Master Crook’s Crime Academy: Burglary for Beginners and Robbery for Rascals by Terry Deary

Author:Terry Deary [Deary, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic
Published: 2009-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 1

CARRIAGE AND COURT

Wildpool Moor – 16th February 1797

The wind blew wildly across the moor and a young man shivered as he huddled in the bare bushes. His coat was thin and his boots more holey than a priest.

He wore a cloak and thought it made him look like the famous Dick Turpin. In fact the cloak was a grey blanket that he’d tied with a ribbon – it made him look like a scarecrow.

Cold mud seeped through the sole of his right boot. “I’m going to buy some new boots when I’ve done this robbery,” he promised himself. It cheered him up. His pinched face suddenly glowed with joy. “And socks!” he moaned. “I’ve always wanted a pair of socks. Oooooh! And stockings for my mum too. And a wig…3

… all the best highwaymen have a wig with a black hat with three corners. My name will bring terror to the roads round Wildpool, just as Dick Turpin’s did in the south.”

But his name would bring only laughter to the people of Wildpool. For his name wasn’t Dick Turpin. It was Rick Turnip. He was almost the last of a long line of Turnips. Their roots went back into the mists of time.4

Fifty years before, Tom Turnip had been a terror. The Turnip families still had his picture on the walls of their cottages. They were proud of him.

He was a legend in the Turnip family. “Tom Turnip. The man they couldn’t capture!”

That wasn’t quite true. He was captured when he tried to escape from a tavern with a cheese sandwich. A cheese sandwich that he hadn’t paid for.

The law officer found our sandwich-stealing Tom hiding in a ditch; he put irons around his wrist and chained him to the village pump while he went to fetch the magistrate.

When the officer returned Tom Turnip’s arm was still fastened to the pump … but Tom wasn’t fastened to the arm. It was his false arm and he simply unfastened it and ran off.

Tom met his doom when he tried to cross the river on some slippery stepping stones and fell in. It’s hard to swim with just one arm…5

…his body was washed out to sea and never seen again.

The Turnip family believed their Tom had escaped to America where he made a living robbing stagecoaches. That thought made them very happy.

The law officer handed the wooden arm back to the owner of the second-hand shop, so the shop-owner was happy too.

The Turnips said, “Tom was a dangerous outlaw.”

The law officer said, “No, he was ’armless.”

THIS was the man that Rick Turnip has grown up hearing stories about. And stories are dangerous things. Rick wanted to BE Tom Turnip – highwayman.6

One night, in the Black Sheep Inn, he overheard the Twitch Family gang plotting an evil plot. “Tomorrow,” they plotted, “Lord Fumble leaves Fumble Hall for his country house … Wishington Country Manor.”

“So?”

“So whenever he goes from house to house he takes the Fumble Family Fortune with him on his coach.”

“So?”

“So,

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