Hugo Pepper by Paul Stewart

Author:Paul Stewart [Stewart, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49542-6
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2008-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Cressida Claw and her cats befriended Alfie, and together they talked about all the people they hated in Harbour Heights. They had a lot in common. Then one day, Mr Spangle senior sold his sausage shop to Bernard Bumble, the meat-pie magnate, and moved to the Sunny South, and Alfie – who was by now far too old to be a butcher’s boy – was left wondering what to do with the rest of his life.

As luck would have it, it was just then that Cressida Claw discovered that Wilfred McPherson of the Institute of Travellers’ Tales was looking for a new assistant. His old one had apparently disappeared on an intrepid voyage to the Frozen North.

Not long afterwards, a young man in a cheap, ill-fitting suit and slicked-back hair appeared at the Institute and introduced himself as Elliot de Mille, a brilliant young expert in nautical yarns and sea-shanties. Wilfred McPherson had become a recluse after the disappearance of his daughter and son-inlaw and had even lost interest in the institute’s journal, The Firefly Quarterly. The young man seemed keen and came bearing a long list of impeccable qualifications, so without any further ado, the story collector took him on as his assistant on a four-month trial.

Time passed, Wilfred McPherson moved to the Sunny South – according to Elliot de Mille, who became the institute’s new director – and the institute began to change …

Shutters went up at its windows, visiting scholars and interested members of the public were turned away, and its doors – previously open – were locked. In fact nobody was seen to enter or to leave.

Once every four months, delivery boys on butchers’ bicycles, hired from Bernard Bumble, would arrive and load their baskets with bundles of The Firefly Quarterly which were waiting for them in stacks outside the institute. These they’d deliver to the squares and streets of Harbour Heights, where anxious-looking, tight-lipped people would be waiting to read the contents.

Schoolboys who had misbehaved, worried actors wearing false beards and meat-pie magnates with something to hide scoured the contents of The Firefly Quarterly, hoping that their donations were large enough to stop their secrets being revealed. How on earth, they often wondered, had the Quarterly discovered these secrets? Nobody knew, yet issue after issue was full of gossip and tittle-tattle of the worst sort.

More time passed, and most people forgot – as people are liable to do – that the magazine had ever been any different. Most people, that is, except for the residents of Firefly Square.

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