A Daring Escape

I’m Imogen Church, and this is the news from Fogsowrth. Top story: you’re awesome. Also in the news, private detective Molly Whiskers has had a run-in with the Fogsworth police force, Patchee’s woken up from a concussion and has started tidying Molly’s flat, and the General – the big pug in charge of kidnapping the town’s football squad – is very, very stinky.

Part seven of our story begins… now!

Patchee giggles.

He’s been giggling quite a lot, this evening.

Right now he’s giggling because he’s thinking about toilet paper.

Toilet paper, he thinks, is very handy stuff, because it can be used for all sorts of things, plus it comes in big rolls so it’s very easy to tear a bit off when you need it.

Patchee has been tearing lots of little bits of toilet paper off the roll in Molly’s bathroom. He’s had to do this to cover the many tiny cuts he has all over his little rabbit body.

He has lots of cuts all over his body because that’s what can happen if you’re careless when dealing with smashed glasses and splintered crockery.

Poor Patchee has been so busy clearing up the mess in Molly’s flat that he hasn’t stopped to consider that he might not be very well, which can happen if you get a bump on the head and don’t get enough rest. Instead he’s been busily working his way through the flat, bagging up bits of broken crockery and glassware, putting the bits in bin bags and cutting himself on the sharp edges — of the crockery, not the bin bags — then running to the bathroom to get toilet paper to cover the cuts.

This isn’t a sensible way of covering a cut, but Patchee can’t seem to find Molly’s first aid kit, and is starting to suspect she might not have one, so he’s making the best of a bad situation.

Which has led him to think a lot about toilet paper, which has made him giggle.

After a few moments, he stops giggling, takes a deep breath, looks around at the clean and tidy flat — it’s a little bare now that there aren’t any cups, plates or glasses to be found — picks up the two heavy bin bags, smiles broadly, and falls over backwards.

“I can’t remember; do you take sugar?”

With a start, Patchee is suddenly awake. The weird dream he was having — something to do with a map and a bed and a squadron of attack plates — fades quickly as he adjusts to his surroundings. He’s on the bare, hardwood floor of his boss’s flat, but somehow during the night, he’d found — or been given — a blanket and a pillow. This was all highly unusual. He remembers having a headache at one point, but now feels absolutely fine. Just very, very confused.

After a moment he remembers someone asking him a question.

“Hmmm?”

“In your coffee. Do you take sugar?” asks the voice.

“Yes please. And milk. Um, thank you.”

Patchee scrambles to his feet and pads carefully over to the chair opposite his boss’s desk. After a couple of years — at least that’s how it feels to Patchee — a slightly taller rabbit enters, balancing a tray. On the tray is a kettle, steam pouring from the little spout, a wide glass cylinder filled with corse brown grains and with a plunger on top, a glass of milk, a paper bag filled with sugar cubes, a measuring jug and a small vase.

“I wasn’t able to find any cups, for some reason”, says Molly, “but I imagine we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” Pouring water from the kettle into the cylinder and stirring the contents with a spoon, Molly eyes her employee with a mixture of amusement and bafflement.

“Molly, I’m so sorry, I —”

Patchee’s boss holds up a paw indicating for him to stop. “Coffee first”, she says, patiently, “then me, then you.”

After a few minutes of silence, broken occasionally by Molly giving the mixture in the cylinder a stir, she presses down on the plunger.

“Now then, the vase or the measuring jug?”

Patchee points to the jug with his paw, and Molly pours the brewed coffee into the jug and then adds milk and sugar. She then pours the rest of the coffee into the vase, takes a small sip, and sits back.

“We’ve both had quite the night, it seems”, says Molly, looking sideways at Patchee.

“Yes, I’m so —”

“The coffee in jail isn’t very good, you know”, interrupts Molly. Patchee’s milky eyes open wide in surprise. “But I did find some useful information which could help us crack the case.”

“So that’s our next lead”, finishes Molly, with a satisfied smirk. She has brought Patchee up-to-date with her evening’s discoveries, and shared some of her findings from this morning, while he was sleeping off his headache. “Now, let’s talk about you.”

A knot appears somewhere in Patchee’s stomach, and starts tightening, but as he begins to retell his story, from the moment he trod on the pear in her bedroom, he is amazed to find his boss laughing. By the time he has got to the part where he falls over while carrying the bin bags — which was only minutes before Molly came in — she is almost in tears with laughter.

After taking a moment to catch her breath, she says “so, why were you in my bedroom in the first place?” With this, her voice changes ever so slightly, a note of suspicion creeping in.

“I was just tidying, I —”, but Patchee is interrupted by the clamour of the phone on Molly’s desk. Patchee only hears one side of the conversation, but it sounds as if the work Molly had done this morning has paid off.

“I’ll send my assistant. He’ll be with you in half an hour”. With this, Molly puts down the phone, scribbles a name and address on a piece of paper and hands it to Patchee.

“I need you to go there and speak to Ms Tink. Her shop is on the other side of town, and she’s just seen some suspicious goings-on from the old army base. She also thinks she saw one of her customers helping to move something large. I have something I need to do here. Do you think you can handle it?”

“Of course!” says Patchee, perhaps a little too enthusiastically.

“When you get back, we’ll have a talk about respecting each-other’s privacy”, says Molly, a little more sternly.

Patchee nods shyly, picks up his coat from where it hangs by the door, and is stopped just before he opens it.

“Patchee”, says Molly, quietly, “be careful”.

As we’ve already discussed, a pleasant way to see Fogsworth is by horse-drawn carriage. When going at a gentle clip, the sound of the horse’s hooves on cobblestones is soothing, and passengers have a chance to see the history of the town, from the high street with its mix of new and old buildings, to the rural outskirts where the road under-hoof changes from stone to tightly-packed mud, and then to grass.

Another way to see the town is on foot, which is what Paul and Poppy are doing just now. The newly-named Mr and Mrs Plum are two happy beetles: yesterday they had their wedding in a beautiful, old shoebox, and they are now on their honeymoon.

The couple spent the night in a tiny hotel which began its life as a beer barrel, and now Poppy has arranged a surprise tour of Fogsworth’s art studio, which has some of the most comfortable paintbrushes a beetle could ever hope to sleep on. She’s been saving money to buy one as a wedding present, and have it shipped home, as their old one was stiff and had started to smell.

“Oh look, Mr Plum, an art studio!” says Poppy in mock wonder.

“Fancy that, Mrs Plum”, says Paul, both of them enjoying their new formal titles. “Do you want to go and have a nosey?”

“Go on then”, says Poppy, giving her husband a little peck on the cheek.

They hold hands as they cross the cobbled street, aiming for a tiny hole in the studio’s old, wooden door. Then halfway across the road, they narrowly avoid being squished under the wheels of a carriage, which is being pulled by two horses.

As the Plums scurry out of danger and into the art studio, we turn our attention to the inside of the carriage, which is in fact two carriages, connected by a short length of rope.

“Can’t this thing go any faster?” yaps a small terrier, his tiny front legs leaning up against the wall of the carriage nearest the sweaty horses.

“Dunno mate”, says one of the horses, “depends on how quickly you need to get where you’re going”.

“Yeah”, says the other, “and how much you’re willing to pay.”

With a “hrumph”, the terrier sits back down and turns to face his boss.

“Go and check on the two clowns back there”, says the giant pug, who has given up trying to fit on the bench and is now slumped on the floor, “and make sure they haven’t eaten our cargo.”

“Sir!” barks the little dog, before scampering across the rope to the second, larger carriage, where the two guard dogs are playing a board game.

“No no no no no”, says the bloodhound, in a patient and sympathetic tone. “You can’t move your queen while your knight is in hock. You threw a three, which means play reverses until the spoon-holder returns to the home square!”

“Yeah, right see, but at the end of the day, it seems to me like naves are still wild, so to all intents and purposes, my knight’s out of hock while the price of milk is still frozen”, counters the rottweiler.

“Ach drat”, mutters the bloodhound, “I’d forgotten about the milk rule.”

“I mean, this is just me talking, right”, says the rottweiler, “but I can’t help but feel sometimes like, and take this with a pinch of salt, right, but it almost feels like sometimes, yeah, you’re making the rules up as you go along.”

His opponent clucks his tongue against his cheek for a few seconds and then appears to have an idea. “Ah, but now this puts us into Baldor’s Gambit!”

“Baldor’s what!?” gasps the rottweiler, who is of course correct in guessing that the bloodhound has been making the rules up as he goes along. They have been playing Ninky Popswitch for three years now, and the rottweiler has never won a game yet, but he’s pretty sure he’s built up a good grasp of the rules by now.

“Aye” says the bloodhound. “Baldor’s Gambit; it’s a subtle variation on the existing rules, but it really does open up the board quite a bit.”

“Gentlemen”, interrupts the terrier, just as the bloodhound is about to start moving game pieces randomly around the board, “any trouble from the prisoners?”

The two guards blink for a second before seeming to remember why they were in this carriage in the first place.

“Not a peep, captain”, says the bloodhound.

“Mmmm”, grumbles the tiny dog, as he pads over to the cage taking up most of the space in the carriage. The cage is mostly covered in large brown sacking, so it didn’t look too suspicious when being moved. Getting a closer look at the cage, the terrier begins to get a little nervous.

“Right, so now we take fourteen points off your score, which leaves you at… minus twenty-five”, continues the bloodhound in a business-like fashion, “then we reset the mouse trap, and now if you want to go up a ladder, you’ll need to throw a seven, so —”

“Stop! Stop the carriage!” This earsplitting bark interrupts the guards’ game yet again, so both dogs turn to see the little terrier, panting next to a large piece of brown sacking and an empty cage.

What is said next is said in a very low growl, by a very large dog, from the other carriage, yet somehow it feels to the bloodhound and the rottweiler like someone whispering directly into their ears.

“Gentlemen, I think you have some explaining to do.”

“Stay low to the ground, everyone”, says Mr Nibbs, “and keep to the side of the road.” Tiny feet skitter over cobblestones as the band of hamsters try and put as much distance between them and the dogs as possible.

“What’s the plan?” hisses Ms Pickles, as she catches up to run just behind him.

“Right now, staying alive” says Mr Nibbs. “By the way, well done on the escape.”

It had been quite the escape, too. Ms Pickles had been one of the first hamsters the dogs had lured away, and while they’d been given food and water, one thing the dogs hadn’t provided was a way for the hamsters to file their teeth down.

Hamsters’ teeth never stop growing, and if they don’t have something to chew on, they can become very painful. But Ms Pickles had put her long teeth to good use by gnawing through the thin wire cage while they were underneath the sacking in the carriage.

Once she’d gnawed enough of a hole for them all to fit through, she found a length of unused rope from the back of the carriage and she and the rest of the hamsters climbed to safety.

Out of the nine hamsters, she was best friends with Mr Nibbs, so they’d hatched their plan the night before, with Mr Nibbs taking over duties once they hit the road. They made a good team, but now they were going to be put to the test.

“What… are you two… talking about?” pants a sweating Mrs Toggle. She was having trouble keeping up, as she was used to standing in goal when they played football, rather than running around the pitch.

“Just figuring out how to stay out of danger”, says Mr Nibbs. And then, pointing to an alleyway in between two shops: “there! Come on, everyone.” Darting his head left and right to check for traffic, he bounds across the road, followed shortly by Ms Pickles and a few other hamsters.

Mrs Toggle and the remaining older hamsters follow shortly after, at a slightly slower pace. One of them, a veteran striker known only to the team as Old Binky, narrowly misses being hit in the head by a horse’s hoof as it swerves to avoid him.

Finally with everyone across, Mr Nibbs motions to the team to walk down the alleyway in between the chemist and the grocer’s shop.

The hamsters walk in silence for what feels like forever. After a while, Mr Nibbs begins to see a house in the distance, and can make out a fork in the road. He knows that if he turns right, he’ll hit Guinea Crescent, which is safe and secluded, and where the people who live there are friendly towards hamsters.

“Not far now”, he says to the team.

And then, just as he is beginning to feel like they might make it to safety, a shadow heaves into view in the distance. From the right emerges a rottweiler with a black coat and a brown face. And from the left, a ruddy-brown bloodhound saunters in.

With fear in his wide eyes, Mr Nibbs hisses “turn back, everyone! Turn back!” But when he looks behind him, he sees a familiar pair of horses, pulling two carriages. The horses have a look on their faces that seems to say “bad luck, but a nice try.”

As the two guard dogs creep in from one end of the alley, the horses slowly approach from the other, until the hamsters are completely penned in.

The bloodhound bares its teeth, and the rottweiler follows. What happens next is unpleasant and undignified, and if you’d rather skip forwards to an episode with Patchee in it, no-one will think any less of you.

One by one, patiently and silently, the dogs use their teeth to pluck the hamsters from the ground by the scruffs of their necks, and toss them into the carriage. They do this carefully because their boss has told them they need each hamster alive and in one piece, but it’s not a nice thing to watch.

Once inside the cage, the terrier ties a short length of rope around the waste of each hamster, avoiding being bitten by several of them. He then sits directly in front of the hole Ms Pickles had created, and does not take his eyes off the hamsters until the carriage stops for the final time.

The rottweiler and the bloodhound continue their nonsense game, neither of them noticing the small, hairy black body, with eight spindly legs, crawling out of the dice bag.

That’s the end of part seven. On a brighter note, I think the next episode might be the one with the chocolate cow in it. It’s a shame not everything can be quite as sweet, especially when Molly finds what Patchee has been writing about her.