‘Police!’ cried Tobias as the sound of a siren grew closer and closer.
‘Goody!’ cheered Freja
‘At last!’ cried Vivi.
‘Katastrophe!’ shouted Manfred. He snatched the laundry sack from the ground, ran to the bridge and tossed it into the river. It whirled about for a moment, then floated downstream, away into the dark.
Sidling up to Manfred, Freja whispered, ‘Isn’t that naughty? Isn’t it a crime to interfere with a police investigation?’
‘Ja,’ sighed Manfred. ‘So now there are two criminals at Hotel Schloss der Freude — the chocolate thief and myself!’ He staggered away across the bridge, mumbling and tugging at his hair, disappearing into the night.
The police arrived, flashing torches, puffing out their chests and asking dozens and dozens of questions, including several very silly ones, such as, ‘How old is the dog?’ and, ‘Does he always smell so bad?’ and, ‘Bitte! Bitte! Can you please stop him licking our torches?’
Of course, Tobias and Freja could not stop the licking, no matter how hard they tried.
The questioning done, the police gathered all of the chocolate from the street into large plastic bags. They said it was evidence, but Freja saw the way they licked their lips as they packed the bags into the boot of their car.
Frau and Herr Mettler, the owners of Café Schokolade-Schokolade, arrived just minutes later. Herr Mettler was tall and thin with red hair and small round glasses. His wife was short and plump with blonde hair braided into two plaits. They both stared up at the open window and the sheet-rope, then led the way upstairs to see what damage had been done to their beloved café.
Herr Mettler opened the door and flicked on the lights. Everyone gasped. Except for Finnegan. He chased his tail until he caught it, then yelped in pain.
The gasping was born of astonishment. For, instead of finding a scene of destruction and chaos, the café looked bright and clean and orderly. Most of the chocolates were stacked into perfect pyramids, arranged in tall-stemmed glass bowls or nestled in gold boxes with red satin bows around the edges — just as they were supposed to be. The mirror behind the counter sparkled and the antique chocolate moulds still hung proudly from the walls. Frau Mettler opened the cash register and found it as full of notes and coins as when they had locked up at the end of business. Herr Mettler did a lap of the kitchen and declared everything to be tipptopp. Even the Mettler family-heirloom recipes were still arranged in alphabetical order in their little wooden box on the workbench. The only sign of the burglary was the open window from which the sheet-rope hung, and several gaps on the shelves where the thief had taken the entire collection of certain chocolates.
‘But why the mice and the frogs?’ Frau Mettler asked, peering at the gaps in the chocolate animal display. ‘Why not the white chocolate rabbits and marmots? Why not the dark chocolate ibex and bears?’
‘Ja! Ja!’ cried Herr Mettler, peering down into the glass counter. ‘And why steal all the caramel chocolate bars but not the nougat or the strawberry mousse or the coconut deluxe? And why take the nutty almond blocks but not the nutty peanut blocks?’
‘Nein!’ gasped Frau Mettler, now frowning so deeply that her eyebrows looked like they might crumble. ‘And why would they take all the chocolate bark with the glacé fruit and the nuts but leave the chocolate bark with the shards of brittle toffee scattered on top? The brittle toffee bark is what we are famous for!’
Herr Mettler shook his head and, for a moment, looked as though he might burst into tears. He seemed more upset that his signature chocolate bark had been rejected than by the fact that a thief had broken into his café in the middle of the night and stolen a whole sack of his beautiful chocolate creations. Creations that had taken great patience and skill, many hours of work and many francs’ worth of fine chocolate.
Freja tugged at her ear. She thought about the chocolate bark they had seen scattered along the street. Its light brown milk chocolate had looked smooth and creamy and delicious, even in the dim light of the street lamps. Her mouth watered and something tickled at the back of her mind.
Freja walked to the open window, patted the topmost knot on the sheet-rope and looked down into the street. She did a memory walk past all of the chocolates that had fallen from the hole in the sack. Chocolate bark with glacé fruit and nuts . . . Blocks of chocolate bursting with roasted almonds . . . Chocolate bars with little streams of caramel oozing out of the cracks that had formed when they had fallen to the ground . . . Chocolate mice and frogs . . .
‘Oh!’ cried Freja, spinning back around. ‘The chocolate! All the chocolate that was stolen — I can see it now! There is a pattern.’
‘Nein!’ said Frau Mettler. ‘There were animals and bars and blocks and bark. The thief took a little of everything.’
‘No,’ said Freja. ‘I mean, yes, they were different shapes and fillings and toppings. But . . .’
She grabbed Tobias by the hand and dragged him along the shelves, pointing out the dark chocolate and white chocolate creations that remained.
‘Yes!’ cried Tobias, chuckling. ‘Well done, old chap.’
‘Si! Si!’ shouted Vivi. ‘You are so clever, Freja.’
‘What?’ cried Herr Mettler. ‘What do you mean?’
Freja turned to the Mettlers. ‘Everything that was stolen was made of milk chocolate.’
Frau Mettler gasped and pressed her hand to her chest.
Herr Mettler blinked three times, then stared, his eyes as wide as two mixing bowls. ‘Ja! Ja! The girl is right. Nothing made from the dark chocolate or the white chocolate has been taken. It is all here. The thief took only the milk chocolate.’
‘Milk chocolate,’ echoed Frau Mettler.
‘Ridiculous!’ snapped a policeman.
‘But true,’ whispered Freja.
It was one o’clock in the morning when Freja finally climbed into bed. Finnegan jumped up beside her, then lay on top of her, his breath warm and comforting — although a little bit stinky — in her face.
Freja wrapped her arms around his shaggy grey neck and rubbed her face against his. ‘Strange evening, wasn’t it, puppy?’
‘Boof!’ said the dog, and he poked his tongue down her earhole. This might have been his way of agreeing that, yes, indeed, it had been a strange evening full of weird and wonderful happenings — including the fact that he had caught his own tail for the first time ever and found it to be not nearly as satisfying as he’d thought it would be! But it might also have been the dog’s way of saying, ‘Thank you for the cuddle and I love you very much, Freja. So much, in fact, that I am going to clean your ears to save you the trouble of doing it yourself.’
The grooming done, Finnegan finally settled down, his body stretched the full length of the bed, and fell asleep. He snuggled and snored and, occasionally, licked the girl’s cheek in his sleep.
‘Beautiful puppy,’ whispered Freja, and she closed her own eyes. But she could not settle.
Freja turned on the light and grabbed her scrapbook. It was old and tattered, the pages bulging with treasures from her travels with Clementine and, later, with Tobias — feathers, ferns, seeds, pressed flowers, ferry tickets, food labels, lists of words from other languages, photos and maps. Freja turned to a fresh double page and began to draw a map of Lucerne, filling in the places she now knew — the River Reuss, Leckerbissen, the clinic, the Spreuer Bridge, the Chapel Bridge and the outdoor café, Hotel Schloss der Freude, the funicular railway, Berna Schokolade and, way off to one side, Mount Pilatus and the marmots. Finally, she drew Café Schokolade-Schokolade surrounded by a scattering of tiny chocolate frogs and mice.
‘So strange,’ she murmured. ‘A rope made from Hotel Schloss der Freude’s sheets and a sack from Hotel Schloss der Freude’s laundry. It’s very suspicious.’ She closed the scrapbook and tugged at her left ear. ‘And then there’s the actual theft. Chocolate, but nothing else. No money. No antiques. No secret recipes that might be sold for large amounts of cash. Just chocolate.’
Finnegan snorted, licked his nose and stuck his head beneath the pillow.
‘Of course, chocolate is important . . . and terribly tasty . . . but at the end of the day, it’s just chocolate.’ She paused, then added, ‘Milk chocolate.’
And suddenly, from out of nowhere, an image of a log floated through Freja’s mind.
A chocolate-coated log in the middle of a forest.
A milk chocolate-coated log in the middle of a forest.
‘Weird!’ whispered Freja.