Circus of Thieves on the Rampage Read Online Free PDF Page B

venue called
the Oh, Wow! Centre.
    Now Queenie Bombazine happened to be an old acquaintance of the Oh, Wow! Centre’s Operations Manager, a man called Kelvin Pype, who by a curious coincidence had once been Queenie
Bombazine’s second-favourite plumber. She called him up, reminisced for a while about a blocked U-bend, back in the good old days when U-bends were U-bends and days were good and old, then
she told him about her plan for a comeback show. She wanted to book the Oh, Wow! Centre for two nights.
    ‘Oh, wow!’ replied Pype, who was something of a circus aficionado, and was fully aware of the legendary status of La Bombazine. He immediately agreed, on condition that she’d
give him a seat in the front row for every performance and autograph his bottom. (He was a BIG fan.) Queenie Bombazine, who had seen it all before (not his bottom – I simply mean she had come
across all kinds of eccentric behaviour), agreed, with a weary sigh. Fans, these days, really were getting weirder. After one of her last performances, she’d been asked to sign a full-size,
home-made, papier-mâché hippopotamus. There was simply no way of explaining what people wanted from her.
    It was hard, indeed, being a celebrity. Harder than it used to be, back in the good old days when U-bends were U-bends and celebrities were left alone. In fact, that was one of the reasons why
she had retired, the other one being that trapeze careers have a habit of coming to a sticky end (literally). Queenie didn’t believe in safety nets, but she also didn’t believe in
plummeting to her doom for the entertainment of strangers, so, when the day came that she felt the strength in her arms beginning to weaken, she decided to call it quits before she came a cropper.
But that, of course, was before she came a cropper in a quite different way, by plummeting to her doom from cosy, multiple-bathroomed richness to chilly, horrid skintness.
    The Oh, Wow! deal was arranged by phone, from Queenie’s bath. Barely had she hung up than she heard the sound of Reginald Clench’s motorbike puttering up her driveway. Queenie had a
long driveway. That’s how rich she was. Or had been, when she bought the house. ‘Pip pip,’ tootled Clench as he parked up and strode across the field to Queenie’s bath. His
Labrador, Rudolph, leapt out of the sidecar and marched alongside, in step with his owner.
    The dog marched?
    Yes.
    Marched?
    Stop arguing. Rudolph the dog marched. Clench was a military man and he’d trained Rudolph as he would have trained any young recruit. If you’ve never seen a dog march – and you
probably haven’t – then you’ll just have to imagine it. It’s more or less the same as a normal soldier’s march, except with more legs.
    ‘Hello, Reginald,’ said Queenie. ‘I’ve booked us the Oh, Wow! Centre for two nights.’
    ‘That’s top-hole!’ said Reginald, who was delighted to have his enforced retirement coming to an end. He didn’t even like weekends, so for him retirement was a dismal
nightmare of relentless tedium, which he could only fill by carrying a toolbox with him wherever he went and performing almost constant DIY. During some of his lowest moments, he’d been known
to break things just so he could fix them again.

    ‘How are we doing for infantry . . . I mean, performers?’ he asked.
    ‘I was just going to make a few calls.’
    ‘Good idea. You chat ’em up, talk the talk, then pass ’em over and I’ll take care of the money. Let’s get weaving. No time like the present. Rolling stone and all
that, what what?’
    They got weaving. Queenie Bombazine made her calls, though it wasn’t so easy to track everyone down, since her old troupe was so loyal to Queenie that when she’d retired most of them
had taken the decision to bow out of circusry altogether rather than work for someone else.
    Her first call was to Jemima Steam, the nautical fire-eater. It turned out she was now working as a pearl diver in the