Free The Monster Hunter by Kit Cox Page A

among Ben’s papers. ‘I think this is your most important find.’ She spoke softly as she handed it to him as if humouring a much younger child. Ben looked at the map blankly. He lookedup questioningly at the nanny but she was already disappearing back through her door.
    As if guessing his question, she simply said: ‘You will find more out in the field than in in a stuffy room surrounded by books. You just have to find the strength to go out and look, like the people who wrote all these words in the first place.’
    Ben looked around at the many books that had seemed to contain so many answers but none of them for the right questions. He knew that Nanny Belle was a good teacher – possibly one of the best – and that the best teachers didn’t simply tell you the answers – they pointed you in the right direction and let you find the answers yourself. How could she know what question he was asking, though, and which questions couldn’t be answered by books? He wasn’t even sure whether he knew the questions he was asking himself.
    He started stacking up the books and returning them neatly to the rough wooden shelves of the schoolroom. His little study den had been discovered once now and he did not wish it to be discovered again by one of the other children, who would not be so tolerant as Miss Belle. Soon all the desks were clear, apart from the map of Whitgate, which he had rolled out flat and which he was now studying for the very first time.
    It was a simple map drawn by the hand of a company-employed cartographer with the initials A.N. several years previously. Its initial purpose had been to find top-quality gravel and shale for mining and the original skilled hand had marked out the land with blue circles where the sought-after materials were most likely to be found. A latter hand, in a heavier black ink, had carefully added on the streets of Whitgate and the farms and orchards of the area. There was only one other mark on the whole map, a tiny grey egg-shaped spot. It fell almost directlyat the centre of one of the original cartographer’s blue circles and was in turn surrounded by an irregular ellipse in the black ink.
    Why had this spot been highlighted by three different hands? Ben was racking his brains. He wanted to knock on the teacher’s door and ask the answer, but he realised that she had been deliberately cryptic and would refuse to help him, though naturally in the most good-humoured of ways. To Miss Belle it was all about learning and you did that best at your own speed. He might also just be looking for clues where there were none; she might simply have been telling him to go outside.
    Then he looked again and it struck him all at once. The blue circle was like all the other blue circles on the map – a potential source of aggregate for the building industry. The ragged ellipse was the shape of the subsequent quarry that had been mined and which was now spent, for Ben knew that mining no longer took place in the area. The small grey egg was the final piece of the puzzle. He smiled as he placed his own index finger on it to prove to himself that it was in fact the smudge of a fingerprint. It was smaller than even his own, so it could only be that of a young child, a child who was choosing a destination.

The Gravel Pit
    B en stood at the lip of the old gravel pit, in his hand a field guide to the local plants and flowers, for he was still convinced that the sick children had eaten something untoward. The sides of the quarry were deep and steep, with a simple fence running around its perimeter, presumably intended to keep out livestock. Any child could easily have climbed the fences and walked down into the quarry itself. The quarry was quite small and looked like a deep ring cut into the countryside. At its centre stood an ‘island’ whose chalk-white sides jutted up from the quarry’s base and with a copse of short stubby trees growing at