Sleuth on Skates Read online

“The problem with Sophie is that she’s a self-obsessed little Narcissus.”

  “Mummy, my tie has absolutely got to be tied in the right way, or else I might catch Mr. Halitosis’s virus when he tells me off.”

  “Mr. What?”

  “Mr. Halitosis. You know, my teacher?”

  “Mr. Barnes, you mean?”

  “Mother, you are five centuries late. That used to be his name, as in, on the very first day of school, before we noticed what was wrong with him. We called him Mr. Deathbreath for a while, but then Gemma’s mum told her bad breath was actually a medical condition called halitosis. So to be more respectful and accurate, we now call him Mr. Halitosis.”

  “You’ve been in front of that mirror for eighteen minutes.”

  “And it’s worked wonders. The tie is perfectly tied. You may call for my carriage.”

  “No need, the carriage is already calling for you.”

  Indeed, I could hear yonder our little blue Twingo hooting and honking like we’d won the World Cup.

  “Oh, Dad’s in command of the Smurfmobile today?” I asked. “Why not you?”

  “Because—hurry up, for goodness’ sake—because in exactly one minute and forty-eight seconds, some very important people will be knocking on the door to discuss very important matters with me.”

  “About Jenna Jenkins?”

  Mum sighed one of her legendary sighs. “No, not about Jenna Jenkins. We still have no idea what happened to her.”

  “Who is it then?”

  “Jesus Christ, Sophie Margaret Catriona!”

  “Is that his full name?”

  “You are such a pest. You’re not even going to be interested. They’re from Cooperture Ltd, the largest marketing agency in the country. Happy?”

  “No. Atrociously disappointed.”

  “Go!”

  I went.

  “Have a nice day at school!”

  I did.

  My best friends at school are called Gemma Sarland and Toby Appleyard. I selected them on the basis of their abilities.

  Gemma always wears pearl earrings and lives in a huge house in Waterbeach, which is a deceitful place parading as a tropical heaven when it is, in fact, just a normal Cambridgeshire village.

  Toby lives very close to school. In fact, he lives at school. His mum is Mrs. Appleyard the school caretaker and his dad is Mr. Appleyard the school cook. Mr. Appleyard’s food is odious. Toby’s used to it, but Gemma and I aren’t yet, and we have to be nice and swallow everything and pretend that we don’t detest it. That is the main inconvenience of being friends with Toby.

  Our school is called Goodall and isn’t all bad.

  “I have astonishing news,” I said to Gemma and Toby immediately. “A student at Christ’s has simply ceased to exist.”

  “Dead?”

  “God knows. Gone, for sure.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  “No, or it wouldn’t be a true disappearance.”

  “Who is it?”

  Frustratingly, Mr. Halitosis decided it was time to start telling us about geometry, forcing us to continue conversing in the form of scribbled notes.

  “Pythagoras’s theorem . . .” said Mr. Halitosis.

  She’s a ballet dancer, I scribbled in turquoise. Like a tutu dancer.

  Epic fail! wrote Toby in highlighter.

  “. . . states that the squared length of the hypotenuse . . .”

  She’s also the Editor-in-Chief of UniGossip, which is a magazine with lots of scandalous things in it, I pencilled on.

  Why would anyone want to find her? Good riddance, retorted Toby’s black ink pen.

  STOP IT, it’s serious, answered Gemma sparkily (I don’t know where she finds her pens). She could have got killed! I know tons of ballet dancers and they’re the meanest people on this side of the Equator!

  “. . . is equal to the sum of the squared lengths of the other two sides . . .”

  How do you know tons of ballet dancers? interrogated my red marker.

  “. . . in a right-angled triangle . . .”

  It was starting to look pretty, all these colors. Gemma’s revelation was pale green:

  Because I’m playing cello in Swan Lake this year, remember?

  “Sophie Seade, what is Pythagoras’s theorem?”

  Mr. Halitosis crossed the classroom and Gemma, Toby and I immediately switched to no-breathing-allowed mode.

  “Yes, you can blush, my dear child,” he said (I wasn’t blushing, just running out of air). “You haven’t been listening to a word I said.”

  “On the contrary, Mr Barnes,” I replied, using my air in a controlled fashion developed over months of practice. “Pythagoras’s theorem is all about how the squared length of the hypotenuse is equal to the added squared lengths of the other two sides. Of a right-angled triangle, of course.”

  Mr. Halitosis stayed still for a moment, and then he said, “Oh good,” and went back to his desk. We breathed in some non-polluted air, and our lungs said thank you.

  And that is an example of what you can do when the number of connections in your brain is at least equal to the number of stars in the universe.

  At break, Gemma expanded on her stupendous revelation.

  “My dad met someone who was looking for cello players for the University Ballet show, so he said why not Gemma? And I said no thanks, but it was too late, and now I have to rehearse every two days on top of all my homework and I’m the youngest there and the producer’s horrible. It’s dire.”

  “So you must know Jenna Jenkins!” I exclaimed. “She dances in that ballet!”

  “I don’t know them all by name. What part does she play?”

  ‘The lead. I don’t know the story, so I’m assuming it’s either the Swan or the Lake.”

  “The lead is called Odette, you ignoramus,” scoffed Gemma. “OK, I know who she is. But if she’s been wiped off the surface of the Earth, who’s going to play her part? Someone must be, because I have rehearsal tonight at six.”

  Notwithstanding my profound hatred of tutus, I realized it was part of my sleuthing duties to endure it just this once.

  “Gemz, I will come with you to rehearsal this evening.”

  “Oh, yes, please do. It’s so boring being around these old students. You’re used to it, at least.”

  “That’s unfair,” protested Toby. “I was just going to ask you both to come over to my house to watch a film after school! My mum bought me new DVDs over the weekend. I got Wall-E, and Anastasia, and Spiderman . . .”

  “Sorry, Toby. We can’t be distracted from our important mission. But I’m putting you in charge of extracting top-secret information from the depths of the Internet. Find out all you can on Jenna Jenkins. It’s crucially vital.”

  He agreed. “OK, then. Oh, good news! Dad told me this morning that we’re having roasted chicories with lard for lunch!”

  Gemma and I urghed in unison.

  After school and before Gemma’s rehearsal we had two hours to do exactly what we wanted.

  “Well, not really exactly what we want,” retorted Gemma, unfolding her scooter. “We can’t go and raid the old sweet shop, for one, since we don’t have balaclavas.”

  That was indeed a shame. “However,” I remarked, “we can pretend that we’ve just raided it, and that every tourist holding a camera is a police officer with a flamethrower.”

  Gemma thought this was the best idea since the other one I’d had two hours earlier about adopting a grasshopper. So I slammed the clasps of my roller skates into place and we left school, rattling along the pavement at high speed in the white afternoon sun and dodging the deadly camera flashes of the tourists (which in Cambridge is no small feat). Ducking and bending, we managed to whoosh past all the buildings up to King’s College, but suddenly—

  “No! One of them got me!” screamed Gemma. “I’m completely on fire!”

  He’d almost got me too, but I’d leapt over the low brick wall and landed flat on the lawn, wh
ich earned me some furious glares from the Porter at King’s gate, since walking on the grass is the deadliest sin.

  “Sesame, are you mental?” said Gemma. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life visiting you in prison.”

  “To be fair, it was that or being turned into hot embers by a flamethrower.”

  “Well, I’ve been turned into hot embers, so let’s call it a day and go to your place to dig out some chocolate from your dad’s secret cupboard.”

  I wiped my green hands on my shirt, jumped over the wall again and grabbed on to Gemma’s burning clothes to pick up a bit of speed. But as we turned the corner of the street, my right eye caught the name of a place and it rang a bell. I braked and pondered.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Gemma, braking too. “Are you on fire after all?”

  “No. I’m having an ‘ah-ha!’ moment. Look: Auntie’s Tea Shop!”

  She looked bewildered, so I had to explain that Jeremy Hopkins’s message to Jenna Jenkins mentioned that very teashop, and that it was a unique opportunity to investigate.

  “Maybe this place is Jeremy Hopkins’s favorite feeding ground,” I asserted. “Let’s go in and see if he’s there. He might give us important information about Jenna Jenkins.”

  “Who cares? They’re just students.”

  I forgave Gemma for that remark. It’s true that students are generally not very interesting. But this time, there was kidnapping and possibly murder in the air.

  “I’ll only be a minute. Keep an eye on my roller skates.”

  Merrily, I kicked them off and walked into Auntie’s Tea Shop. Unfortunately, no one in there looked like they could possibly be Jeremy Hopkins. Even more unfortunately, someone in there looked like she could very possibly be my own mother.

  “Sophie Margaret Catriona Seade! In the name of all that is holy, what are you doing alone in here?”

  Mum, wearing her best apricot dress, was surrounded by smug-looking men in suits. In the soft jazzy music of the place, they were nibbling on slices of a blueberry cheesecake which I warmly recommend.

  “My dear Maman,” I said, curtseying to the floor, “good afternoon to you and to all your friends. I saw you through the window and could not resist the urge to pay you my respects.”

  “I see,” said Mum in a voice that meant “Liar.” “Gentlemen, this is my daughter, Sophie.”

  “Pleased to meet you, I’m Sesame,” I said. And then I waited to be introduced, so Mum could not but introduce me.

  “Sophie, these are Mr. Franklin and Mr. Mukherjee from Cooperture, and this is Ian Philips, an eminent professor of Ancient Greek from the Department of Classics.”

  I shook hands with the whole bunch.

  “And what are you doing this afternoon, Sophie?” asked Professor Philips in a smooth, deep voice. “Your mother seems surprised to see you here.”

  “I’m just skating back from school with my friend Gemma.”

  “Is this the route you usually take?”

  “Not at all,” said Mum. “The problem with Sophie is that she’s a deceitful little Judas. We never have any idea what she’s up to. Why are you only wearing socks?”

  “I left my wheels outside under Gemma’s watchful eye.”

  While Mum was frowning rudely at my socks and the hole in one of them, I glanced at the table. Among the cups of tea and slices of cake there were pieces of paper with complex-looking words. I eyed a few figures with several zeros.

  Professor Philips coughed and Mum said, “Sophie, go home, please. We’re actually in an important meeting.”

  “Please can I please go and watch Gemma’s rehearsal of Swan Lake tonight at six please?”

  Mum’s eyebrows said “No” but in the atmosphere of general amusement she eventually muttered, “All right then. Where is it?”

  “West Road Concert Hall!”

  “How will you get there?”

  “I’ll go with Gemma really fast and we won’t talk to any strangers!”

  “How will you get back?”

  “I’ll ask Dad to pick me up!”

  Mum rolled her eyes, nodded and let me go, for which I was grateful.

  “How was it?” asked Gemma as I squeezed my feet into my roller skates for the third time that day.

  “Catastrophic. I bumped into my mum.”

  Gemma shuddered from head to toe. She’s scared of my mum. I used to be scared of my mum too, until I started scaring her back.

  “Well,” she said, readjusting her tie, “I had a more useful time waiting here outside. You’ll never guess what I found on the pavement.”

  “How many guesses do I get?”

  “Three.”

  “A small piglet.”

  “No.”

  “A smoky meteorite.”

  “No.”

  “The Crown Jewels.”

  “Almost. Look.”

  I looked, and it was a crumpled-up five-pound note. “That’s super lucky of you!” I exclaimed. “What are you going to do with it? Of course you can do whatever you want and don’t need to share with me whatever you buy with it.”

  “Of course I’ll share,” she said (thankfully). “If you hadn’t asked me to wait here I wouldn’t have been bored enough to look at the pavement. Come on, let’s get a box of tangy tangerine strings at the old sweet shop.”

  So we picked up speed again and whooshed past a cluster of tourists and overtook a pushchair-pushing person and almost got run over by a gangly student on a bike and slalomed around a man in a wheelchair with a robotic voice.

  And then the worst happened.

  ‘Sophie Margaret Catriona Seade!’

  Seriously! Parents!

  I braked wearily and turned around to face Dad.

  “What on Earth are you doing in the street on your own?”

  “Good afternoon, dearest Papa. How coincidentally beautiful to find you here! It must be the Almighty guiding my steps to you. And I am not alone! Gemma’s here too.”

  He twirled around but didn’t see Gemma, who was hiding behind a burly student because she’s also scared of Dad.

  “Right there,” I said, and she had to show herself, looking meek. “You see, Daddy, Gemma won the pavement lottery and we were about to splash out on tangy tangerine strings.”

  “Certainly not. Does Mum know you’re here?”

  “Your mum, or my mum?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Here here, or here in Cambridge?”

  “Where do you think? Listen, Sophie, I don’t have time for this. But since I strongly suspect that Mum—your mother, my wife, Professor Seade—has absolutely no clue that you and Gemma are roaming the city center like street urchins . . .”

  “We’re not that prickly!”

  “. . . you shall both come with me and stay with me during my meeting with Reverend Tan.’

  “But Daddy . . .”

  “Hush!” he hushed in a way that made us both follow him in silence. He pushed a glass door to a church converted into a café and sat us down at a table.

  No tangy tangerine strings would tingle our tongues today. We shot surly glares at Dad, who asked, “All right. What do you want?”

  “An electric guitar.”

  “What do you want to drink?”

  “Whisky.”

  “Goodness!” he eructed, and he went up to the counter. “Two glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice and a cappuccino, please. Oh, hello, Frederick.”

  Frederick, alias Reverend Tan, had just walked in. Like Dad, he was wearing a dog collar. Unlike Dad, he still had all his hair and no wrinkles. Unlike Dad, he didn’t look angry. In fact, he looked positively terrified.

  “My daughter Sophie and her friend Gemma,” groaned Dad as he and Reverend Tan sat down at a nearby table. “Girls, this is Reverend Tan, the Chaplain of Trinity College.”

  I stopped slurping and said, “How do you do? I’m Sesame.”

  Gemma said, “How delightful to meet you. I’m Gemma.”

  Dad said, �
��Do your homework.”

  We got our books and notebooks out of our bags and Gemma started trying to figure out what Pythagoras was about and how to use his theorem to answer the questions properly.

  “Darling daddy, do you have a pen I can borrow?”

  “You don’t have any pens? What’s that pencil-case for?”

  “Well, see, it does contain pens, but also a grasshopper, so if I open it now it’ll go hopping everywhere.”

  Dad blew out a lot of air, fished out an expensive fountain pen from a pocket of his shirt and said, “Now you’d better be silent.”

  Since I had such a good pen, I couldn’t waste the ink on geometry, so I started writing a poem of despair and anguish at the absence of Jeremy Hopkins and the possible imprisonment of Jenna Jenkins in a dark rat-infested cave. It was stupendously goosebump-inducing.

  Meanwhile, Dad and Reverend Tan were talking, and part of my brain was listening to them while the other part of it was being poetic. That’s another thing you can do when the number of connections in your brain is more or less equal to the number of stars in the universe.

  “What is it, Frederick?” murmured Dad. “Your message got me worried. Is it that bad?”

  “It is a serious matter, and I don’t know enough about it, nor feel that I can do anything about it. It’s a question of . . .”

  He turned his head towards Gemma and me, and I went into removed-from-the-world-of-the-living mode. His voice was so low I had to intensely strain my stirrup, which is the smallest bone in the body (located in the ear), in order to hear it.

  “I have evidence . . .” he whispered, “Well, . . . at least, a student has told me that she has witnessed serious illegal activity at her department.”

  “Which student?” whispered Dad.

  “I cannot say, David.”

  “Frederick, in such a situation . . .”

  “I don’t mean that I feel I shouldn’t. I mean I don’t know who she is.”

  He glanced at me again (seriously, do I look more suspicious than Gemma?) so I pretended to stare at an ugly abstract painting on the wall that looked like someone had thrown up Smarties on a canvas.