Scam on the Cam Read online

  “Wait a minute,” said Gemma, pointing at me. “Who are you?”

  “Who am I? Has your brain suddenly been abducted by an ill-advised brain thief? I’m Sesame Seade, supersleuth on skates, Cambridge’s first self-made superheroine! I’m almost internationally famous, feared by at least some criminals and a couple of my adventures have even been written down by an amicable pen-pusher for clever people to read. There are as many connections in my brain as—”

  “Shut it, Sesame. I mean, which part are you playing in this story? While I’m being important and journalistic, and while Toby’s merrily snapping away, what will you be doing?”

  “Oh, that. I thought you’d guessed. You know how adults, sadly, never trust me?”

  “Yes,” chorused Toby and Gemma.

  “Well, that’s why I’ll have to act extremely innocent. I’ll keep looking at my shoes and shooting silly smiles at the walls. Just tell the rowers I’m the vaguely stupid kid in the class whom you’ve been told to take along and acknowledge in the article so she can feel special for one day in her life.”

  “Why can’t I do that?” moaned Toby. “I’m sure I’d be good at it.”

  “No doubt. But don’t worry, you’ll be my inspiration. All right—let’s get a move on!”

  So we shot out of school on our faithful wheels: my purple roller skates lashed with orange flames, Gemma’s tidy little scooter and Toby’s red bike. The problem when we race through town like that is that we’re a little bit faster than the speed of sound and it’s happened a few times that we’ve run over various people, some of them notorious criminals. Just like today, when there was a CLANG! and a BANG! and two OUCHES! and when the dust cloud finally settled, it revealed a very red Gemma and a very black-and-blue . . .

  “Julius Hawthorne!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

  “What do you mean?” he scoffed, dusting his embroidered school blazer. “This is my city too, you know. I was peacefully making my way home from the Laurels.”

  Gemma beamed at him like he’d just said he was walking back from Hogwarts.

  “I’m ever so sorry,” she said. “I hope you don’t have too many bruises.”

  “Bruises?” he replied. “Oh, you mean hematomas. Yes, a few, but I should be fine. We Laurel boys are made of ferromolybdenum.”

  “Can you move out of the way of Gemma’s wheels?” I asked. “We’re trying to get somewhere to do something.”

  “Oh yes? Riverward? What might it be?”

  He scrunched up his eyes in a perfect imitation of Peter Mortimer having swallowed anti-worm medicine. “Perhaps training in secret, in hopes of one day beating us at rowing? Surely not?”

  “Actually,” I said sourly, “not quite. We’re going there to interview the Cambridge University rowing team for the school newspaper.”

  “Are you now? Did you arrange that with Gwendoline, the coach?”

  “Course. We’re best mates. She and us are like that.”

  And I showed my hand with four fingers all intertwined, which is quite difficult, if you want to take a moment to try it yourself.

  “Funny,” snarled Julius. “She hasn’t told me anything about you. Even though I see her every evening, since she’s, you know, my sister.”

  I have to admit I got a little bit warm around the ears, judging by my hair getting all lifted up by the steam in the manner of a hot air balloon. Before I could think of a good lie, Julius waved and said, “Anyway, catch up later. Probably at the next race. I’m sorry I never see any of you for terribly long; it’s all a bit of a blur. I do try to slow up my crew, but it’s very unnatural for them to go so painfully sluggishly.”

  And he was gone. I sped up to avoid having to listen to Gemma’s reproaches about my ruining her chances of ever being recognized by Julius Hawthorne as anything other than a loser.

  “Your parents ruined them first by putting you at Goodall,” replied Toby shrewdly.

  We reached the big field at the north of the town and whooshed past a cluster of cows, spiraled around a few dogs tied to wheelchairs tied to people, sped up at the white-and-pink bridge beside which the weeping willow was still weeping and a few seconds later braked in front of the university boathouse. Just in time to avoid diving into the gray-green Cam River.

  Next to us was a huge, shiny white rowboat, and on the bank were long black oars decorated with the light-blue stripes of Cambridge. Examining the oars was a skinny, small, brown-haired student with glasses who looked nothing like a rower. He looked up when he heard us, and I switched to stupid mode (which is a very difficult mode for me to switch to).

  “Can I help you?” he asked kindly. “Are you lost?”

  Gemma’s hand shot out toward his. “Good afternoon, sir. I’m very sorry to importune you . . .”

  And we were in.

  It turned out that the student’s name was Will Sutcliffe, and that he was a student at Homerton College and the cox of the university rowing team. He was about as tall as me and barely heavier, and he had a smile as white as the boat and almost as big, which punctured his cheeks with two dimples.

  “A school article on the university team! Sure, we’ll find some time to answer your questions, of course,” he went on, taking us on a whistle-stop tour of the boathouse. “We’ve just finished a short outing on the river; we were just practicing starts. We’re going to have a debriefing session right now, with Gwen—the coach—she’s probably going to come down in a minute . . .”

  As he was opening and shutting doors and showing us around the smelly gym, the smelly changing rooms and the smelly offices, Gemma was busy taking notes and asking questions that Will didn’t really need to fuel his endless chitchat. Toby, meanwhile, was taking so many pictures that I worried for a moment that the camera would melt. As for me, I was acting perfectly stupid, but my constellation of brain cells was taking in as much as possible.

  And in particular the grotesque amount of bottles of antibacterial gel screwed to the walls, with handwritten inscriptions on Post-it Notes above them—’Keep Your Hands Clean! Bacteria Spread in Every Handshake!’ and other such instructions that my parents would have been proud to give.

  While Will was taking us up a smelly staircase, I nudged Gemma and pointed at one of them. She nodded.

  “Will?” she asked innocently. “What’s all that about? Have you all been getting a cold, or measles or the bubonic plague?”

  “Oh no,” he said, suddenly somber. “There’s been an outbreak of norovirus, or something of the sort. Three of our best rowers have come down with a terrible stomach illness and can’t make the race. It’s all a bit hush-hush, but it won’t hurt if it ends up in your school newspaper—as long as you publish the article after the race.”

  “What’s norovirus?” asked Gemma.

  “Some stomach bug, probably from the river. But it’s not the usual type, apparently. We’re not sure. The guys who’ve caught it got extremely ill for about a week. When they’re up and running again, it’s too late, of course; they’ve lost too much weight and been out of practice for too long. They’ve had to give up, and we’ve pulled guys from the reserve crew. Pretty bad news for the team. Anyway, we’re doing our best. They have to wash their hands all the time. Everyone’s got their own personal tube of antibacterial gel!”

  He got his out of his pocket and shook it under our noses.

  “What’s going on, Waldo? Who are those kids? Your schoolfriends?”

  We’d reached the top of the staircase, but we still had to crane our necks to look at the boy who’d just spoken. And even looking up like that we couldn’t quite make out the features of a face which was so high up in the distance that it was probably less oxygenated than the rest of us.

  “Oh hi, Rob,” Will laughed. “You’re funny—no, they’re just kids from a local school who want to run a story on the university team in their newspaper. I told them they could ask a few questions.”

  “Sure,” scoffed the giant, “best idea I’ve ever he
ard. Like we’ve got time to waste, when we’re trying to get everything together before next week.”

  And he walked away with T. rex-like footsteps, making the whole boathouse shake.

  Will smiled awkwardly.

  “Rob Dawes,” he said to us, “is in the reserve crew. He’s, um, quite a character.”

  “Why does he call you Waldo?” asked Toby.

  “Oh,” said Will, “just because, well, I guess . . .”

  “Because he looks exactly like Waldo in Where’s Waldo?” said a voice just behind us. “Do you also want to say that in your school newspaper?”

  We twirled around and were faced with what Julius Hawthorne would have looked like in eight years’ time with a short, curly blond wig. We guessed that this probably meant we were now facing Gwendoline Hawthorne.

  “Ah, Gwen,” said Will. “Yes,” he chuckled to us, “it’s Martin, one of our rowers (well, one of our ex-rowers—he got the virus) who thought up that nickname for me. Funny, huh? And, you know, everyone now calls me—”

  “Can we have that debriefing session?” snapped Gwendoline. “Or do you have an interview planned with the local kindergarten?”

  “Sure,” said Will, “sure. Are the guys ready?”

  “They’re waiting for you. We’re all waiting.”

  “Okeydoke, sorry—coming, coming,” said Will in his singsong voice. “Sorry, kids—meeting time. Everyone’s a bit stressed because of the dropouts, you see. We can’t have anyone else there; meetings are top secret. What if you’re spies sent from Oxford, you know? Ha-ha! Just kidding. Maybe I’ll see you around some other time? Sorry again. Feel free to drop by if you have any more questions. Bye-bye! Bye-bye!”

  He showed us out and vanished again into the staircase. The white boat was gently tapping along the bank, next to a couple of angry-looking swans. Propelled by our splendid muscles and by hunger, we got back to my house and settled down on my bed with mugs of hot chocolate and hot-cross buns.

  “Well,” said Gemma, “we haven’t learned much, apart from the fact that everyone’s stressed out about the virus.”

  “I’ve taken some way cool pictures with that telescopic zoom, though,” said Toby. “Look—that’s Gemma’s earwax!”

  We looked, and it wasn’t pretty. Toby swooshed through a dozen random pictures.

  “What’s that one?” I asked. “Looks like it was taken through a half-open door.”

  “Dunno. Oh, yeah, it’s Gwendoline’s office, I think.”

  “Can you zoom in?”

  He pressed the screen.

  And then Gemma said, “What’s that old metal key on the desk?”

  And then Toby said, “Why is there an Oxford University bag in there?”

  III

  I’ll say something for Mr. Halitosis: when he’s got an idea, he sticks to it. He sticks to it almost as much as his sweaty shirts stick to his chest (but not quite as much as his boogers stick to the end of his nose). The next morning, just as we were walking into the classroom all porridged-up and yawning, he welcomed us with a formidable roar.

  “This afternoon after class, children, you’re going to the river with me and rowing and rowing until you get good enough to beat the Laurels boys!”

  “That’s not super convenient, Mr. Barnes,” I said, “because Gemma, Toby and I had plans for this afternoon.”

  “Such as what, Sophie Seade?” he asked, getting dangerously close to my airspace. “What kind of havoc were you going to wreak this time?”

  “None whatsoever,” I said. “We’re writing an article for the Goodall Days. On the university rowing team.”

  “You three doing something productive? I don’t believe a word of it. And that wouldn’t dispense you from training. You’ll be in pairs: Gemma and Sophie, Toby and Lily, Emerald and Solal.”

  “In pairs?” I choked. “You’re expecting me to row?”

  “A little bit of exercise won’t do you any harm, my dear child,” said Mr. Halitosis. “Mens sana in corpore sano: a healthy mind in a healthy body. That’s what one should always strive for.”

  “And failing that, become a primary school teacher,” I muttered. “All right, team—we need to talk.”

  Except we couldn’t, because class had started, and we had to resort to the good old strategy of passing little notes around, which was all the more complicated as it was dictation time.

  “A smorgasbord of heterogeneous epithets,” dictated Mr. Halitosis, “was the ubiquitous idiosyncrasy of this metaphysician’s phraseology . . .”

  Okay, I penciled on the lines of my music notebook. This afternoon, Toby, you keep Halitosis occupied. Gemz and I will go and investigate the boathouse and elucidate that Oxford bag question.

  “. . . but his pseudognostic logorrhea, full of mammoth anacolutha and pachydermic pleonasms . . . ”

  No need, wrote Gemma hurriedly in bright red ink on the music sheet. I’ve figured out why Gwen’s got an Oxford bag.

  Why?? added Toby in fountain pen.

  “. . . was, per se, siphoned of all signified, and, qua paideia, superfetatory and sans sprezzatura . . . ”

  Yesterday, replied Gemma, getting as red as her ink, I looked her up on the Internet. She went to university in Oxford. She’s coaching the Cambridge team now, but there’s nothing surprising with her still owning an Oxford bag.

  What????!!! wrote Toby, who’s got a soft spot for exclamation points and question marks. She’s an ex-Oxford student????? Well, if that’s not a motive to want the whole Cambridge team to fail!!!!!

  And he added a whole line of !s to the music sheet, which made it look like an uninspired composer had gone brutally insane.

  “. . . which both bamboozled and flummoxed, but also galvanized, the zealous areopagus of his exegetes.”

  That’s a ridiculous claim, wrote Gemma, redder now than the ink. She’s the team’s coach, she’d have no reason to want them to lose.

  “All done?” thundered Mr. Halitosis. “Three seconds to check that you’ve written your name on your sheet, and I’m collecting them!”

  Toby panicked, quickly scribbled ‘Tobais Aplepleyard’ at the top of his sheet, and completed the dictation with whatever he could remember, ending up with “both bamboos and hammocks are jealous of Exeter.”

  “Well,” I whispered to Gemma and Toby as Mr. Halitosis was touring the classroom wrenching dictation sheets from everyone, “whether that’s true or not, I’d still like to have a look at that office. And to see if that old metal key might fit into, you know . . .”

  “. . . the pirate chest,” completed Toby.

  “Sesame, you are relentlessly hopeless.”

  “I’m trying my best!”

  “Try harder! You’re going to crash us into a barge. Take a small stroke. A SMALL stroke!”

  Plonk.

  “Well, at least now we’re next to the bank.”

  “Only the tip of the boat is touching it. Take another stroke!”

  “No, wait—if I reach out to the bank, I can pull us in . . .”

  “Careful! You’re going to tip us oveeeer—”

  A couple of minutes and a century later, under the sarcastic gaze of our two swan acolytes, we managed to moor our small rowboat to the bank. We made sure that it was hidden from the other side of the river by the hippie hair of the weeping willow, and got off.

  The pirate chest was still there, and still locked.

  “I hope Toby’s doing his best to keep Halitosis angry at the other end of the river,” murmured Gemma as we tiptoed behind the silent boathouses.

  “Don’t worry. He’s a natural. Duck!”

  “Sesame, we can’t waste time looking at the ducks.”

  “No, I mean duck! There are people coming!”

  I grabbed her by the collar and we dived down into a bush. The university team, including the ever-smiley Will, the grim-looking Rob and Gwendoline the snow queen, were all getting into a van. I guessed they were going to Ely to train on the river there.

&n
bsp; “Excellent,” I said as the van roared past us and disappeared into the distance. “There won’t be anyone in there. Let’s go!”

  All the boathouse doors were locked, which was a happy occurrence as I’d been yearning for an opportunity to climb up buildings. We made our way to the back of the house, found a drainpipe, then a diagonal wooden beam, and a few minutes later we were on the little balcony at the front of the house. Someone had left a small window open, probably hoping to empty the house of some of its smelliness, and we squeezed inside disappointingly easily.

  “I hope they close it next time,” I said, “it will give me an excuse to use my skeleton key.”

  The house was dark and silent. We’d landed in the changing rooms, full of discarded towels, water bottles and men’s underwear, which we didn’t look at. There were also boxes of biscuits and chocolates, which I managed not to steal from (because Gemma held my hands behind my back), and a smorgasbord of heterogeneous items including more bottles of antibacterial gel, a red-and-white stripy hat, a Cambridge teddy bear and a discarded copy of UniGossip.

  “This way,” I whispered to Gemma, and we walked into Gwendoline’s office. The old metal key wasn’t on the desk anymore, but we soon found it hanging from a little hook next to the door.

  It fell into my pocket.

  As for the Oxford bag, it was still on a chair but didn’t contain anything at all. “Anything else of interest?” I asked Gemma, who was looking around.

  “No. I’m telling you, you’re completely wrong. There’s no reason why Gwendoline should be up to no good. She’s the coach; she wants them to win!”

  “Well, let’s see if that key fits into that chest, and then we’ll decide. You’re right, maybe it’s completely innocent. Maybe she just keeps her clothes there. Or a body chopped into several pieces.”

  I dodged Gemma’s incendiary glare (it ricocheted off the wall, left through the window and set a branch of a nearby tree on fire), and we wormed our way out of the house through the changing room window again. A few acrobatic moves later, we were about to touch the ground, ready to run to the weeping willow and what might be a perfectly innocent pirate chest.