Turtle Trouble by Lily
I just fed my pet turtle some lettuce. His name is Squirt and he absolutely adores lettuce. If you give him a massive ball of it he would eat it all up in one day.
Sitting down with Squirt, I watched the news on telly simply because it was the first thing to come on. The man reading the news always looks so serious, but one day he looked most serious when he said that turtles had started to go missing in London. I gave Squirt a squeeze like someone was taking him away right now.
When I went up to bed that night I told my mum what I had heard on the news about missing turtles.
‘I’m sure Squirt will be alright.’ Mum hugged me knowing I was scared. I was awake half the night listening for noises. On the side of the bed I had a baseball bat, just for emergencies.
‘Lily!’ Mum came into my room with a cup of hot chocolate and a few marshmallows bobbing inside it. I new it was bad news because mum never gives me hot chocolate unless it was a special occasion.
‘What’s wrong?’ I cried with tears in my eyes, even though I didn’t now what had happened.
‘Squirt’s not in his cage,’ she whispered.
‘No!’ I yelled and ran downstairs sobbing. Suddenly I saw a small card on the kitchen table. It said ‘animal burglar’ in blue ink. Grabbing it, I opened the door and ran down the street to the shop still in my pyjamas.
‘Bella! Bella!’
I ran in without knocking or saying hello. I didn’t need to knock because Bella is my best friend and her mum runs the shop down the road. Bella has a turtle too so I was wondering if it had been stolen also. Bella came downstairs from her room sobbing and I knew that the thief had struck here too. We hugged each other, knowing what had happened to us.
‘We have to find this guy,’ said Bella. She suddenly wiped away her tears and grew a bit more confidence. We both knew it was useless going down to the police station to report the crime. The police had bigger matters to attend to than looking for missing turtles, so we formed our own plan…..
‘Right, number 32,’ Bella was saying the next morning. She ticked the number on her clipboard. We were asking for everyone who had a turtle to bring it to my house so we could guard it while the thief was still at large. My mum wasn’t too happy when she came home from work and realised what the situation was.
‘Give them all back,’ she said, bundling Bella and I out of the front door with the turtles in a box. ‘I have enough to do without having to protect other people’s turtles.’
‘Maybe that wasn’t a very good plan,’ giggled Bella as we trudge up and down our street reuniting the pets with their owners.
We came back to my house and sat on the sofa. We both sighed. What other plan could we think of now? We needed one that actually worked. Seconds later I had it, and I spat it out at Bella.
‘We should catch the thief and become famous.’
‘We’d need to catch him red-handed because he’s a clever thief and he is used to getting in and out of people’s houses.’ Bella let my hopes down but then up again. ‘So we’d need to set a trap that he would fall into.’ That made us both think for a while, then Bella hugged me.
‘I know a trap,’ she whispered.
It was a clever plan. Later that evening Bella stayed over at my house. The trap was ready. When I go fishing I have a blue net, the same colour as the carpet downstairs. That is where we would catch the unsuspecting thief, literally. Bella and I made a model of a small turtle out of polystyrene balls and an old toy helmet which we painted green to look like a turtle shell. We placed that at the bottom of the stairs and tuned the light down so low anyone would think it was a real animal. We made sure it was visible from the window, tempting the turtle thief inside and into the net which he had laid out at the bottom of the stairs. You couldn’t see that in the dark for sure. Then we hid in the kitchen and we waited for him to come. But would he?
I have no idea what time we heard the lock on the door click. Someone was tiptoeing into the hallway. Bella and I held each other’s hands tightly.
‘Aaagh!’ We heard a yell and we both of us ran out into the hallway.
The burglar was at the bottom of the stairs, tangled in the fishing net. He was squirming and trying to get out. I was speechless but Bella reached for the phone and dialled 999. The police came really quickly. The burglar was still trying to untangle himself when they arrived and arrested him.
‘We did it,’ Bella and I yelled and hugged each other, for joy this time. The next morning we heard from the police that all the missing turtles had been found in the burglar’s home and reunited with their owners. Luckily none of them had been injured. Squirt came home and I gave him the biggest ball of lettuce I could find in the shops. From then on I made sure he slept in my bedroom. There was no way I was going to have him go missing again.
A few weeks passed and I went downstairs to the kitchen to make myself some breakfast. I like fixing my own breakfast so I don’t bother mum. When I opened the fridge nothing was in there, no food, no milk, no vegetables in the drawers at the bottom. There was only a small white card, tucked where the eggs should have been. I picked it up and slowly read it.
FOOD BURGLAR!