Foxy: Rivalry at Summer Camp (10 page)

“Um, I’m not sure yet,” Holly said elusively. “I’m looking forward to seeing the ponies at Hilltop again, though.”

She rushed off ahead, and the Pony Detectives hung back to talk.

“I wish we were going into the village first,” Charlie said quietly. “If we don’t get hold of a copy of
Pony Mad
, how are we supposed to even recognise Foxy?”

“We’ll just have to memorise all the chestnuts at Hilltop,” Rosie suggested. “Then we can compare them once we’ve bought a copy.”

“We’d better get in there quick, though,” Alice said. “Watty and her gang were all after copies too, remember?”

They hung up their headcollars, grabbed their damp riding hats and rushed to gather by the gates to walk to Hilltop Riding School. The blue team’s instructor, Beth, was staying behind, but as they did a head count, they realised that one of the riders was missing, too.

“It’s Amber,” Holly said, looking round.

“We’ll go and see where she is,” Alice volunteered, dragging Rosie with her. They raced back through the stables, calling out to Skylark as he whickered to them, and out again to the tents. They flew through the tent door to find Amber sitting alone on her sleeping bag, her mobile phone next to her. She hastily wiped her eyes with the back of her hand before she looked up.

“I just called Mum,” she said, trying to smile like nothing was wrong. “She didn’t answer, though. She must be busy with Lily somewhere.”

Alice felt bad for her. “Everyone’s waiting
by the gate for you,” she said. “We all wondered where you were.”

“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” Amber explained, “so I thought I’d stay behind. I might pop back and check on how Aunt Becca’s doing at home instead, if Beth says that’s okay.”

Rosie was about to leave with Alice, when she suddenly thought of something. “If you do go home,” she said, “could you find a photo of Foxy for us to see?”

Irritation flashed across Amber’s face, just for a second. “If I remember,” she muttered, before looking back down at her phone and lying back on her bed.

“This is CRAZY!” Watty shrieked. She was kneeling on top of Monty, a chunky bay horse who was being lunged at walk in the outdoor school. She tightly gripped the surcingle, which
circled his girth with a loop by his withers, until her knuckles turned white. “I think I’m going to fall off!”

“Try concentrating, Sarah,” Freddie called out from centre of the ring, smiling as Watty let out another yelp and almost slid off the pad on Monty’s back. The rest of the camp was watching from the side of the ring, waiting excitedly for their turn and giggling at Watty’s antics.

Holly watched for a bit, then sneaked off to say hello to some of the ponies. Mia watched as Holly leaned over the first stable door and gave a skewbald pony some fuss. Mia nudged her friends. “If we tag along with Holly,” she whispered, “it gives us the perfect excuse to look round. And she’ll know if any of the ponies are new.”

Holly smiled when she saw them walking over.

“This is Patches, the very first pony I sat on,” she said. The skewbald closed his eyes as Holly rubbed his ear.

“Do you know all the ponies here?” Alice asked, looking at the small, neat yard.

Holly nodded. “I’ll show you round if you like,” she said happily as she stepped to the next stable. “This is Bilbo – he’s really naughty.”

The four girls walked round the yard with Holly. There were a couple of chestnut ponies, but they both looked ancient and Holly said they’d been at the yard for ages. Finally they reached the last stable and any hope of finding Foxy at Hilltop disappeared at once.

“And this is Jester,” Holly said, letting herself into the chunky dun pony’s stable. She gave him an affectionate hug as he frisked her pockets and nudged her. “I always used to ride him – every Sunday since last summer.”

“Is he your favourite?” Rosie asked.

Holly hesitated. “Um, kind of. At least, he was until this week. He taught me to canter and to jump, and he’s really sweet. But now he’s my joint favourite with Skylark.”

At that moment Freddie’s mum walked out of the office and joined them in the yard.

“Aha, did I hear Skylark’s name?” she asked Holly, smiling at the girls. “How are you getting along with him, Holly?”

“I love him to pieces,” Holly confessed, going slightly pink. “I’d have had fun on any pony, but Skylark’s just so magical. He’s what Grammy would call my once-in-a-lifetime pony, even though it’s only for one week.”

“I bet she’d love him too, and I’m so pleased you’ve clicked,” Freddie’s mum said, squeezing Holly’s shoulder. “Freddie found Skylark for the school earlier this year. I’m still not convinced he’s good riding-school material, but we’ll just have to wait and see what the future holds for him.”

Alice noticed Holly’s crestfallen look, while Freddie’s mum turned to the Pony Detectives. “And I hope you girls are getting a lot out of Freddie’s teaching too?”

Rosie nodded. “He’s been ace, especially considering that he’d rather have been at Burghley this week!”

“Whoever told you that?” Freddie’s mum asked, laughing off the suggestion. Mia rolled her eyes at Rosie’s lack of tact.

“Oh, I… I can’t remember,” Rosie mumbled.

“Well, they got it wrong,” Freddie’s mum smiled breezily. “It was Freddie’s choice to stay for camp. He could have gone to Burghley, but he’s passionate about teaching. He’s been helping Georgie Belle, his girlfriend, with her training all summer, too.”

Charlie had a sudden thought. “Does she keep her horses nearby, then?” she asked. “Has she got her own yard?”

“Oh, goodness, no. She’s only got the one top horse at the moment,” Freddie’s mum explained. “She lives nearby, but she doesn’t have her own land to keep her horse on, so she’s always stabled him here. That’s how she met Freddie.
Anyway, you better get back to your vaulting. Unless there was anything else you’d like to see?”

“Holly was just showing us your ponies,” Mia said. “Have we seen them all?”

“This is it,” Freddie’s mum said, looking round. “It’s not a big yard, but it suits us.”

The girls thanked her and walked back to the school in time to see one of the boys stand up on Monty’s back. He wobbled, his arms circling, but he managed to stay up without holding onto the surcingle for a whole turn of the school before sliding off and landing on his feet to a round of applause. As Holly rejoined the group by the side of the school waiting for their turn, Charlie turned to her three friends with a disappointed sigh.

“Is anyone else thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.

Mia nodded. “If Foxy isn’t anywhere at Dovecote Hall,” she said quietly, “and he isn’t
being hidden here, then it can’t have been Freddie that took Foxy, could it?”

“What about the phone call to Georgie, though?” Alice reminded Mia. “That was pretty suspicious.”

“True,” Mia agreed, “but I don’t think that’s enough on its own. Do you?”

Charlie shook her head. “I guess you’re right.”

“So that leaves us right back at square one,” Rosie said, slumping against the fence.

“And we’re running out of time,” Alice added. “Today’s Wednesday. We’ve only got a few days left at camp to find Foxy.”

“Well, let’s wait till we’ve got a copy of
Pony Mad
,” Mia said, “and see if that gives us any inspiration.”

“What do you mean all the copies have gone?” Rosie asked the man behind the counter.

“We sold the last two copies to someone about an hour ago,” he snapped. The village shop was brimming with noisy campers who were choosing treats for midnight feasts. The man was on his own, and a redness was creeping up his neck as he tried to serve everyone bundling up to the counter with their mixtures of sweets and handfuls of coins.

“But we’ve all been at Hillside,” Mia frowned. “And why would someone buy two copies of the same magazine?”

“Do you remember what that person looked like?” Charlie called over, but the harassed shopkeeper had moved on from their conversation to serve the next camper.

The girls retreated from the bustle of the shop, and stood on the pavement outside in the hot sunshine.

“Great,” Rosie said. “Our chief suspect suddenly seems innocent and we still haven’t got hold of a copy of
Pony Mad
. So what now?”

“All we can do when we get back to camp,” Charlie said, “is go over what we’ve got so far.”

Mia pocketed the mints she’d bought for Wish, and felt something else in there. She pulled it out. It was the devil’s claw sachet. With everything else that had been going on, the Pony Detectives hadn’t even given this clue a second thought. Mia turned the sachet over in her hand. Suddenly the shop door pinged open behind her and the rest of the camp spilled out noisily onto the pavement.

As Mia quickly slipped the sachet back into her pocket, she wondered again why a rider would keep the devil’s claw a secret.
It couldn’t be linked to Foxy’s disappearance,
she thought to herself.
Could it…?

T
HE
four girls headed straight to the paddocks to check on their ponies. In the next field, they saw Amber sitting near Copper, deep in thought.

“Are you feeling better?” Rosie called over.

Amber nodded. “Thanks for asking,” she smiled back, looking much happier than when they’d left her at lunchtime. “I popped home to see Aunt Becca and helped with the animals.”

“Any news on Foxy?” Rosie asked.

Amber shook her head. “Sorry I snapped earlier about the photo, Rosie. I wasn’t feeling myself.”

Their conversation was interrupted as Watty, closely followed by the rest of the blue team,
ran noisily into the paddock, keen to tell Amber what she’d missed out on. Amber sighed.

“I’ll have to catch up with you later,” she said.

The Pony Detectives left Amber to it with a sympathetic shrug, knowing she’d probably be stuck with the blue team for ages. They caught a glimpse of Holly in the stables, chatting with Destiny, then they hurried inside their tent and went into a huddle.

Rosie chomped noisily on a cereal bar as Mia flipped her notebook open. She tapped the book with her pen, pointing to a couple of clues that she’d written down earlier in the week.

“Before we start, do we need a lookout?” Charlie asked.

“I can stay by the door,” Alice offered. She got into position, then Mia began.

“Okay, so we all agree that finding
Pony Mad
in the muck heap, with part of the Lily Simpson article missing, suggests someone at camp
knows something about Foxy’s disappearance, right?”

“Right,” the others nodded.

“At first everything pointed to Freddie,” Mia continued, “but now it seems seriously unlikely that he’s the culprit.”

“So who does that leave us with?” Alice asked, chewing her lip. The Pony Detectives sat quietly for a moment, thinking hard.

“What about Holly?” Rosie asked, tentatively. The others looked at her, waiting for her to continue. “I mean, some of the things she’s done don’t quite add up – like her going missing on Sunday. She wasn’t in the tent or the stables when she said she was.”

“And she returned from wherever she’d been with chestnut hairs on her,” Charlie added.

Mia nodded, her thick ponytail falling over her shoulder as she started to make notes.

“And Holly knew where my
Pony Mad
was,” Rosie said. “She was late coming to our
welcome talk on that first day – she could have taken it then!”

Alice lit up, forgetting to listen at the tent door as she thought of more clues. “And do you remember on that first hack Holly said she knew all the paths that led from Chestnut Grove.”

“So?” Charlie frowned.

“So, she knows exactly where Chestnut Grove is, for a start,” Alice explained.

“Maybe she knows all the paths,” Rosie suggested, “because she’s been hanging around there loads?”

Mia wrote the clues down, but didn’t look convinced. “This does all look a bit odd, but it doesn’t add up. Holly is Lily’s biggest fan,” she frowned. “There is no reason why she would want to steal Foxy.”

The others sighed, knowing Mia was right – there was no reason.

Charlie read through the clues once more.
“Well, look,” she said, “we haven’t got anything else to go on, so maybe we should keep a closer eye on her for the next couple of days.”

Suddenly they heard a tiny sneeze outside the tent. Charlie held up her hand and the Pony Detectives fell silent. They heard a light patter of footsteps moving away from them. Alice scrambled to the door and shoved her head through the flap. But when she looked out, there were lots of riders milling about. It was impossible to tell who, among them all, might have been listening.

Once the ponies had fed and the haynets were hung up, everyone headed over to where the instructors were lighting a campfire, ready to cook sausages and veggie burgers to go with the mountain of salad that was waiting to one side.

As the light started to fade, the whole camp
sat around the fire on their sleeping bags and pillows. The flames and smoke snaked up into the inky sky, spitting and crackling. The instructors rubbed butter on the outside of potatoes, wrapped them in foil, then poked them into the ashes around the base of the campfire.

Melissa and Beth organised everyone into their teams. They handed out a pencil and sheet of paper with numbers down the side to each team. Holly went back to the tent to fetch her purple ink pen and notebook, so they could scribble notes if they needed to.

“Okay, guys, listen up!” Melissa called out over everyone’s chatter. “It’s time to start the quiz, so pens at the ready! Some of the questions will link into the stuff you’ve been taught in the last few days. Now we’ll find out who’s been listening!”

As everyone groaned jokingly, Freddie called out the first question.

“At shows, what are the colours of the
first- to sixth-place rosettes?”

“Dancer wouldn’t know what a first-place rosette looked like!” Rosie joked and Alice giggled.

As the other teams discussed the answer in urgent, hushed whispers, Mia neatly wrote down the purple team’s answer. Silence fell again, then the next question was asked.

“What are the principles of feeding?”

“For us or the ponies?” Rosie called out.

Mia rolled her eyes, as Charlie joined in the giggling with Alice. As Amber sat, racking her brains, Holly flipped open her notebook and quickly scribbled a few points down. She showed them to Mia who copied them silently from the purple-tinted paper.

“Next question,” Beth said. “This is a picture round.”

Melissa and Beth handed round pieces of paper with pictures of four different sets of horses’ teeth drawn on each.

“You need to match each of those pictures with the ages I call out,” Lara said, as the smell of burgers and sausages cooking began to drift across to where they were sitting. “One of those pictures is of a two-year-old’s teeth, one is of a five-year-old’s, one’s an eight-year-old’s and one’s a sixteen-year-old’s.”

Before the rest of the purple team even got a chance to discuss it, Holly had written an age against each picture.

“Next question!” Melissa called out.

The questions came thick and fast about stable management and riding, including some technical ones about approaches to different cross-country fences, and skin conditions they’d been taught about. But yet again, before the others had even begun to think about the answers, Holly was already scribbling them down.

“There’s no point doing this if you’re going to take over,” Amber muttered grumpily, sitting back on her sleeping bag and feigning disinterest.

Holly flushed pink and looked awkward. She kept quiet for the next question. It was about which essential nutrients a pony needed each day and none of the others knew the answer. Finally Holly bobbed forward and shyly listed them.

“That’s awesome,” Charlie said. “So, official rule – you’re forbidden from being quiet from now on, Holly!”

Amber glared at Charlie. “We don’t know if her answers are right yet, though,” she pointed out.

Charlie frowned but didn’t say anything more.

When they’d finished, the teams all swapped sheets. Freddie read out the answers to a mixture of cheers and groans.

“I don’t believe this!” Emily called out at
the end of the marking. “It must be a fix!”

“What?” Destiny asked, looking over.

“The purple team have got nearly
every single question
right,” Watty said, as Beth began to collect the sheets and some of the teams got up and began to mill around. “They must’ve cheated.”

“We’re just lucky to have an equestrian super-brain on our team, that’s all,” Charlie grinned. “Holly.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she
had
cheated,” Amber said, half under her breath but just loud enough for Holly to hear.

Holly looked upset. She stood up awkwardly, and moved to sit with Destiny and the rest of the red team on the other side of the camp fire.

Charlie tutted. “I don’t understand why you’re picking on Holly all the time,” she said. “I thought you’d be happy that she knew the answers – it helps our team score, after all.”

Amber rolled her eyes. “It isn’t about the
team score,” she said, “or anything to do with the stupid camp competition.”

“Really?” Rosie said, sceptically.

“Oh, forget it,” Amber said, getting up. “You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you, anyway.” With that, she stormed off .

“Do you think we should go after her?” Mia asked.

“Um, can we do that
after
we’ve eaten?” Rosie asked.

The others agreed. They quickly shovelled in some food, then went to look for Amber.

They found her in the stables, sitting in the semi-dark with Copper. As they approached, she fished something out of her pocket and handed it to them.

“There, look at that,” she said. Mia took the envelope that Amber was holding out. “Aunt Becca gave me this today. She said it was hand delivered last Sunday, the day after we started camp.”

The writing on the envelope was in purple ink.

“Lily gets lots of fan mail and we all open it to help her out,” Amber explained as Mia pulled a pale purple sheet with faint ponies down the side from the envelope and unfolded it. “Fans often want a signed photo, or an autograph, that kind of thing. This one stood out because it was written in purple, so I opened it … This is what I found.”

Mia’s heart started to thud as she read it out loud.

“See?” Amber said, prodding the letter. “Everything you need’s right here.”

“Everything we need for what?” Charlie asked, confused, wondering if she’d missed something.

Amber rolled her eyes. “I thought you said
you were detectives. Here, read it again. Look – Holly would do
anything
to have a lesson with Lily, and she’s got something that might be worth a lesson in return. I’m convinced Holly stole Foxy to get a lesson with my sister – if she finds him, Lily will be really grateful, and a lesson would be the least she could do to say thanks. But actually all Holly’s done is wreck Lily’s chances of becoming the youngest ever Burghley winner.
That’s
why I’m off with Holly.”

At that moment they heard Skylark whicker. They all turned to see Holly standing by his stable. She stroked his inquisitive big nose, as she looked over at the girls.