Blink and You Die. Lauren Child

their daughter was lying in the housekeeper’s lap quiet as a lamb and smiling up at them. Everyone was very relieved, their little girl saved, not a scratch to her perfect face, no damage done.

      Or so they thought, for in that baby’s head a tiny kernel of fear had lodged, a fear which would grow and grow until in her thoughts a monster lurked.

      

      WHEN RUBY REDFORT WAS THIRTEEN AND THREE QUARTERS, she found herself confronting the biggest dilemma of her short life. On the desk was an apple split in two. In her hand was a tiny piece of paper.

      On the paper were printed two small letters; small letters which spelled something so vast and so terrifying that it made her eyes water.

      The letters told of betrayal and murder.

      It was the Count who had planted suspicion, posed the grim question and introduced the poisonous thought that the untimely death of Spectrum’s most valuable agent, Bradley Baker, might have been ‘arranged’.

      ‘The question is,’ he’d said, ‘who pulled the trigger?’

      It was the apple, the messenger of doom, which held the answer.

      If Ruby was to believe in its truth then life had suddenly become dramatically more dangerous. She looked down at the paper inscribed with the initials of the woman who called the shots, who held the lives of so many in her hands.

      The boss of Spectrum 8.

      LB.

      Ruby looked into darkness and wondered who she could trust.

      Trust no one, she thought.

      

      RUBY REDFORT WAS PERCHED ON a stepladder looking out of the high landscape window which ran the length of her room. The window was designed to allow the light in rather than to provide a view of the street below, but today it was the view Ruby was interested in. She was looking down at the network of roads and alleys, contemplating the scene below. Mrs Beesman was wheeling her shopping cart down one of the back alleys which ran between the rows of houses. The cart was filled with several cats and some jars, saucepans and a whole lot of random junk. A few of the cats appeared to have socks wrapped around their middles, presumably to keep them warm. Mrs Beesman herself was wearing several coats and a fur hat with earflaps, ski gloves and an extremely long, moth-eaten scarf. Mrs Beesman tended to wear a coat in all weathers, but today, bundled up as she was, suggested that it was a pretty chilly morning. As the old lady trundled past Mr Parker’s yard, so his dog Bubbles began to bark.

      On Ruby’s lap was a plate of pancakes: her second serving and it was still only 6.47 am. Ruby had been away from home for the whole of November, and the housekeeper had missed her more than she would ever say. The minute Ruby had walked through the door Mrs Digby had reached for the batter and the skillet and while she flipped pancakes so they chatted. Their conversation had been interrupted by an urgent call from Mrs Digby’s cousin Emily and Ruby, knowing the time these phone calls often took, had carried her breakfast on up to her bedroom.

      The pancakes were lasting longer than usual because Ruby’s eating was interrupted by her neighbourhood observations. Every few minutes she would put down her fork and take the pencil from behind her ear and make a note in the yellow notebook which lay in her lap. It was surprising how much was going on out there given the time of day. Ruby had taken up the yellow notebook habit when she was four years old and she now had 625 notebooks full of the exciting, interesting, ordinary and often dull happenings that had occurred in the world around her. She stored the 624 notebooks under the floor, the 625th she kept hidden inside the door jamb.

      Ruby had returned unreasonably early that December morning from what she referred to as the ‘dork pound’ and what the organisers would call Genius Camp ‘for the mathematically gifted’. As far as Ruby was concerned, it was four weeks of her life she would never get back. It had been no walk in the park, not because the work had been particularly hard, but because some of the kids enrolled in the course were, well, not particularly nice, and some of them were a whole lot worse than that, namely Dakota Lyme. Ruby had run into Dakota not so long ago at the October mathletics meet, one of the less pleasant days of Ruby’s (on the whole charmed) life. Ruby had found herself going head to head with the objectionable girl in the final round of the one-day competition, and for all the trouble it had caused her, Ruby would have gladly conceded victory and walked away from the whole stupid circus. However, she won and took the consequences, which were a lot of abuse and a nasty encounter in the mathletics meet parking lot. One of the problems for Ruby was that her brilliant brain brought her a lot of attention, attention she really didn’t want, nor, given her status as an undercover agent, need.

      Mr Parker came out onto the lawn to shout at Bubbles. The sound of his voice was a whole lot more unpleasant than the sound of the dog’s barking.

      Ruby’s life as an agent was no picnic, but then that was hardly a surprise given the kind of people one was inclined to run into during the day-on-day battle of good v evil. Evil, a much overused word in Ruby’s opinion. Not every person who committed a crime was evil, and only rarely (extremely rarely) would one consider them through and through bad with not an iota of goodness in them. But when it came to the Count, Ruby would have to concede that if there was any good in him then it was too small to see. Blame it on a bad childhood, a life gone wrong, his ma and pa’s genes, blame it on the weather, but whatever the reason, it didn’t change the facts – goodness had deserted him utterly, and his soul had gone to rot. Around this monster of a man swirled a murky soup of the vile and the unhinged, all eager to do his dirty work. The plots they hatched and cruelties they inflicted were dark enough to give Wonder Woman herself reason to keep the nightlight lit. So how did a thirteen-year-old school kid from Twinford hold her nerve? Well, no one had promised her it was going to be easy. But what scared Ruby more than the cruel ones, more than the Count even, was the force behind it all, the one who pulled the strings. Because there was someone, and according to the Count it was this someone who wanted Ruby dead and caused the Count himself to shudder.

      And one should always, in the words of Mrs Digby:

       Fear the wolf that other wolves fear.

      Ruby watched as a removal van turned the corner and made its way down Cedarwood Drive. It stopped outside the grey clapboard house, the oldest house on the street. It seemed it was about to become vacant once more. As far back as Ruby could remember, no one ever stuck around long enough to make the house a home.

      Ruby Redfort was a girl who embraced change and was not fearful of a little adventure, but lately she wouldn’t mind if the whole world stood still.

      A car drove by. It stopped at the junction; the driver wound down the window and threw a soda can onto the street.

      October had been a busy month. Her life as an agent at the most secret of secret agencies – known only to those in the know as Spectrum – had been dominated by the growing sense that somewhere in Spectrum’s subterranean corridors there lurked a mole. Ruby had felt the steely looks as the eye of suspicion was trained on her. She had been interviewed by the head of Spectrum 1, Agent Delaware, and it had not been a comfortable experience, particularly when with a steady gaze he had uttered the words, ‘I could be staring into the eyes of a traitor right this very moment and not know it.’ But Ruby shouldn’t have taken it personally – it was simply protocol. Every agent in Spectrum was under suspicion, every single one of them