HANNAH FACED A CONUNDRUM in four parts.
1. SHE NEEDED TO GO TO THE CIRCUS.
2. SHE WOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO GO ON HER OWN, SO SHE NEEDED AN ADULT.
3. IN ORDER TO COMPLETE HER PLAN, SHE NEEDED AN ADULT WHO WOULDN’T NOTICE IF SHE SLIPPED AWAY DURING THE SHOW.
4. UNFORTUNATELY, NOBODY IN HER IMMEDIATE FAMILY WAS BLIND.
Tricky. But as you will remember, for Hannah nothing was impossible. And in this case, she quickly realised that her problem had one very simple solution: Granny.
Granny loved outings, particularly outings that gave you an excuse to buy sweets, so the circus was perfect. More important than the fact that Granny liked circuses (and that Hannah liked Granny) was a particular habit of Granny’s, which on this occasion would come in extremely useful. If you took Granny anywhere and the lights dimmed, Granny fell asleep. Even if you took her nowhere and just dimmed the lights in the sitting room, Granny still fell asleep.
In bed, the lights trick didn’t work. Granny, oddly enough, was a terrible insomniac. But put her in a chair, more or less anywhere, and if it got even slightly dark, Granny was guaranteed to doze off.
It was only a short walk to Granny’s house, and when Hannah got there, she could hear the TV blaring through the front windows. Hannah pressed the bell hard, partly because Granny’s hearing wasn’t the best, partly because she knew she might well be asleep. After several long presses, and a few knocks on the window, Granny eventually came to the door.
‘Oh, Hannah, love! It’s you!’
‘It is,’ said Hannah, giving her a hug.
‘I dozed off!’ said Granny, who was surprised every time it happened. Granny often seemed to think she was twenty-five, as if the last fifty years hadn’t really happened. ‘Come in come in come in,’ said Granny. ‘I’ve got a bag of mint imperials that’s just begging to be finished.’
Hannah came in and politely accepted a mint imperial, even though she thought they tasted like lumps of baked toothpaste.
‘I can’t stay long,’ said Hannah, ‘but I’ve got a present for you. A ticket to the circus. We can go together.’
‘Oooh!’ said Granny. ‘How wonderful! Candy floss!’
‘I have to dash. I’ll come back and get you after tea.’
‘Lovely.’
Then Hannah ran home, to make preparations for the evening’s escapade.
Meanwhile, the circus troupe had gathered round in the Big Top to talk through Armitage’s arrangements. The running order for the show was usually the same, but for every performance the plan was different.
Why?
Because putting on the show was only half the job.
Or rather, the show the audience saw was only half the operation. It was what they didn’t see that made Armitage Shank his money. And the only thing Armitage loved more than showing off was money. Money money money, sweeter than honey, cuter than a bunny, funnier than funny. He just looooooooooooooved money. He’d been like that since he was a child. When he was only six, his pet dog had a litter of puppies, which Armitage had named Cash, Wonga, Dough, Loot, Dosh, Moolah, Spondoolicks and Interest. After a couple of weeks, he sold them.
That afternoon, Armitage had done what he always did when the circus arrived in a new place. After the parade, after selling tickets and signing people up for the raffle, Armitage took a little tour of the town with a map in one hand and the list of raffle addresses in the other. Where the address looked like a large, or well furnished, or generally prosperous-seeming house, Armitage marked his map with a red cross.20
As Armitage went through the running order with his cast, everyone looked carefully at the map he handed out, which had a blue circle for the Big Top in the middle, and in the nearby streets a cluster of red crosses. Each performer was assigned a house, and a gap of thirty minutes off-stage time when it was their job to nip out, find the house (which of course would be empty, because the occupants were at the circus), and rob it.
Hank and Frank were assigned 23 Privet Place; Maurice and Irrrrena were given the cat-burglary job on the penthouse apartment in Houghton Mansions; Jesse was in charge of the bungalow on Scunge Crescent; and the top team, Armitage and Fingers O’Boyle, would be working together to do over the Post Office, using the troupe’s signature trick – a routine so outrageously, audaciously, courageously mendacious that you could almost, but not quite, describe it as impossible.
Every year, every car in the country goes to a garage to be serviced. A mechanic lifts the bonnet, rummages around in the engine, checks everything is OK, then gives you a certificate to carry on driving for another year without worrying about what is making the car go. I am now going to lift the bonnet of this book for a moment, and point something out that you may or may not have noticed, depending on whether you are a bonnet-lifting kind of person. Whoever you are, you cannot fail to have realised that Hannah and Armitage were, essentially, opposites.
Hannah, you will recall, took questions of right and wrong very seriously. Armitage, by contrast, liked to shove right and wrong into a liquidiser, make soup out of them, then tip the whole lot into his gob without giving two hoots, or even one hoot, about which was which.
Hannah was kind; Armitage was mean.
Hannah was modest; Armitage was arrogant.
Hannah was generous; Armitage was greedy.
Hannah liked apples; Armitage liked pears.
But when it came to this one word – impossible – they were the same. For both of them ‘impossible’ was just a challenge. They couldn’t hear those four syllables without trying to figure out a plan for how to get rid of the ‘im’.
This connection may just be a coincidence. On the other hand, it may not be. But going back to that first hand again, it might be. Or not.
That’s all. Bonnet down. Off you go.