Chapter Fifteen

Mavis Clutter watched as Irma Drusen led Bobby Macula away from the poplar trees, across the playing field and towards the main entrance of Queenswood Junior School. From a distance of perhaps fifty metres, she surveyed the scene before her, watching as Irma climbed onto a recycling bin, rolled up her sleeves and began to jimmy open a side window with a crowbar she’d produced from the pocket of her jet-black, bespoke spying trousers.

As if to honour the good work being carried out in Essex by the Oxford Office of Ophthalmic Health, a peal of bells instantly rang out across the playing field. They were the bells of a burglar alarm, at once deafening, urgent, incessant, and ignored by everyone within a half mile radius. Irma lost her balance and fell off the recycling bin, the crowbar flying out of her hand and into the window of the caretaker’s storage shed opposite. A second alarm rang out. Scrambling to her feet, Irma ran across the Year 6 herb garden, waving her arms and shouting something indiscernible as Bobby stood motionless by the front entrance.

As Irma passed him at speed, tripped over a crudely painted gnome, and landed face down in a compost heap, Bobby noticed something at his feet. He bent down, picked up an inverted flowerpot, and found a key beneath. Holding it up momentarily for his colleague to see, he tried it in the door marked ‘Main Entrance’. It duly opened in front of him.

Mavis watched as the lovely pair of the OOOH matron and her newfound sidekick, Bobby, disappeared into the school. Moments later, the ringing of the alarm came to an abrupt end, and silence once again filled the cold November air.

A wry smile spread slowly across Mavis Clutter’s face. She looked down at her feet, at the ropes which bound her ankles, then up at her wrists, which were similarly tied. Apparently unbothered by the predicament in which she found herself, she calmly flexed the joints of her right arm, bent her wrist at an impossible angle and, employing a technique she’d learnt in 1989 at the ‘Escape from New Yorkshire’ escapology conference just outside Barnsley, she slipped her right hand effortlessly out of the rope.

Loosening her remaining bonds a little with her free hand, she did the same with the left, before reaching into the right pocket of her cardigan. Her hand emerged moments later clutching a silver cigarette lighter and a Panatella cigar. She lit the latter with the former, and took a long drag, inhaling deeply, then blowing out the smoke with an almost endless sigh of satisfaction. Pausing briefly to savour the moment, she returned the lighter to her pocket, held the cigar between her teeth, and lifted the bottom hem of her blouse to reveal a colostomy bag.

Mavis checked all around her, then, satisfied that there was no one nearby, she opened the colostomy bag and removed a small, sealed package no more than four inches long. Shaking it clean, she opened it, and removed the item inside. It was a mobile phone.

A glance towards the school confirmed that she was alone. Tapping a number into the keypad, she held the phone to her ear.

“It’s me,” she said. “I’m at ground zero. Everything’s going according to plan. I’ll call you when they’re dead.”