said, ‘If I hadn’ta been so busy cooking you Redforts your every morsel, I would have sung for my supper and made a bundle on Broadway.’
‘Anything happen while I was busy learning stuff?’ asked Ruby, opening the refrigerator.
‘Only that the fish store was all out of fish. I ask you, we live practically in an ocean, but I swear there’s not one single sprat for sale. In my day fishermen knew how to fish; they could catch a catfish in a rain puddle.’
‘Don’t sweat it,’ said Ruby. ‘I’m not in a fishy frame of mind tonight.’
‘I don’t care what frame of mind you’re in child, it’s what you need that counts and you need fish or that little brain of yours is going to shrivel up like a currant.’ Mrs Digby was a great believer in fish oil.
‘So what are we having instead?’ asked Ruby.
‘You will be having a spoonful of cod-liver oil and some cabbage soup,’ said the housekeeper firmly.
‘You have to be kidding!’ said Ruby.
‘Your mother’s orders,’ said Mrs Digby, her hands on her hips, prepared for the inevitable argument. ‘Your ma said fish or cabbage and I gotta abide by her rules.’
‘But what you are actually saying is fish and cabbage – that’s not the deal,’ said Ruby.
‘I’ll grant you that,’ nodded Mrs Digby. ‘Cabbage it is – cod-liver oil will have to wait.’
Mrs Digby was a stickler for abiding by Sabina Redfort’s dietary rules, so there was no getting away from it: cabbage was on the menu and that was that.
‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ said Mrs Digby. ‘That Elaine Lemon stopped by wondering if you’d like to babysit Archie.’
Ruby made a face. ‘No way, no day,’ she said firmly. ‘Uh uh.’
Mrs Digby chuckled and started chopping cabbage.
It was at supper that night that Ruby got the message. She looked down into her unfortunate cabbage soup to see a fly struggling to make it to the rim – it was making good progress, but just as it was about to reach the bowl’s edge, it would change direction and stupidly end right back where it started.
‘There appears to be a fly in my soup,’ said Ruby, looking directly at Hitch, who had joined them for supper and was taunting Ruby by tucking into a steak cooked medium rare, fries on the side.
He winked back. ‘I had a premonition that that might happen. Let me substitute it for something less cabbage,’ he said, removing the offending liquid and replacing it with food that told her all she needed to know.
It was a slice of toast, and into it was grilled a message.
‘Be ready: 2.30am. Bring your waders.’
The note had been toasted into the bread by the Spectrum-issue toaster fax machine. A discreet way of conveying information – and what’s more you could eat the evidence, which Ruby promptly did.
Finally, the toast she had been waiting for: Spectrum had a mission for her.
AT 2.30AM RUBY GOT OUT OF BED, pulled on her jeans, a T-shirt printed with the words excuse me while I yawn and a sweater, picked up her sneakers, pushed open the window and climbed down the eucalyptus tree. Its limbs stretched towards the west side of the house providing a perfect ladder for the able tree-climber.
Hitch was already sitting in the silver convertible, its engine turning over so quietly you hardly knew it was running.
‘Nice of you to show up,’ he said.
Ruby looked at her watch. It was 2.32am. ‘Give me a break,’ she said.
‘Lives have been lost in two minutes,’ said Hitch.
‘Oh, come on man, what’s the big deal?’
‘The “big deal”?’ pondered Hitch. ‘Let me think… well, I hear you can only breath-hold for one minute and one second so imagine if you were waiting for me to rescue you, and you were stuck underwater, and I took a whole two minutes to get there. You’d be all out of air kid.’
‘You were waiting in the car. You weren’t exactly in total mortal danger.’
‘You didn’t know that.’
‘OK, OK,’ said Ruby. ‘I’m sorry, I won’t do it again.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ said Hitch. ‘Listening to advice isn’t what you do best.’
‘Well, since we are busy “sharing” here then might I suggest that giving people the benefit of the doubt isn’t one of your strengths?’
Hitch pointed at Ruby’s T-shirt and said, ‘Your T-shirt is on the money kid, so zip it.’
He backed out of the driveway and they drove in silence to Desolate Cove. As the name sort of suggested, no one much visited this place – it had no sand and was nearly always windswept and rarely warm. Hitch parked behind a steep bank of pines, the vehicle hidden from view, and he and Ruby set about zipping their jackets and pulling on rubber waders. In silence they walked across the pebble beach until they reached the place where the cliffs met the water.
‘Stay close to the rock kid,’ warned Hitch. ‘There’s a sudden drop to the left – very deep water and I’m not sure I can be bothered to fish you out.’ The sound of his words was almost drowned by the sound of the sea as it dragged through the stones of the beach, relentlessly pulling and pushing, almost like a chorus of whispering voices.
Here you could perhaps believe in the fisherman’s legend of the sea devil and the sea witch.
The water reached almost to the top of Ruby’s waders and she just barely managed to keep from getting soaked. She had no idea where they were headed or why, but she guessed there must be a pretty good reason for this little jaunt.
They made it round the next sharp corner and then there it was: a hidden low opening in the cliff, not so much a cave, more like a large niche, just big enough to conceal…
… a scuba sub.
‘Kinda cool,’ said Ruby.
‘You have no idea,’ said Hitch.
A metallic pod-like thing, the sub had a reflective glass dome on top.
‘The glass is four inches thick,’ said Hitch. ‘Allows the sub to dive to depths of five miles. When submerged, the light bounces off it in such a way that it is just about invisible.’
‘Even cooler,’ said Ruby casually, like she’d seen a whole bunch of scuba subs in her time.
Hitch raised his eyes heavenwards and depressed a button on his watch and the glass lid slid back. There looked to be enough space to seat three passengers comfortably and four at a squeeze.
