Beetle Queen Read online

  Standing in the darkened room, Darkus could feel how desperately Mrs Crips missed her son. He sat down on one of the arms of the big chairs, suddenly feeling the weight of how much he missed his own mother.

  ‘Look.’ Virginia elbowed him and pointed at a picture hanging on the wall above the fireplace. A skinny teenage Spencer in a white lab coat, his hands balled up in his trouser pockets, was looking adoringly through rectangular spectacles at an enormous dung beetle sitting on his shoulder.

  Darkus gasped.

  In the kitchen, Mrs Crips filled her kettle and took out porcelain teacups. ‘I had a packet of biscuits in here somewhere,’ she said, opening and closing cupboards.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Bertolt said. ‘We’ll manage just fine without them.’

  ‘Oh, no, I insist. It’s not every day I have visitors who want to talk about Spencer.’

  Once the kettle had boiled, Bertolt lifted it and poured water into the waiting teapot. ‘We really don’t want to be any trouble.’

  ‘No, no, no trouble at all,’ Mrs Crips said, her head inside a cupboard. ‘My Spencer loves to dunk a biscuit in a cup of tea. Here we are now.’ She turned around with a packet in her hand. ‘I knew I had some.’

  ‘I’ll carry it,’ Bertolt insisted as she loaded the teacups on to a floral tea tray.

  Mrs Crips pulled a small side table between the two armchairs. ‘Set it down here – Bertolt, is it? – thank you.’

  Mrs Crips sat down opposite Darkus with a happy sigh. ‘I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation with anyone other than the postman,’ she said, looking at the three children. ‘Now, why don’t you tell me what it is that you want to know about my Spencer?’

  ‘I read in the paper, Mrs Crips,’ Virginia paused, and Darkus wondered what was going to come out of her mouth, ‘that you think Spencer . . . um, that perhaps he didn’t drown like the police said?’

  ‘No. Spencer would never drown,’ Mrs Crips replied with certainty. ‘He was a good swimmer and the canal is shallow.’

  ‘But what about the shoes and his watch?’ Virginia asked.

  ‘Pooh!’ Mrs Crips’s face scrunched up like she had smelt something bad. ‘I don’t know why that appeared in the papers.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s rubbish.’

  ‘So what do you think did happen?’ Darkus asked.

  ‘All I know is that Spencer didn’t come home from work one day,’ Mrs Crips said. ‘The shoes and the watch weren’t his. The shoes must have belonged to some other unfortunate soul, but my Spencer is a size nine and those shoes were a size eleven. He wore scruffy trainers, and those were smart brogues. I told the police all of this, but would they listen?’

  ‘No,’ Darkus replied. ‘I’ll bet they didn’t investigate any of it.’

  ‘Spencer was kidnapped,’ Mrs Crips said. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ Bertolt asked.

  ‘What other explanation is there? My Spencer is a caring, happy boy who would never do anything to worry me. Wherever he is, he’s being held against his will and can’t contact me. That’s kidnapping.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who did it?’ Virginia leant forwards. ‘Or why?’

  Darkus’s eyes flickered up to the photograph of Spencer and the dung beetle. He had a horrible feeling he knew what had happened.

  ‘The day that Spencer went missing, before the police came and told me all that rot about him drowning, a woman came here and took Scud.’

  ‘Scud?’

  Mrs Crips pointed at the photo. ‘Spencer had a pet dung beetle called Scud.’

  Bertolt glanced at Darkus, who looked at Virginia. She nodded in reply to their silent question.

  ‘Did the woman who took him have a walking stick and big sunglasses?’ Virginia asked.

  Mrs Crips shook her head. ‘No, it was an Asian woman in a black suit with a chauffeur’s cap. She said Spencer had stolen property belonging to Cutter Laboratories. She barged right in here, searching the place until she found Scud’s kettle in Spencer’s room – Scud slept in an old copper kettle filled with damp soil, you see – and took him, without so much as a by-your-leave.’

  ‘That sounds like Lucretia Cutter’s chauffeur.’ Bertolt looked up at Darkus.

  ‘I told the police about her, but they laughed at me.’ Mrs Crips shook her head. ‘They even asked me if it was true that Spencer was a thief.’

  ‘Mrs Crips,’ Darkus leant forwards, ‘we believe every word you are saying.’ He hesitated. ‘Scud, was he . . . clever?’

  She gripped on to the arms of her chair and stared at Darkus. ‘How could you know that?’

  Darkus looked at Virginia and Bertolt. The three of them got to their feet.

  Baxter crawled out from his hiding place under Darkus’s jumper. Marvin leapt down from Virginia’s braid, as Newton rose out of Bertolt’s hair, glowing.

  ‘Because we have beetles like Scud,’ Darkus replied. ‘This is Baxter,’ he pointed to each beetle in turn, ‘and this is Marvin and this is Newton. Our beetles understand humans too.’

  Mrs Crips’s eyes were wide and her mouth open as she looked at the three beetles.

  ‘Oh, my dears, if this is true,’ she whispered, ‘then you are in terrible danger.’

  ‘We know.’ Darkus nodded. ‘That’s why we need you to tell us as much as you can about what happened before Spencer disappeared. It might help.’

  Mrs Crips’s eyes darted from side to side, her shoulders dropped and she sighed.

  ‘Shall I pour the tea?’ Bertolt asked, lifting the teapot. ‘It’ll be stewed if it’s left much longer.’ Newton danced about him, flashing, happy to be out of hiding.

  ‘Spencer wanted more than anything to be a vet,’ Mrs Crips said, as Darkus and Virginia returned to their seats. ‘But he didn’t get on with school. He was bullied. He dropped out and got a job working for a cleaning company, doing night shifts in big offices, vacuuming carpets and wiping down desks. One of those offices was Cutter Laboratories in Wapping.

  ‘One morning, he comes home from work saying he’s seen a job posted up on a noticeboard, to be a laboratory assistant looking after beetle farms. He was so excited about getting to work with living creatures that he applied, and he got the job. I was so proud. And Spencer loved it. I’ve never seen him so happy. He was working in a laboratory in the East End and learning new things every day. He’d come home and tell me about different species, and the work he did feeding them jelly and recording their behaviour on special charts. He was good at his job, so they promoted him. That’s when the strange things started to happen. They made him sign a legal document promising not to tell anyone about his work. He couldn’t say anything, but something about this new work troubled him. Spencer’s dinner conversations became about how animals deserved to roam free, in their natural habitat, especially ones clever enough to know they were living in a cage.

  ‘The day before he disappeared . . .’ she paused. ‘Spencer came home from work in a state. He wouldn’t tell me what had happened, but his behaviour worried me and I badgered it out of him. He said that if he got caught he’d be sacked, but that it was a small price to pay for the beetles’ freedom.’

  ‘What had he done?’ Darkus asked.

  Mrs Crips bit her lip. ‘Spencer was monitoring a special selection of beetles called the Bartholomew Cuttle Strain.’

  Virginia grabbed Darkus’s arm.

  ‘These were beetles, intelligent enough to understand their surroundings. Experiments were being carried out on these beetles, and Spencer had to record their behaviour in the hours and days after each experiment.’ She shook her head. ‘Spencer had a big heart. He grew attached to the beetles, a dung beetle in particular that he called Scud. Some of the experiments were cruel and Spencer hated to see the insects in distress.

  ‘One day, one of the normal dung beetles – the ones they bred in the farm tanks – died. Those beetles were used as control tests and weren’t tightly monitored, so Spencer put the dead bee
tle into Scud’s tank and smuggled Scud out of the laboratory in his lunchbox. He wrote on the chart that Scud had died. No one in the laboratory realized that the dead beetle wasn’t Scud, and no one was interested in the ordinary farmed insects. Weeks passed. No one noticed the missing dung beetle, but the other beetles knew what had happened, and they clamoured for Spencer to free them too. Their unhappiness in the laboratory made him feel terrible, and so he came up with a plan. He made a careful note of each species of beetle, and measured each individual beetle’s size. Then he collected matching samples from the farm tanks and, once he had a group of beetles that mirrored the Bartholomew Cuttle Strain, he stayed late. When no one was about, he smuggled the special beetles into a cake tin, replacing them with the ordinary beetles, and then he left the laboratory,’ Mrs Crips looked at the children, ‘and he set the beetles free.’

  Virginia sucked in her breath and looked up at the picture of Spencer on the wall. ‘That was brave.’

  ‘Mrs Crips,’ Darkus said, ‘our beetles – they’re Spencer’s beetles, or descendants of them. What he did was heroic. I wish you could see them all. There’s this amazing place called Beetle Mountain and all Spencer’s beetles live there, free and happy. He did a good thing.’

  ‘I’d swap ten mountains of happy beetles to have my son back,’ Mrs Crips said.

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  ‘We’ll find him, Mrs Crips. You’ll see.’ Bertolt said.

  ‘So Lucretia Cutter’s making beetles, in these insect-farm things – but why?’ Virginia asked on the way back to the bus stop. ‘And why would she kidnap Spencer?’

  ‘Bet Dad knows what’s going on,’ Darkus said. ‘I wonder why the beetles are called the Bartholomew Cuttle Strain?’

  ‘Maybe she’s repeating the same experiments she did with your dad,’ Virginia said, ‘on the Fabre Project.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Darkus frowned.

  ‘We need to find out more about the work they did when they were part of the Fabre Project,’ Bertolt said.

  ‘Dad’s not going to tell me anything,’ Darkus sighed, ‘and we can’t ask Lucretia Cutter . . .’

  ‘What about Novak?’ Bertolt said. ‘She helped you before.’

  Darkus frowned. He hadn’t heard from Novak since the morning she helped him rescue his father. ‘I don’t want to get her into more trouble than she’s already in.’

  ‘Is there no one else we can talk to?’ Virginia said.

  ‘I can’t think of anyone.’ Darkus frowned. ‘Wait a minute! I’m being an idiot. Of course there is: Professor Andrew Appleyard.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Entomophagy

  It was five o’clock, and getting dark. Darkus, Virgina and Bertolt hopped on a number 73 to Angel tube station, where they scrambled through the barrier and on to a train, switching from the Northern Line at Monument to the District Line and getting off at South Kensington. A short walk from the Natural History Museum, Darkus came to a halt in front of a five-storey red-brick building with a pair of white pillars either side of the front door and black wrought-iron balconies below the windows.

  When the buzzer sounded, Darkus pushed the giant door, entering a church-like vestibule with a mosaic floor and a grand, sweeping staircase.

  ‘This place is posh,’ Virginia said, looking up at the ornate cornices on the ceiling. ‘Is Professor Appleyard rich?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Darkus said. ‘He’s just lived here a really long time, from before things got expensive. He’s pretty old – he worked with my dad at the Natural History Museum before he retired.’

  As he reached the top of the staircase, Darkus saw the door to apartment number fifteen was open, and a thin, elderly gentleman, dressed in powder-blue pyjama-like robes, was standing in the doorway. He blinked at the children through half-glasses propped on the end of his nose.

  ‘Is that Bartholomew’s son?’ he said, his forehead wrinkling as his eyebrows rose. ‘My, you’ve grown up quickly. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Hello Professor. We wanted to talk to you about something,’ Darkus replied. ‘It’s really quite urgent.’

  ‘Well then, come in, come in.’ He waved the children through the door and into his home. ‘I must say, I was relieved to hear that Barty had reappeared. He had me worried for a moment there. It was very naughty of him to disappear off on a research sabbatical and not tell anyone about it. He gave us all a terrible fright.’

  Darkus grimaced. The research sabbatical was the story Dad was telling everyone, and he was shocked by how readily people accepted the lie. When they asked about the locked room, his father would calmly explain that he’d never gone in there, that it was a mistake blown up by the newspapers into a big mystery. People would nod knowingly and reply, ‘You can’t trust what you read in the papers.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends?’ Professor Appleyard asked.

  ‘Sorry.’ Darkus pointed. ‘This is Virginia, and this is Bertolt.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Virginia,’ Professor Appleyard shook her hand, ‘and you too, Bertolt.’

  ‘The pleasure is all mine, Professor.’

  ‘Here we go.’ Virginia rolled her eyes and Bertolt scowled at her.

  ‘Now, young Cuttle, have you come with a message from your father?’

  ‘Kind of,’ Darkus said, distracted by the walls of the professor’s hallway, which were built from glass terrariums. Each one was lit with white, green or red lights, and furnished with earth, greenery and a species of invertebrate. He saw locusts, crickets and a variety of beetles including longhorns and June beetles.

  ‘Whoa! Tarantulas!’ Virginia pushed her nose up against one of the tanks. ‘Pink ones!’

  ‘Yes.’ Professor Appleyard chuckled. ‘Now, can I interest you children in a bite to eat? I was about to make myself supper.’

  ‘I’m starving,’ Virginia replied.

  ‘Marvellous, but first, why don’t you bring out your Chalcosoma caucasus,’ he pointed at Darkus, ‘your Lampyridae, and your Sagra buqueti?’ He smiled at Bertolt and Virginia.

  The three children stared at Professor Appleyard.

  ‘How did you know we had beetles?’ Darkus asked, as he lifted Baxter out from the neck of his jumper.

  Professor Appleyard clapped his hands together with delight as the three beetles leapt and landed on to their humans’ outstretched hands.

  ‘I’ve spent my life observing beetle habitats and watching insects. I can spot twitching antennae from thirty paces, although I must admit this is the first time I’ve discovered the habitat to be children. The Sagra buqueti was in plain view. I saw it before you walked through my door. The Lampyridae was peeping over Bertolt’s ear, and as for your Chalcosoma caucasus, Darkus, his horn was poking through your jumper. The size, shape and colour of the horn is a dead giveaway as to the species of a beetle, you know.’

  ‘His name is Baxter,’ Darkus said.

  ‘He’s unusually large; where did you get him?’

  The children looked at each other.

  ‘Actually, that’s what we came to see you about,’ Darkus replied.

  ‘Well, I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to ask you to put your coleopteran friends in this empty tank, to keep them safe.’ He lifted the lid of a tank carpeted with brown mulch. ‘There are other insects that roam free in my home, and some of them are predatory.’

  Darkus placed Baxter in the terrarium and Newton flew in to join him, but Marvin wasn’t so keen. ‘Let go!’ Virginia held her hand over the tank and shook it, but the metallic red beetle clung on stubbornly. ‘C’mon, Marvin. It’s only for a little while.’

  Marvin reluctantly let go, one leg at a time, dropping on to Baxter’s elytra. The frog-legged leaf beetle kicked his hind leg, spurring Baxter forwards.

  ‘Ha! Look!’ Virginia pressed her nose to the glass. ‘Marvin’s riding Baxter.’ Marvin waved his forelegs at Virginia. ‘See you later, little dude.’

  Professor App
leyard’s brow furrowed as he stared hard at the beetles. ‘This way to the kitchen.’

  The children followed him to the end of the hallway of tanks, and into a wooden-floored kitchen with a sink, work surfaces and cupboards along one wall, and a low rectangular table in the middle of the space, surrounded by floor cushions. The professor opened the fridge and lifted out two plates, setting them down on the low table.

  ‘Please do sit down.’ He turned and grabbed a ramekin of thick brown liquid from the side. ‘Mustn’t forget the satay sauce.’ The children sat cross-legged on the cushions, and Bertolt peered at the plates. ‘Now what did you children want to talk to me about?’ the professor said, joining them.

  ‘Um, excuse me, Professor,’ Virginia asked, ‘is that octopus or squid?’ She poked one of the crispy black shapes.

  ‘Neither! It’s tarantula tempura. High in protein, low in fat and surprisingly tasty.’

  ‘You eat spiders?’ Bertolt whispered, aghast.

  ‘And those?’ Virginia’s eyes were bulging out of her face.

  ‘Cricket satay,’ Professor Appleyard replied, with a smile. ‘My favourite.’

  ‘This is your supper?’ Darkus asked, astonished.

  ‘Yes, I’m rather into entomophagy.’

  ‘Ento-moph-agy?’ Darkus sounded the word out.

  ‘Insect eating.’ The professor chuckled, ‘although strictly speaking, a tarantula is an arachnid.’ Darkus grimaced. ‘Come now, Darkus, eating an invertebrate is no different from eating any other kind of creature. Birds feed on them and you eat birds. Your digestive system is probably full of tiny creatures you haven’t realized you’ve swallowed.’

  Darkus stared at the spiders. ‘But the hairs . . .’

  ‘Singed off before they were dipped in batter.’ Professor Appleyard offered the children chopsticks. ‘Would you like to try one?’

  Bertolt shook his head. ‘No, thank you.’

  Virginia bent down, her nose almost touching the rim of the plate. ‘You really eat them?’

  Professor Appleyard picked up a tarantula with his chopsticks, dashed soy sauce over it from a bottle on the table, dusted it in cayenne pepper and bit into it.