Friday was shocked. The sound was distorted by the echo in the confined space, but it was a woman’s voice. Friday grabbed her feet and yanked hard.

  ‘Hey!’ cried the woman kidnapper. She hung on the rung above with her hands. But Friday jumped up and grabbed her about the middle. The kidnapper could not hold on. They both fell.

  Friday was winded because the kidnapper landed on her chest. She lay flat on her back like a fish out of water – gasping to get breath into her lungs. She could hear the sound of scuffling and fists meeting faces. Ian was apparently in quite a fight. He needed help. He couldn’t risk another head injury. Friday had to be strong. She pushed herself up into a sitting position and, as she did, something dug into the palm of her hand. It was a zip tie. With a zip tie you can secure anything.

  Friday looked across at the woman kidnapper. She was wearing a ski mask too. She must have known about the CCTV cameras. The kidnapper had grabbed hold of the ladder to steady herself as she stood up. Friday realised what she had to do. She launched herself forward, grabbed the kidnapper’s hand and zip tied it to the ladder.

  ‘Hey!’ cried the kidnapper.

  Friday rolled away out of her reach, got to her feet and hurried over to help Ian. She tried to do the same type of running crash-tackle that she’d seen Ian do earlier. But when she launched herself at the kidnapper’s waist, he barely moved. She was essentially just giving him a big hug. It did, however, distract the kidnapper long enough for Ian to bop him on the head with the remote-control unit.

  The kidnapper realised he was losing the fight, so he tried to make a run for it. But in the dark tunnel, he didn’t see Bernie jogging towards them. The kidnapper ploughed face first into Bernie’s chest, bounced off and slammed into the floor.

  ‘Nice one,’ said Ian. ‘One of your old ice-hockey moves?’

  ‘I was always good at standing still and letting other people run into me,’ said Bernie.

  Friday went over to her mother and carefully removed her helmet. Her mother looked even more dishevelled than usual. ‘Are you okay, Mum?’ asked Friday.

  ‘I am not,’ said Dr Barnes. She sounded genuinely emotional. She hadn’t been crying but she sounded close.

  ‘Did they hurt you?’ asked Friday.

  ‘What?’ asked Dr Barnes. ‘No. But they interrupted me at a crucial stage in my calculations. I wasn’t even allowed a pen and paper. It’s not acceptable.’ Her voice broke.

  ‘It’s okay, Mum,’ said Friday. ‘Everything will be alright now. We’ll get you back to your desk soon.’ Friday hugged her mum and her mum awkwardly leaned into the hug. She gulped down a sob. ‘I know what will cheer you up. I’ll bet Uncle Bernie has a notepad and pen. He’ll let you borrow his until we can get you home.’

  ‘He will?’ said Dr Barnes.

  Ian had started tearing off the gaffer tape that had bound Dr Barnes’ arms to her side.

  ‘Sure, Evangeline,’ said Bernie. ‘You’ve had a rough day. You can hold my pen and pad for as long as you like.’ Ian had freed her right arm. So Bernie tucked his notebook and pen into her hand. Tears started streaming down Dr Barnes’ face. ‘Thank you. Thank you. I would have hated to die and leave behind my work unfinished.’ She put the notepad on the ground and started writing.

  Ian caught Friday’s eye. He grimaced. Friday shrugged. ‘Leopards don’t change their spots,’ said Friday. ‘But that’s okay. It’s the spots that make them a leopard.’

  ‘I think technically you can have a plain-patterned leopard,’ said Ian.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Friday. She turned and walked over to the woman kidnapper.

  ‘Careful,’ said Ian. ‘She could be dangerous.’

  ‘There’s no doubt about that,’ said Friday. Reaching out and grabbing the hem of the ski mask, she whipped it off the kidnapper’s face. It was Halley.

  ‘You! You kidnapped your own mother!’ exclaimed Bernie.

  ‘Just when you thought this family couldn’t get any odder,’ said Ian.

  ‘So is this the boyfriend?’ asked Bernie. He pulled up the other kidnapper’s ski mask and it was, indeed, Brad.

  ‘At least they like to do things together,’ said Friday. ‘That’s one step up from Mum and Dad.’

  ‘But why?’ asked Bernie. ‘You’ve both got dream jobs here at CERN. Why risk it all?’

  ‘That’s exactly why,’ said Friday. ‘Because they love their research so much they would stop at nothing to see it through. The one thing all researchers always complain about is being underfunded. Is this how you’ve been getting your big influx of grant money? Smuggling?’

  ‘Theoretical physicists hog everything,’ snapped Halley. ‘The limelight, the awards and the money. Grants are decided by moron administrators like Dr Dalecki – people who aren’t good enough to be proper scientists. So we set up our own grants scheme.’

  ‘But how were you going to make money out of kidnapping Mum?’ asked Friday. ‘Dad hasn’t got any money. He couldn’t pay a ransom.’

  ‘You’re so naïve,’ sneered Halley.

  ‘What were you going to do?’ asked Friday.

  ‘Your mother doesn’t care where she is or who she works for,’ said Brad.

  ‘You found her another job?’ asked Friday. She felt chilled. There was something so callous about this whole plan.

  ‘We needed two million euros to fix the image capture apparatus on the Detector,’ said Halley.

  ‘So what did you do?’ asked Friday.

  ‘I said yes when I was offered two million euros to deliver Dr Barnes to her new employer,’ said Halley.

  ‘Mum,’ said Friday. ‘This is Mum we’re talking about. She’s more than Dr Barnes to us.’

  ‘She’s never been more than Dr Barnes to anyone,’ said Halley. ‘She would have done the same thing to us in a heartbeat. But she doesn’t need to because she has a Nobel Prize so she is showered in grant money and staff.’

  ‘What you have done here is beyond illegal,’ said Friday. ‘It’s amoral. Family is the basic unit of civilisation.’

  ‘Pfft,’ said Halley. ‘Everything comes down to physics. Weak force is weaker than strong force. Gravity is weaker than weak force. And the force that binds our family together is weaker than any of them.’

  ‘The force that binds you to sanity is weaker than any of them,’ said Ian.

  ‘Come on, we’d better get out of here before we all get hypothermia,’ said Bernie.

  Bernie handed Halley and Brad over to the Swiss police. Kidnapping was a more serious offence than smuggling so the local police had first priority. The detective sergeant was delighted to finally have a member of the Barnes family behind bars and with so much irrefutable evidence of their crimes.

  Dr Barnes was taken to hospital. Ms Dekker insisted that after going through a kidnapping ordeal she needed to be checked out. The doctors found no injuries except for a few bruises on her arms. But they kept her in overnight because they did find she had the bone density of a stick of chalk, vitamin D deficiency from never going out in sunlight and severe iron deficiency.

  ‘But we’ve been making her three proper meals a day,’ protested Melanie.

  ‘Two weeks of proper food does not make up for forty years of cuppa noodles,’ said Friday.

  ‘This is good news,’ said Ms Dekker. ‘Now that it’s not just domestic incompetence, it’s a medical crisis, I can arrange funding to have a full-time proper nurse take care of her. I’ll make sure she eats, takes vitamins and is forced to exercise every day.’ Ms Dekker was positively gleeful at the prospect. She didn’t mind brilliant scientists so much when she could completely control their behaviour.

  When they got back to the residential building that night, they were all too tired to cook. So Bernie ordered pizza, Quantum got a big tub of ice-cream from the convenience store, Ms Dekker made a salad from the remnants of vegetables she found in the fridge – then they sat around trying to get straight in their minds exactly what happened. At first they were too tired to talk. Then they were too busy eating to talk. But by the time they got to the big tub of ice-cream, Friday started asking questions.

  ‘How long do you think Halley and Brad will be in jail?’ asked Friday.

  ‘Honestly,’ said Bernie. ‘Less than you’d think. Probably no time at all.’

  ‘But they committed a massive crime spree,’ said Friday.

  ‘That will all be hushed up,’ said Bernie. ‘No-one was injured. They weren’t the ones buying and selling stolen goods. They were just the transportation.’

  ‘But kidnapping is one of the most serious classes of offence,’ said Friday.

  ‘Yeah, but a good defence attorney will get into the details of how terrible a parent your mother is,’ said Bernie. ‘They’ll be able to argue that Halley’s immorality is, in fact, your mother’s fault because she raised her.’

  ‘That’s baloney,’ said Friday. ‘There is no excuse for kidnapping your own mother.’

  ‘The main reason Halley won’t do jail time is because she is a genius,’ said Bernie. ‘The government will want to control her. Now they will really be able to do that. She’ll be wearing an ankle bracelet and having her passport withheld for the rest of her life. She may not do jail time, but her punishment will be indentured servitude to whatever scientific institution they trade her to.’

  ‘But that’s what she wants – to pursue her research,’ said Friday.

  ‘That’s what she thinks she wants now,’ said Bernie. ‘She’s twenty-two. She’s full of fire and ambition. But what you want from life at thirty-two and forty-two are very different. And she will never be able to live down what she did here. She will come to regret it.’

  ‘There is still one mystery,’ said Ms Dekker. ‘You never figured out who graffitied the equation.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Friday. She blushed a little and stared at her pizza, as if suddenly finding her anchovy fascinating. ‘I did actually. But I didn’t like to say anything. I was hoping they would confess.’

  ‘You know! And you didn’t say anything?’ said Ms Dekker.

  ‘Why should I?’ said Friday. ‘Solving one of the great unsolved mysteries in physics is not a crime. It’s something that should be rewarded. I rewarded this individual with the time to summon the courage to reveal themself.’

  She was staring very intently at the pizza now, really struggling to not look up and make eye contact with anyone in the room.

  ‘It was me,’ confessed Quantum.

  ‘You?!’ exclaimed Ms Dekker.

  ‘Wow!’ said Melanie.

  ‘This family,’ said Bernie, shaking his head.

  ‘How did you figure it out?’ Quantum asked Friday.

  ‘You were the last person into the auditorium,’ said Friday. ‘And you came and sat with us. It was so out of character. You’re usually so up in your head, thinking about your work, it would never occur to you to go and sit with a family member. It only makes sense if you weren’t thinking about physics. You were adrenalised by something you had just done.’

  ‘I gave myself away,’ said Quantum.

  ‘Also you were rubbing your hands,’ said Friday. ‘It only occurred to me later what you were doing. Rubbing the chalk off them.’

  ‘But why vandalise the equation?’ asked Ms Dekker.

  Quantum hung his head. He did not want to answer that one.

  ‘For the attention,’ said Friday.

  ‘But publishing your findings properly in a journal would have galvanised the attention of the entire scientific community,’ said Ms Dekker.

  ‘Yes, but that’s not the attention he wanted,’ said Friday. ‘You publish if you want the attention of the scientific community. You commit a crime if you want the attention of CERN’s best lawyer.’

  Now Ms Dekker looked confused.

  ‘Oh-oh-ooooh!” said Melanie. ‘He’s in love! With Ms Dekker! And she didn’t realise!’

  Quantum stared at the floor like he was hoping the ground would open up and swallow him whole.

  ‘Oh, your whole wonderfully socially incompetent family is a gift that keeps on giving to a hopeless romantic like me.’ Melanie sighed happily. ‘You must invite us back for the wedding.’

  Ms Dekker was sitting right next to Quantum on the couch. There was barely ten centimetres of space between them, yet their body language was as if they were communicating through a Perspex window in a prison visitors room.

  ‘You did it because you have a crush on me?’ asked Ms Dekker.

  Quantum went bright red in the face. It may have been blushing, or anger, or because he was holding his breath. It was hard to tell.

  ‘That’s the bit I was waiting for you to confess,’ said Friday.

  Quantum still couldn’t speak.

  ‘It’s really easy,’ said Melanie. ‘Just ask her to have dinner with you.’

  Quantum glanced at Melanie. She nodded encouragingly.

  Ms Dekker looked on in shocked disbelief. She looked like she was watching a snake eat a rat. Horrified and enthralled.

  ‘Marika,’ began Quantum haltingly. ‘Would you . . . like to have . . . dinner with me . . . tomorrow night?’

  Ms Dekker’s eyes narrowed as she considered this for a moment. ‘Do you promise not to ever vandalise CERN property again?’ she asked.

  Quantum nodded.

  ‘Well, I do have to eat tomorrow,’ said Ms Dekker. ‘So it may as well be with you.’

  Quantum turned and looked at her. ‘I love you!’ he declared.

  ‘Whoa! Too much too soon,’ coached Melanie.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Quantum, getting control of himself. ‘I meant to say – thank you, I’ll pick you up at eight.’

  ‘This is the best happy ending ever,’ said Melanie. ‘Unless you’d like to add anything.’ She turned to Ian and glared at him expectantly.

  Ian looked shocked.

  Friday was embarrassed too. ‘Leave him alone. He’s still recovering from a head injury.’ She got up and turned on the TV. ‘It’s the top of the hour. Let’s check the news headlines to see if they’ve got anything about Mum.’

  ‘Or the recovery of the Raphael,’ said Bernie. ‘I could do with some brownie points with the Governor.’

  Friday flicked to the news channel.

  ‘Leading the news tonight, the President of Norway has just given a press conference confirming that Crown Princess Ingrid and her fiancé were abducted earlier today,’ said the newsreader. ‘Their car was found abandoned in the outer suburbs of Oslo. Police have been searching the area. There are no leads. No ransom has been demanded . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Melanie. ‘It can’t be true. Binky would never let anything happen to Ingrid.’

  Friday sat down and took her friend’s hand. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find them.’

  To be continued . . .

  R.A. Spratt was born in the UK. Her family comes from Dursley, Gloucestershire – a town immortalised by Harry Potter’s deeply unpleasant relatives. When she was two years old they moved to Australia.

  Growing up in the 80s in the western suburbs of Sydney the only thing for a kid to do was get on a bicycle and go to the library, so R.A. Spratt did just that. Once there, she read everything, devouring the books of Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Robin Klein and Judy Blume, and audiotapes of Shakespeare productions and Sherlock Holmes dramatisations. And so, her young mind was formed, and set on the path of becoming the extraordinary author she is today.

  Now based in Bowral NSW, she’s the bestselling writer of dozens of absurd and witty books including Hamlet is Not OK, The Adventures of Nanny Piggins, The Peski Kids and the Shockingly and Astonishingly Good Stories collections. Her podcast, Bedtime Stories with R.A. Spratt, has had over 4 million downloads and connects R.A. with story-lovers across the globe.

  R.A. has five goldfish, three chickens and a very needy dog called Henry. (She also has a husband and two daughters.)

  For more information, visit raspratt.com

  Books by R. A. Spratt

  The Adventures of Nanny Piggins

  Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan

  Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion

  Nanny Piggins and the Accidental Blast-Off

  Nanny Piggins and the Rival Ringmaster

  Nanny Piggins and the Pursuit of Justice

  Nanny Piggins and the Daring Rescue

  Nanny Piggins and the Race to Power

  The Nanny Piggins Guide to Conquering Christmas

  Friday Barnes: Girl Detective

  Friday Barnes: Under Suspicion

  Friday Barnes: Big Trouble

  Friday Barnes: No Rules

  Friday Barnes: The Plot Thickens

  Friday Barnes: Danger Ahead

  Friday Barnes: Bitter Enemies

  Friday Barnes: Never Fear

  Friday Barnes: No Escape

  Friday Barnes: Undercover

  Friday Barnes: Last Chance

  Friday Barnes: Collision Course

  The Peski Kids: The Mystery of the Squashed Cockroach

  The Peski Kids: Bear in the Woods

  The Peski Kids: Stuck in the Mud

  The Peski Kids: Near Extinction

  The Peski Kids: The Final Mission

  Shockingly Good Stories

  Astonishingly Good Stories

  Bedtime Stories with R.A. Spratt

  Hamlet is Not OK

  This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Penguin Random House Australia is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  First published by Puffin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, in 2024

  Copyright © R.A. Spratt 2024