Authors: Annie Dalton

Fogging Over (13 page)

BOOK: Fogging Over

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Lovelace. That was the name of the villain Aunt Agnes believed had died on the transport ship to Australia; Noel Scrivener’s accomplice!

Recent memories flashed before my eyes. Red dirt, pink cartoon birds, silver eucalyptus trees and an ex-convict with a guilty secret.
I put it in my pocket, I put it in my pocket
…

Omigosh, I thought. OMIGOSH!! And I suddenly knew exactly how Sherlock Holmes felt when he solved a case.

Mr Lilly had just given us the crucial information we needed to restore Georgie and Charlotte’s stolen fortune. And it totally didn’t worry me that our witness was on the other side of the world, in the middle of the red Martian desert of the Northern Territories. Because when you’re in full angel mode, you just know with every shimmery angelic cell that miracles can happen.

”
Carita
?” said Lola anxiously. “Are you all right?”

“I’m better than all right,” I burbled happily. “I may even be a genius!” I turned to Brice. “Do you think your spirit buddies could do us one final favour?”

OK, I admit to a bad moment when Ivy showed the Scotland Yard detectives into Minerva’s parlour. But it was just a bad moment.

We totally had seances down by this time. First we softened them up with titbits of trivial personal info; the name of one detective’s favourite childhood dog, the time the other detective nicked money from his mama’s purse and blamed it on the gardener’s boy.

After that the cops became a great deal more open-minded, listening to our revelations with increasingly intrigued expressions. The younger one was laboriously taking notes. “So you’re telling us that your ahem,
spirits
think Mr Scrivener’s accomplice may have been transported to Australia?”

With the help of her team of angelic researchers, Minerva gave a detailed description of the area where we’d found the old convict, including the sacred rock and the mission house.

The detectives were sufficiently perturbed by what they heard to pay a visit to Uncle Noel’s house that afternoon, taking Charlotte and Georgie with them. Naturally we tagged along.

When Uncle Noel saw the girls’ accusing faces, it was like a dam burst inside him. He completely cracked, tearfully confessing what he’d done. As Brice said later, Uncle Noel just wasn’t cut out to be a villain. He wanted all the perks, but he wanted to be Mister Nice Guy at the same time. No wonder Georgie got confused!

The next twenty-four hours brought all kinds of satisfying changes for the Hannay girls. Scotland Yard sent a telegram to the Aussie cops in Alice Springs, asking them to track down a transported criminal called Sid Lovelace for questioning. And Edwin Godbolt was released from Newgate. Can you believe that old sweetheart immediately came round to Minerva’s house to volunteer to be the children’s legal adviser, for free? He brought his twin sister too and she looked exactly like him, except for being female.

There was quite a party by that time. The two detectives had popped back, with a police photographer. I think he was hoping to capture Minerva’s spirits on one of his photographic plates.

I remember looking around the parlour and just feeling so honoured to be part of this happy ending. “It’s so cool that Minerva wants the girls to come and live with her,” I said to Lola.

My friend was watching Brice chatting to his see-thru spirit buddies in the corner. “Wouldn’t you love to know how he learned to speak Spook?” she grinned.

“That has to be a good story!” I agreed.

Lollie’s face suddenly took on a listening expression. “I can’t believe it’s that time already!” she groaned. “I was just getting into the Victorians too.”

I couldn’t believe it either, but when the Agency needs you to move on, they totally let you know about it.

“This is so unfair,” I complained. “I mean, I know things will work out but I wanted to SEE them work out.”

Brice looked over. “You still can, you ditzy angel,” he called. “And when we get back I’ll prove it to you.”

Then the entire parlour lit up and we blasted off back to our heavenly home.

“You’d better have a really good reason for dragging us down to the Angel Watch Centre at this hour,” I told Brice yawning.

It was early next morning and I’d been hoping for a nice lie-in. Instead we were tiptoeing past flickering booths where AW personnel were working vigilantly at their computers.

Brice let us into a private cubicle usually reserved for Agency staff. “Stop moaning, Beeby.” He slid a glittering disk into the machine.

A screen lit up and a familiar scene appeared; red dirt and eucalyptus trees wavering in a heat haze.

“I can’t believe you were able to swing this!” Lollie gasped.

He tapped his nose. “Inside information,” he said smugly.

Brice had somehow acquired one of the cosmic recordings the Agency uses for training purposes. From an angelic point of view, Earth’s past, present and future all occur simultaneously. So it was technically possible for us to see what had happened after the telegram arrived at the police station in Alice Springs.

We watched in total silence as Aussie cops in sun helmets finally tracked Sid Lovelace down at the mission house. It seemed that the missionaries had actually taken pity on him after all. Lola and I gasped as the old man, still weak from fever, reached into his pocket and pulled out a letter so old it had almost disintegrated along its folds. The writing was just barely visible, but after Brice had enhanced the image, we were able to make out the incriminating passage requesting Alfred Lilly to falsify certain legal documents. At the bottom of the letter you could clearly read Uncle Noel’s signature.

Lovelace handed the letter over to the police, and I felt a terrible weight roll off him, like the lifting of a curse.

This is SO cosmic, I thought. We saved him, and now he’s saved Georgie and Charlotte, so he can start to forgive himself.

” Show’s over, folks!” Brice said brusquely. “I’d better put this back before anyone notices.”

Lola and I agreed to meet up with him later at Guru. By this time we were wide awake and extremely peckish.

“Can you believe Brice actually stole that disk?” Lola giggled as we breezed into our favourite breakfast hang-out. “The guy’s a total maverick!”

“I’ll say. I’d love to know what he was up to that night, when he left us with those kids.”

Lola’s expression changed. ” Actually I do know, but you mustn’t tell him I told you.”

I was covered in shame when Lollie told me that Brice had gone to help the spirit of one of the Ripper’s victims. The poor girl was so traumatised that she needed a lot of angelic assistance to help her cross over to the Next World.

“Why ever didn’t he say?” I exclaimed.

“I guess he thought you wouldn’t believe him,” Lola said. “You do tend to be a bit hard on him.”

And suddenly Lola and I were having our first proper conversation in months. I admitted how shocked and jealous I’d been when I realised she and Brice were together.

She nodded solemnly. “I know. But you’ll always be my soul-mate,
carita
! I wouldn’t just drop you for some - you know -
guy
!”

We were still having a heart-to-heart over our breakfast pastries when Brice came in with Reuben and his bizarre mate Chase.

“Brice has been showing us a picture of your Minerva,” Reuben said beaming, and I got the funny feeling he knew something we didn’t.

“Hey, don’t ruin my story,” objected Brice. “I found a book on Victorian mediums and there she was. She eventually became quite famous. Here’s a picture.”

Time is so weird. It seemed like only yesterday when that photograph was taken, and in my time scheme it was. Yet here it was in a book written more than a century later, by a sceptical academic who thought all mediums were frauds and charlatans.

The black and white portrait showed Minerva in a lace cap looking v. stern and Victorian. Light seemed to have leaked into the camera, inadvertently creating some weirdly extraterrestrial-type FX.

I stared at the three featureless blobs beside her. The photographer had snapped us at the exact moment we beamed back to Heaven.

“This is my favourite bit!” Brice pointed to the caption.

“Minerva Temple and her angelic advisers,” I read. “The heavenly trio famously helped Scotland Yard solve the notorious Scrivener case.” Underneath the author had written, “An obvious fake.”

We all howled with laughter. This is one of the happiest moments of my life, I thought.

“So what was it like, going on a mission with your evil nemesis, Melanie?” Chase asked me.

Chase, otherwise known as Mowgli, mostly hangs out with the animal kingdom and is not known for his tact. I really wished the ground would open up and swallow me. The entire cafe instantly went silent. Everyone was staring at me, obviously interested to hear my answer. I felt my face grow bright red.

“Well, actually—” I began then I stopped.

This matters, Melanie, I told myself. It matters what you say here. Don’t try to wriggle out of it. Don’t try to please anybody. Just answer him truthfully.

Meanwhile Brice was trying to look as if he didn’t give a monkey’s what I thought.

I forced myself to meet his eyes and I gave him a rueful grin.

“It was educational,” I said finally. “Unexpectedly educational.”

About the Author

Annie Dalton has been shortlisted for the Carnegie medal and won the Nottingham Children’s Book Award and the Portsmouth Children’s Book Award.The twelve Angel Academy books (previously known as Agent Angel), became an international best selling series. Annie lives overlooking a Norfolk meadow with a ruined castle, in a row of cottages that were rescued from bulldozers and lovingly rebuilt by a band of hippies.

www.anniedaltonwriter.co.uk

Also by Annie Dalton

Urban Fantasy Books

Night Maze

The Alpha Box

Naming the Dark

The Rules of Magic

Angel Academy Series

Winging it

Losing the Plot

Flying High

Calling the Shots