Catch Your Death. Lauren Child

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      Hitch didn’t answer immediately. He checked his mirror and made to swing back out onto the road and then he said, ‘No need. LB already knows you flunked kid. She knew before you did.’

Chapter 9.

      

      HITCH AND RUBY ARRIVED BACK HOME at Cedarwood Drive soon after midnight. They walked up the steps in silence and once in the front door Hitch whispered, ‘Sleep like the dead kid,’ before making his way down to his small stylish apartment at the bottom of the house.

      Hitch had been with the Redforts for approximately four months and he had turned their lives around. He was there in the guise of household manager (or ‘butler’ as Sabina Redfort liked to brag) and he was good at it; no one would doubt his cover story.

      But his real posting was as protector of Ruby; he was there both to keep an eye on her and work with her. If Hitch made a good butler, he made a whole lot better bodyguard and Ruby never once took it for granted. She had known him since March and already owed him her life twice over.

      Now alone, she hobbled on up the two flights of stairs to her own private floor. Her room was much as she’d left it. A selection of her dirty mugs, cereal bowls and banana milk glasses had been collected up and removed, but generally her room was an unchanged scene of devastation. On the floor was a trail of clothes that led to or spread from the walk-in wardrobe. Record sleeves stacked one on top of the other next to the still turning turntable; piles of magazines and journals on all subjects fanned out across the rugs, and on top of these were pens, papers, telephones – all sculpted in various ridiculous shapes, some comical, some unlikely, a squirrel in a tux, a bar of soap, a corncob, a dog bone; and these four were not even the most eccentric.

      The only place in any way orderly in her room was the bed; this was neatly made with the clean sheets pulled tight over the mattress and the quilt on top.

      ‘Good old Mrs Digby,’ sighed Ruby.

      Because Mrs Digby had been the Redforts’ housekeeper since always, she knew Ruby as well as she knew every cooking pot in her kitchen (as she was fond of saying). She might not interfere with the general appearance of Ruby’s space, but she was insightful enough to know that just about anyone would rather come home to a clean, made bed.

      Ruby for one was sincerely grateful. She eyed the bed longingly, then, before she lost all will to do anything but fall on top of it, she dragged herself to the bathroom and examined her face in the mirror. She was looking unusually pale; her complexion, normally olive-oil brown and healthy, seemed to have faded to a sickly grey. Her green eyes were a little bloodshot and her long dark hair was tangled and without shine. Ordinarily, Ruby was very particular about her appearance, styling her hair into a side-parting so one eye was almost obscured by a heavy curtain of glossy black-brown and fastened with a barrette; tonight she barely recognised herself.

      Is this the face of failure? she wondered.

      She set the shower running and had a good hot soak. Once just about all the mud and leaf was washed away, she got dry and dressed. She dabbed a little Wild Rose perfume on her neck and wrists. Boy, it was good to smell of something other than mulch and river sludge. She chose the warmest pyjamas she could find, long striped socks that stretched from her toes to her knee tops and – swamping her tiny frame – an outsized sweatshirt.

      Even so she still felt cold.

      Back in the bedroom she stood in front of the huge bookcase that extended from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. The bookshelves held Ruby’s large assortment of written works: everything from spy thrillers and classic novels to encyclopedias, factual journals to comics, graphic novels and codebooks. All these books she treasured, reading them again and again, over and over.

      She was standing there, wondering what book to pull from the shelves, when she heard the familiar squeak of her father’s new and expensive Marco Perella deck shoes – the squeak was coming from outside, which surprised her since she was sure her father was tucked up in bed. She dimmed the light and peeped out of the window to check out what he was up to, but it was not her father she saw, but rather their neighbour, Niles Lemon, putting out the trash. He had on the exact same deck shoes as her dad and they made the exact same stupid squeak when he walked. They were, as far as Ruby was concerned, label before style, a whole lot of cash to look like a nerd. The only thing was Brant Redfort pretty much managed to look good in anything and Niles Lemon did not.

      ‘What a bozo,’ muttered Ruby.

      Mr Lemon didn’t have an original idea in his whole body. Last month he had purchased the same sunglasses her father wore and, two weeks ago, the same tennis racquet (it hadn’t improved his game). Ruby reached for her yellow notebook, notebook 624 – the previous 623 were kept under the floorboards. She wrote:

      Niles Lemon has bought the exact same deck shoes as my dad. A total waste of several hundred bucks.

      These yellow notebooks of Ruby’s were all filled with tiny and mundane incidents like this one. Every now and again an event of obvious importance would be added, but usually it was something pretty dull, funny or odd. Most of these happenings had taken place on Cedarwood Drive, plenty in Twinford and a few out of town. Ruby simply noted the things she saw, the everyday-ordinary and the once-in-a-blue-moon weird. This Niles Lemon incident certainly fell into the first category, but then one just never could be sure when something utterly banal was going to become significant. RULE 16: EVEN THE MUNDANE CAN TELL A STORY.

      The pencil almost didn’t make it to the end of the sentence before her eyes closed and the yellow notebook fell softly to the floor and Ruby was plunged into dream-filled sleep.

      She was attempting to scale a cliff face; a pack of wolves was snapping at her feet: she could smell their fur, feel their claws. She felt a tug on her sleeve and hot breath on her cheek. She let out a squawk and snapped the light on.

      ‘Jeez Bug, what are you doing creeping up on me like that?’ Ruby sat up and scratched the husky’s head and he licked her cheek again before lying down on the mat next to her bed.

      Ruby sighed, shut her eyes for a second time and didn’t open them until daylight crept into the room. The first thought that crossed her mind, the very first thought, was: I failed.

Chapter 10.

      

      STRANGELY FOR RUBY, she had found herself waking early. It was probably to do with having slept in damp undergrowth for three nights – her body had got used to the idea that it didn’t want to lie down for longer than was totally necessary. Or maybe it was due to the lurking fear that gnawed at her dreams and caused her to stare up at the ceiling, wondering if this was the day when LB would kick her out for good; the Spectrum Field Agent Training Programme did not deal in failures.

      She was shaken from her troubles by the marvellous smell which drifted up the stairs, reminding her that grubs and boiled-up bark weren’t on the menu in the Redforts’ architect-designed home.

      Ruby pulled on jeans, a pair of Yellow Stripe sneakers and a T-shirt bearing the words don’t even ask. She secured her hair neatly with СКАЧАТЬ