Half Moon Investigations - Eoin Colfer [18]
My fingers hovered over apple+p. If I printed these 300-plus pages, I was setting off on a road that might be difficult to exit. Was my shield really worth that much to me?
Yes, I decided. It was.
I pressed the keys.
MAKING AN IMPRESSION – ON MOON’S FOREHEAD
I remember my first case. I was three years old, penned up in a crèche in downtown Lock. One of the minders, Monique, took off her engagement ring while she was sterilizing bottles. She put the bottles in the microwave, and when she got back to the worktop, the ring was gone. It wasn’t the kind of ring you could mislay – a big hunk of zircon. Someone had taken it. Monique was hysterical, tearing the place apart. It took three women to stop her ripping out the plumbing.
I remember sitting on a beanbag, chewing a rusk, thinking it over. I knew who had taken the ring. A toddler called Mary Ann, who loved shiny things. I hadn’t actually seen her take it, and I knew enough about playground law to know that you didn’t shout your mouth off without proof. I decided to get proof because Mary Ann had swiped one of my chocolate fingers the week before. She was a repeat offender and she had to be stopped.
I waddled over to the crime scene and had a good poke around. When I had everything I needed, I brought my case to the sobbing minder.
‘Mary Ann took the ring,’ I told her.
Monique tried to be professional through her hysteria. ‘Now, Fletcher, we’ve talked about this. No making up stories.’
‘Mary Ann took the ring,’ I insisted, scowling through the crust of rusk round my lips.
Mary Ann picked up a building block and hefted it at my head. It made solid contact, felling me like a tree trunk. Once the bleeding had stopped, I made a second attempt to break the case.
‘Mary Ann took the ring,’ I said again. ‘Come and see.’
I dragged Monique over to the sink.
‘Look,’ I said, pointing to a red smear on the stainless steel, near where the ring had been. ‘Jam. Mary Ann had jam.’
Monique’s expression changed from patient to interested.
‘That’s true, I suppose, but other people had jam.’
I had more evidence. ‘Look. On the floor. Marks.’
Monique checked the floor. Wet tracks led across the tiles and on to the Disney rug. Four tracks. A walker.
‘Mary Ann has wheels,’ I said.
It was the clincher. Only Mary Ann had jam and a walker. She was quickly stripped and searched. They found the ring stuffed down her nappy, along with three marbles, a plastic dinosaur and two sets of car keys. I know now that Mary Ann was suffering from what detectives called Magpie Syndrome.
I thought that my cleverness would make me popular. I was wrong. No one wants a friend who can find out their secrets. Somehow I realized, even at three years old, that if I wanted friends I would have to stop finding things out. I didn’t stop, and Mary Ann has hated me now for almost a decade. If she wants to do anything about it after all this time, she’ll just have to join the queue.
I was up half the night sifting through the police incident reports. After a while I began to see a pattern. Basically the Sharkeys were on the guards’ hot list and were automatic suspects for any unsolved cases. Just because they were tagged did not necessarily mean that the Sharkeys were guilty, or even the prime suspects. But even if they’d committed a quarter of the crimes that they were in the frame for, they were major players in the criminal underworld.
The crimes were mostly routine stuff, but several reports struck me as unusual because they were not typical crimes. Over the past few weeks it seemed as though someone was targeting Lock’s youth for petty, seemingly motiveless crimes. And according to Bernstein’s manual, there was always a motive. When you found that, you generally found the criminal. Was Red Sharkey avenging himself on others, just as he had on April and myself?
One of these quirky files was dated 7 September and included a statement from the victim, a Mr Adrian