Sleuth on Skates

by Clémentine Beauvais

  “You see,” he said, “I’ve set up an online anonymous chatroom called Ask-a-Vicar. Anyone in the university can talk to me one-on-one, on any matter, every evening, over the Internet. Yesterday night, a person using the screen name ‘Tsarina’ started talking to me. She said she was a female student—she wouldn’t say any more. And then went on to tell me that she knew someone was doing something illegal at her department. Something that could have an impact on the whole university. But before she could tell me what it was—literally just as she was about to say it—the college’s Internet suddenly went down, and I never managed to speak to her again.”

  I felt like I’d stumbled from a fairly fun dream into a much spookier one. Jenna Jenkins, I thought. It must be Jenna Jenkins. But yesterday, she’d already gone missing . . .

  “Jenna Jenkins,” murmured Dad as if he’d read my thoughts. “Have you heard . . . ?”

  “It was not Jenna,” said Reverend Tan, shaking his head. “I know her—she’s interviewed me in the past for her magazine. And I’d heard about her disappearance, so I thought of her immediately. But it couldn’t have been her.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Jenna’s dyslexic, she’s told me a few times how difficult it is when you want to be a journalist. But that girl—the one I talked to on the Internet—her spelling was impeccable.”

  Dad looked dubious for a moment, as if it was easy-peasy for a dyslexic to fake impeccable spelling. Then he said, “Well, Frederick, I think you should pass this conversation to the police. They’ll be able to trace it back to the computer and—”

  Frederick gave a sour laugh. “I would be thrilled to pass everything to the police. Unfortunately, my computer was stolen from my room this very morning.”

  IV

  Thankfully, Dad let Gemma and me go to West Road Concert Hall on our own. I think this was mainly because he thinks highly of Gemma.

  “Right, Sophie, I’ll pick you up at 7:30.”

  “Sir, yes, Sir!”

  “You are actually going to this rehearsal, right? You’re not going to run away?”

  “Sir, no, Sir!”

  He gave the clouds a God-give-me-strength sort of look, my forehead a kiss, and started walking back. Gemma unfolded her scooter in a few clicks, and we rushed forth into the city.

  “What was that about?” she asked in a wobbly voice as she scooted over an irregularly-cobbled patch of pavement. “Illegal activity? What kind?”

  “You were listening?”

  “I was all ears!”

  “Me too! That’s probably why we’re friends. What do you think? He didn’t say much, apart from the screen name. Tsarina. Do you have any idea what it could mean?”

  “Well, apart from a Russian princess, no.”

  “A Russian princess?”

  “Yes, Sesame, a tsarina is a Russian princess. That’s what they’re called.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She replied, “I know everything about the royalty of every country.” This only surprised me a little, as she does wear pearl earrings.

  “Right. So a Russian princess witnessed illegal activity at her department.”

  “No. There aren’t any Russian princesses any more. Russia killed all its royal family ages ago. A tragedy.”

  “Weird. I wonder if this not-Russian-princess found out anything to do with Jenna Jenkins’s mysterious disappearance.”

  “Can’t see any reason why they’re related,” shrugged Gemma.

  “I can’t either, but my sleuthing radar is picking up suspicious signals.”

  “What’s a sleuthing radar?”

  “A special sixth sense for signs of scam and scandal. If you need to ask, it means you haven’t got it,” I declared, and squinted to try to make the signal clearer (which didn’t work).

  Gemma sneered, “Thank goodness for that. Apparently, having it makes you look like a right loony.”

  So I switched the radar off and we reached West Road Concert Hall, from which unpleasant musical noises were escaping. I took off my roller skates, put on my shoes and followed Gemma into the temple of tutus. Her folded-up scooter clanked melodiously against her shoulders.

  Two musicians, a boy and a girl, holding immense instrument boxes, were chatting in a corner. Another three were at the bar.

  “Right,” I whispered to Gemma. “This is your moment. Go and interrogate people about Jenna Jenkins.”

  “Seriously, Sesame! You can’t ask me that. Do it yourself.”

  “No, I can’t, people always think there’s something fishy about me, whereas they’d beg to store their butter in your mouth if fridges didn’t exist. Come on, do it—I’ll pretend I’m your foreign penfriend.”

  Gemma started shaking a little bit, but I poked her in the ribs and she leapt forwards and landed right next to the two instrument-holding students.

  “Hey,” she mumbled, “how’re things?”

  “Who are you?” replied the boy in a voice that made it sound like meeting us was only slightly better than kissing a dung beetle.

  “Gemma. I’m in the orchestra,” she said. “I play the cello. This is my penfriend Sesame . . . er, I mean . . . Sashimi.”

  “Sashimi?”

  “Yes. She’s Japanese.”

  The two students stared at me in mild disbelief, for which I don’t blame them. There’s a reason Gemma isn’t Cambridge’s number one self-made-supersleuth.

  “Anyway,” said Gemma, “me and her, I mean she and I, were wondering if perhaps you know where Jenna Jenkins is.”

  “Why?” the boy asked.

  “Because,” replied Gemma in a strained voice, “because . . . well, Sashimi wants to . . . er . . . invite her to Japan . . . to dance . . . at the Emperor’s annual Yule ball.”

  I rolled my eyes so forcefully that I managed to get a glimpse of my own brain.

  “Listen, I think I know what you’re playing at, kids,” said the girl. “You’ve heard that Jenna’s disappeared, and you thought you’d have a little detective game. Am I right?”

  Gemma said, “Yes.”

  I said, “Ie!” which means “no” in Japanese, but no one understood.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ve got better things to be doing with your time,” said the girl. “Jenna simply decided to leave Cambridge, everyone here is sure of that. Too much pressure, too much competition. Nothing mysterious at all.”

  “Who’s replacing her?” asked Gemma.

  “Her understudy, Stacy Vance. That’s what understudies are for.”

  The boy checked his watch. “OK, Shauna, we’d better go. And you too, Gemma, if that’s your real name. It’s time.”

  Forgetting that I was Japanese, I erupted, “Wait a minute—Stacy Vance? What’s she like? Does she have a murderous sort of personality?”

  The girl burst out laughing and turned back. ‘You’ve got the wrong suspect there, love. Stacy and Jenna are best friends. Stacy’s absolutely distraught that Jen’s disappeared. She’s been looking for her all weekend.”

  And they vanished into the wings.

  I paced to and fro for a while, wondering if Stacy Vance could have chopped Jenna Jenkins into tiny cubes and drowned them in the river Cam just to get to play her part, but eventually I made my way to the huge concert hall. From the orchestra pit rose the screeches and whines of the violins and cellos. I hate string instruments. The sound gets inside your head like it’s sawing through your brains. I don’t tell Gemma that. She was inside the pit, scraping her bow against the strings like all the others. She winked at me, and I blinked back for want of winking ability.

  “What are you doing here, young lady?”

  I turned around. It was a student about as tall as me and as big as me, but with a bow tie, and who looked vaguely familiar.

  “I’m friends with Gemma Sarland.”

  “Who?”

  “The one there with the pearl earrings and shameful Mr. Men knickers.”

  “What? Where?”


  “There. She’s wearing a skirt, you’ll have to take my word for it.”

  “And who are you?”

  “My name is Sesame. How about you, pray?”

  “Edwin. I’m the producer.” He looked at me mysteriously as if to unlock some invisible trapdoor on my forehead. “Go and sit down. It’s going to start.”

  He followed his own order by sitting down and getting his laptop out. I sat down a few rows up, wincing at the cacophony coming from the orchestra pit. When it failed to stop, I realized it was actually the beginning of the ballet. A dozen tutu-waggling ballerinas came onstage in a pointe walk that was so noisy it sounded like someone was enthusiastically hammering a bunch of nails into a tambourine. After a great number of what I’m assuming were grands jetés and pas de chats, someone tiptoed onstage who could only be Stacy Vance. She was so swan-like I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her fly.

  After ten minutes of this frilly rigmarole, I started to tire. There’s only so much tulle tulip-shaped tutu twirling one can take. So I left my seat and skipped out of the concert hall and into the wings.

  In the wings, there were more wings: a huge stack of feathery wings. As I wondered what on Earth these wings could be doing there, I heard the hammering noise again and quickly jumped behind an old piano, peering around the side of it. The army of ballerinas had emerged from the dark curtains that led on to the stage, and each stopped to pick up one pair of wings, which they clipped to their backs and ironed out with their fingers like a strange flock of coquettish cockatoos.

  “What do you think?” whispered one of them to another one of them.

  “About what?”

  “Stacy, of course!”

  “She’s good enough.”

  The first girl nodded, and looked around. The others were busy ruffling each other’s feathers. “What the hell is up with Jen? Everyone’s so cool about it. Seems to me like no one actually cares where she’s gone.”

  “She’s so unstable, Kim. You’ve only been here this term, you don’t know. Jen’s just the sort of person who’d run away from a stressful situation.”

  “Really? She seemed strong enough.”

  “It’s all fake. She’s a bundle of nerves. If you ask me, it was too much pressure. This part, plus her exams, plus UniGossip . . . No wonder she couldn’t cope.”

  The first girl looked unconvinced, but suddenly the music changed and they had to leave again, fluttering to the stage like skinny angels. I relaxed a little, and sat down against the back of the piano.

  And then realized I wasn’t the only one there.

  “Nice to meet you,” said the other one, “I’m Jeremy Hopkins.”

  I shook his hand. “How do you do? I’m Sesame Seade. Do you come here often?”

  “It’s my first time, but I won’t come back, the service is terrible.”

  “I’m glad I’ve finally bumped into you behind this piano. I had a few questions to ask you. What were you and Jenna Jenkins going to talk about during your meeting at Auntie’s Tea Shop that she never went to?”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “What’s all this about? How do you know about Jenna Jenkins?”

  “It’s not going to work if we keep asking each other questions. The basic rule of a dialogue is to alternate questions and answers.”

  “Right-o, smartypants. I’ll answer your question. Jen and I were supposed to meet up at Auntie’s on Friday afternoon. She vanished that very morning. We were going to be talking about UniGossip.”

  “She was going to ask you to investigate something. What was it?”

  “I have no idea. We can’t discuss things like that by email or text—only face to face. She’d only told me that it was something big. Very big.”

  “You don’t know what it was about?”

  He rubbed his fingers together. “Money. What else? Anyway, what brings you here?”

  “I also happen to be investigating the mysterious disappearance of Jenna Jenkins.”

  “Splendid. Let’s compare notes.”

  He actually got his notebook out. I felt very unprofessional. “It’s all in my head,” I said, and that was true—it’s the best notebook I have. I lose all the other ones. “So, what have you found out?”

  “Not much more than what I’ve already told you. I think the last person she talked to on Friday was Edwin—he told the police he’d phoned her to discuss something costume-related. Now, what have you got?”

  I was a bit embarrassed there because my findings were more or less equivalent to zero. Of course I’d had time to think of many colorful ways in which Jenna Jenkins might have been minced up, and the Tsarina mystery was interfering with them on my sleuthing radar, but none of this would convince an experienced Chief Investigator like Jeremy Hopkins. So I said, “Well, to be fair,” and stopped.

  “Right,” he laughed. ‘OK, listen. I think no one’s worried enough about what’s happened to Jenna. Everyone seems to think she left of her own accord. But that’s not the kind of thing she’d do. I know her well, it takes guts to run UniGossip. I think she’s been forced to leave. If not worse.”

  “Dead or alive, we’ll find her!” I promised fervently.

  “Do you even know what she looks like?”

  I had to admit I didn’t, and he got a photo out of his pocket. The lighting was bad but you could see a thin bird-like girl, wearing bright clothes, surrounded by a great quantity of opened and unopened presents, including a blue teddy bear, a bottle of the same perfume as my mum, and a pair of ballet shoes.

  “It was taken at her birthday party, in October.”

  The unpleasant hammering noise started again, and the fluttering squad flooded in. In a few seconds, they unclipped their wings and flung them to the floor, ruffling a pile of brochures. One of them took off like a dove and landed next to me.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Just the program,” replied Jeremy Hopkins. “They have to reprint them all, because Jen’s not Odette any more.”

  It was a slick-looking thing, with a big green and white C in a circle to symbolize Cambridge, I guessed, and the words Swan Lake, in elaborate spirally writing.

  I shuffled through it. Half a page was devoted to telling the reader everything about Jenna Jenkins’s life so far. Nothing I didn’t know before. Next was a pompous picture of the producer from a professional photo shoot, and in enormous letters:

  Edwin Franklin, Third-Year

  Student in Classics,

  Trinity College.

  The blurb babbled on about his achievements. I skimmed through the rest. Gemma’s name was mentioned among a hundred others in the orchestra.

  “Anyway,” said Jeremy, “I came here to listen to what people were saying in the wings, but I only overheard people congratulating each other. I don’t think Jenna’s disappearance is linked to the ballet. I think it’s more sinister than that.”

  Onstage, the music died out.

  “Let’s get out of here before the tutu battalion comes back,” said Jeremy.

  We jumped to our feet and left the wings, blinking in the neon light of the entrance hall. When my eyes finally managed to focus, they focused on a stunned-looking vicar.

  “Oh no,” I sighed.

  “Sophie! What on Earth were you doing in there?”

  “Just having a look around, Daddy. I’ve concluded that ballets are more interesting backstage.”

  “Who is this young man?” said Dad in a voice that meant, “Who is this scoundrel?”

  “That’s Jeremy Hopkins,” I said obligingly.

  “And what is Jeremy Hopkins doing here with you?”

  My words were so good that Jeremy Hopkins nicked them: “Just having a look around. I’ve concluded that ballets are more interesting backstage.”

  Dad shot him a hundred terrifying glares. “Why are you hanging out with my daughter?”

  “I didn’t know she was your daughter,” replied Jeremy.

  The answer didn’t seem to satisfy the holy man,
whose nostrils frilled up in the manner of the huffy buffalo. “Right,” he said. “We’re going home.”

  “Daddy Daddy Daddy, I have an urgent question.”

  “What is it?”

  “Is the pregnant duck still in the garden? I’m worried, you see, because if Peter Mortimer sees her it’s going to be World War III.”

  Jeremy Hopkins chuckled, Dad obliterated him with another discharge of angry glares, then he ruffled my hair and said, ‘Yes, love, it’s still there, but I thought of you and looked up a few things on the Internet about ducks. Apparently, it’s trying to find a place to settle down and lay eggs. Tomorrow I’ll move it to Emmanuel College. They have a pond there, and no cats.”

  “Oh, Daddy! I’m so proud of you! I’m sure God is really proud of you too. I bet he didn’t know you had potential as a bird-relocalizer. Maybe that’s your new calling!”

  “Yes, well. Let’s go.”

  “Bye, Jeremy!”

  “Bye, Sesame!”

  And we walked home in the purple night.

  V

  Tuesday morning introduced itself rudely by shooting a painful ray of sun right into my opening eye. The garden was drowned in sunlight, the towers and gargoyles shone white. Peter Mortimer, flattened out in the manner of a bearskin, was on the terrace outside my window, purring like a diesel engine.

  “Today, I’ll find Jenna Jenkins,” I promised the world.

  But before that I had to get dressed for school, and as I was putting on one sock, Peter Mortimer leapt on the other one and kidnapped it just like that.

  “Peter Mortimer! Give that back, you vicious velociraptor!”

  But the sock-hijacker dived out of the room and tumbled awkwardly down the stairs. A second later, he’d slipped into Mum’s study to hide the indispensible piece of clothing under her desk.

  “You are such an obnoxious example of felineness! I will have you hanged high and short!”

  Knowing himself to be under the protection of God and the East Anglian Cat Lovers’ Society, Peter Mortimer didn’t budge, and I had to crawl under the furniture to dislodge the hissing monster from his lair. When I finally managed to push him out of the study, I was bleeding from all sides like a hot-water bottle in a hedgehog’s bed.