The Boy Who Cried Fish by A. F. Harrold

said at the end of the previous chapter. ‘I’m thinking that won’t be needed.’ (He meant searching the boys.)
    ‘But we caught them . . .’
    ‘Ah, yes, but I don’t think these are our thieves. I’ve listened to their yarn, and it’s just been a misunderstanding. They thought we were the thundering thieves.’
    ‘But the robberies?’
    ‘Someone else. You’re still on the case, Mrs Darling. The game is still afoot.’
    ‘Admiral Spratt-Haddock,’ Fizz said, raising his hand in the air.
    ‘Aye, lad?’
    ‘We saw someone.’
    The two boys explained to the Admiral and his guard what it was they’d seen: the masked man and his wriggling coat.
    ‘Where was that?’ Spratt-Haddock asked.
    ‘In the green room,’ Mrs Darling said.
    Fizz nodded in agreement.
    ‘You’ve got to come look,’ she said. ‘See what he’s taken this time.’
     
    Admiral Spratt-Haddock tapped on the glass with his hook and peered into the water.
    ‘Gone,’ he whispered.
    There were several empty tanks in the corridor. The one he was stood in front of now had a sign by its side that read GREEN-GILLED MUDSHARK. The tank to the side of that, which he’d looked in first and for a long time, was labelled LESSER GREEN-FOOTED CORAL OCTOPUS. Wystan and Fizz remembered it looking exactly as empty as it did now when they’d seen it that morning and Dr Surprise had been very impressed by its alleged contents, but the Admiral assured them it was really empty now and he seemed upset by it.
    ‘But how did he steal it?’ Fizz asked, pointing at the mudshark tank. The glass was unbroken. Unless the thief had magic powers, he couldn’t have just reached into the water and taken the fish.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘I’ve not been able to work it out. Nothing’s ever broken, the doors are all still locked. It’s a mystery.’
    Fizz had spent long enough in the circus, and especially with Dr Surprise, to know that when things looked impossible, there was usually a perfectly sensible explanation behind them. It had to be the same here.
    He looked in the empty tank. He tapped on the glass. He looked at the damp floor where the burglar had been stood when they’d first seen him, wrestling something into the inside pocket of his coat, presumably this mudshark. He looked at all these things in just the way a detective in a book would, but none of them gave him a clue. None of them leapt out at him shouting, ‘Aha! It’s me!’
     

     
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘I’m stumped.’
    ‘You’re Stump,’ corrected Wystan.
    Fizz raised his eyes to the ceiling at the terrible joke, and saw something that made him think, ‘Aha!’ after all.
    ‘Look at that,’ he said, pointing up.
    It was a ceiling tile, like the ones in Mrs Darling’s office, and it was slightly askew.
    ‘We surprised him, like you surprised us,’ he said to the security guard. ‘He didn’t have time to put it back straight.’
    ‘But?’ she said, taking her hat off and running a hand through her short hair.
    ‘I bet there’s no lid on the tank, is there?’
    ‘No,’ said the Admiral. ‘I likes to give them fishes of mine a dash of the fresh air, like they’d have out at sea.’
    ‘Well, then,’ said Fizz. ‘He must’ve had a bendy net or something and poked it up and over the side, through the hole in the ceiling and down into the tank. Then he could watch through the glass as he scooped his fish up.’
    ‘I reckons you’re right, lad! But that don’t get us no closer to running the roach rustler to ground.’
    ‘Hang on,’ Wystan said, stroking his beard (which is how you can tell a person with a beard has been thinking about something). ‘In the office there was a telly screen.’
    ‘Yes,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘It’s linked to all the security cameras.’
    ‘So how come you’ve not caught the burglar yet?’
    ‘He’s quick,’ she said, glumly. ‘He’s crafty. He covers the cameras up. Look over