Monster Mission

Chapter Seven

Eight days after Minette ate her drugged cheese and tomato sandwich, Minette’s mother, Mrs Danby, rang Edinburgh to ask if Minette could stay with her father for an extra week. Minette’s term had started but that was not the kind of thing that bothered Mrs Danby.

‘I have the chance of a job filming in Paris,’ she said.

This wasn’t strictly true. What she did have was yet another boyfriend who said he’d take her to France for a bit of a ‘jolly’.

Professor Danby, whom she’d interrupted as he was preparing an important lecture on The Use of the Semi-Colon’, did not at first understand what she was saying.

‘I can hardly keep Minette longer, when I haven’t got her,’ he said in his dry, irritable voice.

There was a pause at the other end while Mrs Danby fought down the slight fluttering in her stomach.

‘Don’t be silly, Philip. I sent Minette to you more than a week ago. She’s been with you since the fifteenth.’

‘No, you didn’t. I had a telephone message to say you were keeping her with you and taking her to the seaside. I remember it quite clearly.’

The professor had in fact been rather pleased because the lecture he was giving was part of an important series — ‘The Use of the Semi-Colon’, ‘The Use of the Comma’, ‘The Use of the Paragraph’ and so on — and he needed to get on with his work without being bothered by a child.

Now, though, he too began to feel as though his stomach was not quite where it should have been. But of course being the sort of people they were, the Danbys immediately began to blame each other.

‘You must be mad, not letting me know she hadn’t arrived.’

‘I must be mad?’ hissed the professor. ‘You must be mad. Any normal mother would ring up to see that her daughter had arrived safely.’

‘And any normal father would ring and find out why she wasn’t being sent.’

‘Are you accusing me of not being normal?’ said the professor in a dangerously quiet voice. ‘A woman who stubbed out her cigarette on a poached egg.’

‘It wasn’t a poached egg, it was a fried egg. And if you hadn’t kept turning the lamps off because you were too mean to pay the electricity bill I’d have seen it wasn’t an ashtray. And anyway, how a man who leaves a bath full of scum every time he—’

‘Scum!’ yelled the professor down the phone. ‘Are you accusing me of leaving scum? Why I couldn’t even get into the bath without wading through a heap of your unspeakable toenail clippings.’

They went on like this for some time but then they remembered that their only daughter was missing and pulled themselves together.

‘Can she have run away?’ wondered Mrs Danby.

‘Why should she run away? She has two perfectly good homes.’

‘Yes. But she’s been looking a bit peaky. And she sees tigers on the ceiling. Perhaps I should have let her have a nightlight.’

‘If every child who sees tigers on the ceiling ran away, there’d be very few children left in their homes,’ said the professor.

But obviously the next thing to be done was to go to the police. So Professor Danby went to the police station in Edinburgh and Mrs Danby went to the police station in London. Then she rang her ex-husband and said that the police wanted them to come together and compare their stories exactly.

‘You have to come down,’ said Mrs Danby. ‘And quick. They say there’s no time to waste.’

So the professor took the train to London and the next day both of Minette’s parents sat side by side in a taxi on the way to the Metropolitan Police Station.

The officer they saw this time was a high-ranking one, a detective chief superintendent who had a secretary sitting beside him to take everything down.

‘Now, I understand that you have heard nothing since your daughter disappeared ten days ago?’ he asked. ‘No messages? No ransom demand?’

Both the Danbys shook their heads.

‘I have very little money,’ said the professor. ‘I’m on the staff of the University and they pay abominably. It’s a disgrace how little—’

‘And I’m on the dole,’ said Mrs Danby, unusually honest. ‘So even if they asked us for money, it wouldn’t help.’

The detective wrote this down. ‘Now tell us, please, Mrs Danby, exactly where and when you last saw your daughter.’

‘It was at two o’clock on the fifteenth of April. At King’s Cross Station, Platform One. I handed her over to an aunt—’

‘Wait a minute!’ The superintendent’s eyebrows drew together sharply. ‘You mean your aunt … or her aunt …?’

‘No. An aunt. An aunt from an agency. Minette always travelled with aunts.’

The detective seemed to find this very interesting. ‘Go and get me the file on the Mountjoy case,’ he said to the secretary. ‘Sergeant Harris has it.’ He turned back to the Danbys. ‘Now tell me from what agency you hired this aunt. It’s an extremely important point.’

Mrs Danby frowned. ‘Well, generally they came from an agency called Useful Aunts. I’ve used them for years — they’re very reliable. But I think …’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘I’m not sure … I think this one may have been labelled Unusual Aunts. Yes, I think so. And there was some writing above that which said “My Name is Edna”. Or maybe it was Etta.’

‘If you hadn’t rotted your brain with tobacco you might be able to remember,’ said the professor under his breath.

But at that moment the secretary came back with a blue folder. ‘Yes,’ said the detective as he opened it. ‘Yes. The two cases are extraordinarily similar.’ He looked up at the Danbys. ‘Another child disappeared on the same day as your daughter and he too was put in the charge of an aunt. I think we’re getting somewhere at last!’

The old Mountjoys were always pleased when Hubert-Henry went back to boarding school. They hated having children about and they could never quite forgive their son for having married a foreign dancer in a nightclub and producing such an unsuitable grandson.

Then just a week after Hubert-Henry had left for Greymarsh Towers, a letter came from the headmaster which told old Mr Mountjoy that even though Hubert was not at school because of Burry-Burry fever, the full fees for the term would still have to be paid.

That did it of course. Mr Mountjoy rang the headmaster and said what nonsense was this about Burry-Burry fever and where was the boy, who had been delivered to school on the first day of term?

And the headmaster said, no he hadn’t, the aunt from the agency had told Matron that Hubert-Henry was ill.

So after the old Mountjoys had shouted down the telephone and threatened to sue the headmaster they went to the police. They might not be fond of Hubert-Henry but he was their grandson and their property and if anyone had taken him they wanted to know the reason why.

Which meant the police knew of two cases in which a child had vanished in the care of an aunt and it was now that the Great London Aunt Hunt began.

The police only knew about two aunts because Lambert’s father was still in America, so that the boy had not yet been reported missing. But two aunts were enough to be going on with — and the newspapers and the police and the general public now went slightly mad.

Aunt Plague Menaces the City screamed the headlines, and Monster Aunts on Killer Spree!

Once people had been warned they saw these murdering women everywhere.

An aunt was caught outside a supermarket trying to impale a sweet little baby with a giant knitting needle while his mother shopped inside.

‘I was only trying to spear a wasp,’ she quavered, ‘I didn’t want it to sting the child.’ But she was hauled off to the police station and it was only when they found the back end of the squashed insect in her knitting bag that she was set free.

An even more sinister aunt was seen in Hyde Park, kicking in the head of a little boy who lay in the grass.

‘I seen her clear as daylight,’ said a fat man who’d been walking his dog and sent for the police. ‘Kicking like a maniac she was!’

And, ‘Look how he’s crying, the poor little fellow,’ said the other dog owners who had crowded round — and it was true that the boy, holding on to his football, was crying. Anyone would cry, seeing their aunt bundled into a police van when she’d been showing them how to curl a penalty into the top right hand corner of the goal. She’d been a striker for the Wolverhampton Under-Eighteens and he thought the world of her.

There was talk in Parliament of a curfew for aunts, forcing them to be in bed by eight o’clock; the Daily Echo said aunts should be electronically tagged like prisoners — and an elderly lady was arrested in the shoe department of a department store for abusing her great-niece who was trying on shoes for a party.

‘She was shouting and screaming at the child and her eyes were wild,’ said the woman who had turned her in — and the aunt would probably have gone to prison, but while she was in the cells, the shop assistants downed tools and marched on the police station with banners, demanding that she should be freed.

‘I wouldn’t just have shouted at the girl, I’d have wrung her neck,’ said a motherly shop assistant to the reporters standing round.

‘The poisonous child had thirty-nine pairs of shoes out and she was throwing them round the floor,’ said another shop girl. ‘If you ask me, that aunt had the patience of a saint not to scream at her earlier.’

So the police let her go and then the newspapers said they were too soft and aunts should be flogged like in the good old days.

Meanwhile posters of Etta and Coral were stuck up in police stations and public libraries and bus shelters everywhere. These pictures had been drawn by an artist from the descriptions he had been given by the people who had seen them last, and they were extremely odd. Aunt Etta had a nose like a pickaxe, a blob of hair like a jelly bag on top of her head and a moustache she could have twirled, it was so big. Aunt Coral had a mad squint in one eye, seven pairs of earrings in each ear and absolutely no neck.

Have you seen these women? it said at the bottom of the posters.

But of course no one had, because women like that do not exist. And so the days passed and still the police had no clues to go on. The Aunts’ Agency had closed down and it seemed as though the stolen children and their kidnappers had vanished off the face of the earth.