Catscape (3 page)

“What question?” said Murdo through a mouthful of syrupy
sponge.

“You asked if I had any ideas,” said Fergus putting the lid back on the tin and then prising it off again with the end of the spoon. He tapped his DataBoy to show Murdo that the mystery of the manhole cover and the watches might be solved with some simple levering. Murdo’s eyes widened and he nodded quickly. Furiously spooning sponge pudding into his mouth he spoke through sticky teeth. “Eat up, we’ve got some calculations to do.”

After just a few hours Fergus was getting the hang of the way that Murdo Fraser worked. It reminded him of last year’s Guy Fawkes Night. Fergus had looked at the fireworks at a neighbour’s bonfire party, and remembered liking the instructions — “light blue touch-paper and stand well back.” This seemed to be a similar instruction to give to anyone who was going to spend some time with Murdo. To activate him, you just had to put a small idea in his head and then get out of the way as he exploded into action, usually in different directions at the same time. Fergus concluded that “standing well back” might not be enough in Murdo’s case. The warning should probably read “dive for cover.” The mere suggestion of prising open the manhole cover had sent Murdo into a frenzy in the Incident Room. The problem with the Incident Room was that it wasn’t big enough for frenzies, or for anyone to “stand well back” in. To complicate matters, Jock got involved in Murdo’s bouts of activity, scrambling around under his feet and barking in what he thought was a helpful fashion.

Murdo began by wanting to estimate the size and weight of the manhole cover. Fergus was prepared to take an educated guess, but that was not enough for Murdo. The process for him involved drawings, a measuring tape, a calculator, a set of kitchen scales, a number of heavy books and the lid of a casserole dish. Fergus didn’t think that Mrs. Fraser would have been too impressed with her kitchen equipment being used as a pretend manhole cover. If you added the fact that the boys were planning to have a look under the pavement of Comely Bank Avenue at night when they were supposed to be asleep, Fergus felt sure that Mr. Fraser would close the Incident Room down
and sell it off in a flash.

Fortunately, Mrs. Fraser remained oblivious to the boys’ activities and despite his complicated calculations Murdo reached the conclusion that the manhole cover was “probably quite heavy.”

“Very useful, but what could we actually use to lift it up?” asked Fergus. With that Murdo was off again as Fergus continued to be an amused spectator. First there was a fruitless search in the garden shed before they moved on to the garage where Murdo’s dad had a workbench, with a variety of tools.

“I’m not supposed to fiddle about with this stuff,” said Murdo beginning to fiddle about with the stuff. After weighing up various hammers, the largest screwdriver Fergus had ever seen, and drill bits of every length and thickness, Murdo went headfirst into a cupboard and began rummaging around with only his bottom and pudgy legs on show. A few minutes later there was a muffled, but enormous “Ah-ha!”

He emerged red-faced, sweating and triumphantly clutching a crowbar. “This is what we’re after,” said Murdo. “I’ve never seen Dad use this so there’s no way he’ll miss it for a night.”

Fergus and Murdo replaced all the other tools to cover their tracks and returned to the Incident Room for the next stage of the planning. Using the crowbar they practised lifting the pile of books and the casserole lid.

“Right,” said Murdo brandishing the crowbar happily. “We now have the technology to open the cover.”

“If we do manage to lift the manhole cover,” said Fergus, “what do we do next?”

“Just have a look,” said Murdo with a vague wave of his hand. “How can we plan when we don’t know what we’ll find?”

“Well we need to think it through a bit further, otherwise it will be a bit of a waste of time,” explained Fergus. “For a start we’ll need a torch.” Thirty seconds later a big torch had joined
their growing pile of equipment on the table.

“Do you think …? Would we …? Would we actually go down there?” said Murdo trying to hide his rising concern with this project by asking an innocent question.

Fergus thought this through. He was beginning to realize that the fun of planning the expedition was now reaching the point where they had to decide exactly how much they were prepared to do.

“I think that might be a bit risky,” he said. “I think at this stage it’s just a … a … preliminary investigation.”

“That sounds good,” said Murdo. “I like that.” He seemed relieved.

“Although it would be a bit disappointing if the torch didn’t shine far enough and we didn’t see anything,” continued Fergus. “We’d be none the wiser. We’d be back to square one.”

There was silence as the boys pondered the situation.

“What if we could hear?” said Fergus thinking aloud.

Once again Murdo sprang into action, emerging with an old and rather bulky walkman.

“If I remember rightly this has a ‘record’ function on it,” he said, inserting a tape and attaching a tiny microphone lead to it. “Testing, testing — one, two, three,” he said rather pompously before replaying it to confirm that it was working. “Excellent,” he said adding it to the pile of equipment.

“Problem,” said Fergus.

“What?” said Murdo looking confused.

“Well the lead isn’t that long,” said Fergus, “It won’t even go down as far as we can see with the torch.”

Five minutes later the collection of equipment included a large ball of string.

“Are we getting there?” asked Murdo. “Crowbar if it’s heavy, torch if it’s too dark, microphone if we can’t see, string if it’s too deep,” he said looking over the gear they had gathered together.

“How exactly are we going to do this without being too
obvious? We need a smokescreen,” said Fergus. “We need something that gives us a reason for hanging about on the pavement.”

“Well, if we both take bikes then we can pretend we have a puncture. We can turn one bike upside down and be fixing it — supposedly. That should hide what we’re doing on the pavement,” said Murdo.

“That’s probably about as good as we’ll get,” said Fergus. “There can’t be many other reasons for spending time in one place on the pavement.”

“Okay. Finally the biggest problem as I see it,” he continued, “is how exactly do we get out at night when we’re supposed to be tucked up in our beds?”

“That’s easy!” said Murdo.

Ten minutes later Mrs. Fraser called Mrs. Speight. The two mothers found that that they had a good friend in common, so the conversation took forever to reach the subject of a sleepover in the caravan. However, when they finally heard Mrs. Fraser saying “Yes, Murdo does it all the time in the summer,” they knew that the crucial moment had arrived.

“There we go, boys. That’s fine,” said Mrs. Fraser as she came off the phone. “Now, Murdo, the usual rules apply and I’ll just explain them to Fergus so that he knows too. It’s lights out when I say so, and lights out does not mean torches under the blankets. The door is locked by you and that’s you in there for the night, okay?”

“Does it get any easier than that?” said Murdo back in the caravan. Fergus had to agree that the planning for the evening’s expedition was going remarkably well, and things continued to go smoothly — at least, at first.

Fergus went back home for tea and to collect a few things for his night away, including his bike. The boys then spent the first part of the evening in the caravan getting Murdo’s
rucksack of equipment together. Jock dozed in his basket in the corner seemingly having had enough of the day’s events. Murdo showed Fergus how the seats in the caravan could be turned into beds, and then the boys spent some time reading comics to distract themselves for an hour or two.

“Why have you got a computer in a hundred pieces?” Fergus asked, pointing to a pile of wires, memory cards and casing sticking out of a box in the corner behind Jock’s basket.

Murdo looked unhappy. “There’s supposed to be a function on the DataBoy that lets you transfer information from its memory to your PC. I was setting it up and thought that I would make some modifications to the hard drive but I hit a snag.” Fergus thought that “snag” looked like a bit of an understatement for the random collection of parts.

“Have you got a computer?” asked Murdo.

“No … I just use the one in the library sometimes but you can only get an hour at a time and there’s always someone waiting to go on after you,” said Fergus.

Eventually Mrs. Fraser popped her head round the door and suggested it was time for bed.

“Aw, Mum!” said Murdo putting on a bit of an act, since it would have seemed very odd if both boys revealed that they were delighted to have reached that stage of the evening.
Switching off the lights as instructed, they then had the longest wait of the evening yet as the Frasers took the next hour to go to bed. Murdo twitched the curtain every few minutes to check if lights were still on in the house. Finally, after what seemed like an age, the last of the lights went off and after a few more minutes Murdo gauged that it was safe to go.

“Let’s synchronize watches,” he said putting on the rucksack in the dark and pressing the light on his DataBoy. “I make it 23.14.”

With these final preparations complete, the boys headed for the door. Jock sprang to his feet in anticipation. “No, Jock,
you stay here,” said Murdo in a firm whisper. Jock growled and barked twice. “No, Jock, not now,” said Murdo looking despairingly at Fergus. “We might have to take him or he’ll just start barking and Mum will know that something’s up.” Fergus nodded his agreement.

So Jock joined the boys as they slipped out of the Incident Room, pushed their bikes to the pavement and sped off. The Edinburgh summer night was clear and, with a full moon, it seemed more dark blue than black. In only a few minutes they were at the bottom of Comely Bank Avenue, had set their bikes up as planned and were crouched down as if involved in some essential bike maintenance. The road was quiet and with the plan starting so well, both boys were more excited than nervous. Even Jock seemed to have captured the mood, sniffing the air and pricking his ears up to be alert for any new sound.

In no time they were using the crowbar to begin lifting the manhole cover. Unfortunately, a few minutes later, they were still at the same stage. It was not budging an inch, and the afternoon spent with a pile of books and a casserole lid began to seem like a long and irrelevant time ago.

“Push harder,” said Murdo. Fergus had by now turned brighter than the brightest red as he put every effort into leaning on the crowbar to try and prise the cover upwards.

“Can’t … do … an-n-ny … more,” he squeezed out through gritted teeth. Murdo was hopping around behind him in agitation, giving what he obviously thought were helpful hints. Jock hopped around behind Murdo making what he obviously thought were encouraging panting noises.

“It’ssssss.s..s … s-no good,” said Fergus collapsing on to the pavement beside the manhole cover. Jock sniffed at the crowbar suspiciously and looked expectantly at Fergus, as did Murdo. Murdo might have been big, but he didn’t consider himself to be strong and he looked very doubtful at the challenge offered by the manhole cover and the crowbar.

Fergus steeled himself for one last attempt and this time felt the manhole cover start to shift. “I think … I think …” he puffed between his teeth.

Jock panted ever more quickly and as Fergus said “I think …” for the third time, the cover lifted a fraction. He yanked the crowbar to one side, just far enough to bring the cover down leaving a small opening.

Murdo set to work speedily, delving into his rucksack and pulling out the torch, but he soon found that the gap wasn’t wide enough and the torch’s beam wasn’t strong enough, to enable them to see anything other than the first few feet of stone under the road surface. He switched to the next option of the walkman, microphone and string. Pressing the record button he fed the equipment through the gap they had created and lowered it down. “We’ll let it run for a few minutes. If there’s anything going on, we should be able to pick it up on this,” he said tying the string round a rucksack strap and leaving the walkman dangling a few feet underground.
Feeling pleased that they would get something out of the evening’s work after all, the boys were able to rest for a minute or two as the tiny tape recorder did its job. There were only a couple of cars passing by, and the drivers seemed oblivious to the boys on the pavement, huddled around upturned bikes. No one else seemed to be out and so the movement that Murdo saw out of the corner of his eye caught his attention immediately.

“Look over there,” he whispered. “Is that a dog?”

Fergus looked over to the shadowy figure of an animal.

“It’s a fox,” said Fergus, “It comes round here quite a bit at night scavenging food from the rubbish.”

Distracted from their task, the boys watched the fox sniffing around at a bin bag that had been left on the pavement. Through the silence of the night they could hear the rattle of a can falling to the ground. Suddenly the silence was completely broken by furious barking. Jock, who had been patiently waiting as
Fergus and Murdo had struggled with the manhole cover, had decided that the fox presented some form of danger to them all, and had taken matters into his own paws. By the time the boys realized what was happening, he was whizzing across the road on a collision course with the fox. Sensing that its evening meal was about to be interrupted the fox turned with a curious
high-pitched
bark, arched its back and stood snarling at Jock who was now speeding towards it like a canine missile. The fearless Jock stopped a few metres short of the fox, utterly convinced that he was saving the boys from some sort of terrible fate.

“Jock, be quiet,” said Murdo sharply, but far too late considering that the night-time peace had been disrupted for almost half a minute already. Murdo grabbed his bike and crossed the road to try and break up the stand-off between Jock and the fox.

Sensing trouble as the noise showed no signs of stopping, Fergus quickly started gathering together the equipment when suddenly he was bathed in light. He whirled around to find an old lady peering through a brightly-lit window, which overlooked the pavement. He could see her scowling face clearly, although it seemed that she was having difficulty making out what was happening.

Jock’s frenzied barking was making it clear that something out of the ordinary was taking place on Comely Bank Avenue. Breaking out into a panicky sweat, Fergus thought fleetingly that Murdo might let him off with this haphazard way of packing the rucksack given the pressure of being caught.