Casper Candlewacks in the Claws of Crime! - Ivan Brett

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rode out into the countryside to hunt weasels. Suddenly, he was ambushed by a band of villains. They nicked his horse and pushed him down a hill. Down he tumbled, over rocks and under cows and through prickly thistles, until he landed face down in a river running with the clearest and sweetest water he’d ever drowned in. Fortunately, he was rescued by a passing river nymph with long wavy hair and scaly skin. They fell in love, built a house by the river and had eighteen beautiful children with thirty-six beautiful gills (which is two each, if you share them out nice and fairly).

      However, their peace was disturbed when the band of villains returned, demanding a refund for their horse, since it had broken down and they didn’t carry a spare. But the young knight muttered those famous words, “Hast thou a receipt?” and slew the leader with his gigantic iron sword. Then with the help of his eighteen fishy children he rounded up the rest of the band, wrapped them all up in a brown paper parcel and posted them to Norway. They were never seen or heard of again. Then, to celebrate, the young knight popped down to the shops and spent his pocket money on some priceless rubies and emeralds and a pot of glue, and stuck them all on to his sword.

      That young knight was called Sir Gossamer D’Glaze, the river was the Kobb and his house by the river came to be known as Corne. Sir Gossamer had many adventures, but when he died he bequeathed his sword to the village, and there it has remained to this day (apart from one time when it was sold in a car-boot sale to a dentist with a limp, but that doesn’t count, for obvious reasons).

      So now it is clear why Corne-on-the-Kobb is so proud of its sword. If, say, somebody were to come and steal it, who knows what hysteria would follow…

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      The long hot summer had toasted Corne-on-the-Kobb like a slice of granary bread on a beach holiday. The grass was parched and brown, the flow of the River Kobb had ebbed to a thirsty trickle and several pigeons had a serious case of sunburn. This was the worst drought that the Kobb Valley had seen since 1915, when the whole place became a savannah and some lions moved in and ate everybody. But that’s another story and the lions have politely asked me not to mention it.

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      Casper and Lamp crunched through the sun-baked park towards the village square. Lamp was dawdling behind, staring into space and smiling vacantly.

      “What are you doing?” said Casper.

      “I’m going to call it Daisy.”

      “Call what Daisy?”

      “My lie detector. It’s a lovely name.”

      Casper sighed. “That might get confusing. Someone’s already got that name.”

      “Who?”

      “Daisy.”

      Lamp scratched his head. “Oh yeah.”

      “How about The Bluff Boiler?”

      “That’s nice too.” He galumphed forward and giggled. “I’m in love.”

      As the boys approached the square, the first thing they saw was ‘Blossom’s Bloomers’, a little terraced shop where ‘Murray’s Doorknob and Salami Emporium’ used to stand. Now it was fronted with a dark green awning and walls covered in flowering clematis. Outside the entrance were displayed hundreds of little plant pots holding geraniums, tulips and pansies of every colour, in front of muscular sunflowers and luscious lilacs. There was a queue of villagers trailing out of the door and halfway round the square, and more leaving the shop already loaded with bouquets of roses or baskets of wild grasses. The square itself was adorned with beautiful flowering wreaths on every door, window boxes filled with delicate petunias and vases stuffed full on every porch, beside every bench and lining the steps to the village hall. Finally, flapping at the top of the flagpole on the village-hall roof was not the normal tattered flag, but the most gigantic bouquet of multicoloured hydrangeas the world had ever seen since the world’s biggest hydrangea bouquet competition last year, which, admittedly, had some pretty massive bouquets of hydrangeas.

      “Wow,” cooed Casper. “They must make a killing.”

      “I’m going to buy some flowers for Daisy,” said Lamp.

      “She’s probably got enough already.”

      Through the window Casper could see Daisy wrapping up a large bunch of peonies while Lavender snipped some sweet peas from their stems and presented them to a blushing gentleman. Casper dragged Lamp away from the shop and into the square where Mayor Rattsbulge was trying to gather a crowd. So far he’d only managed to attract the attention of Clemmie Answorth (still clanging her bell), old Mrs Trimble and the flock of pigeons.

      “Oi!” he shouted to the enormous flower shop queue, spraying greasy flecks of spit all over Mrs Trimble. “We’ve got an emergency here.”

      The queue members just grunted and shuffled forward a bit. More people joined the back, sighing longingly with flowery business cards clutched to their chests.

      The mayor bellowed, “Come here, you scoundrels! This is no time for flowers.”

      “Ooh, are they selling flowers?” said Mrs Trimble, who owned twenty-six cats (all called Tiddles). She put on her spectacles and trotted off to join the queue.

      Mayor Rattsbulge had had enough. “Fine,” he barked. “Nobody’s getting the cash reward…”

      At the words ‘cash reward’, the villagers’ idiotic ears pricked up. They dropped whatever they were holding (such as babies, packed lunches or priceless Ming vases) and bounded towards the mayor like squirrels to a nut buffet, barging Casper and Lamp to the back of the crowd with well-placed elbows or teeth. Instantly the square was packed with penniless, greedy idiots, and the flower shop was empty.

      “That’s better,” said Mayor Rattsbulge, taking a chomp of the Scotch egg that he’d put in his top pocket for emergencies.

      “Oh, no, she’s here,” groaned Lamp, pointing to Casper’s right where a skinny little girl with long brown hair and a hawk nose approached them, hand in hand with her pointy mother.

      Casper winced. “Anemonie Blight.”

      In a recent poll, Anemonie Blight was voted the most evil girl in the cosmos (pushing the previous winner, Empress Vandraga ‘Slayer of Children’ into second place). Made from a pint of pure hate and a sprinkling of malice, then oven-baked in the furnaces of hell, Anemonie was only happy once she’d made somebody cry. Two weeks ago she’d burst Teresa Louncher’s eardrum in a game of Rock, Paper, Nuclear Explosion. Last time Anemonie had seen Casper, she punched him so hard that even Lamp got a nosebleed.

      “She’s coming this way,” quavered Lamp, visibly shaking.

      Casper crossed his fingers and closed his eyes. Anemonie was close – not more than five metres away now. He held his breath, prepared for the pain and waited, and waited, and… oddly, nothing happened. Casper dared to open an eye. Anemonie had walked straight past them, head down, hands deep in the pockets of her sickly pink jumpsuit.

      Casper nudged Lamp, who had been cowering behind his hands. “She’s gone,” he said.

      Lamp chewed his lip. “Why didn’t she hit me?”

      “I know. That’s not like her at all.”

      Casper watched as Anemonie stopped next to her pointy mother at a spot right at the back of the square and observed the scene from afar.

      “Now, now,” drawled Mayor Rattsbulge, “give me your attention or I’ll raise taxes.”

      The villagers hung on to the mayor’s every word like nits on a hippie’s beard.

      “Somebody…” Mayor Rattsbulge’s bottom lip quivered, so he hid it behind a mouthful of Scotch egg. “Somebody…” – Scotch egg now swallowed – “has assaulted Betty Woons and stolen the bejewelled sword of Sir Gossamer

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