Free King and Joker by Peter Dickinson

and looking pleased. So far so good, except that Mother had always thought the colour of the flower that bore her name brash and unsubtle, and Mr Farren loathed having holes dug in his turf: Louise now presented an added problem, because in the interview with the sugary lady she had said that she hated anything to do with gardening, and this had struck the GBP, that nation of gardeners, as a charming eccentricity. In the end Commander Tank decided that she could lie in the foreground doing her homework, clearly of the Family but not—when it came to planting rhododendrons—with it.
    As photographic sessions went it wasn’t bad. The rain held off. Albert shovelled earth out of the barrow with a will. Father, majestic even on his knees, tendered the roots into place. Mother held the shrub upright with a smile that implied some ancient enemy was being buried alive beneath it. Louise’s homework was French, a language in which she’d been bilingual since she was four (though with a slight Spanish accent), so she got some of it done in spite of the distractions. Mr Jones clicked for the last time and said “Thank you”. Albert produced a bunch of plastic tulips he’d kept hidden in the barrow and popped them in round the shrub. Father bellowed, snatched them out and started pelting him with them and with clods of earth. Mother laughed. Albert scampered away across the lawn, an ape-man in jeans. By the time Louise had gathered her books he’d caught up with Sir Sam and was talking earnestly to him.
    â€œâ€¦ might have been anything,” Sir Sam was saying as she came in earshot. “A plain flat box. Cleaner’s name on top, but somebody’d put a couple of files on it, so that was covered up.”
    â€œThen I don’t believe he found it, just like that,” said Albert. “It’s too much. Prowling round your bathroom looking for extra pairs, yes. But I know what your office is like … what happened when the messenger brought the box up?”
    â€œI wasn’t there. When I got back Mrs Anker said, ‘Something’s come—I think it must be your bortschy trousers’.”
    â€œYou see,” said Albert, suddenly sounding remarkably like Father, which happened when he was seriously interested in anything, “that means the joker’s made a mistake this time. He’s narrowed the field. If you get going on it at once you ought to be able to find everybody who knew that your pants had come back from the cleaners—there can’t be many.”
    â€œI’ll make a small bet there won’t be any.”
    â€œWell, you’d lose,” said Louise. “McGivan told me he’d checked your toad, Bert, in case it was a bomb, and Sergeant Theale had made a joke about it. I bet that happens with all the boxes that come.”
    â€œYes of course it does,” said Sir Sam. “It’s standard procedure. I wasn’t thinking about the security staff.”
    â€œWell, I think we ought to,” said Albert. “It’s going to be a bit tricky because they’re the ones you’d naturally get to investigate anything. But you see, not many people knew about my toad either. They did.”
    â€œThey could have told somebody,” said Louise.
    Albert reverted to his usual slightly quacking gabble.
    â€œOh, sure,” he said. “We’ve all seen the staff passing on tidbits out of the corners of their mouths. ‘Sir Sam’s trousers what Mrs Kissinger threw the soup over have come back from the cleaners.’ Not very high on the rumour scale, Lulu.”
    â€œI meant your toad, you fool,” said Louise.
    â€œSergeant Theale’s got a curious manner,” said Sir Sam. “I hope it’s not him. He’s a very good man, otherwise. Well, if you’re right ten pairs of trousers will be a small price to catch the blighter.”
    His frown vanished with an almost audible