Nanny Piggins and the Pursuit of Justice (3 page)

‘But what about the community service?’ said Michael. ‘Five thousand hours is a lot. Even if you worked ten hours a day it would still take you a year and a half. How will you find time to look after us?’

‘You don’t suppose there’s any chance the judge might just forget about it all?’ asked Nanny Piggins, looking a little worried.

They all shook their heads sadly. Nanny Piggins looked depressed. But then she put a very large
slice of cake in her mouth, and you could almost see the chemical transformation it had on her body. She sat up straight, colour returned to her cheeks and a sparkle to her eye. She licked the icing off her trotters. ‘Piffle!’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I’m sure it will all work out. These things always do. Terrible things are never as bad as you think they are going to be. Except for carrot cake. That is always atrocious. As long as they don’t expect me to eat carrot cake, I’m sure this community service will fly by.’

The children were not so confident. They loved their nanny very much. But seeing sense was not her strong suit. So they suspected that the following months would not be easy at all.

Now this is the incredibly dangerous stage!’ whispered Nanny Piggins. ‘Is everyone wearing their protective gear?’

The children nodded. They were all wearing cricket gloves and swimming goggles as they peered over Nanny Piggins’ shoulder and watched the brown liquid she was stirring start to bubble.

‘It doesn’t look very dangerous,’ said Michael dubiously.

‘That is exactly why it is so hazardous,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You think, because fudge is so wonderfully delicious, what harm could such a scrumptious treat do, don’t you?’

The children nodded.

‘That is exactly how fudge lures you into a false sense of security!’ declared Nanny Piggins. ‘While set fudge is wonderful, yummy happiness in a lump, cooking fudge is seriously unsafe! Molten sugar is both super boiling hot and super sticky on your skin. So it doesn’t just burn you, it keeps burning
you while you run around the kitchen howling, “Get it off, get it off, get it off!”’

‘The army could use hot fudge as a weapon,’ suggested Michael.

‘They did!’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘but they had to stop because it caused such terrible burns.’

‘But surely that’s what they wanted?’ said Derrick.

‘The fudge didn’t burn the enemy,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘It burnt the soldiers using it because they couldn’t resist licking the delicious fudge and they got terrible burns on their tongues.’

‘Really?’ said Derrick.

‘Yes, the dangers of fudge would be more widely known except, like so many military secrets, the truth remains classified,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘So how can we tell when it’s ready?’ asked Samantha.

‘By the ploppiness of the bubbles,’ said Nanny Piggins.

The children all peered into the pot again. The bubbling fudge looked like any bubbling liquid to them. But they didn’t like to say so in case this led to a three-hour lecture on comparative ploppiness. (Derrick had made the mistake of questioning Nanny Piggins’ opinion on the runniness of honey once, and he could now write a book on the viscos
ity of bee-regurgitated nectar as a result of all the information his nanny had forced him to learn to cure his lamentable ignorance.)

‘As the fudge gets hotter and more moisture evaporates,’ explained Nanny Piggins, ‘it becomes thicker and the bubbles don’t pop open like water bubbles, they plop and flop like fudge bubbles. Then you know it’s ready and it is time to start testing the fudge.’

‘By eating some?’ asked Michael hopefully.

‘Of course not!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘Do you want to get horrible fourth-degree burns to your tongue like those poor soldiers?’

Michael did not.

‘No, you get a saucer of cold tap water,’ continued Nanny Piggins, ‘then drop one drop of the boiling fudge into the water. If it immediately sets and becomes hard to the touch, the fudge is ready.’

‘Then can you taste it?’ asked Derrick.

Nanny Piggins sighed. ‘Samantha, fetch your brother a chocolate bar. He is clearly becoming delirious with fudge longing.’

But Samantha did not hear her nanny. She was too busy staring at the boiling fudge. (Samantha had a flashlight strapped to her head for maximum analysis
of the liquid.) ‘Nanny Piggins!’ she exclaimed. ‘The fudge! It’s starting to plop!’

‘It’s time!’ yelled Nanny Piggins. ‘Quick, fetch me a saucer of water. We mustn’t dillydally; the window of fudge perfection is a short one.’

Michael rushed over with a saucer of cold water. He was getting good at running with containers of liquid, so he only spilled half of it on the floor.

Nanny Piggins put the saucer on the countertop and carefully, using a teaspoon, scooped the smallest portion out of the pot.

‘Couldn’t you just use a cooking thermometer?’ asked Derrick. ‘Samson Wallace says that’s what Nanny Anne uses.’

Nanny Piggins paused and glared at Derrick out of the corner of her eye. (Nanny Anne was Nanny Piggins’ arch nemesis. To be strictly accurate, one of her arch-nemeses. She had quite a few, but Nanny Anne was definitely in the top three. She was a woman so puritanically obsessed with hygiene that she often gave poor Samson Wallace soap sandwiches in his lunch box, just in case he was thinking of saying something naughty.)

‘Sorry,’ said Derrick. ‘I’ll fetch myself a chocolate bar. I’m obviously not thinking straight.’

Nanny Piggins returned her concentration to
her half-teaspoon of fudge. She held the precious confectionary over the saucer and dropped the brown liquid in. Everyone leaned forward for a closer look. The fudge had not flattened or gone runny. It had formed a nice round mound.’

‘Excellent,’ muttered Nanny Piggins. ‘Pass me the wooden spoon, please.’

Michael handed her a wooden spoon.

Using the handle, Nanny Piggins slowly and carefully prodded the lump of fudge. The brown mixture crumpled slightly but still stayed in one piece.

‘Perfect!’ whispered Nanny Piggins. ‘We have made the perfect vanilla fudge.’

DING-DONG!

‘I thought I told you to disconnect the doorbell,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘I did,’ protested Derrick. ‘It’s Father. You disconnect the doorbell so often that he has taken to secretly installing back-up doorbells.’

‘Why?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘Because he doesn’t like to miss it when salesmen or market researchers come to the door,’ explained Derrick. ‘He likes rudely telling them to go away.’

‘It’s the only social contact he has with real people,’ added Samantha.

DING-DONG DING-DONG DING-DONG!

‘Do you want me to tell them to go away?’ asked Michael.

‘No,’ said Nanny Piggins, putting down her wooden spoon. ‘Your father and I do have one thing in common. Rudely telling people to leave is something I enjoy too.’

She marched to the front door, the children following close behind in case they needed to grab her and prevent her from adding to her newly established criminal record.

Nanny Piggins flung open the front door, drawing breath as she did, so she could immediately launch into her tirade. But when she saw who it was on the doorstep, she paused. It was the editor from the newspaper and the girl cadet journalist (who looked much too small for her oversized notepad).

‘What are you doing here?’ demanded Nanny Piggins. ‘Have you come to apologise for not helping defend me in court, when it was the lack of a rope bridge between your office and the adjacent building that forced me to engage in apparently illegal tightrope walking in the first place?’

‘Um . . .’ said the editor. ‘No.’

‘Then give me one good reason why I should not
slam this door in your face right now,’ demanded Nanny Piggins.

The editor eyed the door warily. ‘We’re here strictly for professional reasons, nothing to do with your legal problems.’

‘Which your negligent building design caused,’ said Nanny Piggins petulantly.

‘Hmmm,’ said the editor, not wanting to agree (for legal reasons) but too frightened to disagree. ‘Anyway, the real reason we’re here is because we want a quote for a story about something else entirely.’

‘Ahhh,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You want my opinion about the mayor’s dress sense. Well I think it is dreadful. You can quote me on that. And Piggins is spelled P-I-G-G-I-N-S.’

‘No,’ said the editor. ‘Although we will make a note of it.’

The young journalist nodded and scrawled in shorthand furiously.

‘We’re here because there is a new pig in town, on a speaking tour to promote his book,’ explained the editor. ‘It is a very exciting book in which he tells the story of all his amazing feats and accomplishments.’

‘What’s that got to do with me?’ asked Nanny Piggins suspiciously.

‘Well,’ continued the editor. ‘Among the many achievements listed in his book, he describes, in great detail, how he became “The World’s Greatest Flying Pig”.’

‘What?! WHAT!! WHATTT!!!!’ yelled Nanny Piggins.

The editor and the cadet journalist took several steps back.

‘He says he is “The World’s Greatest Flying Pig”,’ repeated the editor, as he turned, ready to run in case Nanny Piggins took after him.

‘Who would dare utter such a lie?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘Eduardo the flying armadillo?’ suggested Derrick.

‘No,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘True, he was deluded enough to think he was the world’s greatest flying animal. But he never claimed to be a pig. He seemed very proud of his armadillo heritage.’

‘Perhaps it’s one of your identical fourteenuplet sisters,’ suggested Samantha. ‘Several of them are evil.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Nanny Piggins, ‘but they are all brilliantly evil in their own right. They’d have no need to steal credit for my accomplishments.’

‘He’s also claiming –,’ said the cadet journalist,
reading from her notes – ‘to be the first pig to climb Mount Everest, the first pig to win the Nobel Prize, the first pig in space, the greatest pig international super-spy, the greatest pig international jewel thief . . .’

‘But that is a list of all my sisters’ and my achievements,’ interrupted Nanny Piggins. ‘Who would be stupid enough to claim such an unbelievable litany of things?’

‘An egomaniac?’ suggested Derrick.

‘An attention seeker?’ suggested Samantha.

‘A delusional egomaniacal attention seeker?’ suggested Michael.

‘Or,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘no, it can’t be. Not my idiot older brother, Bramwell?’

‘Yes, that’s him,’ agreed the editor. ‘Bramwell Piggins. In his book, he claims he has allowed his sisters to get credit for his achievements to help boost their self-esteem.’

‘I’ll boost his self-esteem when I see him,’ muttered Nanny Piggins, ‘by giving him a good hard whack on the –’

‘Nanny Piggins! The fudge!’ yelped Samantha, suddenly reminding them all of the much more important matter in the kitchen.

When they returned to the stove (the editor
and the young journalist came with them in case something newsworthy had happened. And indeed it had), the fudge was a sorry mess. It had now boiled down entirely and the wooden spoon was set hard in the blackened mass at the bottom of the pot.

Nanny Piggins burst into tears.

‘Don’t cry,’ pleaded Samantha. ‘I’m sure your brother didn’t mean to betray you.’

‘I’m not crying about that,’ sniffed Nanny Piggins. ‘I’m crying about the fudge. Now I’ll have to go to the shop and buy some.’

‘Among his other claims,’ said the editor, ‘Bramwell Piggins also says he is the world’s greatest fudge maker.’

‘Right, that’s it,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘My older brother needs to be taught a lesson.’

‘He’s signing his book at the local bookshop tomorrow,’ smiled the editor. ‘We’ll send a photographer if you’re turning up.’

‘Send two,’ said Nanny Piggins ominously.

At five minutes to nine the next morning, Nanny Piggins and the children were sitting in the front
row of their local bookshop waiting for Bramwell to arrive for his book signing. Nanny Piggins glowered at a large promotional poster for Bramwell’s book, which read:

The Adventures of Bramwell Piggins

(World’s Greatest All-Round Pig)

Volume One

A full night of thinking about her brother’s wicked treachery had only made Nanny Piggins madder. And while she looked even more beautiful and glamorous than usual in her knee-length designer dress and bejewelled headband, the children knew she had her hot pink wrestling leotard on underneath.

‘Nanny Piggins?’ asked Samantha carefully (she did not want her nanny to launch into a premature rage). ‘Why did you never mention that you had a brother? We’ve always known about your identical fourteenuplet sisters, but in the whole time we’ve known you you’ve never mentioned Bramwell before.’

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘because you have two perfectly lovely brothers. But trust me, if you had a brother like Bramwell, you’d do your best to forget he existed as well.’

‘Is he evil?’ asked Derrick.

‘Hah!’ snorted Nanny Piggins. ‘He isn’t interesting enough to be evil. He’s just so . . . so . . . I don’t think there is a word for him – pathetic, annoying, inadequate, whining, ungrateful, blubbering, waste-of-space – none of them quite covers it.’

‘What does he do that’s so awful?’ asked Michael.