Fizzlebert Stump and the Great Supermarket Showdown Read online

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Stump, turning to talk to the person.

  Alice’s heart was beating so loud in her ears she could hardly hear the conversation that began behind her.

  Without really thinking, and without turning back or giving up, she slid further into the building.

  She knew Mr Stump wouldn’t give her away. He’d do his best to keep her safe, to keep her secret. But she’d best be quick. She’d best hurry. Hanging around dawdling would do no one any favours.

  And so she went on, deeper into the building.

  Mr Stump was dazzled by the light of the torch. He couldn’t see who was on the other side of it and he didn’t recognise the voice.

  He did, however, have a twisted-off doorknob in his hand, which was never a good look in the middle of the night round the back of a shop.

  ‘Ah,’ he began, by way of an explanation that explained nothing.

  ‘I think maybe you’d better come with me,’ said the voice. (It was a man’s voice, belonging to someone quite tall, and possibly with a wiry grey moustache, Mr Stump reckoned, using his eagle-ears and his supernaturally powerful intuition.)

  ‘I can explain,’ he said, starting his second unhelpful explanation by not saying anything explanatory.

  ‘Explain what, sir?’ asked the voice.

  ‘I live here,’ said Mr Stump, pointing towards the caravan with the hand that held the doorknob. ‘I mean, I live there. I work here,’ he gestured over his shoulder at the supermarket with the same hand and a bit of metal fell out of the doorknob with a clatter.

  ‘Do you?’ said the voice. (It sounded as if it almost didn’t believe him.)

  The torch was still shining in Mr Stump’s eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I work for Mr Pinkbottle. I’ve just been made head of the soft fruit department.’ (He had felt proud of this, until Alice had made him see things more clearly. Now he didn’t quite know what to feel, other than cheated and unjustly employed.)

  ‘Soft fruit?’ asked the voice, incredulously. ‘With those hands?’

  ‘Now, hang on a minute –’ began Mr Stump.

  ‘Will you step over here please,’ the voice interrupted.

  The torch flashed over towards the caravans.

  Mr Stump walked over to where it gestured.

  The light from the streetlamps lit this bit of car park and finally Mr Stump could see who he was talking to.

  It was a short, roundish police officer with no moustache.

  (So much for starting up an Eagle-Eared-Man-Can-Describe-You-From-Just-Your-Voice act, thought Mr Stump.)

  She said, ‘Do you have any ID on you, sir?’

  ‘ID?’

  ‘Yes, to prove who you are.’

  ‘Who I am?’

  ‘Yes, who you are, sir.’

  Mr Stump patted his nightshirt.

  ‘Not on me,’ he said.

  ‘I think I’m going to have to ask you to accompany me to the station,’ the police officer said.

  ‘To the station?’ asked Mr Stump. ‘Isn’t it a bit late? I expect the last train’s already gone.’ She didn’t say anything to that, not because she didn’t have a sense of humour, but because it had been a long night already and she had been about to go off duty when she’d noticed this strange man lurking behind the supermarket … in his nightshirt.

  She reached up to her collar and pressed the button on her radio.

  ‘This is PC Singh calling Police Headquarters. PC Singh calling Police Headquarters. Come in Headquarters. Over.’

  There was a crackle of static and then a tinny voice said, ‘You OK, Ruby?’

  ‘No,’ said PC Singh. ‘Everything’s not OK. I’ve apprehended a confused gentleman attempting a forced entry at Pinkbottle’s Supermarket. He’s refusing to cooperate with my enquiries. I think I may need back-up. Over.’

  ‘Back-up?’

  Mr Stump, who was stood two metres away and who was causing no trouble whatsoever, thought back-up probably wasn’t necessary and said, ‘I don’t think you need back-up.’

  ‘All right, Ruby,’ came the voice from her radio. ‘We’re on the way. You hold tight and we’ll be there in a few minutes.’

  ‘Cup of tea while we wait?’ said Mr Stump, pointing at the caravan.

  Indoors, and barely fifty metres to the west of the police constable, Alice Crudge was edging her way, trespassingly, through the behind-the-scenes parts of the supermarket.

  There were more storerooms full of stuff than she’d expected.

  She’d hardly ever been in a supermarket in her life. Her dad did most of the shopping for them and she had to stay at the cicrus and look after the caravan because he didn’t trust Hugh Deeney-Bopper, the cicrus’s escapologist. ‘He’ll be through those locks in seconds,’ Mr Crudge would say, ‘and then we won’t have so much as a teacup left.’ (It was an old grudge, made even sillier by the fact that Hugh Deeney-Bopper needed help from audience members every night to do up his handcuffs (and more often than not help from the fire brigade to undo them at the end of the act).)

  But just because she’d rarely been inside a supermarket before didn’t mean that Alice Crudge didn’t know what a supermarket was. She was a stronggirl, not an idiot, after all. She’d read all the Agnes Black-Whiffle, Girl of Mystery comics, about a girl who lived in a supermarket by day and had adventures by night. (She hadn’t enjoyed them, because it was a rather rubbish old comic, but they were heirlooms her father had handed down to her from her mother the year she left to become a nun and had to give up worldly things, such as rubbish comics. So, she treasured them, even if they weren’t very good) and so she knew that a supermarket was a place that sold food and other stuff, which was, let’s be clear, more than she needed to know to undertake the sort of mission she was undertaking.

  She was worried about Fizzlebert though. Why had he gone missing just as they were about to undertake their great crime? Where could he be now? Was he in danger?

  She didn’t know, couldn’t know. So she carried on with the plan. Maybe, along with the blackmail evidence, she’d find some clue as to where Fizz and his mum were.

  Fizz and Kevin were sat in the dark listening to the noise of Fizz’s mum snoring.

  It was quite a funny snore (she was a clown, after all), and it was keeping them awake. They didn’t know, however, that it was keeping them both awake because they weren’t saying anything because it was dark and Mrs Stump was trying to sleep and they both suspected the other had gone to sleep as well and neither of them wanted to wake anyone up so they were just sitting there in the dark, wide awake and unable to sleep and time went by. Darkly.

  Although there was, beyond the snoring, the occasional odd sound of slurping and of what sounded like empty tins rolling on the concrete floor as people shifted around. Neither Fizz nor Kevin (nor Mrs Stump, for that matter) paid them any attention. To pay too close attention to such noises in the middle of the night, in the deep dark, when you’ve been locked away and everyone else is asleep encourages thoughts of monsters, ghosts and hobgoblins. It was better (for the sanity of one’s brain) to write the noises off as the flittering notes of half-dreamt dreams you’d almost slipped into and woken up from. Much better to think that.

  And so the dark went on.

  Alice tried the handle of the door marked Manager’s Office – Keep Out but it was locked.

  This was the room she wanted.

  There was a glass panel in the door and through it, lit by a shaft of orange streetlight from a high window, she could see a desk and rows of filing cabinets. If this wasn’t the place a wicked manager would keep secrets hidden then she was a Frenchman. And she wasn’t. A Frenchman, that is, although she had once been to the Isle of Wight.

  After quickly looking around, to make sure she wasn’t being watched, she gave the door handle a sharp tug and, like the one Mr Stump had ‘unlocked’ outside, it came off in her hand.

  She felt a tiny bit bad about it, because she didn’t like breaking things, but she s
oon forgot about it as she crept into the office.

  Where to look first?

  The desk had six drawers. The filing cabinets had twelve drawers (between the four cabinets (which was three each, mathematically speaking)). Then there was a little cupboard and a bookcase against one wall.

  And not only that. The desk was heaped with books and files and bits of paper and letters and mugs of stuff that had once been coffee but which were now starting their own civilisations, and there was a computer monitor and a keyboard and a stuffed owl in a bell jar.

  The bookcase was the same. It was full of stuff. Untidy stuff. Old stuff. Forgotten stuff. Unnecessary stuff.

  Alice thought it was as if an anteater had picked up all the rubbish that human beings leave lying around in the jungle and in the rainforest and in the Pacific Ocean, sorted out all the least useful bits and bobs and posted them to Mr Pinkbottle with a covering note saying, Please put this stuff somewhere safe, you never know when it might come in handy. And he had. And then he’d forgotten about it. And after that he’d added some more things of his own. And then he’d forgotten about them too.

  How was she ever going to find what he was using to blackmail the Ringmaster? Among all this stuff? It was impossible.

  For the sake of doing something she pulled open the nearest of the filing cabinet drawers.

  It was stuffed with folders and files, filled with bits of paper.

  She lifted one out and opened it.

  It was too dark to read the writing, so she carried it back to the door and flicked on the light switch.

  There was a buzz, a hum, a shudder and the fluorescent tube overhead popped into life.

  She rummaged through the papers in the folder. They looked like contracts or pay slips or something. Nothing to do with the Ringmaster.

  She dropped the folder on the floor (which when she looked down she saw was already swimming in papers and old sandwich cartons and crumbs) and went back to the filing cabinet.

  At a glance it looked as if the folders in there would contain the same sort of thing.

  This was hopeless. There were hundreds of bits of paper to look at and it would take her forever.

  Oh, if only Fizz were here they could do it in half the time. (Half of forever, however, is, unfortunately, still forever.)

  Then, as one always does at this point in a story, she heard footsteps out in the corridor.

  And they were coming her way.

  But it was almost midnight, she thought. Who on earth is up at this time of night stalking round a supermarket?

  And then she thought, A burglar! Like me!

  And then she thought, Oh crumbs! I’ve turned the light on.

  And then she thought, Maybe it’s Fizz!

  And then she thought, Still, I ought to hide.

  And then she thought, Alice, you dummy! Stop thinking and start hiding!

  And then she thought, OK.

  And then she dived into the space under the desk where the legs of the person sitting at the desk go.

  She pulled the chair in behind her.

  ‘Coo-ee!’ called a voice. ‘Bernard? Are you here?’

  Alice didn’t know that the voice belonged to Mrs Leavings, because she’d never met or heard the regularly clipboarded lady before.

  The footsteps stopped outside the office.

  ‘If you’re not here,’ Mrs Leavings said, ‘then why have you left your light on?’

  There was silence for a moment, except it wasn’t that silent for Alice because her heart was thumping in her ears.

  ‘And … oh dear …’ said Mrs Leavings. ‘Your door handle seems to be broken off.’

  Alice heard the noise of a toe tapping against a broken door handle on a tiled-but-covered-with-quite-a-lot-of-rubbish floor.

  ‘I wish you’d tidy up sometime, my dear,’ the voice went on, talking to the absent ‘Bernard’ (which Alice assumed, correctly, was Mr Pinkbottle’s first name (his parents had wanted one of those mountain rescue dogs with the little brandy barrel round their neck, but had had to make do with a son (and since calling a child ‘Saint something’ is a bit weird, they’d just settled on plain Bernard).)). ‘I can’t tell if you’ve been burgled or not. I suspect not, because a burglary would leave your office tidier than before. Oh, Bernard! It’s the one thing that makes me wonder whether I’m right to love you like I do, secretly, hopelessly, desperately.’

  Oh gosh, Alice thought. I do hope she stops talking soon, before she embarrasses one of us.

  ‘If someone has been in here though,’ the woman was talking more quietly, more to herself now than to the imagined supermarket manager, ‘they’ll have gone for your photographs, won’t they? Second drawer down on the left-hand side of your desk. I’d best just check they’re still there. Just for safe keeping, you know.’

  Footsteps, tiptoeing through the accumulated detritus on the floor, stepped closer to Alice, closer to the desk, closer to finding her …

  And then another voice yelled in the night.

  ‘Mrs Leavings! Mrs Leavings!’

  It was a man’s voice. Out in the passage. Further away, but coming nearer.

  The footsteps in the room stopped.

  ‘Bernard?’

  ‘Mrs Leavings,’ snapped Mr Pinkbottle as he stopped running. ‘The police are here! They’re out the back. They’ve got that idiot Stump man and are asking him questions. What the flip’s going on, Mrs Leavings?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘And what are you doing in my office?’ Mr Pinkbottle shouted, not entirely kindly. (Alice didn’t like him, simply because of the way he spoke to Mrs Leavings, never mind all the things that Fizz had told her.) ‘I’ve told you before to get out! It’s my office.’

  ‘But …’ said Mrs Leavings, trailing off.

  ‘You need to get out there and deal with the coppers. What do I pay you for? Go and use your person skills to make them go away. We don’t need them nosing around. Always causing trouble, their sort. I don’t like them. Not one bit.’

  Mrs Leavings left, followed up the corridor by Mr Pinkbottle, and Alice was on her own again.

  All was quiet.

  She thought about what she’d just heard.

  So, it was the police who’d shone the torch at Mr Stump, was it? They’d be useful. If Alice could find the evidence, they were just the people she should show it to. Except, of course, for the fact that she was trespassing inside a supermarket at night, rummaging through private drawers and stealing (hopefully!) a blackmailer’s photographs. (Would the police be more angry about that or about the blackmail? She didn’t know. She could only hope that they’d overlook her little crime, when they learnt about the bigger one … and when they learnt that Fizzlebert and his mum were missing. (Surely Mr Stump will have told them that already?))

  She scooted out from her hiding place and slid open the second drawer down on the left-hand side of the desk.

  There was a folder in there labelled: Blackmail Photographs: Ringmaster – Do Not Lose!

  She hadn’t really expected it to be quite so easy.

  She lifted the folder out and felt the photographs slide about inside.

  Should she open it?

  Should she look?

  What could be so embarrassing that it would make a man willing to sell his circus?

  Outside Mr Stump was lifting PC Singh up with one hand as she giggled.

  Three other police officers stood in a little semicircle clapping.

  ‘What’s all the noise? Keep it down. Ken’s trying to sleep,’ shouted Emerald Sparkles, the ex-circus knife thrower, as she approached across the car park. (Ken was actually the name of her third husband, but fortunately her fifth husband, Levi, was hard of hearing and incredibly polite and never made a fuss when she got confused about which was which and muddled up their names.)

  ‘I was telling these nice people about the circus,’ said Mr Stump, juggling PC Singh from one hand to the other. ‘Can you believe they’ve n
ever been to the circus?’

  ‘Really?’ asked Emerald, rather incredulously.

  (It’s important to remember that everyone’s different, isn’t it? Just because you’ve done something a hundred times or a thousand times, there’s always going to be someone out there who’s not even done it once. And there’ll be things that they think are perfectly ordinary that seem amazing to you, simply because we’re all different people with different sets of experiences behind us. (If you learn nothing else from this book, I hope you learn that. (Or how to peel a banana using only your toes, but, to be honest, I’d be surprised (although dreadfully impressed) if that was what you took away at the end.)))

  You’re probably wondering how it is Mr Stump went from being nearly arrested on looking awfully suspicious in his nightshirt by a police officer with back-up on the way, to doing a strongman act at almost midnight in a supermarket car park to an eager audience of coppers.

  Well, it went something like this:

  (1) While waiting for back-up to arrive Mr Stump put the kettle on and made PC Singh a horrible cup of tea.

  (2) On tasting how horrible the tea was she insisted on showing him how to make a nice cup of tea (it’s all about the angle at which the teabag and the water intersect).

  (3) To do this she went in the caravan and in the process of boiling the kettle (with fresh water (nothing’s worse than reboiled water for good tea)) she spotted a circus poster on the wall.

  (4) She asked Mr Stump about the poster and he explained it was for the circus he used to work in.

  (5) She said, ‘I’ve never been to a circus.’

  (6) He said, ‘What?’ and (7) proceeded to tell her all about it.

  (8) She changed her opinion about Mr Stump, concluding that (a) he did live in the caravan as he’d said, (b) he was in his nightshirt because it was almost midnight and (c) the way his moustache twitched when he was excitedly talking was quite funny in a cute way.