I was fast asleep by the time we arrived in Amsterdam. William shook me awake as we entered the city. We thanked the kindly Monsieur Poivre for the lift and headed off through the streets of Amsterdam.
I liked the place immediately. Like Venice, it was full of canals, but here there were no gondolas. Instead I spotted rows of houseboats lining the sides of the waterways. The buildings were high and narrow, with quaint gables painted in a variety of soft colours. Bright flowers were spilling from window boxes, and the cobbled streets were filled with people on bicycles.
We bought a street map at a news stand and sat down on the edge of a canal to study it. “William, I don’t understand. You said Carl worked at a tulip farm. We passed loads of them on our way here. What is Mr Cloghopper doing in the city?”
“It’s a very sad story,” sighed William. “Old Cloghopper did not take losing his tulip bulbs very well. He got depressed, I think, and, well, a bit too fond of the gin they make here. They call it jenever. Apparently Carl drank bottles of the stuff. He could not keep his business together and he lost it all.”
“Anyway, my French connection, Gustav Pamplemousse, managed to track Carl to a boarding house here in Amsterdam.”
William pointed at the map with a furry paw. “There it is: Boom Street, number 46.”
On the way we stopped at a small café for a couple of ham sandwiches, and washed it down with hot chocolate. I was enjoying the mild summer sunshine as I watched some small birds peck crumbs from the cobblestones around our table.
A display of traditional Dutch cheese in the window of the café attracted my attention and we decided to try some.
Delicious!
Twenty minutes later we were standing in front of the boarding house where Carl lived. It was painted light blue with a bright red door. The building had a tall gable that looked a little lopsided, and there were red geraniums growing in planter boxes on the window sill.
William glanced around, checking the street and the canal behind us. “Relax, no one is following us,” I tried to reassure him. But his ears remained pricked, and he kept his tail in the alert position.
I knocked, and I could hear someone shuffling inside. A little old lady opened the door and greeted us with a friendly smile.
“We are looking for Carl Cloghopper,” I explained. “Is he here?”
She shook her head sadly. “Mr Cloghopper? Ah, yes. Oh dear. Oh no. Deary me, poor Mr Cloghopper,” she muttered. I thought she would never get to the point. Finally she said, “He used to live here, yes, but now he’s gone.”
It took a while to get the whole story out of her. It seemed that Carl had stayed there for about a week some months before. Then one day he simply vanished, leaving all his belongings behind. She had packed them into a trunk in case he ever came back looking for them, but he never did. Since that day there had been no sign of him. The woman finished the story and bid us farewell abruptly, shutting the door in our faces.
We were left standing in the middle of the street, with no further lead to follow.
“What do we do now?” I asked William. But before I could get an answer, a powerful pair of hands gripped me from behind, pinning my arms to my body.
“Got you!” said a deep voice. From the corner of my eye I saw someone pick William up by the scruff of his neck. The next moment we were bundled into the back of a black car with darkly tinted windows.
We were being kidnapped!