The time was 6 a.m. General Worrier had his second-in-command, Major Worrier, with him, plus a half-dozen of his trusted
‘Because we were so terrified of disappointing you,’ said the general, perching on the dressing table and looking at his notes, ‘we set about organising ourselves into a tiered command structure so orders could be spread quickly and fast. With the thousand worriers divided into two cohorts commanded by five highly strung centurions each in charge of one hundred overwrought neurotics to recheck each others’ work, we had enough worriers to make a huge number of inquiries, filter them for relevance, then pass all pertinent information on to a centralised committee to be flustered and fretted over minutely before being passed on to me.’
‘It sounds super-geeky,’ I said. ‘I love it. Then what?’
‘No one knows when the Princess was switched, but since the impostor couldn’t have made it across the Button Trench due to the number of Trolls in attendance, she must either have flown here or arrived by boat.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘Right. So we sent our field agents off to knock on the doors of freight managers, shipping agents and immigration officials at the docks and Penzance International Airport, to see what we could find out.’
‘Surely no one’s keeping records in a time of war?’
‘These are
He placed a photocopied passenger manifest on the table.
‘She flew in yesterday morning, part of a refugee flight set up for people on the Eat List – they run mercy dashes from Bodmin, a place not yet overrun with Trolls. She came in under her own name: Betty Scrubb, aged sixteen. Nationality: Snoddian.’
He placed another photocopy on the table, this time of her identity card. The likeness to the Princess was uncanny.
‘So what happened then?’
‘Nothing. She got the bus into St Ives, and the trail goes cold.’
‘I really hope there’s more.’
General Worrier grinned broadly.
‘And how. Checking the passenger manifests again, someone named Betty Scrubb flew out of Penzance International Airport just before the nuptials yesterday afternoon. We had a word with the immigration officer and he said she appeared to be “in a bit of daze”.’
‘Drugged?’
‘Most likely. But get this: her travelling partners were four of Sir Matt Grifflon’s personal bodyguards. I ran their IDs and they must have been hand-picked to defend the Princess against rescue: all of them were convicted for extreme violence and murder, and each time pardoned by Sir Matt or his father, Lord Grifflon of Bedwyn.47’
‘What was their onward destination?’
‘The Isles of Scilly,’ he said, ‘about twenty miles west of here. As soon as the aircraft departed, “King” Mathew annexed the entire Isles of Scilly as a no-fly zone, and requisitioned all the castles there for his own use.’
He flicked over the pages of a notebook.
‘After analysing all the potential castles for princess-imprisoning and grading them on suitability, isolation, lofty towers and dampness, we came up with this as the most likely.’
He showed me a postcard of Cromwell Castle on the island of Tresco, a tall, cylindrical stone tower with one entrance, six storeys and a single window high up under the eaves of a pointed roof. It was perfect for imprisoning a princess, which was not surprising, as imprisoning princesses at the top of tall towers was a mini-industry in itself, and there were several purpose-made towers dotted around the country which could be had at a very reasonable weekly rate.
I opened the window and called up to Colin, who was sitting on the roof above my bedroom. He stepped off into a near-silent hover, and came down to see me.
‘Hello,’ he said, scratching himself, ‘this bat survey stuff is actually quite fun. I’ve seen fifty-eight pipistrelles, twelve lesser horseshoe, seventeen long-eared and a Daubenton’s. How did the meeting go last night?’
I told him about Shandar’s plans.
‘Dear oh dear,’ he said, ‘humans are
I explained where we thought the Princess might be imprisoned.
