‘Like squid ink?’ asked Ruby.
‘Well, sort of but not,’ said Brant. ‘It was like no squid ink I ever saw before. And blue, not black.’
‘It got all over Pookie and he didn’t like it one bit,’ said her mother. ‘Kept trying to lick it off and the more he licked, the more he yapped.’
‘Boy, did that dog yap,’ agreed Brant.
‘Though thank goodness he did,’ said Sabina. ‘Because the Runklehorns heard it – they were sailing past the far side of the islands and the next thing we heard was Eadie Runklehorn’s voice calling, Ahoy there Redforts, just the people we were looking for. We need a couple to make up a bridge four! We’re getting very bored playing Snap on our own.’
Brant was laughing at the very memory of it.
‘You know Eadie,’ he said. ‘Such an original sense of humour – there we are, clinging to a suitcase, practically drowning, and she makes a joke!’
Ruby was looking at them wondering if too much sun and saltwater had sent them insane. Not many drowning people would see the funny side, but she guessed this was the old Redfort survival instinct kicking in; keep laughing and nothing can ever be as bad as it seems. She had read about this in the SAS/Marine Survival Handbook. It said there that the trick to surviving a life-and-death situation was ninety per cent attitude – same as her Rule 48.
‘So then what?’ asked Ruby.
‘And then, ta-da, they rescued us!’ Sabina said this last part with a flourish of her powder-brush as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be rescued from a sea monster.
‘Yes, and just in time for afternoon tea,’ said Brant.
‘So if you got rescued at 4pm on Friday, how come you didn’t make it back here until lunchtime the following Wednesday?’ asked Ruby.
‘Oh honey, you know what the Runklehorns are like,’ said her father. ‘Wouldn’t put us ashore until we’d played a dozen rounds of deck quoits and several hands of bridge. Then of course we remembered the pirates.’
‘You forgot them?’ said Ruby.
‘Well, it was all so exciting bumping into the Runklehorns like that,’ said Sabina. ‘The pirates clear went out of my mind – anyway, we all decided we had better sail the long way round since we didn’t want to get captured again and then of course we had engine trouble. Luckily, that nice fellow with the helicopter showed up.’
‘Supper was the only disappointment,’ said her father. ‘The chef had been having trouble trying to catch a single fish. We ended up eating canned tuna.’
‘I guess something was scaring the fishes,’ said her mother.
Water, water everywhere and not a fish to eat, thought Ruby. She remembered the other week when Mrs Digby had threatened her with cod-liver oil because the fish store was out of fish. Weirder and weirder still.
The doorbell chimed.
‘Oh, that will be the Runklehorns,’ said Sabina. ‘Go put on that nice yellow number, would you honey?’
Ruby opened her mouth to protest, but before she could say anything, caught sight of herself in the mirror. The T-shirt she was wearing was printed with the word duh. She would make her mother’s day perfect and go change.
THE DINNER CONVERSATION WAS OF COURSE LIMITED to the subject of pirates, rescue and lost treasure.
‘What gets me is why the coastguard didn’t pick up my mayday call,’ said Sabina.
‘Yes, that is a mystery,’ agreed Brant.
‘And Bernie sent message after message when our engine went kaput, but no one responded,’ said Eadie.
‘It was pure chance that we got rescued – the guy in the chopper just happened to be flying by,’ said Bernie.
‘Shame, it was a lovely spot,’ said Brant. ‘We were really having a high old time, weren’t we darling?’
‘Oh yeah,’ replied Sabina. ‘A swell time.’
While her parents and the Runklehorns laughed, Ruby was beginning to put things together in her head. She was sure that the pirates had to be responsible for the lost mayday calls: it made sense; this way they could rob and hijack vessels without being disturbed. But how were they doing it? From her mother’s description they didn’t sound like the most sophisticated villains at sea and surely, if they were going to all the trouble of blocking mayday calls, they must have a bigger target in mind than cruise boats and cash.
Like Blacker said, it wasn’t like many pleasure boats sailed in those waters.
‘Sabina was so heroic.’ Brant gripped her hand and smiled. ‘You should have seen her out there, quite an inspiration.’
Her mother’s family had always had confidence, but what they were famous for was their guts, the kind of courage that inspired awe – after all, there were legends about it. No one could be sure that these weren’t just tales told by drunken sailors, but Ruby chose to sort of believe them; they sounded just far-fetched enough to be true. And it wasn’t impossible that her mother had a pirate relative, though when she looked across at Eliza’s great-great-great-granddaughter, sitting there in her cerise Marco Perella evening dress, it did seem unlikely. Sabina Redfort might not have inherited her great-great-grandmother Martha’s brains, but she had certainly inherited her courage. Sabina Redfort was no wuss, no siree.
Later, when dinner was over and Ruby’s parents were sitting chatting with the Runklehorns, she went upstairs to her room and pulled out the list and the spider-map. It seemed likely that the dead couple, the couple who turned out not to be Ruby’s parents, were also the victims of the pirates, judging by the state of their yacht, the Swift, which had been ransacked. They too had been thrown to the waves, but they were not such able swimmers and with no ambassadorial luggage to cling to, drowning was their fate.
Ruby added their names under the heading, pirate attacks.
The facts on the piece of paper were growing and things were beginning to add up. Though she still wasn’t sure to what.
The drowned agent diver
Confused shipping
Unusual marine activity
Sea sounds
Missed maydays
The stranger
Pirate attacks
Ruby fell asleep without difficulty and slept soundly until an hour before dawn when her dream took a puzzling turn.
She found herself in her music class. Clancy was tapping out a message with a drumstick. Ruby was frustrated: she knew Morse code well, but she couldn’t decipher this, it just made no sense. What are you trying to tell me Clance? He was just looking at her like she was super dumb and continued to tap. Was it nonsense or was she not as smart as she thought?
She woke up, but the dream continued… or at least the tapping did. It was coming from the bathroom. Ruby fumbled for her glasses, got up and switched on the light. It was the cold tap, not quite turned off, and a steady drip was drumming onto a plastic cup that was sitting upside down in the sink. Ruby switched on the radio, which was still