Freddy drew his finger a line down:
19:30 Enters the Putrid Poulet.
“Loud music, headbanging and vodka. No kids allowed.”
“And after that?” asked Pete.
Freddy’s finger slipped down another line:
01:00 Closing time. Staggers back to the school.
Pete looked at Squeak. “If kids can’t get in …”
Squeak stepped back. “Don’t even think it!”
“He’ll get trampled,” said Freddy. “It’s a pretty wild place.”
Pete and Squeak stared at Freddy.
“So I’m told, okay?”
“Okay,” said Pete. “No sweat. All we need is an adult accomplice.”
Squeak thought for a moment. “Vusi may help.”
“Cousin’s getting married,” said Pete.
“Morris?”
“He’s the cousin who’s getting married.”
Freddy had a sudden inspiration. “We could hypnotise some unsuspecting adult, like I did with Pete the …” He cut his sentence short when he saw Pete’s green eyes flashing. “He could act as a kind of remote agent,” he added lamely.
Pete looked at Squeak.
Squeak looked at Pete.
“Sticks!” said Pete.
“The Snowman will eat me alive.” The little mouse’s whiskers trembled.
“We’ll be back in less than an hour. He won’t even notice,” said Pete. “And tomorrow’s Saturday, the shop’ll be closed.”
When Pete and Squeak returned to Paradise Mansions later that night, the light was on in the bicycle shop. They entered, and the doorbell played a silly tune.
“Good thing you came, guys,” the Snowman said from the countertop. “Percy wants to see you.”
Sir Percival Potts (Esq) was a VID (Very Important Dwarf), Knight of the Order of the Blind Cow in the service of Her Royal Highness, the Queen. The dwarf was on all fours, hunting for clues. When he heard Pete entering, he wiggled from under a fallen shelf and stood up. His grey beard was covered with dust and ash, and there was an oil stain on his round belly. He put his magnifying glass in his pocket. “We have something of a situation on our hands. Take a look at this, young man.” He took a weird-looking brass device from his trench coat, placed it on a chair and turned a little crank on the side. It made a jarring sound for a few seconds, then it pinged, and a small dial popped up from the top.
The dwarf examined it. “Have you ever seen a reading this high?” he asked Pete.
Pete had never seen anything like it in his life. “What is it?”
“It measures rancorous residues,” said the Snowman, obviously proud of his superior knowledge.
“Oh!” said Pete, and Squeak did an exaggerated impersonation of the cat.
Percy nodded. “It measures the tracks left by malignant magical creatures. Oogieboogies, warfs, woggles and the like. Of course, woggles are far worse than anything else.”
An icy chill shot through Pete’s bones. He had had a close encounter with a woggle before. An encounter he almost did not survive. “It was a woggle?”
“If it were a woggle, you’d jolly well be dead now, old chap. No, these were shadows, according to what Mr Snowman and this little dial here tell me.”
“But you said the reading was so high …” said Squeak. He crawled into Pete’s top pocket just to be safe.
The dwarf pushed the dial back into the contraption and stuffed it somewhere in his coat. “It’s high because there were many of them.”
Pete looked over his shoulder. Suddenly the deep shadows in the shop harboured all sorts of imagined terrors. “Shadows?”
“Have you ever wondered what happens to your shadow when it’s completely dark?”
A few weeks before, Freddy had gone through a philosophical phase and kept asking questions exactly like that. Pete answered, “When there is no light I can’t cast a shadow, so I don’t have one. Right?” knowing in his guts that mere science wouldn’t satisfy the dwarf.
“What do they teach in Physics these days?” Percy shook his head in pity for his poor uneducated friend. “In complete darkness, your shadow just crawls into some handy corner until there is light again and it has something to do. That is, unless someone summons it to do something else … Of course, it could never do something its owner wouldn’t.”
Squeak peeked over the edge of Pete’s pocket. “I’ve never seen a shadow that could blow things up.”
“It depends on whose shadow it is,” explained the dwarf.
“So who did the summoning?” asked Pete.
“Someone powerful. Someone who wants something in this shop.”
“Greenback?”
Greenback, a very rich industrialist, was the mastermind behind Mr Humperdinck’s murder. He had also robbed a bank and planned the computer crime of the century. But Pete and his friends had foiled his plan.
Percy shook his head. “The blighter’s in prison, and we have our eyes on him. This must be a new sorcerer in the neighbourhood.”
The Snowman marched to and fro on the counter. “We need to find out who did this to my shop, and why. This can ruin my business!”
“Relax, old fellow,” said the dwarf. “We’ll apply every resource available to us to this problem. In the meantime, I’ll have an alarm system installed in the shop, and we’ll have someone on standby twenty-six hours a day.” He took out his cellphone and made a call. After a short conversation, he said, “Everything’s organised, old chap. We’ll have a brownie regiment here by thirteen o’clock tonight.”
The doorbell rang and Pete’s father came in. The Snowman disappeared behind the counter, and a few moments later Sticks made his appearance from behind a shelf.
“Pete, it’s almost eleven. You should be in bed,” said Peter Smith after greeting Percy and Sticks.
Pete pulled a face but followed his father out. They climbed the stairs to the third floor in silence.
“I was worried when I came home from the AA meeting and you weren’t at home,” Peter Smith said as they entered their dingy little one-roomed flat. “Next time I want you to tell me where you’re going and to be home by nine.”
It was as if Pete were locked in the bank’s vault again. Trapped. Smothered. “Nine o’clock! Dad, I’m
