For a Moon Bunny a Dough Girl and a Fish thank you for all the smiles And for Mum and Dad there can be no better guides to living life well
I The Silent Battle the precise moment The remember moment I learned a secret that had eluded the finest detectives of Scotland Yard a secret the newspapers kept demanding to know yet nobody could tell them For months a master thief had left the curators of museums up and down the country waking in cold sweats Not a soul in England knew his identity they said and until that fateful moment they were prob ably right But no longer They called him the Ruminating Claw this vir tuoso of burglary The razor-sharp talons he wore on one hand swiped away masterpiece after masterpiece but all were returned mere days later That made him a true criminal according to the papers he stole for the thrill of it rather than to hoard his treasures or to 1
sell them on It seemed a mere game to him dancing around the guards of London’s finest museums and leaving the police looking like fools The spokesman from Scotland Yard liked to say they were hot on his trail but everyone knew there was no trail to follow Nobody knew why he wore a sinister-looking metal claw on his right hand but all agreed it made him dangerous But now I knew the truth even if I could hardly believe it The true identity of this fearsome Claw was Mr Scant my father’s valet and our household but ler The tall silver-haired old man who had to pick up my jacket if I dropped it who was usually found standing respectfully just behind Father My father being Mr Sandleforth Diplexito of Diplexito Engi neering and Combustibles Ltd Tunbridge Wells Perhaps had I been clever enough I could have guessed at the truth much earlier But until the moment of realization came I had thought Mr Scant was nothing more than a particularly boring part of my endlessly boring life He had always been a little frightening with his sour looks and pointy eyebrows His tone of voice always hinted he knew more than he let on But if all gloomy old men with pointy eye brows were to be marked as dangerous criminals half 2
my teachers and most of the congregation at church would have to be locked up Then there was the fact that every report on the Ruminating Claw spoke of his remarkable agility and stealth when Mr Scant was positively ancient at least sixty-five years old The moment I found out the truth came on a cold November night I had crept out of bed to see if I could find where Mother had hidden my Christmas presents Not something I would normally do but this year she had mentioned that since I was now twelve and making my own way to school a bicy cle might be prudent A bicycle wasn’t an easy thing to hide and even if she’d wrapped it up it would have been easy to find I had been jealously watch ing schoolmates send up clouds of dust with their skids and race each other down hills for months so I decided to go for a late-night sneak After creeping to the long gallery I saw some thing so bewilderingly unlikely I wondered if I was actually still asleep There in the dead of night was Mr Scant And there on his right hand was the famous claw larger and even more vicious than it had looked in the newspaper Instinct made me scurry behind the chaise longue praying I hadn’t been spotted Only then did I begin to grasp what I 3
