The Curds and Whey Mystery. Bob Burke
was the best (and only) lead I had right now.
Back in the office, I gathered my team (okay an ex-genie named Basili – who couldn’t do magic any more – and a little boy called Jack Horner) together and explained the current case. Jack seemed very interested in the spiders. He seemed to think that a house full of them was cool for some reason.
‘If I was looking for spiders, how would I go about it?’ I asked him.
‘Pet shop.’
‘Well, that much I’d worked out for myself. Now supposing I wanted a couple of thousand of the critters; tarantulas, black widows, all the big guys.’
Now I had his attention.
He mulled it over for a second. ‘Well, not too many of the local shops would be able to supply that many.’
I noted the use of the phrase ‘not too many’.
‘Best guy to talk to would be the Frogg Prince. He specialises in reptiles, spiders, that sort of thing. If anyone could do it, he’d be your man – I mean frog. I got my gerbil off him; he’s called Fred.’
I assumed he was talking about his pet and not the owner of the store.
‘And where is this Frogg Prince likely to be found exactly?’
Twenty minutes later I was talking to an enormous frog dressed in a grey pinstripe suit. Had I not been a pig myself it might have been a bizarre experience, but in Grimmtown you tended to meet all shapes and sizes – and creatures.
Theodore Frogg was the owner of Frogg Prince Pets and apart from a tendency to ribbit occasionally when talking, he was relatively normal – or at least as normal as a frog in a suit can be.
‘Ah, yes, Mr Pigg, we did ribbit get an order that exhausted our entire supply of arachnids and we still ribbit had to provide more.’
‘Arachnids?’ He’d lost me.
‘Spiders dear boy, ribbit, spiders. Yes, it presented us with quite a challenge I can ribbit tell you. But we managed it.’ He glowed with pride, but then again it might just have been the natural state of his skin – it was quite shiny.
I was getting that tingly feeling that I usually got when a case finally started to come together.
‘Who ordered the spiders?’ I asked.
‘Well, strange to relate, ribbit, it was a most unpleasant person indeed; very small, very green, extremely smelly and with a large wart on the end of his nose. Spoke in a kind of squeaky voice. He was somewhat bedraggled and quite offensive – but he did pay in advance so I ribbit didn’t ask too many questions. In any event, I didn’t want to refuse as he had two rather large creatures with him and I ribbit found them quite intimidating. I got the distinct impression they weren’t about to take “no” for an answer.’
This was getting stranger by the minute, but the reference to speaking in a squeaky voice hadn’t been lost on me. I’d have laid money that this was the same creature that had offered to buy the B&B from Miss Muffet.
‘Creatures? What kind of creatures?’
‘Large grey creatures dressed in ribbit, well, very little actually. They did ribbit rather frighten me, I must say.’
Large grey creatures; probably Trolls. Someone was certainly making sure the Frogg Prince wasn’t going to renege on this particular deal.
‘And they just instructed you to deliver them to the Curds and Whey B&B?’
‘Good heavens, no. I just had to organise the acquisition of the spiders. They said they’d ribbit collect.’
‘And you didn’t think that this was at all suspicious?’
‘Not at all, no. I just assumed they were scientists and needed them for research.’
That certainly wasn’t likely. One small, green, smelly person and two trolls were about as far from science as you could get. ‘And I assume they paid cash up front?’
Frogg nodded guiltily, knowing he’d been rumbled.
‘So once you had the spiders, how did you contact them?’
Mr Frogg rummaged around in his wallet. ‘They left me a number. Here it is.’
He handed me a piece of paper with some scrawled digits on it. It looked like a mobile phone so probably wouldn’t lead to anything, but I had to follow it up anyway. ‘And how did they collect the merchandise?’
‘They came in a big ribbit truck and loaded everything into it.’
I thanked Mr Frogg and walked back onto the street. As I did, a large transport truck, with an equally large bulldozer on its trailer, passed by. A yellow bulldozer, I noticed idly.
Yellow!
Construction yellow!
My mind began to make the connections and I finally began to do some serious detecting.
Construction workers – or more to the point, construction trolls – like the ones that tended to frequent Stiltskin’s Diner of an evening, and very like the ones I’d seen working near the B&B.
Small, green, smelly person! Could only be an orc. And who employed all the orcs in Grimmtown? Ah, now that wasn’t so good. That was someone I particularly didn’t want to upset if I wanted to keep all my body parts intact.
Things were beginning to make sense. Someone wanted Miss Muffet out of business all right – but that someone wasn’t running a rival hotel; oh no, that someone wanted her out because she was in the way of something much bigger. It was all becoming very clear. Now all I had to do was prove it. I needed to pay a visit to a building site – and make sure I wasn’t caught in the process.
Building sites are difficult to find your way around at the best of times. Add in some night, a sprinkling of rain, a generous helping of mud and not only are they difficult, but they become downright unpleasant. The ground that has already been excavated becomes very slippery. Pools of cold, dirty water lie in wait for the unwary pig and, if the pig is very unlucky, there are large holes in the ground just waiting for him to fall into.
This particular building site was about a mile from Miss Muffet’s place. Huge hoardings announced that a new motorway, coming soon, would provide access to Grimmtown for countless commuters, blah de blah de blah. It was the usual PR doubletalk. Of more interest was the name of the construction company involved in this wondrous feat of engineering: The Yellow Brick Road Construction Company looked to be doing this particular job. Then again, as it was owned by Edna, the Wicked Witch of the West Side, an old sparring partner of mine (to put it as euphemistically as I could), the YBRCC did most building jobs around Grimmtown. To an outsider, it probably seemed amazing how they always managed to get the big building deals. As any insider would tell you, they greased politicians’ palms, encouraged planners to ‘share’ any competitive quotes and generally bullied any other prospective contractor out of business. If they were doing this job and Miss Muffet was in the way, then chances were she wouldn’t be in the way long. More to the point, if the spider strategy didn’t work then they’d probably find something a tad more imaginative to encourage her to sell up.
I knew Edna of old and knew she wasn’t a woman to be trifled with, especially where money or power was concerned. She was also a woman who didn’t let much get in the way of achieving whatever her current objective was, so I had to tread very carefully indeed if I wasn’t to become a permanent part of the motorway foundations. Not that I wasn’t treading carefully already. Not only was I trying not to ruin my clothes, I was trying