Catscape Read Online Free Page B

Incident Room for the next stage of the planning. Using the crowbar they practised lifting the pile of books and the casserole lid.
    “Right,” said Murdo brandishing the crowbar happily. “We now have the technology to open the cover.”
    “If we do manage to lift the manhole cover,” said Fergus, “what do we do next?”
    “Just have a look,” said Murdo with a vague wave of his hand. “How can we plan when we don’t know what we’ll find?”
    “Well we need to think it through a bit further, otherwise it will be a bit of a waste of time,” explained Fergus. “For a start we’ll need a torch.” Thirty seconds later a big torch had joinedtheir growing pile of equipment on the table.
    “Do you think …? Would we …? Would we actually go down there?” said Murdo trying to hide his rising concern with this project by asking an innocent question.
    Fergus thought this through. He was beginning to realize that the fun of planning the expedition was now reaching the point where they had to decide exactly how much they were prepared to do.
    “I think that might be a bit risky,” he said. “I think at this stage it’s just a … a … preliminary investigation.”
    “That sounds good,” said Murdo. “I like that.” He seemed relieved.
    “Although it would be a bit disappointing if the torch didn’t shine far enough and we didn’t see anything,” continued Fergus. “We’d be none the wiser. We’d be back to square one.”
    There was silence as the boys pondered the situation.
    “What if we could hear?” said Fergus thinking aloud.
    Once again Murdo sprang into action, emerging with an old and rather bulky walkman.
    “If I remember rightly this has a ‘record’ function on it,” he said, inserting a tape and attaching a tiny microphone lead to it. “Testing, testing — one, two, three,” he said rather pompously before replaying it to confirm that it was working. “Excellent,” he said adding it to the pile of equipment.
    “Problem,” said Fergus.
    “What?” said Murdo looking confused.
    “Well the lead isn’t that long,” said Fergus, “It won’t even go down as far as we can see with the torch.”
    Five minutes later the collection of equipment included a large ball of string.
    “Are we getting there?” asked Murdo. “Crowbar if it’s heavy, torch if it’s too dark, microphone if we can’t see, string if it’s too deep,” he said looking over the gear they had gathered together.
    “How exactly are we going to do this without being tooobvious? We need a smokescreen,” said Fergus. “We need something that gives us a reason for hanging about on the pavement.”
    “Well, if we both take bikes then we can pretend we have a puncture. We can turn one bike upside down and be fixing it — supposedly. That should hide what we’re doing on the pavement,” said Murdo.
    “That’s probably about as good as we’ll get,” said Fergus. “There can’t be many other reasons for spending time in one place on the pavement.”
    “Okay. Finally the biggest problem as I see it,” he continued, “is how exactly do we get out at night when we’re supposed to be tucked up in our beds?”
    “That’s easy!” said Murdo.
    Ten minutes later Mrs. Fraser called Mrs. Speight. The two mothers found that that they had a good friend in common, so the conversation took forever to reach the subject of a sleepover in the caravan. However, when they finally heard Mrs. Fraser saying “Yes, Murdo does it all the time in the summer,” they knew that the crucial moment had arrived.
    “There we go, boys. That’s fine,” said Mrs. Fraser as she came off the phone. “Now, Murdo, the usual rules apply and I’ll just explain them to Fergus so that he knows too. It’s lights out when I say so, and lights out does not mean torches under the blankets. The door is locked by you and that’s you in there for the night, okay?”
    “Does it get any easier than that?” said Murdo back in the