One Dog and His Boy

13 The Detective Agency

Curzon Montgomery sat in his leather armchair leafing through the pages of Yachting World. There was a hundred foot ketch for sale which he had his eye on. They were asking a ridiculous price but if the morning’s interview went as he hoped, he’d be able to make a bid for it. Not that he liked being at sea. All that roughness and choppiness could really get you down, but you couldn’t beat a yacht as a place for giving parties.

The room he sat in did not look like an office. It was furnished like a very expensive sitting room with deep upholstered sofas, a thick-pile carpet and the kind of pictures on the wall which might be absolutely anything. All the same, it was from this room that Curzon ran his Media Management and Manhunting agency – or MMM for short.

Curzon did not accept just any sort of client, as he made clear. He was very particular – but actually only very special clients could afford his fees. Not that he was greedy, not at all, but his uncle, Lord Featherpool, had invested a lot of money in MMM and he expected results.

Now Curzon rang for his receptionist, and a beautiful girl with a bandage round her ankle came teetering in. Fiona Enderby-Beescombe had been at school with Lord Featherpool’s niece and in need of a job, and Curzon had been glad to take her on. It was true that her habit of wearing ten-inch heels meant that she was frequently injured, and she spent so much time painting her fingernails that she did not always reach the phone in time, but Curzon had been pleased to hire her because as soon as she opened her mouth people knew that she came from the right background.

“I’m expecting an important client at ten, Fiona. A Mr Fenton. We shall want coffee. You’d better turn on the infrared detector and the digital decoder and all that stuff. He might want to have a look. And tell Sprocket to keep out of the way.”

Ten minutes. Was there time for a small snifter? A whisky before an interview often made things go smoothly. But before he could open the drinks cabinet, the bell rang and Donald Fenton was shown in.

Donald and Albina had had a sleepless night. The kidnappers had not rung and the police were useless – plodding and slow. But the head of the MMM agency was a reassuring sight. The office was in the most expensive block in the city, the sign outside the door in gold letters so small and discreet that it had taken Donald several minutes to find it. Everything, in short, was of the best.

Curzon rose from his chair. His large red face was amiable. As they shook hands he said, “Now, how can I help you? I gather your son is missing.”

“Yes. Yes.” Donald was a sorry sight. There were dark rings under his eyes; his hands shook. “We’re sure he’s been kidnapped but there’s been no word. The police had the nerve to suggest he might have run away, but that’s nonsense. Hal had everything he wanted in the world. My wife and I tried to gratify every whim of his. You should see the toys in his nursery.”

“Quite. Quite so. Now if you’ll just tell me the whole story.”

So Curzon switched on the recorder and Donald told of the night they thought Hal had gone to stay with his friend and the awful discovery that he had never turned up there, while Curzon nodded his head in an understanding sort of way.

“I came to you because I heard how you found Mackenzie’s wife’s diamonds. It was an amazing piece of work,” said Donald.

Curzon smirked modestly “Yes … yes. That took a bit of doing. A very tricky case … but it came out all right in the end.”

Actually what had happened to Mackenzie’s wife’s diamond necklace was not quite what Curzon pretended. A few days after the necklace went missing, Curzon went round to a cocktail party at the Mackenzies’ house and drank so much that he wandered out into the garden to look for a place where he could be sick. He had decided on the compost bin and was just lifting the lid when he saw the glint of diamonds inside. (Mrs Mackenzie was a keen gardener and had been cutting roses before she set off for the opera.)

So Curzon slipped the necklace into his pocket and two days later he rang Mackenzie and told him that after a very difficult and secret piece of detection he had managed to find it.

“I’ve brought the photos of Hal of course and…” here Donald’s voice faltered, “his toothbrush for DNA samples and a few clothes…” He turned away to gather himself together.

“Good man. Good… Now perhaps you’d like Miss Enderby-Beescombe to show you round the laboratory. As you’ll see, we have all the latest equipment. Meanwhile I’ll get on to my team.”

Although Miss Enderby-Beescombe was a little vague about some of the gadgets she showed him, the hum and whirr and flashing lights in the adjoining room were impressive. But what impressed Donald most of all was the fee that MMM charged.

It was six hundred pounds an hour, Curzon told him, and then a fee of fifty thousand once the boy was found.

Donald, returning home, was able to reassure and comfort Albina. At that price MMM had to be not only good, but the best.

When Donald had left, Curzon picked up the internal phone.

“Sprocket?” he barked.

“Yes, sir, it’s me,” said a high voice.

“Of course it’s you, you idiot,” said Curzon. Sprocket was in fact “the team” about which he had boasted to Donald Fenton. “Now listen. We’ve got a missing boy case. I want a hundred flyers and a photo in the usual dailies. There’s a twenty-thousand-pound reward for news of the boy. Fiona’ll bring everything down.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll see to it straightaway.”

Milton Sprocket was a thin, pale young man who was never allowed upstairs because he had a local accent and had not been to the right school. MMM had the use of a basement room and a garage and it was there that he was to be found.

He was a man who took his work very seriously. After rather a sad childhood being bullied at school and failing his exams, Sprocket had taken a correspondence course at the College of Surveillance and Technology and got a Diploma in Detection and Tracking (or DDT for short). It was a first-class diploma because the college didn’t give out any seconds or thirds, and after this his life had changed.

Sprocket was hard-working and neat. In his cubbyhole in the basement was a cabinet with a number of drawers, all carefully labelled, in which he kept his disguises. There was a drawer labelled: moustaches, eyebrows, nose hair. Another said, scabs, wounds, pimples and boils, and another read, spectacles, monocles, ear trumpets. There was a wig stand in a corner, and a compartment for false teeth, and in a locked cabinet on the other wall lived a row of bottles labelled spit, blood, pus and phlegm, which had been a special offer on the Internet.

But though being in disguise and stalking people was what Sprocket liked best, most of the room was given over to the latest technology. The gadgets upstairs were only for show; it was down here in the basement that the real stuff was to be found. There were fibre-optic cables for looking round corners, and underwater cameras with fins, and sat navs which told you where you were going and where you had been, and binoculars with night vision, and ultraviolet heat-sensing devices … and because some of these things were not very easy to understand, Sprocket had a tall pile of instruction manuals over which he pored for long hours, trying to work out exactly what went where.

Not only that, but Sprocket was also a poet. In the MMM garage next to his room was a white van which he used when he was detecting, and on the side of the van was a verse he had written quite by himself.

The poem was written on a board which could slide out and be replaced by others if he was on a secret mission and both he and the van needed to be in disguise. For example, there was one for when he wanted to pretend to be a greengrocer, which went:

He was also working on a completely new verse which he meant to use when pretending to be a plumber, but it was giving him trouble. A poem like that had to be strong and powerful, but of course none of the words in it could actually be rude.

He pressed the repeat button on his phone and listened to the last part of Curzon’s message once again.

“This is a big one, Sprocket. Go to it! No hanging about.”

Sprocket smiled and rubbed his hands. He was just in the mood for an important and tricky case.