Circus of Thieves on the Rampage (16 page)

‘Here you go, boy,’ he said, putting it gingerly at the dog’s feet.

The dog still didn’t move.

‘You’re a weird dog,’ said Armitage.

You’re a weird man
, thought Rudolph, but he didn’t bark or twitch.

Armitage concluded that this was either the world’s worst guard dog, or that it was actually dead and stuffed. What he didn’t even consider was that Rudolph might have been
instructed to observe, but not to intervene until a particular trigger point had been reached.

Armitage now turned his attention to the safe. Joy of joys, wonder of wonders, rapture of raptures, the thing wasn’t even locked! Distracted by the excitement of getting changed into his
Hawaiian maiden costume, Clench had been slack. He’d made a catastrophic error.

Of all the things to forget!

Armitage let out his biggest cackle of the day as he reached in and began to stuff his pockets with money. He would have quite liked to include ‘stuffing my pockets with money’ on
his list of hobbies, but to be honest this didn’t really happen often enough for Armitage to count it as anything more than an occasional pastime.

Just as Armitage was beginning to think this was the easiest burglary of his entire career, he heard a voice in the room behind him, a voice he dimly, distantly recognised from his dim and
distant past.

‘ARMITAGE SHANK! WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING? IN FACT, I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND I’M NOT EVEN SLIGHTLY SURPRISED. NOW WHERE’S MY SON?’

Armitage spun round and gazed up in horror. The voice belonged to a man he had not seen for many years. A man he thought was safely locked up in jail. A man in the top ten on Armitage’s
list of People Who Will Want To Do Me In If They Ever Find Me Again. Ernesto Espadrille.

H
AD HE BEEN THINKING MORE CLEARLY,
Armitage might have concentrated on finishing stuffing his pockets with
money; he might even have tried to ignore Ernesto’s surprising outburst; but the idea of Billy not being his son was one that made Armitage’s brain sizzle with uncontainable fury.

‘
Your
son?’ snapped Armitage, his moustache quivering like a plucked harp string. ‘You don’t have a son!’

‘Don’t give me that nonsense,’ replied Ernesto. ‘Just tell me where to find Billy!’

‘I tell you, he’s not your son, he’s mine. You ran off and abandoned him years ago. He can’t ever forgive you for that. Luckily, I was around to pick up the pieces, or
who knows what would have happened to him? Disappointment, debility, destruction, distress, despair, defeat and destitution. He calls me father now, and has completely forgotten that anyone else
has any claim on him. If he sees you, and remembers what you did to him, it’ll break his heart.’

Ernesto’s response to these words was to shrink. A human being cannot literally diminish in size from one moment to the next, but that is exactly what appeared to happen to Ernesto. The
pain of hearing these words seemed to knock the life out of him. Within the few seconds it took Armitage to utter this speech, Ernesto gave the appearance of shrivelling into a smaller, lesser
man.

‘I . . . I . . . didn’t abandon him,’ stammered Ernesto. ‘I had no choice.’

‘Billy knows you betrayed him. He loathes you. I’ve tried my best to teach him not to hate – to have a kind and gentle soul – but the pain runs too deep. You have scarred
him to the very bones.’

‘I . . . I . . . came for him as soon as I could.’

‘Too late. Many, many years too late. Now go away and leave me to finish my work before you wound him any further.’

Suddenly, a voice piped up from the doorway. The voice of a young girl. A voice supercharged with outrage and anger and also a little bit of loveliness.

‘LIES!’ bellowed Hannah. ‘IT’S ALL LIES! DON’T BELIEVE A WORD HE SAYS!’

‘Who are you?’ said Ernesto.

‘That’s what I came here to ask you,’ replied Hannah. ‘Who
am
I? You two are the only people who know the answer.’

‘Oh, my dizzy uncle!’ yelped Armitage. ‘It’s
you!
You’re that girl! The one who tricked Billy! The one who stole all the things I had stolen and gave them
back! How did you get here? Who
are
you? Who are you working for? Why won’t you leave me alone?’

The sight of this mysterious, theft-foiling girl gave Armitage a cold, porridgey feeling in the pit of his stomach. Last time, she had been Very Bad News Indeed. He did not want her there. Not
one little bit.

Hannah had no interest in any of Armitage’s questions. She leapt towards Ernesto and grabbed his hands in hers, looking up passionately into his eyes. ‘Everything Armitage just said
is a lie! Billy loves you! He knows you didn’t abandon him! He thinks about you every day! Armitage forces him to steal and do bad things and he doesn’t want to do any of them! He wants
to be with you. He’s been waiting and waiting for you to come back and get him and as soon as he sees you he’ll be the happiest boy in the world and he won’t ever want to see
Armitage for a single second ever again, because Armitage is a bad, bad, bad person and you’re not and Billy wants to be with you again more than anything else in the whole world including
chocolate.’

‘Chocolate?’ said Ernesto and Armitage together.

‘Maybe that last bit about chocolate doesn’t make any sense. The point is, everything Armitage just said is a lie. Billy knows he’s your son. And I think I am, too! Not your
son, I mean your daughter. Am I? You have to tell me, because, if it’s not you, it’s him!’ said Hannah, jabbing a finger towards Armitage. ‘And frankly I’d rather have
a warthog for a father than that horrible, rotten, lying thief.’

‘Daughter?’ said Ernesto and Armitage together.

‘My mother was Esmeralda Espadrille. I was born exactly twelve years ago yesterday while she was on a world tour. My granny says there are two people who could be my father. You or you. I
have
to know. And it
has
to be you, Ernesto. Please, please, please tell me you’re my father.’

At this moment, two strange things happened. The first one was hardly surprising, given Hannah’s phone call. It was the sudden interruption of a police siren.

The second thing, far stranger, was Armitage’s reaction to this sound. As if suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of inexplicable and uncharacteristic generosity, he leapt forward and began to
pull all the money out of his pockets and shove it into the pockets of Ernesto’s prison uniform. (Such was Ernesto’s hurry to see his son again that he hadn’t paused to change out
of his prison clothes into something a little less suspicious. This, as we are shortly to discover, was a costly error.)

As the sound of police boots approached, Armitage bent over and thrust his head into Ernesto’s armpit, grabbing Ernesto’s arm and squeezing it around his own throat.

‘Help! Help!’ yelled Armitage. ‘He’s got me! Please don’t shoot! I’m a hostage! He’s got me round the neck and he’s going to throttle me unless he
gets all this money. I’m so scared! He’s a monster.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Ernesto, trying to pull away, but he couldn’t, because Armitage had his arm gripped firmly in strangling position. Meanwhile, the rest of
Armitage’s body was writhing as if he was struggling to get free.

‘Ow!’ said Armitage. ‘Please help me! I’m terrified!’

‘Freeze!’ shouted a firm, policemanny voice. ‘Put your arms up.’

Armitage let go of Ernesto and crumpled, choking, onto the floor. Ernesto raised his arms, but only for a moment, because the policeman immediately pushed him against a wall and clamped him into
handcuffs.

‘Wait!’ yelled Hannah. ‘It’s all lies! Armitage is the thief.’

‘She’s his accomplice,’ said Armitage, in a hoarse, just-strangled voice. ‘She’s his daughter and she wants to get him off.’

‘I’m his daughter! Am I really? Or are you just saying that to get me into trouble?’

‘She doesn’t even know who she is!’ said Armitage to the policeman. ‘The pair of them are criminally insane. They should be locked up forever.’

‘I haven’t done anything!’ said Ernesto. ‘I’m just looking for my son.’

‘And he can’t even keep track of his own children,’ said Armitage. ‘He’s a bad parent on top of everything else.’

‘I’m not a thief!’ protested Ernesto, as the policeman began to pull him away.

‘Very convincing,’ said the policeman, sarcastically. ‘Your pockets are stuffed with money from an open safe, you’ve been holding a hostage at strangulation point and
you’re already wearing prison uniform. I’d say this is an open and shut case.’

‘I haven’t done anything!’ said Ernesto.

‘He hasn’t done anything!’ said Hannah.

‘
Woof!
’ said Rudolph, in agreement.

‘Oh, my neck!’ said Armitage. ‘The pain is indescribable! I feel like I’ve swallowed a chainsaw! I think I need a breathing tube. Call an ambulance.’

Suddenly, there was a very loud crash, as a trapeze, dangling from who knows where, smacked into the side of the box office, sending Queenie Bombazine in full Mermaid of the Skies costume
through the window. Shards of glass flew everywhere, but Queenie appeared unharmed.

‘That man hasn’t done anything!’ she bellowed. ‘It’s my money and he can have as much of it as he wants. No crime has been committed here, except for by this
slimeball – Armitage Shank – who is wanted by every police force in the country.’

Everyone was rather taken aback by this spectacular entrance, so much so that a long silence filled the room.

The policeman, who was a big circus fan, and was at this moment feeling distinctly star-struck, responded in a rather unprofessional manner. He gave Queenie a round of applause. His name,
incidentally, was Bill, but since we already have a boy called Billy in this story, to avoid confusion the policeman shall henceforth be known as Old Bill.

‘Well?’ said Queenie, fighting the instinct to take a bow. ‘Let him go!’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ replied Old Bill, suddenly remembering that he was on duty. ‘Robbery is robbery is robbery, even if the victim of the robbery
subsequently claims in suspicious circumstances that she wanted to be robbed in the first place. He’s guilty as sin, madam, and it’s my job to enforce the law. In fact, if you
weren’t well known as a fine and upstanding citizen, I’d have a good mind to arrest you as an accomplice in the crime of burgling yourself, but instead I think I’ll just ask for
your autograph.’