nice and popular and talented all the time, making people fall in love with you, and forgot more important things, like being wary and devious and suspicious.

  Armitage stepped out of his caravan into the crisp dawn air. He hated fresh air – couldn’t stand the stink of it – but nothing was going to dent his good mood this morning. The past couple of months had been the low point of his entire career but now, at last, he had a plan. He was on the up. He was back in the saddle. He was in the swing. It was time for revenge. It was time for a comeback.

  Hannah gets an unhygienic letter

  POOR HANNAH. PLUCKY YOUNG HANNAH, who, along with Billy, had foiled Armitage’s last plot, to rob Queenie Bombazine at the Oh, Wow! centre. Because of her efforts, Hannah had thought she might be taken up as Queenie’s new trapeze protégée; she’d thought that her long-held dream of leaving her boring life and joining the circus might at last become a reality, but things hadn’t worked out that way.

  Queenie’s show, it turned out, was a one-off. She wasn’t looking for a new star. All she’d wanted was to raise enough money to pay off her debts and build a couple of new bathrooms. The Oh, Wow! show had done the job, and Queenie had scurried straight back into retirement like a skinny-dipper sprinting for a towel, leaving Hannah with no option but to return home to her less-than-fascinating parents.9

  But Hannah was not one to give up so easily on her dream. She’d been working on a plan of her own. She had been in training. In just a few years she’d be old enough to live wherever she wanted, with whoever she wanted, doing whatever she wanted – and if what she wanted was to fulfil her circus destiny, then right now was the time to get into training.

  Hannah’s real mother had been a trapeze artist, so that’s where she began, except that trapeze artistry isn’t something you can practise in a tiny bedroom. She had tried, rigging up a home-made swing from the pendant light, but that hadn’t gone well, not for her, not for the light, and not for the plaster ceiling. Trapeze was out.

  She’d also tried juggling, but every time she dropped something, her parents shouted up through the floor for her to stop thumping. This happened once every two seconds. So juggling was out.

  She gave clowning a go, but it’s very hard to be funny on your own, and almost impossible to tell whether or not the thing you think is funny actually is. Also, clowning on your own in a bedroom is strangely depressing. Clowning was definitely out.

  But eventually she found the answer. Tightrope-walking, she discovered, could be rehearsed almost anywhere. Hannah had rigged up two ropes in her home, one from her bedpost to the door jamb, the other at a diagonal across the garden. After a long negotiation with her over-cautious, over-protective, over-anxious mother, a height of approximately twenty centimetres off the ground had been agreed for these ropes. Hannah found this deeply unsatisfying, so she had printed out some satellite photos which she put on the ground under the rope, to make her feel as if she was high in the sky, as a way of working on her fearlessness. Not that it needed much work. Fearlessness came easy to Hannah. Which is probably why her over-cautious, over-protective, over-anxious mother suffered from a nervous condition that made her left eye twitch whenever she heard a loud noise, and her right eye twitch when she heard a quiet one. If she saw Hannah climb anything, ride anything or jump off anything, both eyes twitched and her nostrils did a strange flarey thing like an angry horse.

  Climbing things, riding things and jumping off things were Hannah’s favourite activities.

  Motherhood had not come easy to Hannah’s mother. But then, as you probably remember, Hannah’s mother was not Hannah’s mother. She was her aunt. Her real mother was the trapeze supremo, Esmeralda Espadrille, whose trapezing days were now sadly over, on account of her being dead.10

  But back to the matter at hand. We find Hannah in the garden, on her tightrope, balancing on one leg with her eyes closed,
her head tipped up, a stick on her chin, and a plate on the end of the stick, which she is trying to spin. Hannah’s mother is watching out of the living room window, twitching both eyes and flaring her nostrils.

  ‘She’s a worry to me, that girl,’ said Hannah’s mother, whose name, as you probably won’t remember, was Wanda.11

  ‘I know, dear,’ said Hannah’s father, who was concentrating intently on his matchstick model of the Forth Rail Bridge.

  ‘This is going to cause no end of trouble.’

  ‘I know, dear.’

  ‘She’s going to get injured.’

  ‘I know, dear.’

  ‘Or worse.’

  ‘I know, dear.’

  ‘Are you listening to anything I’m saying?’

  ‘I know, dear.’

  ‘You’re not, are you?’

  ‘I know, dear.’

  ‘This is pointless.’

  ‘I know, dear.’

  At this moment the letterbox flap flapped. Wanda hurried to the hall with some antiseptic wipes, since postmen are well known to have surprisingly dirty hands.

  The letter on the doormat had brightly coloured edging – orange and blue and green and purple – and the paper of the envelope was yellow. The address was in red and bore Hannah’s name.

  Wanda picked up the suspicious item of post between finger and thumb and examined it closely. She did not like the look of this letter at all. This missive was distinctly, unmistakably, shamelessly . . . circussy.

  Hannah was out in the garden practising plate-spinning tightrope tricks, so there was a moment when the letter could have been concealed, but the window of opportunity was too brief. In a flash, Hannah (who seemed to have some kind of radar for detecting interesting deliveries) was right there, at her mother’s side, looking up at the unusual envelope.

  ‘Wow!’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Gaudy, I’d say,’ replied Wanda.

  ‘Look! It’s for me!’

  Hannah took the letter without so much as a please or thank you or even the briefest dab with an antiseptic wipe, and ripped it open.

  ‘UNBELIEVABLE!’ she yelled. ‘A COMEBACK SHOW! Ernesto and Billy are opening tomorrow, on Hockney Marshes, in a new Big Top. We’ve been sent VIP tickets for the opening night! Isn’t that brilliant?’

  ‘Brilliant’ was not the word that immediately occurred to Wanda. Circuses were, frankly, not her scene. And she didn’t like tents. Or crowds. Or Hockney Marshes. Or surprises, especially when they arrived on gaudy stationery. She’d never been to an opening night, but she didn’t really like the sound of that, either. Billy, however, was Hannah’s at-least-half-brother. And Ernesto . . . well . . . that was a looooong story, but he was very important to Hannah, too. So, despite her feelings about circuses, tents and opening nights, Wanda knew that declining the invitation wasn’t an option.

  In the interests of parental bonding, she decided to opt for enthusiasm. ‘Er . . . wow?’ she said. ‘How lovely? We’ll have to wrap up warm, because it’ll be very draughty.’

  Enthusiasm was not her forte.

  ‘Isn’t this just the most fantastic, fabulous, frazilliant letter you have EVER SEEN?’ replied Hannah, to whom enthusiasm came a little more naturally.

  ‘Er . . . frazilliant isn’t a real word, but I can tell that you’re attempting to express jollity and eagerness, which can be very healthy emotions in moderation. So, well done.’

  ‘LET’S GET READY! LET’S PACK! LET’S DO IT NOW, NOW, NOW!’

  Hannah sprinted up the stairs to her room, and the first thing she packed – before her clothes, before her toothbrush, before anything else – was her tightrope. Because Hannah knew this was much more than an opportunity to see her at-least-half-brother perform. Oh, yes. This was the chance she’d been waiting for. Now, at last, she was ready. She didn’t know how she was going to make it happen but, one way or another, when she got herself in front of Ernesto Espadrille, she wasn’t going to let him leave without giving her an audition. And after all the hours of practice she’d put in, she was confident she had enough tricks to impress him. This time, she’d find her way into the circus, where she knew she belonged.

  Hannah had always known she was different – not an ordinary civilian like her parents – and now, at last, a real opportunity to break free and join the circus had arrived.

  This was it! Hannah’s moment had arrived!

  A touching reunion without touching

  ARE YOU READY?

  I can put it off no longer.

  It’s time to plumb the depths of Shankiness. Time to delve to the very bottom of the cesspit of human nature. Time . . . for ZACHARY SHANK.

  There he is! Just look at him! Flopped in a saggy old armchair, twirling his moustache, moaning and groaning and grumping and sulking.

  ‘This is DISGUSTING!’ he’s yelling, holding a mug at arm’s length. ‘When I ask for tea with five sugars, I want tea with five sugars. Not four sugars. Not six sugars. Not four and a half sugars. Not five and a half sugars. How many did you put in?’

  ‘Five!’ replied his apprentice, trainee, office runner and factotum Mungo Einstein (who was descended from a famous mathematician, but had sadly inherited not one single gene worth having).

  ‘Five? Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I counted them and everything,’ said Mungo, who was on the brink of pointing out his impressive arithmetical ancestry.

  ‘Which teaspoon did you use?’

  ‘Just . . . a teaspoon. A normal one.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one with a sticker on it.’

  ‘Did you read the sticker?’

  ‘No. You told me to make you the tea as fast as I can, and reading a sticker would have slowed me down.’

  ‘That sticker says, “DO NOT USE THIS TEASPOON FOR TEA-MAKING BECAUSE IT IS OF BELOW AVERAGE SIZE,” you moron! This tea is revolting.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I should have known you were a moron from the moment you turned up seven hours late for your interview, covered from head to toe in sewage because you’d had a “small accident” on the way.’

  ‘There was a missing manhole cover.’

  ‘You’re just lucky I don’t pay you anything because, if I did, this is the moment I’d sack you.’

  ‘Sorry, guv. I’ll make you another tea right away, with a different spoon.’12

  ‘Get Miss Ingperson to make it. She’s the only one round here with any brains. Apart from me, obviously.’

  Miss Ingperson was Zachary’s secretary. He had kidnapped her several years earlier and nobody had wanted to pay the ransom because nobody liked her, but then it turned out that Miss Ingperson actually liked Zachary, which wasn’t something that had ever happened before, because nobody ever liked him, either. Not long after that, they fell in love, so Zachary employed her as a secretary, which is what he did every time he fell in love. He was not a great romantic.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t like this back in the good old days, when the old crew were around,’ Zachary whinged. ‘I tell you, those guys could have taught you a thing or two. Top bunch of lads they were, before they got banged up. Frankie Geezer, Chippy Barnet and Vince Hurtle – that was the best crew I ever had. Solid gold, they were. Don’t make ’em like that any more, I’ll tell you that for free. WHY ARE YOU STILL STANDING THERE? WHERE’S MY TEA?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  At this moment, something quite extraordinary happened. The door burst open, and who should enter but three men wearing mud-caked Grimwood Scrubs prison uniforms? None other than Frankie Geezer, Chippy Barnet and Vince Hurtle.

  What are the chances of that? Eh?

  Very low.

  Verging on zero, in fact.

  BUT IT HAPPENED!

  Yes, it did.

  ‘Frankie, is that you?’ said Zachary, leaping up from his chair.

  ‘It’s me, guv.’

  ‘Chippy?’ said Zachary, striding towards the three men, filled with relief and joy, whil
e at the same time wondering how to greet three long-lost friends who were at this point the filthiest human beings he had seen since Mungo Einstein’s sewage pipe accident. A hug wasn’t tempting. Even a handshake was kind of unappealing.

  ‘The one and only,’ replied Chippy, his huge toothy grin glinting whitely through the muck.

  ‘Vince?’

  ‘We escaped, boss! Dug ourselves out! Took us seven years, four months and nineteen days, but we did it!’

  ‘We dun it!’ affirmed Chippy, pointedly.

  ‘Well, this calls for a celebration,’ said Zachary. ‘Big time. Miss Ingperson! Cups of tea all round! Large ones! And crack open a fresh packet of plain digestives!’

  Zachary Shank was not a generous man.

  ‘I missed you, fellas,’ he continued, slumping back into his armchair. ‘I missed you something rotten. Thought about you all the time, I did. Proper choked up, I was, when you boys went down.’

  ‘We were pretty choked up, too,’ said Vince. ‘Twelve years, and all. That was my prime, that was. Ripped away from me. And for what?’

  ‘Armed robbery,’ said Zachary.

  ‘No, “for what” as in, for what purpose? I mean, why would I do that to myself?’

  ‘To get rich.’

  ‘No – I just mean, what was the point? It was all a huge mistake, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Getting caught was,’ said Zachary with a long, wheezy laugh, which the other three did not join.

  ‘Hi, fellas,’ said Miss Ingperson, entering with a tray of teacups and a small packet of Tesco Basics digestives.

  ‘Tuck in, lads,’ said Zachary. ‘Have as many as you like. On me. Up to a maximum of two.’

  ‘Thanks, boss,’ said Frankie. ‘It’s great to be back.’

  ‘Boss,’ said Miss Ingperson, which is an unusual way to address the love of your life, but they were an unusual couple. ‘There’s something you ought to know. I been getting calls. Somebody’s putting something up on Hockney Marshes.’