Eva Ibbotson: Monster Mission

But before he could get round to killing the headmaster, Fabio started being sick.

He was sick outside Slough, and on the far side of Maidenhead and in the entrance of a house called The Laurels in Reading, and the closer they got to Greymarsh Towers, the sicker Fabio became.

And when she saw Greymarsh Towers, Coral thought that she too would be sick if she had to return there. It was a huge bleak house with iron bars across the windows, and the stone walls looked slimy and cold.

It was now time to act. The chauffeur was supposed to drop them at the school and she was to make her own way back by train.

‘Will you please wait here, Fabio,’ she said to the boy. ‘Keep an eye on him, Mr Fowler. Don’t let him run away.’

The boy, who had begun to trust her, cowered back in his seat and Coral marched up to the front door. The smell of Greymarsh would have been enough to put her off for life. Hospital disinfectant, tortured cabbage, lavatories …

As for Matron, as she came out of her office she would have made a very good camel: the nose was right, the sneering upper lip, and the distrustful muddy eyes. Except that camels can’t help their expressions and people can.

‘I am afraid I have bad news about Hubert-Henry Mountjoy,’ said Aunt Coral. ‘He has been laid low with a bad attack of Burry-Burry fever and can’t come back to school at present.’

Matron pursed her mouth.

‘Well, of course, that is what you expect from foreign children — he probably picked it up in his hut in the jungle.’

Since Aunt Coral had just invented Burry-Burry fever she only nodded and said she would let Matron know as soon as the boy was better. She then returned to the car and said, ‘I am sorry to tell you that there has been an outbreak of meningitis in the school. Everyone is in quarantine and Hubert can’t go back at present.’

The little boy, who had been hunched against the cushions, now sat up and smiled. He had a very nice smile and Aunt Coral made up her mind.

‘Well, I can’t take him back,’ said the surly driver. ‘I’m going on to another job down in the West Country and I haven’t a minute to waste.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Coral. ‘Just take us to the station. We’ll make our own way back to London.’

Sitting on the station platform, Coral noticed the exact moment when Fabio’s happiness at the thought of escaping school changed to misery at the thought of going back to his grandparents’ dungeon of a house.

She hadn’t had any real doubts but now she was certain. Should she use chloroform? Or the sleeping powder that Etta used?

Either way, thought Coral, Fabio was the one.

Etta and Coral had been right. Aunt Myrtle should never have been allowed to come on the kidnapping job. Almost as soon as she arrived in London she was so homesick that she thought she would die. She missed the sound of the waves on the rocks and the scent of the clover and the way the clouds raced across the high clean sky. But most of all she missed Herbert. She was used to sitting on the point every day and playing the cello to him, and now she began to worry in case he was missing her too.

Or not missing her, which would have been even worse.

So by the time she was sent to take Lambert Sprott to the zoo because his father was doing business in New York and his mother was buying clothes in Paris, Aunt Myrtle was in a bad way. Her hair kept falling down, she had a headache, and the map of the zoo looked complicated.

As for Lambert, he was a boy it was not easy to take to. He had pale distrustful eyes, a tight mouth, and carried a wallet full of money, a pocket calculator and his own mobile telephone so that he looked like a shrunken bank manager, except that bank managers have learnt to be friendly and Lambert had not.

All the same she was determined to do her best, and to share with the boy the beauty of the animals they saw: the knock-kneed giraffes with their long black tongues, the dignified orang-utans with the tufts of red hair under their armpits, the Mississippi alligator, smiling as he steamed in his pool.

‘Oh how fascinating animals are, are they not, Lambert!’ she cried, getting carried away. ‘Look at those bonteboks — the way they carry their heads. And over there, the dear dik-diks — so small but so fast when they run.’

Lambert yawned. ‘They smell,’ he said.

Myrtle was shocked. ‘Well, they have their own scent, yes, but so do you. To a bontebok you would smell of human.’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

Aunt Myrtle sighed, but she was determined not to give up. There must be a flicker of life somewhere in the boy. And there was: when something cost a lot of money Lambert became quite alert. He told Myrtle that you could get twenty thousand pounds for the horn of the white rhino, and that the Siberian tiger could fetch double that because it was so rare.

‘And so beautiful,’ cried Myrtle. ‘Look at the markings on its throat.’

Lambert yawned again — he was not at all interested in things being beautiful and he stopped to dial a friend on his mobile telephone, but the friend was out. ‘I wouldn’t mind going shopping,’ he said. ‘I’ve got my own account at Harrods.’

But Myrtle had not been told to take him shopping and, ignoring his whining, she led the way across a little stone bridge and stopped dead.

They had come to the seals. The females lay about like old armchairs, coughing and grunting, but there was one, a young bull seal, who seemed to be staring directly at her.

Tears of homesickness came into Myrtle’s eyes; it could have been Herbert’s brother lying there! ‘Oh, Lambert, ‘she said making a last attempt, ‘look at the way his whiskers curve, and the shine on his skin. Did you ever see anything so lovely?’

‘They aren’t worth anything,’ said Lambert in a bored voice. ‘You can’t get any money for seals. They’re common.’

And then he opened his mouth and yawned once more. He yawned so that Myrtle saw his unhealthy tongue, his tonsils, even the little flap of skin at the back of the throat that stops the food going down the wrong way — and something snapped inside her.

She wouldn’t kidnap this loathsome child in a hundred years. The thought of waking up on the Island and knowing he was there made her blood run cold, and she could no more soil her cello case by stuffing the repulsive brat into it than she could fly. She would take Lambert back to his house and tell her sisters that she was a failure as a kidnapper, and she would go home.

Once she had decided this she felt better, but there was a long afternoon to get through still; one of the longest of her life, it seemed to Myrtle. Lambert lived in a large house bristling with burglar alarms and fitted with ankle-deep carpets, a private bar, a swimming pool, and a kitchen full of gadgets which hummed and pulsed and throbbed and which she had no idea how to use.

What Lambert’s house didn’t have in it was any people. His father was busy getting rich, and his mother was busy spending the money he made, so neither of them spent much time at home. Myrtle had been told to wait till the woman who gave Lambert his supper came, and hand him over.

Lambert sat down in front of an enormous telly and started zapping channels in a bored way, and Myrtle made her way to the bathroom to freshen up. She had decided to flush the chloroform down the loo; it bothered her having it when she had given up as a kidnapper, so she took the bottle and her bag of hairpins and made her way upstairs.

‘What have you got there?’ Lambert’s suspicious voice made her turn round. He had put his telephone in his pocket and was glaring at her, narrowing his eyes. ‘You’re stealing something. What’s in that bottle?’