He didn’t answer.
“Bad news!” Mia handed Grayson’s iPhone back. “If you want to get away with a crime of passion, you have to be quick about it!”
“Who are you telling?” muttered Charles.
“This time, the Boker won’t get off scot-free,” said Mia. “This time we must defend Mom’s honor. And Lottie’s. And our own. We can’t put up with this kind of thing any longer.”
Grayson raised his eyebrows. “What on earth,” he asked, “is a Boker?”
9
LATER, WE ARGUED over who had thought it up. Mia insisted that it was her idea. But one thing is certain: on the way home from the tea party, we were racking our brains for ways to teach the Boker a lesson. This afternoon had been the last straw, and we wanted to hit her where it would hurt. And what occurred to us—or as Mia insisted, to her—was that clipped topiary bird standing in her front garden, Mr. Snuggles, whom no one was allowed to touch except Mrs. Spencer herself. It was obvious that she loved that box tree more than anything else in the world.
Yes, Mr. Snuggles was her vulnerable point. And on educational grounds, we had to strike that vulnerable point. Or rather clip it. Mr. Snuggles’s hours as a peacock were numbered.
We spent the rest of the evening planning our coup, unobtrusively collecting all the equipment we’d need, and waiting for everyone else in the house to go to sleep at last. Just after midnight, we slunk out of the house. I’d have liked to go by bike, but the garage door squealed so badly that we’d have woken everyone. Anyway, it took us only ten minutes to walk to the Boker’s house, and we passed the time by arguing over what creature we were going to turn the peacock into. Mia wanted it to be a penguin; I was in favor of a skunk, because for a skunk we wouldn’t have to sacrifice the entire peacock tail—we could reuse parts of it.
However, the fact was that we’d greatly overestimated our ability to clip a box bush. Even in easier conditions—and it was dark, it was cold, we were in a hurry, and we hadn’t been able to get hold of suitable tools on the spur of the moment—it probably would have been difficult to give the peacock a completely different shape. What was more, we set about it with different ideas in mind—“A penguin!” “No, a skunk!”—and Mia was working on Mr. Snuggles from the front with Ernest’s handsaw, while I was clipping his rear end with the big household scissors.
At least no one disturbed us. We hadn’t met anyone on the way here (and this was supposed to be a big city!), and everyone in Elms Walk seemed to be sleeping peacefully too. Although the moon was full. The snip-snap of my scissors and the critch-cratch of Mia’s saw were the only sounds to be heard. Apart from our hissed curses.
“These scissors will only cut thin twigs,” I complained. “If I carry on at this rate, the skunk won’t be finished until Christmas next year!”
“And this saw will only get through what it’s not supposed to! This is where a night-vision aid would really come in useful. Oops!” Mia held her breath for a moment. “There goes his beak.”
“Never mind, skunks don’t have beaks.… Come on, let’s change places. Heavy engineering is what we need back here.”
At this point, we really knew that we wouldn’t manage to give Mr. Snuggles a new identity—as either a penguin or a skunk. All the same, we went on sawing and snipping. When we finally stepped back and looked at our handiwork in the moonlight, we had to admit that what was left of the peacock didn’t resemble any known form of life. Or any form at all, to be honest. It was just a heap of leaves and shredded branches.
Mia was the first to begin again. “Well, if we’d managed a suspiciously perfect penguin, I suppose the Boker might even have been pleased.”
“Exactly, and that’s not the point,” I agreed. “Still, we could try clipping what’s left of his midriff into a frog.…”
“There’s a car coming.” Mia pushed me down into the flower bed, and as the car drove past and turned into an entrance a few houses farther on, she said, “Forget the frog, we’ll never do it, anyway. Let’s get out of here.”
She was right—we were hopeless gardeners, but all the same, we’d carried out our mission. So we’d better clear off before anyone saw us.
But there was no need to worry. Nothing moved in the streets on the way back either. Only a cat crossed our path, and a cat couldn’t tell on us. Drunk with our victory, we crept into the house, where I took the saw back to Ernest’s workshop—after cleaning off any give-away box leaves—while Mia hung the scissors up in their usual place in the kitchen. No one saw us except Buttercup, and good dog that she was she didn’t bark, but followed us upstairs wagging her tail.