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wasn’t a good idea to shout at Dr Surprise. Not only was he sensitive, but Flopples was very protective. Fizz had lost his temper with the Doctor once, when he was much smaller, and he still heard the rabbit’s fearsome growl in his nightmares. He didn’t want a repeat of that experience.)
    ‘What nonsense, boys,’ the Doctor said. ‘There’s a very special way Fish’s whiskers wrinkle when he sniffs. No other sea lion does it quite the same. The Aquarium’s Pescado was not Fish. Not even close.’
     
    ‘But it’s obvious what’s happened,’ Wystan said when the boys had left the Doctor’s caravan. ‘When Cook threw a ladle at Fish last night and shouted at him and ran him out of the Mess Tent, then he must’ve been so upset that Admiral Spratt-Haddock could easily come along and lure him away.’
    ‘You’re right,’ Fizz said. ‘He looked so upset about being shouted at. All the Admiral had to do was wave a bit of mackerel and smile nicely and he would’ve followed him anywhere.’
    ‘How did he know, though?’ Wystan wondered. ‘I mean that Fish was feeling miserable?’
    ‘Well, maybe he just got lucky, maybe he was over here looking for something else, but ran into Fish, or maybe . . . maybe Cook’s in cahoots with him?’
    ‘Blimey,’ said Wystan, running his fingers through his beard, which was a sign that he was thinking. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Cook would love to get rid of Fish, wouldn’t he? So he upset him on purpose, with the Admiral ready and waiting to be nice to him . . .’
    ‘It was all a plot,’ Fizz concluded, and Wystan agreed.
    And so the boys had dug their way down to the truth of the matter, unearthed the villains, found their friend and worked out the ‘why’ of the crime. Now all they needed to do was bring the dastardly deed to light, rescue their sea lion and set everything to rights.
    Easy.
    In fact they’ll probably do it all in the next chapter. I expect.

Chapter Five
    In which a plan is set in action and in which an Aquarium is visited, again
    I don’t know you. We’ve not met. I don’t know if you’re a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, a sea lion or a shellfish. I can’t possibly know what your life’s like, can I? You might spend lazy sun-filled days on a deckchair sitting on the beach sipping fresh mango juice, humming light-hearted tunes you heard once in a dream, or you might have people looking over your shoulder and breathing down your neck, saying, ‘Do this. Do that. No, not like this. Do it like that. No, not like that. Over here, not there.’
    The life of a boy in a circus isn’t a bad life, but it has few deckchairs in it. It is one where people expect you to do things and to be places at certain times and they get upset if you just go off missing in the middle of the day (unless you’re accompanied by a Doctor). So Fizz had to sit through a whole French lesson with Madame Plume de Matant and then his dad lifted him up (with one hand, naturally) so he could clean the windows of their caravan and then he had to sit in the Mess Tent and eat his tea (cod and chips and crispy seaweed, which was a little annoying, since Tuesdays were normally Fizz’s favourite, caravan pie (which is like cottage pie, but moves about more), but while they were at the seaside it was fish every day).
    While he was eating he saw Captain Fox-Dingle across the tent. He was just as smart as normal, but the pink of his uniform looked a little dimmer. He was moving his dinner round his plate with his fork but without picking any of it up. It looked like Charles hadn’t improved during the day. This wasn’t the way a happy lion-tamer went about eating his dinner.
    Fizz definitely wouldn’t be called upon to do the act tonight.
    On any other day he would’ve been heartbroken to miss out, but his head was still buzzing with Fish and the plan he’d come up with. The job before him, the one he had to do, was to find his friend and free him and return to the