Eva Ibbotson - The Dragonfly Pool

Waiting till he came out and grabbing the boy in that deserted corridor had been child’s play. As of an hour ago, both men were richer by a considerable sum.

Now they drove the Mercedes into a ruined shed at the bottom of the hill and Earless opened the sack which lay covered under a blanket in the backseat.

“ ’Ere, come and look at this,” he said to Theophilus. “Not very princely, is he?”

Theophilus came over and peered into the sack. “No, not what you would call princely at all,” he agreed.

What they saw was a weeping, moaning blob curled up at the bottom of the sack, calling for his mother, though everyone knew that the queen had been dead for many years.

Yanking the howling boy out by his shoulders, they examined him.

It was extraordinary how far the squirming little boy was from any idea of a royal personage. Or from the two faded photos of the prince that they had been shown.

“Now don’t you get in a fuss, Your Highness,” said Earless. “We’re taking you to a place where you’ll be safe and looked after properly. Colditz it’s called, and only important people go there. Very safe, Colditz is.”

“I’m not a highness,” wailed the terrified boy. “I’m Christopher Hargreaves and my father is Patrick Hargreaves and my mother is Amelia Hargreaves and I live in Dene House in West Witherington.”

Theophilus leaned over him. “It would be best not to waste our time.” He shook his sleeve and took out a thin-bladed knife with a mother-of-pearl handle. “We’ve got work to do.”

“I’m not at all like the prince. He’s much—” He broke off, trying for a moment to be brave and protect Karil, but the knife was moving ever closer to his throat.

Earless turned to Theophilus. “He’s fatter than I remember.”

“Yes, I am,” gulped Kit. “I’m very fat. Princes are never as fat as me.”

“Let’s get him out into the light.”

They lifted him out and dumped him on the grass. Doubts were beginning to creep in.

“Speak to him in German,” suggested Earless. “Tell him you’ll set him free if he promises to serve Herr Hitler, and see what he says.”

Theophilus spoke a few words in German, but this only brought on another storm of weeping.

“I don’t speak anything except English. I’m not clever… I’m not clever at all.”

His terrified eyes were fixed on the two men. Tear-washed and swollen as they were, their color, now that they could be seen in the stronger light, was an unmistakable and vivid blue. The prince could have dyed his hair blond, but he could hardly have dyed his eyes.

“You said you’re not at all like the prince,” said Theophilus. “So you know what the prince is like?”

“Yes, I do.” Kit’s moment of heroism had definitely passed. “He’s very nice. He took me to the toilet and lent me his jersey.”

The two men looked at each other. It was clear now what had happened.

And it was clear, too, that this moaning lump had to be disposed of, and quickly, so as to give them a chance to get back and snatch the real prince before he got on the train.

If this boy was allowed to live he could give a description of them to the police.

“Why don’t we just stick a knife in him?” said Earless. “We can dump him here.”

But Theophilus did not care for this. “Messy,” he said. “All that blood, and it just takes one stray dog to set off the alarm.”

But the word “dog” had reminded him of something. For a moment he stared into space. Then his evil face became softer, and his scarred lip curled into a smile. He had remembered some of the happiest hours of his childhood, when he had come out of the library for playtime and helped with the drowning of unwanted dogs.

“Big ones, some of them,” he told Earless. “Saint Bernards or Great Danes or wolfhounds. We’d muzzle them first and tie them in a sack and throw them in the river. It was so funny seeing them struggling, and the sack heaving and bobbing in the water — and then a gurgle or two and down they went.” He shook his head at the fond memories. “Those were good times,” he said wistfully.

“Well, the river’s close by,” said Earless, “and we’ve just passed a bridge. So what are we waiting for?”

The children sat huddled together in the dormitory at the hotel. It had not been necessary for Matteo to show his fury — they already felt as guilty and wretched as they could be for having disobeyed him and gone out by themselves.

Now they waited for news of Kit — no one could do anything; they scarcely had the energy to talk among themselves. It was incredible how much they missed the infuriating little boy and how much they feared for him.

Matteo had shut them into their room and gone to the police station. He had been there twice already and the officer in charge had promised to let him know if there was any news, but he found it impossible to keep away.

There were less than four hours to go before the night train to Calais was due to leave from the Central Station.

“I wasn’t nice to him,” said Tally. “I got so impatient.” And the others told her not to be silly.

“He used to follow you around like a half-hatched duckling,” said Julia. “He wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t been nice.”

But then they realized they were talking of Kit as though he was already dead, and they fell silent once again.

Karil sat apart from the others, on his bed. He did not doubt for a second that he was responsible for what had happened to Kit, that whatever fate had befallen Kit had been meant for him.

At the police station, the clerks sat behind their desks scratching with their pens; clocks ticked.

The phone rang and then rang again, and there was no news. The third time, the chief constable came out of his office and came over to put a hand on Matteo’s shoulder.

“We’ve found him,” he said.

Matteo took a deep breath. “Dead or alive?” he managed to say.

“Alive. They’re bringing him in now. A fisherman found him in the river, tied in a sack. The sack got caught on a shallow bank of gravel. He can’t have been in the water more than a few minutes.”

And to Matteo, the police station, with its slow clerks and the ticking clock, looked suddenly like a room in Paradise.

Kit was carried in wrapped in a red blanket; his soaked clothes had been taken away to be dried. When he saw Matteo he stretched out his arms to him, and as Matteo took him, he began at once to pour out his adventures. Surprisingly this boy who was afraid of almost everything did not seem to be in a state of shock. It was as though he realized that he had become a person of immense importance, and sitting in the constable’s office, with an interpreter taking down his words, Kit told his story clearly and well. What he described most chillingly were the two men who had kidnapped him.

“One had pale eyes and a scar on his lip and you could see his gold tooth glinting. And the other one was huge and he had only one ear. When he bent over you, you could just see a horrible hole.”

“You can take him back now,” said the constable when Kit had finished. “We’ve got a good account of the men; they won’t get away from us. Only there’s one thing I don’t understand: why did they kidnap the boy in the first place? Will you ask him if he has any idea?”

Matteo put the question to Kit — with a warning eyebrow raised — and Kit understood and said, “I think they thought I was somebody else. Someone with rich parents who would pay a ransom, and when they found I wasn’t they decided they had to get rid of me.”

Back in the hotel Kit was surrounded and hugged and praised, all of which he thought was only right and proper.