(Vegetables) Chapter Twenty Five: There’s Something Not Quite Right About The Boss…

“The bad news is, Barbra Allen’s escaped,” said Richard. “The good news is that we’ve got her dragons, so she won’t be going far.”

The friends were in the old manor house where Richard had his lab. They weren’t in the lab, instead they were in a cosy room, sort of a cross between a hotel room and a hospital, where Rosa – who had recovered from her faint, had been installed in the bed. She’d been carefully checked by a doctor and pronounced fit and well, though possibly suffering from shock. At that moment, she was sitting up in the bed comfortably.

Felindre and Morwen also had clean bills of health, though in Felindre’s case, she had an interestingly shaped bruise on her foot from where she’d drop-kicked the dragon down the hall.

“I think I speak for everyone here,” said Morwen, “when I ask – how the hell did you wind up tied to an office chair by your boss, Rosa?”

“Don’t look at me like that,” Rosa protested. “I didn’t know she was going to do that! And those dragons caught you by surprise as much as they did me!”

“Start at the beginning,” advised Richard.

Rosa took a deep breath.

“Ok. Somehow Barbra had got it into her head that I possessed mind control powers.”

“You what?!” said Felindre.

“Yeah,” continued Rosa. “That’s what I thought. But she heard me yell at the crowd at the cake fight, and tell them to stop, and everyone did for a minute. So she thought I had some power or something.

“And do you remember, the day after the cake fight, she called me into the office to quiz me about the fight and how I managed to get people to fight over the copies of the paper?”

Morwen nodded.

“And I made a crack about it being the fairy cakes, not me, so she asked me for the recipe?”

Morwen nodded again. She looked at the others and shrugged.

“It seemed an odd request, but when you put it into the context of some of the crazy thing’s Rosa’s had to do for work, it’s downright normal.”

“So, I gave her the recipe,” said Rosa, “and she tries making them and brought them into work to test them out on the staff.”

She giggled. “She’s not much of a cook, obviously. No one touched them. So I think she decided then that I’d told her a pack of lies, and that it was me who had the power after all.”

Rosa took a deep breath. She was starting to look very pale again. Felindre climbed up on the bed next to her, and took her hand.

“Barbra waited until I was just about ready to go home, and called me into her office. As soon as I set foot through the door I got jumped by those horrible dragons of hers, gagged and tied to a chair, before I could even squeak. And then I sat there, for ages, as she waited for everyone to go home and she could interrogate me in peace.”

The mood in the room was very serious. Morwen stepped closer to Richard. He took her hand. Rosa leaned into Felindre for comfort.

“She kept asking the same questions,” said Rosa shakily. “Kept asking who and what I was. Asking how I’d controlled all those people. And all I could tell her was that I didn’t know.

“I was really scared. She was really scaring me. She wasn’t shouting, she was quiet, but that was almost worse. And I couldn’t scream, because there was one of those dragons on me and I just knew it would hurt me if I made any noise. And she kept asking me questions, and I knew that I couldn’t answer, and sooner or later she’d get fed up and she’d hurt me, or do something horrible to me…”

Rosa’s voice dissolved into sobs and Felindre hugged her and shushed her, stroking her hair.

Morwen looked at Richard.

“You’re telling me that she’s still out there somewhere?”

“Yes,” he confirmed. “But you’re safe here.”

Felindre gave him a dubious look. Morwen echoed it.

Richard continued:

“Barbra Allen has been on our watch list for a long time, longer than I’ve been with the Agency. We know she’s dangerous, but she keeps disappearing. She keeps a low profile though, in the past few years this is the first time she’s stepped out of normal life and done something unusual. So we’ve been mainly content to let her be. But not now. We need to know what she’s up to, who she works for. Which means that the Agency will be looking for her, and they’ll take her in. And you’ll be safe.”

Felindre didn’t look all that reassured.

“You mean to tell me,” she said, “that this woman is expert at dropping out of sight, and getting up to God-knows-what dodgy-ness, and the Agency have let her kidnap and threaten people?! Why should we stay here in that case?”

It was Rosa’s turn to shush Felindre.

“It’s ok,” she said. “I trust Richard. If he says we’re safe, I believe him.”

“Well I don’t,” retorted Felindre⁶⁹.

“You’re free to go at any time,” said Richard. “But I really do think you’d be safer here than at home.”

Morwen looked around the room, at Rosa’s tired face and Felindre’s worried one. And she made a decision.

“No, we can’t go home,” she said. “But we’re not staying here either.”

___

⁶⁹ Always knew she was the sensible one in that relationship.