Monster Mission

‘Wait a minute!’ The superintendent’s eyebrows drew together sharply. ‘You mean your aunt… or her aunt… ?’

‘No. An aunt. An aunt from an agency. Minette always travelled with aunts.’

The detective seemed to find this very interesting. ‘Go and get me the file on the Mountjoy case,’ he said to the secretary. ‘Sergeant Harris has it.’ He turned back to the Danbys. ‘Now tell me from what agency you hired this aunt. It’s an extremely important point.’

Mrs Danby frowned. ‘Well, generally they came from an agency called Useful Aunts. I’ve used them for years—they’re very reliable. But I think …’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘I’m not sure … I think this one may have been labelled

Unusual Aunts. Yes, I think so. And there was some writing above that which said “My Name is Edna”. Or maybe it was Etta.’

‘If you hadn’t rotted your brain with tobacco you might be able to remember,’ said the professor under his breath.

But at that moment the secretary came back with a blue folder. ‘Yes,’ said the detective as he opened it. ‘Yes. The two cases are extraordinarily similar.’ He looked up at the Danbys. ‘Another child disappeared on the same day as your daughter and he too was put in the charge of an aunt. I think we’re getting somewhere at last!’

The old Mountjoys were always pleased when Hubert-Henry went back to boarding school. They hated having children about and they could never quite forgive their son for having married a foreign dancer in a nightclub and producing such an unsuitable grandson.

Then just a week after Hubert-Henry had left for Greymarsh Towers, a letter came from the headmaster which told old Mr Mountjoy that even though Hubert was not at school because of Burry-Burry fever, the full fees for the term would still have to be paid.

That did it of course. Mr Mountjoy rang the headmaster and said what nonsense was this about Burry-Burry fever and where was the boy, who had been delivered to school on the first day of term?

And the headmaster said, no he hadn’t, the aunt from the agency had told Matron that Hubert-Henry was ill.

So after the old Mountjoys had shouted down the telephone and threatened to sue the headmaster they went to the police. They might not be fond of Hubert-Henry but he was their grandson and their property and if anyone had taken him they wanted to know the reason why.

Which meant the police knew of two cases in which a child had vanished in the care of an aunt and it was now that the Great London Aunt Hunt began.

The police only knew about two aunts because Lambert’s father was still in America, so that the boy had not yet been reported missing. But two aunts were enough to be going on with—and the newspapers and the police and the general public now went slightly mad.

Aunt Plague Menaces the City screamed the headlines, and Monster Aunts on Killer Spree!

Once people had been warned they saw these murdering women everywhere.

An aunt was caught outside a supermarket trying to impale a sweet little baby with a giant knitting needle while his mother shopped inside.

‘I was only trying to spear a wasp,’ she quavered, ‘I didn’t want it to sting the child.’ But she was hauled off to the police station and it was only when they found the back end of the squashed insect in her knitting bag that she was set free.

An even more sinister aunt was seen in Hyde Park, kicking in the head of a little boy who lay in the grass.

‘I seen her clear as daylight,’ said a fat man who’d been walking his dog and sent for the police. ‘Kicking like a maniac she was!’

And, ‘Look how he’s crying, the poor little fellow,’ said the other dog owners who had crowded round—and it was true that the boy, holding on to his football, was crying. Anyone would cry, seeing their aunt bundled into a police van when she’d been showing them how to curl a penalty into the top right hand corner of the goal. She’d been a striker for the Wolverhampton Under-Eighteens and he thought the world of her.

There was talk in Parliament of a curfew for aunts, forcing them to be in bed by eight o’clock; the Daily Echo said aunts should be electronically tagged like prisoners—and an elderly lady was arrested in the shoe department of a department store for abusing her great-niece who was trying on shoes for a party.

‘She was shouting and screaming at the child and her eyes were wild,’ said the woman who had turned her in—and the aunt would probably have gone to prison, but while she was in the cells, the shop assistants downed tools and marched on the police station with banners, demanding that she should be freed.

‘I wouldn’t just have shouted at the girl, I’d have wrung her neck,’ said a motherly shop assistant to the reporters standing round.

‘The poisonous child had thirty-nine pairs of shoes out and she was throwing them round the floor,’ said another shop girl. ‘If you ask me, that aunt had the patience of a saint not to scream at her earlier.’