Pick Your Poison

As it happened, Ruby was on the money.

‘Hey Mom, how’s it going?’ she said as she walked into the living room.

‘A whole lot better since two minutes ago. Marjorie has saved my life!’

‘Literally?’ asked Ruby.

‘Sort of literally but not exactly,’ said Sabina.

‘How did she manage that over the phone?’

‘By lending me her ruby-eyed snake earrings. Don’t tell your father,’ said her mother, adopting a conspiratorial whisper. ‘He’ll never spot the difference, even though Marjorie’s are cobras and mine are sea serpents, but he’d be so mad if he knew I’d lost them. You see, I clean forgot to put them on the insurance.’

‘When did you last have them?’ asked Ruby.

‘During my stay in New York City.’

‘So they could be at Grandma’s place?’

‘She’s looked and looked but they haven’t shown up,’ sighed Sabina, ‘not on the night stand, not in the bathroom or anywhere obvious.’

‘So I take it Dad’s not home?’ said Ruby.

‘Not yet honey. He was called in for an emergency meeting about the Explorer Awards. The caterers stepped out at the last minute – the chef apparently has a considerable fear of snakes. Brant offered to find a replacement … He is late though,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘I hope everything’s OK. I have a bad feeling about this whole function.’

It was most unlike Sabina to have a bad feeling about anything – losing her jewellery had clearly rattled her.

Ruby sank down on the sofa opposite her mother.

‘You’re sitting on the menu,’ said Sabina.

‘What?’

‘The menu,’ said Sabina. ‘You happen to be sitting on it.’

‘Oh.’ Ruby pulled the card from under her. ‘So is this what they’re serving on the night?’

‘It was going to be,’ said Sabina, ‘but who knows now, it might just be crackers.’

Ruby began reading from the card. ‘Looks fancy. Caviar, oysters …’

SABINA: ‘I do love oysters, but I feel very uncomfortable eating them now it turns out they have a brain.’

RUBY: ‘I think you are getting mixed up here. They don’t have brains, they are brain food, i.e. meant to be food for the brain.’

SABINA: ‘Whose brain?’

RUBY: ‘Your brain – anyone’s brain.’

SABINA: ‘You sure?’

RUBY: ‘Yes. By the way, you eat plenty of other things with brains.’

SABINA: ‘I know, but I’ve been eating oysters all this time and thinking they don’t have brains.’

RUBY: ‘Well, you can relax ’cause they don’t.’

SABINA: ‘You’re sure about this?’

RUBY: ‘Where do you think they would keep them?’

SABINA: ‘In their shells, of course.’

RUBY: ‘Where in the “body”? I mean, you’ve shucked enough oysters to know.’

Her mother mulled this for half a minute.

SABINA: ‘Now I come to think of it, no, I have never noticed an oyster with even a face.’

RUBY: ‘There you go.’

SABINA: ‘What gets me is how do they think?’

RUBY: ‘They don’t need to think. They’re bivalves, they are pretty much gills and a mouth. They catch plankton in their mucus and—’

SABINA: ‘OK, mucus does it – that’s it for me and oysters.’

Ruby was saved from any more oyster talk by the sound of a key in the front door.

‘That’ll be your father, don’t blab about the earrings,’ hissed her mother.

‘When do I ever blab?’ said Ruby.

‘Brant?’ called Sabina.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he called back.

‘We’ll be late to the Feldmans’ party,’ said Sabina.

‘Sorry honey, I got held up, but guess who I have in tow?’

‘Hola, Mrs Redfort.’

‘Consuela?’ cried Sabina. ‘Is it really you?’ And in walked Consuela Cruz, large as life and in six-inch scarlet heels.

‘Meet my new caterer,’ announced Brant. ‘She has agreed to save the day.’

‘Bravo!’ cried Sabina.

For a very short time Consuela Cruz, a dietician and talented chef from Seville, had been in the Redforts’ employ, hired by Mrs Redfort to bring health and wellbeing to the family, though what had actually happened was the cause of a certain amount of indigestion.

Mrs Digby and Consuela Cruz had not hit it off and had disagreed about most things. Plates had been thrown and tomato juice flung. Mrs Digby had felt very much discarded, her cooking somehow relegated to second best – all in all it had been a less than satisfactory arrangement. It was a mercy Mrs Digby had already departed the house for poker night.

‘Great seeing you again,’ said Ruby.

Consuela gave her a hard stare. ‘Have you been eating your kale, Ruby Redfort?’

‘Course I have, never miss it,’ lied Ruby.

‘Don’t try and pull wool over me, chica. I can see just by looking into your eyes, no kale has passed your lips.’

‘Oh, honey,’ fretted Sabina, ‘is this true?’

‘I’ll go fix her a kale juice once we have debated the menu,’ said Consuela.

Jeepers, thought Ruby, one minute in the door and she’s ruining my life. ‘Really nice to see you again Consuela,’ she said, ‘but if you would excuse me I just need to go and tidy my sock drawer.’

Ruby grabbed some banana milk from the refrigerator while her parents and Consuela Cruz talked oysters. Consuela wanted to serve them on seaweed.

‘I’m not sure we should serve oysters on anything,’ said Brant, ‘because of the green pearl discovery. The marine explorer – what’s his name? – might be offended.’

‘More likely to be offended that you can’t remember what he’s called,’ said Ruby.

‘He wouldn’t have discovered a green pearl if someone had not been trying to eat it,’ said Consuela.

The logic of this statement didn’t register with Brant Redfort.

‘We can’t eat anything endangered,’ he insisted.

‘Oysters aren’t in danger,’ said Consuela. ‘No way José.’

‘Were you aware they don’t have brains?’ said Sabina. ‘Not even faces.’

Ruby decided it might be time to retire to her room.

RUBY PULLED THE BLOCK OF WOOD FROM THE DOORJAMB and took notebook 625 from its hiding place. The previous six hundred and twenty four, all varying shades of the same colour, were hidden under the floorboards. She had been writing things down in yellow notebooks since she was no more than four years old, when it had struck her that the smallest detail was what made up the whole big picture. RULE 16: EVEN THE MUNDANE CAN TELL A STORY. No one knew about the yellow notebooks, not even Ruby’s closest friend, Clancy. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t told him; she just hadn’t.

She flipped back to see what she had written over the last few weeks. There was a lot there, most of it still fresh in her mind, but she was hoping that there might be some detail that once re-read might mean more than perhaps it had when first jotted down. Some detail that made everything fit together, that revealed the pattern she couldn’t see. She sank back into her outsized beanbag and began to read.

Her life as a Spectrum code breaker had begun in March, getting on for seven months ago now, and it had been no easy ride.

Ruby, who was an ambitious kid, was determined to do more than crack codes: her lifelong dream was to be a field agent. That dream – and her life – had been almost snuffed out by various murdering thieves and kidnappers, but that only served to make her more determined. She had made it this far, she wasn’t dead, why give up now?

It was the Cyan Wolf case that had led her to the blue-eyed Australian, and it was the conversation with her on Wolf Paw Mountain that kept circling her mind. She turned back several pages and read her notes on the case. It was up there on the mountain where things had taken an almost fatal turn, though in recent months things had had a habit of taking near fatal turns.

Sometimes she thought she could still smell the fire that had burned around her, the forest catching light as she had dared the woman to explain her dark motives.

‘All this so you can make some money out of some stupid fragrance.’

How the woman had laughed at that.

‘Is that what you think this is about? No sweetie, this is not about some high-end perfume counter cluttered up with rich folk wanting to waste their money. This is about something important, more important than you could ever imagine.’

The woman had been talking about the Cyan scent, the scent of the Blue Alaskan wolf. A scent so rare that just a few drops were worth unimaginable riches, a scent with an irresistible pull – breathe it in and you fell under its spell. But the Australian had made it clear that she was not interested in it for its value as a perfume – she had far bigger ambitions.

Ruby was chewing on a pencil and looking down at a blank page.

She had been recruited by Spectrum in March to crack a code, just one. Her first (and supposedly last) assignment was to figure out what code-breaker, Lopez, had discovered before she mysteriously died. It turned out to be a plot to steal the priceless Buddha of Khotan. Thanks to Ruby’s work, the Buddha had been saved and the criminals identified. One incarcerated – Baby Face Marshall; one dead – Valerie Capaldi, aka Nine Lives; and one at large – Count von Viscount.

It had all seemed to tie up quite neatly, everyone at Spectrum was satisfied, but Ruby was no longer feeling so complacent. Though the Buddha was now safely back in Yoktan (formerly the ancient city of Khotan), might it be that something had after all been stolen?

Ruby wrote:

Was something stolen from the Jade Buddha itself?

She leafed back to the note she had made about the case when it had all been deemed over, done and dusted, put to bed.

WHAT I DON’T KNOW:

What was the Count looking at?

She had seen him take out a small torch-like device and shine it into the eyes of the Buddha. What had he seen there? What secret might be held in the eyes of the Jade Buddha of Khotan?

The case of the Jade Buddha was supposed to be her one and only code-breaking exercise, but Spectrum had kept her on, despite her age and despite LB’s reluctance to take on a mouthy school kid (the Spectrum 8 boss had been clear about that). Perhaps she hadn’t had much choice – even she could see that, had Ruby not been there, things would have ended very differently.

Ruby turned to a fresh page and wrote:

LOOSE END ONE: the jade.

The second case had been a confusing one. The death of a Spectrum diver had turned out to be accidental, and some worrying pirate activity that had seen Ruby’s own parents taken hostage was in fact a cover to allow Count von Viscount to recover the lost treasure of the Sibling Isles. But on reflection this too turned out to be a bluff, a distraction – something much more sinister was going on. Clancy had told her just how pale the Count had turned when he discovered the vials of indigo he was carrying were smashed and his relief when he had found one, just one glass vessel, still intact. The indigo was the ink obtained from the cephalopod – a giant octopus sea creature – the stuff of legend and a legend no one (until then) had believed in. This indigo ink worked exactly like a truth serum – once ingested, you couldn’t help but tell the truth. Ruby had first-hand experience of its powers and could see just why any master criminal would want to have it sitting in his or her cupboard of villainy, but Ruby had a strange feeling that the Count had some bigger purpose for it.

The pirates and their leader had been captured and marched to jail. The Count’s henchman, Mr Darling, had died in the strangulating grip of the octopus. But the Count himself, as always, had sailed away into the sunset, or in this instance into the dawn.

LOOSE END TWO: the indigo. Was it acquired for some specific purpose?

The third case was the Blue Alaskan wolf: rescued, but not before some of its valuable cyan scent had been extracted and stolen.

This time it was the mysterious Australian who had been running the show, and no one had seen her since she made Ruby take a long walk off a cliff edge. Her co-conspirators had been less lucky: Eduardo had wound up dead, his own boss had seen to that, the bulk of the gang had fled the scene only to be captured by Spectrum agents, and as for Lorelei von Leyden, new villain on the block, well she, like smoke, had disappeared into the atmosphere before the mountain was engulfed in flames.

There had been no sign of the Count in the cyan case, but had he been lurking behind the scenes? Had he been the one pulling the strings?

LOOSE END THREE: the Cyan.

Which just left Ruby’s most recent case – the one that had begun with a pair of missing canary-yellow shoes. It was the shoes that had led them to uncover the whole plot, and eventually locate the invisibility skin, stolen to order by a cat burglar named Claude Fontaine, hired by their old friend Lorelei von Leyden. Ruby had recovered the skin and returned it to the Department of Defence, but she had known as she crouched on the rooftop that night that the invisibility skin was not the whole story. With hindsight, it was clear that the skin had been stolen in order to perpetrate another crime.

The real trophy had been the 8 key. A coder key belonging to Spectrum boss LB, which became useless to anyone as soon as it was known to be missing, since all it took was the press of a button to deactivate its functions. The only part of it that seemed to be in any way interesting was the Lucite tag attached to it, and this was only of interest to LB since it had once belonged to Bradley Baker, legendary Spectrum agent and LB’s long-dead sweetheart.

So why had the Count strived so hard to obtain it? Why risk incarceration for a key that would be deactivated as soon as it was discovered missing? A key therefore that would never unlock one single Spectrum door, not one file, not one secret?

And the bigger question: since the key had been locked away inside a DOD safe room, protected by LB’s own code, how had Claude got to it? Had someone from the DOD or even Spectrum given him inside information? Investigations were of course being conducted – Ruby didn’t have to be told this to know it was so. She thought that was probably why no new code-breaking cases had been landing on her desk; activity had been suspended pending security clearance. So was Hitch likely to be ‘on vacation’ with his ‘mother’ at this time of high alert? Answer: not a chance.

LOOSE END FOUR: the key. What’s the link?

She paused before writing,

Beats me.

She didn’t know what else to write, except for the one thing she didn’t want to write: has a bad apple found its way into Spectrum, or is someone in Spectrum rotten to the core? Someone I know? Someone I trust?

She sat back and exhaled a weary breath. ‘Where the Sam Hill are you Hitch, and why can I never find you when I need you?’ The question, muttered aloud, roused her trusty husky dog and he ambled over and licked her hand, a display of loyal affection Ruby was grateful for.

‘Come on Bug, let’s you and me go get a snack, how about that, huh?’

The dog began to wag his tail. Ruby wriggled out of the beanbag and the two of them exited the room and went quietly on downstairs.

When she arrived down in the kitchen she fetched a dog treat from the pantry and fed it to Bug. Then she opened the refrigerator to see a large glass of green with a note pinned to it written in Spanish:

It was undoubtedly from Consuela.

If I wanted to wind up with dog breath – no offence Bug – then I would. She wasted no time in pouring it down the sink, trying not to breathe in the kale smell.

Mrs Digby had made her a small fish pie. Ordinarily Ruby would have been pleased (Mrs Digby made a good fish pie), but due to her earlier encounter with fish heads she decided she might give it a miss. Instead she sliced some bread, dropped it in the toaster and waited in silence for it to toast. She thought about Hitch again and where he might be – was he part of some investigation into the 8 key or had he been kept out of it too? How did people so good at keeping secrets investigate other people who were equally good at keeping secrets?

Her thoughts were interrupted by the pop of the toaster and just like that one of her questions was answered.

THE MESSAGE WAS GRILLED INTO THE TOAST, the words clear but edible, an advantage to any hungry spy looking to cover her tracks. The fax toaster was Spectrum issue and, while useful, some might feel it had its downsides – not everyone wanted to be contacted about work assignments at 8pm when they had just popped into the kitchen for a snack. But then Ruby Redfort wasn’t everyone.

She spread the toast with mayonnaise (the Redforts were out of butter), stuck it between her teeth and pulled on her waterproof coat. Rain was due anytime soon – that’s what they kept saying, though it was the wind that had the city in its grip.

Then she headed out into the dark to Greenstreet subway station. The train journey wasn’t a long one, but even so Ruby was frustrated with herself for forgetting to bring her book. So instead of reading she stared at her reflection in the dark window. Someone had stuck a sticker to the glass. It was of a boss-eyed cartoon kid licking its chops – on the tongue were the words: It’s On the Tip of Your Tongue.

There was also part of a newspaper discarded on the ledge behind the seat, its headline mirrored in the glass:

She picked it up and continued to read:

THIS YEAR’S HALLOWEEN PARADE BIGGER THAN EVER!

Mayor Abrahams, keen to make himself popular before the mayoral elections, had decided that there should be a special televised Twinford Halloween parade in Harker Square. The meteorological service thought this unwise due to the recent violent gales and predicted torrential rain, but Mayor Abrahams was not to be deterred:

“No little rain shower is going to dampen Twinford’s spirits!”

Ruby’s friends, Red in particular, were keen to make a big impression, costume-wise. There had been a lot of talk but so far no decision on what ghoulish theme they would all be adopting.

She resurfaced at Crossways, the subway stop just northeast of the Village and not so far from the Twinford River. On Broker Avenue traffic was heavy no matter what time of day or night, and to traverse meant dodging cars. The Dime a Dozen 24-hour supermarket was her destination: brightly lit with fluorescent tubes, the aisles signed with giant cardboard numbers suspended from the ceiling.

Aisle 17 held canned vegetables and jarred baby food on one side, chilled goods in tall refrigerators on the other. She didn’t immediately spot Hitch. He was browsing chickpeas: a tall, good-looking man, wearing an elegant raincoat over a dark suit.

In his hand – only slightly marring the look – was a Dime a Dozen paper bag.

‘Been doing some shopping?’ she said.

‘You’re only three minutes and forty seconds late, good going kid,’ he said.

‘Isn’t this a bit inconvenient?’ said Ruby. ‘I mean, having to walk through a store every time you want to reach Spectrum?’

‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘It’s a convenience store.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘For those in the know, there are always other ways in, I just thought this one would appeal to your sense of mystery,’ said Hitch. ‘Besides, we were out of butter.’

‘I know,’ said Ruby, ‘but how do you know?’

‘Lucky guess,’ said Hitch.

Boy, thought Ruby, that’s some butler.

‘So I’ve managed to restock the dairy goodness and get to work on time,’ said Hitch, shaking the bag.

‘Where’s the door then?’ she asked.

‘Right here,’ said Hitch, pointing to a section of shelving bearing all kinds of fly sprays, fly papers and fly swatters. He reached behind a can of Fly-Be-Gone and the shelf swung open and they walked through into a very white, very cold space. Nothing was in it at all but for a tiny image of a white fly on the white wall in front of them, almost invisible but not quite. Hitch pressed his thumbprint onto it and the wall slid back and stairs were revealed.

At the bottom of the staircase – an industrial refrigerator door; on the other side – Spectrum. A hive of spies all secretly going about their business.

Hitch went over to check in with Buzz. She looked the same as always, bland and beige and looking sort of like a mushroom sitting there in the middle of her round desk surrounded by telephones. Ruby watched her as she phoned through to LB’s office.

‘Agent Hitch and Agent Redfort,’ she said.

This time there was no waiting and Ruby and Hitch were told to just go right on in to the boss’s office.

If LB had been looking tired and twitchy last month, then she seemed doubly so today. And if the dark circles around her eyes were anything to go by, perhaps her head had not been hitting the pillow as often as it should. Next to her was a man Ruby recognised as Agent Trent-Kobie, head of Spectrum 5, aka Sea Division. He was someone LB had a lot of time for and clearly trusted.

Everyone shook hands.

Ruby noticed LB’s face slightly brighten when she saw Hitch. ‘Sorry to bring you back from your vacation, Hitch, I appreciate your returning at short notice.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ said Hitch. ‘To be honest I’m not a big fan of sand in my shoes.’ Ruby couldn’t swear to it, but she thought she saw a flicker of a wink as Hitch spoke – no doubt because he and LB knew the vacation was bogus.

LB turned to Ruby, no smile. ‘Sit down, Redfort.’

Ruby sat.

LB dropped an aspirin in a glass of water before saying, ‘Oh, and Redfort, please don’t irritate me today; I’m a little out of sorts and you may find me less than my usual affable self.’

‘I’ll keep it, you know …’ Ruby mimed turning a key in a lock.

‘Would you?’ said LB. ‘I have a lot on my mind and a rather bad headache to contend with, so please try not to act your age, Redfort … just pretend you’re someone more reasonable.’

Ruby resisted the impulse to roll her eyes. ‘Got it,’ she said. ‘So you have something for me?’

LB shook her head. ‘As you are probably aware, we are not assigning cases to field agents in training at this time,’ she said.

There was a knock at the door and Blacker entered with a Styrofoam cup and a brown paper bag.

LB looked only a touch alarmed. ‘Lose the baked goods would you Blacker.’

‘Oh, sure,’ said Blacker, exiting the room and returning without the bag.

‘Actually, would you mind relinquishing the coffee too? You know how it is with white carpets … every little mark.’

‘No problem,’ said Blacker, popping out once again and returning empty handed. He winked at Ruby and sat down.