Take Your Last Breath

One Thursday she resurfaced just as Sergeant Cooper walked by. This chance encounter was not a good one.

COOPER: ‘Well, well, well, look who it is, Agent Redfort coming up for air.’

REDFORT: ‘Jeepers, I should have stayed down a few minutes longer.’

COOPER: ‘I doubt that you are capable of that Redfort. I hear you can only make one minute, hardly a record.’

REDFORT: ‘If I’d known I was going to be coming face to face with a giant sea cucumber when I next took a lungful, I might have put some effort in.’

COOPER: ‘You don’t know what effort is Redfort. Now, Bradley Baker, he really could hold his breath. Seven minutes I heard. Years and years of hard work and training.’

REDFORT: ‘No kidding. Were you standing there holding the towel?’

COOPER: ‘It would have been a privilege to hand that young man his towel. You should take note: Baker also started his Spectrum duty as a kid – younger’n you an’ smarter’n you too.’

REDFORT: ‘What? That’s meant to bug me?’

But of course, it did bug her. This Bradley Baker guy bugged the life out of her. Of course, he had long since grown up, become the most versatile agent Spectrum ever trained, loved and admired by all – the youngest, smartest agent Spectrum had ever hired, and no one was going to let her forget it. To make matters worse Bradley Baker had tragically met his end, dying in a plane crash in the line of duty, and so had died a hero’s death. If Bradley Baker’s ghost didn’t haunt Ruby, then his legendary status certainly did.

Of course, no one got away with speaking to Sergeant Cooper this way and Ruby found herself scrubbing all the latrines in the camp for the following three days. Kip Holbrook, who despite all the constant metaphorical hair-pulling was actually a nice guy, was kind enough to wade in and help her out. He didn’t exactly know why but he found himself liking this kid from Twinford.

‘Can I give you some advice Redfort?’ he asked in the middle of day three’s latrine scrubbing. ‘You might wanna learn to keep that mouth of yours shut, it gets you in some unsanitary situations.’

‘I can’t help saying what’s on my mind,’ replied Ruby, ‘it’s the way I am.’

‘Then buy yourself a pair of good rubber gloves because it looks like you’re going to be scrubbing latrines for many years to come,’ said Holbrook.

Having endured two weeks of what she saw as Drill Sergeant Cooper’s poor attitude, Ruby wasn’t exactly grief-stricken when one day she swam up through the clear ocean water to see a sign.

Well, to Ruby Redfort it was a sign: to the mere mortal it was just a donut on a plate sprinkled with candy numbers. The numbers she recognised without rearranging them: they were all digits that together and in the right order made up one long familiar number. Without any hesitation she crammed the donut into her mouth and made her way hurriedly to the bank of telephones outside the canteen.

One of the phone booths had a half-drunk milkshake balanced on top of the phone and next to it a stack of coins. Ruby picked up the receiver and dialled the number. The phone was answered on the third ring.

‘Double Donut, Marla speaking.’

‘Hey Marla, it’s Ruby.’

‘Hang on, I’ll get him, he’s right here.’

One minute twenty seconds later a man’s voice came on the line.

‘Hello.’

‘What took you?’ Ruby said.

‘Kid, can’t a person eat a donut in his favourite diner without getting harassed?’

‘I believe you wanted me to contact you,’ said Ruby.

‘Glad you can still read the signs,’ he said. ‘So how are the plankton?’

‘Oh, the plankton are OK, it’s the sea cucumbers I’m having trouble with.’

‘Sergeant Cooper?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘I gather he isn’t your biggest fan.’

‘I’m not too fond of him either.’

‘Well, this is your lucky day Redfort. Dive school is done with you and Twinford Junior High would like you back Monday at 8am pronto. So slip out of your flippers, you’re on a plane back to Twinford in… oh, seventeen minutes.’

Ruby Redfort smiled, but before she hung up, she asked, ‘So Hitch, why didn’t you just leave a message with the camp co-ordinator, like a normal person? It’s not like you’ve gotta be covert about it; everyone knows you’re my sidekick.’

‘Kid, you can fool yourself that you have a sidekick, but you’ve got a long way to go before you’re going to fool me, LB or anyone else in Spectrum.’

‘OK man, I’m just kidding with you, I haven’t forgotten that you are Spectrum’s number one numero uno action agent – I was only asking. Why all the secrecy?’

‘Just keeping you sharp kid. Don’t want you getting sloppy.’

Ruby smiled. Yep, that was Hitch all right, one royal pain in the behind.

THE DREAM HAD BEGUN IN THE USUAL WAY: Ruby alone, treading water in a bottomless ocean, an ethereal voice whispering to her, almost singing. She would turn this way and that, but she could never see ‘the thing’ until it was too late.

Suddenly she would feel something grab her leg and she would spin down, down, down into the indigo depths. And the miniature man who appeared in the water just couldn’t save her. And all the while the calling, like someone whispering a song to the ocean.

The vision was so real that whenever she awoke, she felt sure it had happened, the whispering so familiar that she could believe that she must have heard it once before, a long, long time ago, perhaps in a past life.

Ruby sat up in bed. She was covered in perspiration, freezing cold, and her head was thudding. She put out her hand and blindly felt around for her flashlight. But somehow the beam it shone just made things worse, more dramatic. She fumbled for the switch on the lamp beside her bed.

Click.

The room was bathed in light and Ruby could breathe again. Through the blur of her less than perfect vision she was reassured: there was the comic she was working on, spread out on her desk; there were the floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books, hundreds of them – fact, fiction, graphic novels, codebooks, puzzle books. Her record player, her records, her telephone collection – eccentric designs, from a squirrel in a tuxedo to a conch shell – all perched haphazardly on shelves and furniture. There was the jumble of clothes on the floor. She was definitely in her room and not miles beneath the heavy ocean, sinking through indigo.

Ruby lay back on her pillow, sighed a deep sigh and drifted back into sleep, this time dreamless, her glasses still perched on the end of her nose. She was only wrenched from her slumber when her subconscious tuned into the sound of screaming, coming from the backyard.

Ruby scrambled to get out of bed, tripped over the tangle of discarded clothes and limped to the window. There she saw clouds of seagulls swooping and diving around the house, filling the air with their wings, legs trailing ready to land. Seagulls are sizeable birds and as they dodged and swooped, their grey and white feathers almost made contact with the glass and Ruby found herself instinctively backing away.

The noise they made was enough to drown out most other noises, but not the screaming – this was coming from a small elderly woman who was darting around the yard waving a broom.

It was Mrs Digby.

Mrs Digby was the Redforts’ housekeeper and she had been with the family ‘forever’, which is to say longer than Ruby had existed and longer than Sabina had existed. No one could do without her and no one wanted to do without her: she was the family treasure.

Ruby stood transfixed, watching the tiny woman tackling the birds, shouting abuse at them and generally telling them where to go. It seemed that they had made the mistake of settling on her freshly laundered sheets and this had got her hopping mad.

‘I didn’t get up before six in the am, work my fingers to the bone only to have you feathered vipers do your business all over my clean linen!’

It was fair to say Mrs Digby was furious.

Just then a well-groomed man came into view. He was wearing a beautifully cut suit and appeared entirely unruffled as he calmly strolled out into the yard, in his hand a tiny device. He held this up to the sky, depressed a button and suddenly, in a deafening screech, the birds all rose as one and squawked their way back in the direction of the sea.

Ruby pushed open the large square picture window that made up most of the wall beside her desk (the Redfort house was a miracle of modern architecture) and leaned out.

‘Wow!’ she said, somewhat sarcastically. ‘I didn’t know you could talk to the animals.’

The man looked up and winked.

‘Hey kid. Surprised to see you up before noon.’

‘Oh, you should know Hitch – early bird catches the worm and all that.’

‘Too late for worms,’ said Hitch. ‘Gulls got ’em, but I can rustle up some pancakes kid.’

Ruby pulled on her clothes: jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt printed with the words honk if you’re happy, hoot if you’re not, toot if you couldn’t care less and scooted down the stairs two at a time. Mrs Digby and Hitch were already in the kitchen and discussing the avian invasion.

‘So what is it?’ asked Ruby, sliding into her chair. ‘Some kind of bird-banishing gizmo?’

‘Works on the same principle as a dog whistle – it emits a sound that humans can’t hear and birds can’t stand,’ replied Hitch, tucking the device into his shirt pocket.

Ruby was impressed – not a bad gadget to have up your sleeve when the wildlife went wild.

‘I might have to get myself one of those,’ said Mrs Digby. ‘Where dya buy it – SmartMart?’

‘Well, they do say SmartMart’s the smart place to shop!’ said Hitch, quoting the store’s tagline.

‘Well, all I can say child,’ said Mrs Digby earnestly, ‘is that it’s just as well your parents ain’t here to see this. Your mother would have a three-cornered fit if she witnessed what those critters have done to her sheets.’

Mr and Mrs Redfort were currently away – as they so often were – this time on a mini cruise which was taking them and the local Historical Society around Twinford’s coast. Dora Shoering was giving a series of on-board lectures about the smugglers’ caves, the famous Twinford shipwrecks and various other seafarers’ legends.

‘Don’t you give those sheets a second thought Mrs D,’ said Hitch. ‘I’ll get the laundry service to pick up the linen – no need for you to waste your valuable energy on that.’

‘Shucks and fiddlesticks,’ said Mrs Digby. Which didn’t really mean anything, but often translated as, If you insist.

It had been less than two months since Hitch had joined the Redforts as house manager (or butler, as Sabina Redfort preferred to think of him) but to look at Mrs Digby you might have thought he had been there always. She had accepted him at once and woe betide anyone who said a bad word about him. As far as she was concerned, he was the best darned butler, house manager (or whatever else he wanted to call himself) this side of anywhere.

Of course, what Mrs Digby didn’t know was that Hitch was actually an undercover agent, sent by Spectrum to protect and work alongside Ruby. She had no idea that the butlering was just a cover – that really would have impressed her.

But it was a Spectrum imperative that Mrs Digby should never know, never even suspect, that this alarmingly attractive man might not be all that he seemed. Although Ruby and Hitch had got off to a somewhat rocky start, they made a dynamic team. LB had seen this: she was a smart woman and she knew that unflinching loyalty was what made a good agent, and agents who were loyal to each other made for a solid agency.

‘So,’ said Hitch to Ruby. ‘How are you going to get yourself in and out of trouble today?’

‘I’m not,’ said Ruby. ‘I’m gonna lie low – take it easy – probably hang out with Clancy.’

She went over to where the kitchen phone sat, picked up the receiver and dialled a number she had dialled approximately several thousand times.

‘Hey bozo, meet me, usual place, just as soon as.’ She replaced the receiver.

‘And they say the art of conversation is dead,’ commented Hitch, shaking out the newspaper.

Mrs Digby looked at Ruby and shook her head. ‘It’s a crying shame,’ she said. ‘All life’s good manners and fine etiquette gone to pot. I tried to raise this child a nice child, but I probably got to accept failure here.’

‘Ah, Clance don’t mind,’ said Ruby. Which was true: Clancy Crew was Ruby Redfort’s closest friend and they understood each other without words – though that said, they spent most of their time ‘non-stop yacking’, as Mrs Digby would often comment.

For this reason there was very little Clancy Crew didn’t know about Ruby Redfort – though another was that it was almost impossible to keep a secret from him – he always sniffed them out, and Ruby was good at keeping secrets. So, despite all her efforts, Clancy had managed to find out about her recruitment to Spectrum. Ruby had been forced to assure LB that from now on she would keep her mouth shut, that she would not blab to him again, that she would keep it zipped at all times.

But Hitch was astute enough to know that this was a promise Ruby Redfort just couldn’t keep. So they had made a little agreement – LB must never know that Clancy knew everything and Clancy must never tell anyone anything, on pain of death. He never would; there was no question about that. Clancy Crew knew how to keep it zipped.

However, Ruby did still have one secret that not even Clancy Crew was aware of.

She kept it in her room under the floorboards and not one living creature except perhaps a spider or a bug knew anything about it. Since Ruby was just a kid of four she had written things down in little yellow notebooks. Not a diary exactly, but a record of things seen or overheard, strange or mundane. She had just completed notebook 623 – this she had placed underneath the floorboards along with the other 622. The one she was working on now, 624, was kept inside a compartment concealed in the frame of her bedroom door.

Now, Ruby went upstairs and took the notebook out.

The way Ruby saw it you just could never be sure when something inconsequential could become the missing link, the key to everything. RULE 16: EVEN THE MUNDANE CAN TELL A STORY. Though usually it was just inconsequential.

She opened the notebook and wrote:

Sixty or seventy seagulls invaded the garden.

She added other important details she had noticed and replaced the notebook in its hiding place. She was just about to exit via the window when she heard Mrs Digby calling.

‘Ruby, you troublesome child, you better not be about to climb out of that window! I want you down here on the double!’

Now, Mrs Digby was one of the few people Ruby could not always twist round her little finger – sometimes Ruby just had to do things Mrs Digby’s way and today, unfortunately, was obviously going to be one of those days.

AFTER APPROXIMATELY FORTY-FIVE MINUTES of running errands, dropping things off and picking them up, Ruby finally pointed her bike towards Amster Green and rode the short distance to the small triangle of grass where a big old oak tree grew, its vast branches reaching off in every direction. She leaned her bike against the railings, quickly looked around just to make sure no one was watching and then, in a blink, swung herself onto the branch above and up and out of sight before you had time to think you had seen her.

‘What kept you?’ came a voice from high in the tree.

‘Mrs Digby,’ said Ruby, climbing up the tree.

‘Oh,’ said the voice. ‘I was about to give up on you. I’d just finished writing you a message.’

‘Yeah? What did it say?’ she asked, still climbing.

‘Here,’ said the voice, and a piece of paper fashioned into the shape of a condor came floating towards her. She unfolded it.

Ec spgkwv kxoss kzi ulabtwwyj’w klmj srv hrvjv llw emiojkevsrpoc uej xo avv eedp*

‘No kidding?’ said Ruby, impressed. The paper, like most of the messages they left each other, was folded into an origami shape, the words encoded using their own Redfort-Crew code, which no one, but no one knew how to decipher.

‘So how did training camp go?’ asked Clancy.

‘Good,’ replied Ruby.

‘Good? That’s it?’

Silence, and then Ruby’s head appeared through the leaves. She shuffled along the oak’s limb to where a skinny boy sat, binoculars around his neck and a sun visor shielding his eyes.

‘Good to see you Clance. What gives?’

‘Truth is, it’s been kinda boring without you, but I’ve been making it work – getting by,’ said Clancy.

‘Glad to hear it,’ said Ruby.

Clancy was eager to get back to the subject of Ruby’s agent activity, but Ruby just wanted to hear about Twinford life and what was going on with Clancy and his efforts to train his dog, Dolly, and had his sister Minny managed to get out of trouble or was she going to be grounded for life?

Clancy saw Ruby wasn’t in the mood to talk about herself and if she wasn’t in the mood, then there was no point trying.

So instead they talked about Clancy’s fortnight, and after that they discussed Redfort home affairs: in particular how Consuela, the brilliant if temperamental chef loathed by Mrs Digby, had resigned in the most dramatic of ways and left to go work for the Stanwicks.

And when they had exhausted these topics, they talked about the amazing events of just one month ago, the museum, the bank, the gold and the Jade Buddha of Khotan. They talked about Nine Lives Capaldi and the diamond revolver she had held to Clancy’s temple.

They talked about Baby Face Marshall, now safely incarcerated in a maximum-security prison somewhere far from Twinford. And they shuddered when they remembered the Count, still at large and free to practise his evil-doing – where in the world was he?

When the sun had gone down and it was beginning to get chilly, Clancy and Ruby climbed back down the oak, picked up their bikes and set off in opposite directions.

‘So see you tomorrow!’ shouted Ruby.

‘My place or yours?’ Clancy shouted back.

‘Mine!’ called Ruby, as she disappeared round the corner.

THE NEXT DAY WAS A SCORCHER – it came out of nowhere and the whole of Twinford seemed to have unfolded their sunloungers and lit their barbeques.

Ruby Redfort and Clancy Crew were sitting on the roof reading comics. It was late afternoon, but the sun was still warm and Clancy was sporting a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses; they were his sister Lulu’s. Nothing wrong with a thirteen-year-old boy wearing heart-shaped sunglasses, nothing at all; plenty of hip boys his age might want to express their sense of style and individuality by wearing heart-shaped sunglasses. But Clancy wasn’t wearing them as a style statement: he didn’t know what a style statement was; they were simply the first thing in the form of eyewear that came to hand. No one could accuse Clancy Crew of vanity – he always wore exactly what he felt like wearing. Didn’t matter how ridiculous he looked – it was one of the things that Ruby liked most about him.

‘Hey Rube,’ he said. Ruby was concentrating hard on the RM Swainston thriller she was reading and didn’t respond.

‘Rube! Can you hear me?’ He prodded her with a stick.

‘Huh?’ She peered up at him. The large red floppy sunhat obscured most of her face and she managed to appear at the same time comical and stylish – neither look, however, was intentional. Like Clancy, she wore what she liked; unlike Clancy, she had an innate sense of style. Style was just something she had. She even managed to lend a certain chic to her T-shirt, which bore the less than elegant words shut your pie hole. Most of Ruby’s T-shirts were emblazoned with upfront messages of this kind; her mother, in particular, loathed them.

‘So?’ said Clancy.

‘Huh, what?’ said Ruby.

‘You were gonna tell me about your training – in Hawaii – remember?’

‘Oh, that,’ said Ruby. ‘It’s kinda confidential, I’m sure you understand.’

Clancy started flapping his arms. ‘What are you saying, confidential? You promised me you were gonna tell me, you promised Ruby, you weasel.’

‘I’m just kidding with you, don’t get your underwear in a bunch,’ said Ruby.

She put the book, The Strangled Stranger, under her chair, took a breath and paused; she did this not only for the sake of drama, but also because, well, everything she was about to tell Clancy was strictly confidential. Classified information. Spectrum had forbidden her to tell anyone, anything about the code breaking and undercover work she was doing for them, but then Clancy Crew was not anyone. Clancy Crew knew how to keep his mouth shut. Clancy Crew would rather die a painful death than betray a secret.

Ruby sucked the last dregs of her banana milk up the clear curly straw sticking out of her glass, swallowed and said, ‘OK, the training basically involved scuba-diving.’

‘Really?’ said Clancy. ‘That’s kinda cool, so you actually went in the ocean?’

‘Yeah Clance, I went in the ocean. Where dya think I went, the paddling pool?’

Clancy had a deep fear of the ocean: it wasn’t just the sharks, it was everything.

Though it was mainly the sharks. He had once read a book when he was younger, a novel, that had given him cause for many sleepless nights. Admittedly, the book had been one his mother was reading and not recommended for fourth graders – he had spotted it on her nightstand and was lured in by the image of the huge shark’s head shown on the front cover, its dead eyes staring up at a lone swimmer. It had made quite an impression. Clancy had found it to be unputdownable and read the whole 649 pages in four sittings, locked in the bathroom. He had paid for this every night of his life for the next 1,366 days – his dreams invaded by this great white monster.

Ruby always did her best to reason with him.

‘Clance,’ she said. ‘Sharks are not interested in human flesh – most attacks happen by accident. The shark spots a swimmer, mistakes it for a seal and goes over to investigate. The problem comes because sharks explore with their teeth – more often than not they take a bite and think better of it.’

‘That’s very reassuring Rube – I feel a whole lot better – just wait while I go dive into the ocean.’

‘What you gotta do,’ continued Ruby, ignoring her friend’s sarcasm, ‘is try not to pee – they take this as a sign of vulnerability. Failing that, if he’s got you in his jaws, bop him on the nose with your fist. The nose is very sensitive on a shark. He’ll soon let go – on the whole sharks can’t be bothered to fight. They’re not used to it.’

‘Well,’ said Clancy, ‘that must be the only thing that sharks and I have in common.’

‘In any case, it’s very rare – I mean you probably have the same likelihood of being trampled to death by a rhinoceros.’

‘Yeah, well, the difference is I would see the rhinoceros coming – at least I could run for it.’

‘Well, you say that Clance, but rhinoceroses are awful fast runners – personally, I’d rather take my chances with the shark.’

Perhaps because of his terror, Clancy also had a deep fascination for anything to do with the sea. He liked to read about all those things that kept him awake at night sweating with fear. Killer jellyfish, killer whales, poisonous coral, giant squid, killer squid, killer-giant-squid, tuna fish, anything aquatic. He was a bit of an expert.

So he listened eagerly as Ruby told him about the stuff she had learned, the dives she had been on, the depths she had swum to and the things she had seen.