The Baker Street Boys - The Case of the Disappearing Detective by Anthony Read Page A

lifted off the smaller packing case, which was trapping Sparrow in his hiding place. Wiggins opened the lid, and a very grateful Sparrow popped up like a jack-in-the-box, a grin on his face that seemed to stretch from one ear to the other.
    “Am I pleased to see you lot!” he exclaimed happily.
    In the light of the lantern, the others grinned back at him – all except Beaver, who was standing holding the smaller packing case and looking puzzled.
    “What’s that ticking noise?” he asked.
    Sparrow suddenly realized what he had been sleeping with. “It’s a bomb!” he yelled. “There’s a bomb in there!”
    Beaver froze. So did all the others.
    “Can’t you hear it?” asked Sparrow.
    Wiggins nodded, signalled to the others to stand back, and gingerly opened the lid. Inside was an assortment of bottles and boxes, books and bags, and a large brass alarm clock with two bells on top, ticking merrily. As Wiggins picked it up, the alarm went off with a deafening clangour. Rosie and Gertie screamed. Shiner, Queenie and Beaver dived for cover. Sparrow dropped back into his packing case.
    Wiggins laughed. “There’s your bomb!” he said, switching off the alarm.
    Sparrow emerged from the packing case again, looking sheepish. “Well, how was I to know? It was tickin’.”
    “Sure and isn’t that what clocks do?” Gertie teased.
    “Never you mind, Sparrow,” Queenie comforted him, helping him out of the case and brushing wood shavings from his hair and clothes. “You was very brave, comin’ here on your own.”
    “Very stupid, more like,” said Wiggins sternly.
    “I wanted to know if the door worked like I thought,” Sparrow replied.
    “And it did,” Wiggins continued. “What d’you think would have happened if we hadn’t found you?”
    “Dunno.” Sparrow shrugged, trying not to show how frightened he had been. “You took your time gettin’ here, didn’t you?”
    “We didn’t know where you was,” Beaver said defensively.
    “If it hadn’t been for Shiner, we’d never have known,” Queenie added. “You should say thank you to him.”
    Sparrow grunted at Shiner, and then said grudgingly, “Ta. Ta very much.”
    “S’all right,” Shiner said, gloating slightly.
    “We never even knew you wasn’t there,” said Beaver, “when we got back to HQ.”
    “Shiner was asleep,” Rosie explained. “So he didn’t tell us you’d gone out. We thought you was still at the theatre.”
    “We all went to bed,” Gertie said, stifling a yawn at the thought of sleep.
    “How d’you find out, then?”
    “Queenie stayed up, waitin’ for you to come home,” Beaver told him. “Like she always does.”
    Queenie gave a little cough, to cover her embarrassment. “I weren’t sleepy,” she said.
    “And when you hadn’t come back by one o’clock, she started worryin’.”
    “Like she always does,” Shiner chipped in, with a wicked grin.
    “That’s quite enough of that, my lad,” Queenie scolded him. She went on to say how she had woken up Shiner, to ask him if he had seen Sparrow.
    “And I told her how you’d got the sack,” Shiner said gleefully. “And all that stuff you was tellin’ me about the trick locks and fake hinges and the door openin’ back to front and everythin’.”
    “Yeah, what you didn’t believe,” Sparrow retorted.
    “It didn’t make much sense to
me
at first,” said Wiggins. “Particularly the way Shiner told it. But I managed to work it out. And here we are.”
    “Lucky for you,” Queenie said. “What’s been goin’ on? Who put you in there?”
    “Nobody,” Sparrow said. “I was hidin’. There was these two geezers—”
    “Two geezers?” Shiner interrupted. “What if they come back? Let’s get out of here!”
    “No, they won’t,” Sparrow said. “When they left, they said they wasn’t never coming back no more.”
    “Well in that case,” said Wiggins, “let’s have a bit more light on the scene.” He struck a match and lit the two oil