Monster Mission Read Online Free Page A

meningitis in the school. Everyone is in quarantine and Hubert can’t go back at present.’
    The little boy, who had been hunched against the cushions, now sat up and smiled. He had a very nice smile and Aunt Coral made up her mind.
    ‘Well, I can’t take him back,’ said the surly driver. ‘I’m going on to another job down in the West Country and I haven’t a minute to waste.’
    ‘That’s all right,’ said Coral. ‘Just take us to the station. We’ll make our own way back to London.’
    Sitting on the station platform, Coral noticed the exact moment when Fabio’s happiness at the thought of escaping school changed to misery at the thought of going back to his grandparents’ dungeon of a house.
    She hadn’t had any real doubts but now she was certain. Should she use chloroform? Or the sleeping powder that Etta used?
    Either way, thought Coral, Fabio was the one.
    Etta and Coral had been right. Aunt Myrtle should never have been allowed to come on the kidnapping job. Almost as soon as she arrived in London she was so homesick that she thought she would die. She missed the sound of the waves on the rocks and the scent of the clover and the way the clouds raced across the high clean sky. But most of all she missed Herbert. She was used to sitting on the point every day and playing the cello to him, and now she began to worry in case he was missing her too.
    Or not missing her, which would have been even worse.
    So by the time she was sent to take Lambert Sprott to the zoo because his father was doing business in New York and his mother was buying clothes in Paris, Aunt Myrtle was in a bad way. Her hair kept falling down, she had a headache, and the map of the zoo looked complicated.
    As for Lambert, he was a boy it was not easy to take to. He had pale distrustful eyes, a tight mouth, and carried a wallet full of money, a pocket calculator and his own mobile telephone so that he looked like a shrunken bank manager, except that bank managers have learnt to be friendly and Lambert had not.
    All the same she was determined to do her best, and to share with the boy the beauty of the animals they saw: the knock-kneed giraffes with their long black tongues, the dignified orang-utans with the tufts of red hair under their armpits, the Mississippi alligator, smiling as he steamed in his pool.
    ‘Oh how fascinating animals are, are they not, Lambert!’ she cried, getting carried away. ‘Look at those bonteboks – the way they carry their heads. And over there, the dear dik-diks – so small but so fast when they run.’
    Lambert yawned. ‘They smell,’ he said.
    Myrtle was shocked. ‘Well, they have their own scent, yes, but so do you. To a bontebok you would smell of human.’
    ‘No, I wouldn’t.’
    Aunt Myrtle sighed, but she was determined not to give up. There must be a flicker of life somewhere in the boy. And there was: when something cost a lot of money Lambert became quite alert. He told Myrtle that you could get twenty thousand pounds for the horn of the white rhino, and that the Siberian tiger could fetch double that because it was so rare.
    ‘And so beautiful,’ cried Myrtle. ‘Look at the markings on its throat.’
    Lambert yawned again – he was not at all interested in things being beautiful and he stopped to dial a friend on his mobile telephone, but the friend was out. ‘I wouldn’t mind going shopping,’ he said. ‘I’ve got my own account at Harrods.’
    But Myrtle had not been told to take him shopping and, ignoring his whining, she led the way across a little stone bridge and stopped dead.
    They had come to the seals. The females lay about like old armchairs, coughing and grunting, but there was one, a young bull seal, who seemed to be staring directly at her.
    Tears of homesickness came into Myrtle’s eyes; it could have been Herbert’s brother lying there! ‘Oh, Lambert, ‘she said making a last attempt, ‘look at the way his whiskers curve, and the shine on his skin. Did you