Are We Being Followed?

A soft drizzle was falling when we arrived in Venice. I carried our two backpacks and the now-empty food basket onto the station platform. The station was a very grand old building. Everything seemed to be made of marble. All around us, I saw people gesturing passionately as they conversed in Italian.

I felt that same excited feeling I’d had that first morning in the Grand Bazaar: the thrill of discovering a new place.

I scurried after William, who was making a beeline for the ticket office.

“What now?” I asked.

“I want you to buy a ticket to Paris on the next express train,” he said. William didn’t need a ticket since dogs travel free on public transport in Europe, without any fuss made about them.

“Why are we rushing off again? We’ve just arrived here and I want to see some of the city,” I whined.

“It is not safe here, Alex.” William glanced ner­vously over his left shoulder, looking back at the train from which we had just disembarked.

“What are you talking about?” I asked. I was beginning to worry that my spaniel was becoming completely paranoid.

“Are you blind?” William asked. “Didn’t you spot one of Brumbum’s guys in our carriage?”

“Oh, please, William,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You’re crazy!”

“Really? So you didn’t notice that little old lady in the straw hat with the fake flowers who kept an eye on us for the entire journey?”

I gasped in disbelief. William was certainly losing it. “That old lady slept peacefully the whole time! She’s as much a crook as my own grandma!”

“Well, now that you mention it, I do have my suspicions about that grandmother of yours. She may be less innocent than you think.”

But before we could get into a serious argument his whiskers bristled. “Quick! Hide behind this billboard!” he commanded.

I did as he said and dived behind the board that displayed an advertisement for ice cream. Carefully, I peeped round its edge. William was right! The little old lady with the flowery hat was standing just a few metres away, scouring the platform with her beady, black eyes. She seemed to be looking for someone. She straightened and took off her glasses, as if to see better.

“Little old lady, my paw!” snorted William in disgust. “That happens to be Scurvy Scabscratch, one of Europe’s most cunning thugs. He’s a master of disguise. But he has a weakness for garlic sandwiches – you can smell him a mile off. Do you realise now what that funny smell was on the train? Garlic!”

I felt a chill creep down my spine. William had been right all along. That was no ordinary old lady.

“Don’t move!” he growled. “I don’t want him to see us.”

Scurvy Whatsisname was pacing along the platform in his high heels. He jumped to look through the windows of our train, probably trying to spot us. Suddenly he came to a decision, and he stalked right past us in the direction of the ticket office. As he passed I got a whiff of his foul breath. Garlic, without a doubt. We overheard the “old lady” ask the attendant in a gruff voice whether a young boy with an ugly, fat, spotted spaniel had recently bought a ticket. The girl behind the counter was so shocked by the fake grandma’s deep, manly voice that she totally forgot she’d seen us.

Thank goodness!

Moody and frustrated, the scoundrel swung round and, forgetting he was wearing heels, he twisted his ankle. He swore loudly, providing me with some colourful new vocabulary that I carefully stowed away in my memory for possible later use.

“Okay,” William whispered as soon as the villain disappeared around a corner. “Now’s our chance. Let’s go.”

We slipped out of the station by a side exit and piled into a waiting taxi.

“To the Grand Canal,” William told the driver. Luckily the man assumed it was me who had spoken, or he might have crashed his car in surprise.