The guard at the door of Buckingham Palace clearly had no intention of letting two teenagers and what appeared to be a talking shaggy dog in a sweatshirt into the seat of royal power in all the British Empire.
“I tell you, she’s expecting me,” Neil pleaded.
“That is clearly an impossibility,” the woman said. “Now, please, go away or I will have no choice but to have you arrested.”
Neil felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned and saw Isabella pointing to a video camera over the guard’s shoulder. Neil began jumping up and down and waving in front of the guard, making sure whoever was watching could clearly see his face.
“ ’Ere, what are you on about? Stop that!” The guard shooed Neil away.
They walked to a spot along the great iron front gates and sat down.
“Now we wait until they tell the Queen,” Isabella said.
Larry looked sad for a minute. “So I guess we can’t go try to spring Rose?”
“Formation two. That’s not just an escape plan. It’s also Jones code for ‘do what we know we can do right now,’ which is get this ‘jewel’ into the right hands. If we can get the Queen the jewel, maybe we can convince her to send out help.”
“How do we know if the Queen is even home?” Neil said.
Isabella pointed to the top of the palace. Neil looked up and saw a flag. It was made up of four squares in red, blue, and yellow, with lions and even a harp.
“It’s the royal standard,” Larry said. “When the Queen is here, they fly that flag. When she’s not here, they fly the Union Jack, the one we think of as the British flag.”
“How do you know all this stuff? And don’t say homework.”
“Homework.”
The guard approached.
Neil stood up. “Do we get to go see the Queen now?”
The guard didn’t answer. Instead she beckoned for Neil to follow her. Isabella and Larry started to as well, but the guard held up a hand, stopping them.
Once they stepped inside the gates, the guard handed Neil a deep blue cell phone.
“Hello, why does this boy always take so long to answer?” said a familiar voice. Neil felt a sudden rush of excitement and relief. This was certainly the real deal, and not Rose.
“Hello, Your Majesty,” Neil said.
“I have been trying to reach you! Why do you not answer your phone? My grandchildren practically have them glued to their heads!”
“My phone got a little . . . smashed. I’m sorry.”
“You should take better care of your things. We do.”
“Yeah. I’ll have to get a butler to help me,” Neil said quietly.
“Young man, that is enough of your cheek! But we shall let it pass. Have you found Lord Lane?”
“I’m afraid not. We think he may be dead.”
“Dead?”
“Well, yes. Didn’t your police tell you we found his bloody clothes?”
The Queen seemed to muffle the receiver to talk to somebody else. Then she came back on the line. “They said there were clothes, and some blood, but they never said anything about a body.”
“There was a lot of blood.”
“After more tests it was determined that some of his blood had been mixed with pig’s blood. This was one of the things we tried to call you about.”
Neil took a second to process this new information. So Lane was possibly not dead? Why go through all the trouble to make it look like he was?
“Hello. Are you still there?”
The Queen’s voice shocked Neil back to the present.
“Yes, I’m here. There is good news. We found the jewel . . . or maybe the jewel.” Neil wasn’t sure. He’d been expecting some kind of actual jewel, not just a page with Shakespeare’s signature on it—as valuable as that was.
“Then by all means, let us have it!”
Something made Neil hesitate. The Queen had invited him to England—no, ordered him to England to find Lane. But she seemed a thousand times more interested in the jewel.
“It’s not here,” he lied.
The Queen seemed angry. “Then where is it? You said you had it!”
Neil took a deep breath. He was treading on some very dangerous territory here. “Here’s the thing. As valuable as this jewel is, there’s something more valuable we need to find before I can give it up.”
“What could possibly be more valuable than a jewel belonging to Shakespeare?”
“Lord Lane?”
The Queen hesitated. “Yes, yes of course. We will continue the search for our royal subject. But the jewel is a separate issue altogether.”
“And we need to find my friend Rose,” Neil said. “I think I need to hold on to the jewel until we get her back. If the kidnappers want it, then I’ll need to use it as bait.”
“This is unforgivable! Give us the jewel or else—”
Neil hung up. There were now only two options. One, the Queen agreed with Neil, and she’d let him keep looking for Lane, and for Rose.
Two, the Queen was going to be seriously cheesed.
“Cheesed!” Neil said as he tossed the phone back to the guard.
Neil ran back to Larry and Isabella, waving them forward toward a row of black cabs.
“Where you headed?” the cabbie asked.
“We’re going shopping for cheese,” Neil said.
* * *
Larry, Neil, and Isabella hid in the alleyway across from the Wensleydale’s cheese shop. The windows were dark. It appeared to be closed, but Neil suspected there was at least one person inside: Rose.
“Tell me again why we are shopping for cheese?” Larry whispered.
“I already knew why I smelled cheese on Reggie.”
“You smudged it all over his face,” Isabella said.
Neil nodded. “But when the twins attacked us on the way to the college, I also smelled cheese on Ronnie. It didn’t strike me at the time—”
“Although Reggie did.” Larry chuckled.
“Ha-ha. I’d never met Ronnie before. But I smelled cheese on both their clothes, and not just the one I’d smudged all over him, but even some Camembert and Gouda.”
“Gouda thing you have such a gooda nose.” Larry smiled.
Isabella gave him a jab in the ribs.
“Go on, Neil,” Isabella said.
“Well, the cheese had a pretty specific aroma, and I knew I’d smelled it before. It was from this shop.”
“You think it was more than a coincidence that you were knocked out here.”
“I’d assumed Reggie had followed me to the cheese shop, but maybe he was already there. Then, when I walked in, he recognized me as Rose’s friend and attacked.”
“They wanted you to take the message to her,” Isabella said.
“Even worse. I think this is where they have their headquarters. I also bet if we look at the cheese they gave me as a ‘gift’—the one Jones put in the van’s fridge—we’ll find a homing device. How could I have been so stupid?”
“It comes naturally to the younger Flambés,” Larry joked.
“So you think they have Rose hidden inside?” Isabella said.
Neil nodded. “As Rose would say, it’s a good working theory.”
Isabella looked at her watch. “The brothers must have discovered that they’ve been duped by now. If Rose was in danger before, she is in mortal danger now. I wish Jones were here.” She sighed.
“Call him again before we try to break in,” Neil suggested.
She pulled out her cell phone and dialed, but there was no response. They’d tried Jones a few times, with no answer. They had checked the news on Larry’s phone on the way to the shop, and there had been reports of an attack at the College of Arms, but police said no one had been found inside.
“So everyone we need to either find or talk to is, as Nakamura would say, ‘at large,’ ” Neil said.
“Actually, Jones is just large,” Larry joked.
Isabella responded by jabbing him in the ribs again.
“Not so Havarti!” he said.
“Shhh!” Neil said. “I think I see a shadow in the doorway.”
They watched as the door opened a crack and a young woman poked her head outside, taking a look down both sides of the street.
“Brie,” Neil said.
“Penny!” Larry said, at exactly the same time.
They stared at each other with absolute confusion.
“That’s Penny Lane?” Neil asked, incredulous.
“Yeah!”
“But Lord Lane said she was on some backwoods field trip.”
“Well, I’ve only met her a couple of times, but that’s her. Maybe she just got back. Did you notice the tattoo of the Queen she has on her shoulder?”
Isabella raised an eyebrow and glared at Neil.
“No!” he said quickly. “We talked about cheese!”
Brie/Penny went back inside and closed the door.
“Why would Lane’s daughter be working with the Crayfish?” Isabella asked.
Larry stood up. “Let’s go and ask her!”
Before Neil could say anything, Larry had marched across the street and begun to knock loudly on the door of the cheese shop.
Neil and Isabella hurried to catch up. They stood with their backs against the wall, keeping an eye on the street.
There was no answer. Larry tried turning the handle, but it didn’t budge. He got down on his hands and knees and ran his fingers around the trim. “This is a solid door. Metal braces, and I’ll bet multiple locks. I can’t pick our way in.”
All of a sudden, Neil caught a faint odor of cheese on the breeze. It wasn’t ripe cheese, ready to be eaten or sold. This was cheese that was being left to ripen in a cool, dark place. Gourmet cheese.
“There’s a cheese cellar,” he said. “Incredible. This might be the Crayfish hideout, but it’s also a real cheese shop.”
“So?” Larry asked.
But Isabella and Neil were off, looking for the source of the smell, Neil with his nose high in the air.
They sidled along to the alleyway on the far side of the shop and peeked around the corner.
Neil jerked his head back. A woman on a motorbike was speeding toward them. She flew out of the alleyway. “Penny!” Neil said, catching a glimpse of her face. “Hurry! She must have come out of a back door.” He headed to the rear side of the building.
Larry quickly sprinted ahead. “Which means there’s another way inside for three intrepid sleuths!”
Neil followed his nose around the back of the cheese shop. He stopped. He expected to see a loading dock, or possibly a large door or something, anything. Instead they found themselves staring at a solid wall.
“There has to be a door,” Neil said, running his fingers along the seams between the bricks.
“Don’t touch them, you bonehead. Sniff them,” Larry said.
Neil stuck his nose against the bricks. He could definitely smell ripening cheese. Where was it coming from? He sniffed along the bricks and down the length of the wall. Finally he smelled a faint breeze from a barely perceptible crack in the bricks.
“Larry, can you pick your way in here?”
Larry rushed over, tripped, and then fell against one of the garbage cans, knocking it into the wall. It dislodged a brick. There was a crack, and a portion of the wall slid back and then to the side.
“Apparently, the answer is ‘yes I can,’ ” Larry said, standing up and brushing himself off. They rushed inside.
They were standing on an oil-stained concrete pad, big enough to fit a couple of large cars. On the right was the back door to the cheese shop. Isabella pointed to the numerous locks. “I guess they don’t want anybody getting into this part of the building by accident.”
Larry was examining the inside wall. “You two go check out the cellar. I’ll figure out how to close this baby.”
To their left, a set of stairs led down to the basement. Neil and Isabella rushed down the steps, where another door was locked. It was solid oak.
Neil could smell the cheese coming from the other side mixed with other smells, including rose-scented perfume. “There are no keys here,” Isabella said, scanning the wall for a hook or chain.
“Larry! Is there anything up there we can use to knock down a door?”
Larry ran downstairs holding what appeared to be a rusty old fire ax. “This is for Rose!” he said, immediately smashing at the door again and again.
Neil looked nervously up the stairs, expecting to see Reggie or Ronnie, or Brie, bearing down on them.
Finally Larry was able to smash a hole through the door near the lock. “Now, on the count of three, we all kick. One, two, three!”
Neil, Larry, and Isabella kicked the door, which creaked on its hinges and swung heavily open.
They rushed inside.
There, lying on the cold floor, and not moving, was Rose Patil.
“We’re too late!” Isabella said.