Free Monster Mission by Eva Ibbotson Page B

mean to pay the electricity bill I’d have seen it wasn’t an ashtray. And anyway, how a man who leaves a bath full of scum every time he—’
    ‘Scum!’ yelled the professor down the phone. ‘Are you accusing me of leaving scum? Why I couldn’t even get into the bath without wading through a heap of your unspeakable toenail clippings.’
    They went on like this for some time but then they remembered that their only daughter was missing and pulled themselves together.
    ‘Can she have run away?’ wondered Mrs Danby.
    ‘Why should she run away? She has two perfectly good homes.’
    ‘Yes. But she’s been looking a bit peaky. And she sees tigers on the ceiling. Perhaps I should have let her have a nightlight.’
    ‘If every child who sees tigers on the ceiling ran away, there’d be very few children left in their homes,’ said the professor.
    But obviously the next thing to be done was to go to the police. So Professor Danby went to the police station in Edinburgh and Mrs Danby went to the police station in London. Then she rang her ex-husband and said that the police wanted them to come together and compare their stories exactly.
    ‘You have to come down,’ said Mrs Danby. ‘And quick. They say there’s no time to waste.’
    So the professor took the train to London and the next day both of Minette’s parents sat side by side in a taxi on the way to the Metropolitan Police Station.
    The officer they saw this time was a high-ranking one, a detective chief superintendent who had a secretary sitting beside him to take everything down.
    ‘Now, I understand that you have heard nothing since your daughter disappeared ten days ago?’ he asked. ‘No messages? No ransom demand?’
    Both the Danbys shook their heads.
    ‘I have very little money,’ said the professor. ‘I’m on the staff of the University and they pay abominably. It’s a disgrace how little—’
    ‘And I’m on the dole,’ said Mrs Danby, unusually honest. ‘So even if they asked us for money, it wouldn’t help.’
    The detective wrote this down. ‘Now tell us, please, Mrs Danby, exactly where and when you last saw your daughter.’
    ‘It was at two o’clock on the fifteenth of April. At King’s Cross Station, Platform One. I handed her over to an aunt—’
    ‘Wait a minute!’ The superintendent’s eyebrows drew together sharply. ‘You mean your aunt … or her aunt …?’
    ‘No. An aunt. An aunt from an agency. Minette always travelled with aunts.’
    The detective seemed to find this very interesting. ‘Go and get me the file on the Mountjoy case,’ he said to the secretary. ‘Sergeant Harris has it.’ He turned back to the Danbys. ‘Now tell me from what agency you hired this aunt. It’s an extremely important point.’
    Mrs Danby frowned. ‘Well, generally they came from an agency called Useful Aunts. I’ve used them for years – they’re very reliable. But I think …’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘I’m not sure … I think this one may have been labelled Unusual Aunts. Yes, I think so. And there was some writing above that which said “My Name is Edna”. Or maybe it was Etta.’
    ‘If you hadn’t rotted your brain with tobacco you might be able to remember,’ said the professor under his breath.
    But at that moment the secretary came back with a blue folder. ‘Yes,’ said the detective as he opened it. ‘Yes. The two cases are extraordinarily similar.’ He looked up at the Danbys. ‘Another child disappeared on the same day as your daughter and he too was put in the charge of an aunt. I think we’re getting somewhere at last!’
    The old Mountjoys were always pleased when Hubert-Henry went back to boarding school. They hated having children about and they could never quite forgive their son for having married a foreign dancer in a nightclub and producing such an unsuitable grandson.
    Then just a week after Hubert-Henry had left for Greymarsh Towers, a letter came from the headmaster which told old Mr