Mystery of the Vanished Prince (8 page)

It was a button! A very fine button too, blue, with a gold edge. Pip sat up and looked at it. Red-Hair glanced at it.

“One of the buttons off his pyjamas,” he said. “You should have seen them! Blue and gold with those buttons to match.”

“Do you think I might keep it as a souvenir?” said Pip. He really wondered if by any chance it might turn out to be a Clue!

“Gosh - what do you want a souvenir for? Are you daft?” said the second boy. “Keep it if you want to. I don’t reckon Wah-Wah will want it again! If he loses a button he’ll be provided with a new set of pyjamas!”

“Did he leave his pyjamas behind?” asked Larry, thinking it might be a good idea to look at them.

“No. He went off in them,” said Red-Hair. “That’s what makes every one think he was kidnapped. He’d have dressed himself if he had run away.”

Larry and Pip wandered out into the open air again. A loud voice suddenly hailed them.

“Larry! Pip! What you doing up here?” And there was Ern’s plump face grinning at them from over the nearby hedge. “Come on over! We’ve got our tent here!”

A Little Investigation

“Hallo, Ern!” said Larry, surprised. He had forgotten that Ern had been camping so near the big Camp Field. The faces of Sid and Perce now appeared, Perce grinning, Sid very solemn as usual.

Larry and Pip said good-bye to Red-Hair and his friends and squeezed through the hedge to Ern. Pip had put the pyjama button safely into his pocket. He didn’t know whether it might be useful or not.

Ern proudly showed the two boys his tent. It was a very small and humble affair, compared with the magnificent one they had just left - but Ern, Sid, and Perce were intensely proud of it. They had never been camping before, and were enjoying it immensely.

There were no sleeping-bags in the tent, merely old, worn rugs spread over a ground-sheet. Three mugs, three broken knives, three spoons, two forks (“Perce lost his when he was bathing,” was Ern’s mystifying explanation), three mackintosh capes, three enamel plates, and a few other things.

“Fine, isn’t it?” said Ern. “We get water from the tap over in the Camp Field. They let us use it if we just go straight there and back. But they won’t let the caravanners use it. So we get it for them, and in return they sometimes cook us a meal.”

There were a good many caravans scattered about, and also one or two more small tents. The caravan standing next to Ern’s tent was empty, and a litter of papers was blowing about.

“The people there have gone,” said Ern. “There was a woman and two kids - the kids were babies. Twins like Perce and Sid.”

“Ar,” said Sid, who was following them about, chewing. “Ar.”

“What’s he mean, arring like that?” asked Pip, annoyed. “Can’t he ever talk properly?”

“Not while he has toffee in his mouth,” said Ern. “Ma don’t allow him so much when he’s at home, of course, so he talks a bit more there. But here, when he can eat toffee all day long, he never says much except ‘Ar.’ Do you, young Sid?”

“Ar,” said Sid, trying to swallow the rest of his toffee quickly, and almost choking.

“He seems to want to say something,” said Pip, interestedly. “Do you, Sid?”

“Ar,” said Sid, frantically, going purple in the face.

“Oh, it’s only to tell you about the twin-babies, I expect,” said Ern. “He was cracked on them, was our Sid. He used to go over to that caravan and pore over the pram hours on end. He’s dippy on babies.”

Pip and Larry looked at Sid with surprise. He didn’t seem at all the kind of boy to be “dippy on babies.”

Sid pointed down to the ground, where there were four different sets of pram-wheel marks.

“There you are, you see - I said he wanted to tell you about them twins,” said Ern. “He used to stand by their pram and pick up all the rattles and things they dropped. I bet he’s ready to howl now they’re gone. He’s a funny one, Sid is.”

“Ar,” said Sid, in a strangled voice, and almost choked again.

“You’re disgusting,” said Ern. “You and your toffee. You’ve et a whole tin since yesterday. I’ll tell Ma on you. You go and spit it out.”

Sid wandered away, evidently giving up all hope of proper conversation. Pip heaved a sigh of relief. Sid and his toffee gave him a nightmare feeling.

“Sid was proper upset this morning, when the twins went,” said Perce, entering amicably into the conversation. “He went over to joggle the pram like he does when their mother wants them to go to sleep - but she yelled at him and chased him away. That made the babies yell too, and there wasn’t half a set-to.”

“What did she want to do that to our Sid for?” said Ern, quite annoyed at any one yelling at his Sid. “He’s been good to those smelly kids, he’s wheeled their big pram up and down the field for hours.”

Pip and Larry were getting tired of all this talk about Sid and the babies. Who cared anyway?

“Ern - did you hear anything at all last night when Prince Bongawah was supposed to be kidnapped?” asked Larry. “Did Sid or Perce?”

“No. We none of us heard anything,” said Ern, firmly. “We all sleep like tops. Sid don’t even wake if there is a thunderstorm bang over his head. The whole camp could have been kidnapped, and we wouldn’t have known a thing. Good sleepers, the Goons are.”

Well, that was that. There didn’t seem to be anything at all to be got from Ern. How maddening to know some one living just across the hedge from the Prince, and to get nothing out of him at all!

“You did see the prince, though, didn’t you?” said Larry.

“Yes. I told you,” said Ern. “He was a funny little fellow with a cocky little face. He made faces.”

“Made faces?” said Larry, in astonishment. “What do you mean?”

“Well, whenever Sid or Perce or me peeped through the hedge, he’d see us and make a face,” said Ern. “He may have been a Prince, but he hadn’t been brought up proper. Brown as a gipsy, of course, proper foreign.”

“Browner than us?” asked Pip.

“’Bout the same,” said Ern.

“Why did you say that he and Bets were as like as peas in a pod?” asked Pip, suddenly remembering this extraordinary remark of Ern’s.

Ern blushed. “Oh well, seemed as if brother and sister ought to look alike,” he muttered, and busily kicked a stone along. “Coo, I wonder what happened to his State Umbrella! You should have seen it, Pip. Somebody came to visit him, and one of them put up this enormous umbrella - all blue and gold it was - and carried it over him. He didn’t half scowl.”

“Didn’t he like it, then?” asked Pip.

“Well, every one laughed and yelled and shouted,” said Ern. “It looked a bit queer, you know.”

“Hallo, there! ” suddenly came Fatty’s voice over the hedge. “Why did you wander off like that? You left me to do all the talking, Pip.”

“That’s why I went,” said Pip. “You like talking, Fatty, don’t you?”

“Can we come through the hedge?” called Daisy’s voice. “Is there a place where we shan’t tear our clothes?”

Ern gallantly held aside some prickly branches for the girls to squeeze through the hedge. Fatty followed. “Nice cousin of yours, that fellow Ronald,” Fatty said to Pip. “We had quite a chat.”

“You must have done quite a lot of ‘questioning of witnesses,’ then,” said Pip, slyly, remembering the books Fatty had been studying a day or two before. “Did you get any interesting information about this case?”

“Well, no,” said Fatty, who had actually spent the whole time relating some of his own exploits to the open-mouthed Ronald. “No. I didn’t gather much.”

“What about you, Pip?” asked Bets. “Have you been questioning Ern, Sid and Perce?”

“Yes,” said Pip. “But Larry and I didn’t get much out of them. They slept all night long and didn’t hear a thing. They haven’t the faintest idea what happened to Prince Bongawah-wah-wah.”

“Ar,” said Sid, joining them suddenly. His jaws chewed frantically. Pip looked at him in disgust.

“Go away,” he said. “And don’t come back till you can say something else. I shall start ‘arring’ myself in a minute. ARRRRRRRR!”

He made such a fierce noise that Sid gave him an alarmed glance and fled.

Pip took out the blue and gold button from his pocket and showed it to the others.

“This is the solitary clue - if it can be called a clue - that we’ve found,” he said. “I found it in the sleeping-bag belonging to the Prince. It came off his blue and gold pyjamas.”

“Well, what use do you think that is?” asked Fatty. “Is it going to help us to find out who kidnapped the Prince, or when or how - or where he’s gone? Not much of a clue, Pip.”

“No,” said Pip, pocketing the button again. “I thought it wasn’t. But you always tell us to examine everything and keep everything - just in case. So I did. By the way, he didn’t dress - he disappeared in his pyjamas.”

That made Fatty stare. “Are you sure, Pip? Who told you?”

“The boys who slept in his tent,” said Pip.

“Well, that’s funny,” said Fatty.

“Why?” asked Daisy. “There wouldn’t be any time, would there, for him to dress? Besides, wouldn’t he disturb the other boys if he did?”

“Not if he stole outside in the dark when they were asleep,” said Fatty. “He could take his clothes with him and dress quickly. Any one wandering about in pyjamas would be spotted.”

“But Fatty - surely there wouldn’t be time for any one to dress if he was being kidnapped,” said Daisy again. “They’d just grab the Prince out of his tent and make off with him, in his pyjamas.”

“Oh no, Daisy,” said Fatty. “You’re not being very clever. Kidnappers would never creep through a crowded field, falling over tent-ropes and pegs finding their way to one special tent, opening the flap, dragging out one special boy in the darkness, who would surely yell the place down. After all, he was called Bongawah-wah-wah because he howled so much.”

“Oh,” said Daisy. “Yes - that was very silly of me. Of course kidnappers wouldn’t do it like that. What do you think they did?”

“I think somebody arranged for him to steal out after lights-out,” said Fatty. “Perhaps they said they’d take him to that Fair in the next town - it goes on till all hours! Something like that. You can’t tell. And if he was going to be kidnapped, the kidnappers would find it easy - there he would be, waiting at the gate for them, all ready dressed, thinking what a Lad he was.”

“I see - and they’d just whisk him away in a car and that would be that,” said Pip.

“Oh - now I see why you’re surprised he was in pyjamas,” said Daisy. “If the kidnapping was planned in that way, he certainly wouldn’t be in pyjamas!”

“Correct,” said Fatty, with a grin.

“Maybe he couldn’t spot his clothes in the darkness,” suggested Ern, helpfully.

“This isn’t a mystery, it’s a silly sort of puzzle,” said Bets. “Nobody heard anything, nobody saw anything. Nobody knows anything. I’m beginning to feel it couldn’t have happened!”

Sid Finds His Voice

“Come on - it’s time we went,” said Fatty, getting bored. “We’re absolutely at a dead end here. Wherever Prince Bongawah is, he’s probably still in his blue and gold pyjamas. Good luck to him!”

They rode off, waving good-bye to Ern and Perce. Sid was nowhere to be seen, for which every one was thankful.

“He chews his toffee like a cow chewing the cud,” said Pip. “Have you noticed how spotty he is? I really do believe he lives on toffee and nothing else.”

“I never want to see him again,” said Bets. “He makes me feel sick.”

“Well, there’s no reason why we should ever see him again,” said Fatty. “So long as Ern comes alone to see us. I don’t intend to visit dear Sid and Perce.”

But he did see Sid again, and that very evening too! Fatty was trying on one of his newest disguises down in his shed, when there came a knock at the door.

Fatty looked through a hole, pierced in the door for spying, to see who was outside. Gosh - it was Ern - with Sid! How aggravating, just as he was going to practise this disguise.

Fatty turned quickly and looked at himself in the big mirror. He grinned. He’d try the disguise out on Ern and see if it worked!

Fatty opened the door. Ern stood outside, ready with a smile. Sid beside him. The smile faded as Ern saw, not Fatty, but a bent old man with side-whiskers, a straggly beard, shaggy white eyebrows, and wispy white hair on a bald pate. He was dressed in a loose, ill-fitting old coat, with dragged-down pockets, and corduroy trousers wrinkled and worn.

“Oh - er - good evening,” said Ern, startled. “Is - er - is Mr. Frederick Trotteville in?”

The old man put a trembling hand behind one ear and said, “Speak up! Don’t mumble. What’s that you say?” His voice was as quavery as his hand.

Ern shouted: “IS MR. FREDERICK IN?”

“Now don’t you shout,” said the old man, in a cross voice. “I’m not deaf. Who’s Mr. Frederick?”

Ern stared. Then he remembered that Fatty was always called Fatty. Perhaps this old man only knew him by that name.

“Fatty,” he said loudly. “FATTY.”

“You’re a very rude boy,” said the old man, his voice quavering higher. “Calling me names.”

“I’m not,” said Ern, desperately. “Look here - where’s the boy who lives here?”

“Gone,” said the old fellow, shaking his head, sadly. “Gone to live in London.”

Ern began to think he must be in a dream. Fatty gone to London! Why, he’d only seen him an hour or so ago. He glanced anxiously at the shed. Had he come to the right place?

“Why has he gone?” he asked at last. “Did he leave a message? And what are you doing here?”

“I’m his caretaker,” said the old fellow, and took out a big red handkerchief. He proceeded to blow his nose with such a loud trumpeting noise that Ern fell back, alarmed. Little did he know that Fatty was hiding his gulps of laughter in that big red handkerchief!

Sid backed away too. He slid down the path but Ern caught him by the arm.

“Oh no, you don’t, Sid! You’ve come here to say something important, and say it you’re going to, if it takes us all night to find Fatty. If you go back to the camp you’ll fill your mouth with toffee again, and we shan’t none of as get a word out of you! You’re the only one of us with a Real Clue, and Fatty’s going to know it!”

“I say! Has he really got a clue?” said the old man, in Fatty’s crisp, clear voice. Ern jumped violently and looked all round. Where was Fatty?