Sleuth on Skates

by Clémentine Beauvais

  “I can’t run, Mr. Barnes, I’ve sprained my ankle.”

  “A likely story, Sophie! Next time you’ll tell me you’ve injured your ponytail.”

  “It kind of hurts too, actually.”

  “Run! Running empties your head.”

  “That explains it,” I muttered.

  I ran for about ten minutes, but it didn’t empty my head. In fact, my skull was positively purring in the manner of Peter Mortimer when his stomach is being stroked. The overload of mysteries was twisting my brains into plaits.

  There was no doubt that the Philips brothers were a criminal couple of crooks. But apart from the fact that one sported a goatee and the other one a moustache, I didn’t have any way of proving it to the world. Jenna Jenkins had said she hadn’t been locked up, and if I talked about the dodgy conversation I’d overheard, my parents would choose both not to believe me and to punish me for skating to the Fitz on my own in the middle of the night. Parents are contradictory like that.

  “I’m not surprised Professor Philips is a bloodthirsty bandit, anyway,” said Toby next to me. “He looked scary.”

  “Speaking of scary people,” interfered Gemma, “what was in his letter to your mum?”

  “Dunno . . . I’d completely forgotten about that. Probably something to do with their business meetings.”

  “I do hope he’s better at business than he is at spelling,” said Gemma haughtily.

  “What do you—?”

  “Sophie Seade, is that what you call running?” Mr. Halitosis’s voice interfered.

  “Yes, it’s a special kind of running I made up. It’s much less tiring than normal running.”

  “I’m afraid someone made it up before you and called it walking. I want to see you run!”

  I had to conform to his definition and painfully caught up with Gemma. “What . . . do . . . you . . . mean . . . about spelling?”

  “Oh, that. Didn’t you see? The address on the envelope was riddled with spelling mistakes! Personally, I never get my apostrophes wrong. And I certainly would not leave out the d in ‘Cambridge’.”

  I stopped in my tracks, grabbing Gemma’s collar (she gurgled a bit) and stammered, “Spelling mistakes! Oh, Gemz! How did you not tell me that before?”

  “I meant to, but then I was gravely ill, remember? Why? It doesn’t matter!”

  “It does! It does! That’s it! I get it!” I turned to Gemma and Toby. “Reverend Tan told us that Jenna is dyslexic! Professor Philips hadn’t written a letter to Mum. He was delivering the letter from Jenna. He forced her to write it!”

  “Sophie Seade, if you don’t start running again, I’ll send you to the Head’s!” boomed Mr. Halitosis, and all the flowers around him withered and died in the vapors of his breath.

  I gave him the furious glare he deserved and started running again, Toby and Gemma on my heels.

  “He . . . forced her . . . to write . . . the letter . . . before he let her out of the cupboard—and Mum believed it!”

  “Really, Sesame, you’re so unfit,” said Gemma. “You sound like a tired Labrador.”

  “I . . . have . . . a stitch . . .” I stopped. “Mr. Barnes, I have a stitch which might very well tear up my stomach if I go on running. Can I stop please?”

  “No.”

  I started again. “Jenna . . . did not have a . . . ouch! a nervous . . . breakdown! She . . . was . . . kidnapped!”

  “But why would Professor Philips go through all the trouble if he was going to release her?” asked Toby. “And why didn’t she go straight to the police once she was free? It doesn’t make sense!”

  “How . . . can you speak . . . so smoothly . . . when running? We have . . . to find out what they were up to. . . . Maybe they threatened to kill Jenna . . . if she said anything . . . to the police.”

  “That’s absurd,” said Gemma. “No one ever kills anyone in this city. I’m sure it wasn’t the same letter. Maybe Professor Philips is dyslexic too!”

  “No . . . way! Jenna . . . was forced . . . to write this letter . . . just as I’m being forced . . . to run around this stupid track. And I’ll . . . prove it.”

  But before I could prove it, we had lunch. Well, technically, no one apart from Toby had lunch. We just stared at our plates hungrily and refused to eat. Over in the corner, Mr. Appleyard was looking at his hands a bit meekly.

  “Are you sure you’re not hungry?”Toby asked, spluttering bits of cabbage. “It’s really good!”

  “I’m giving my wounded stomach a rest,” said Gemma pointedly.

  “Yeah, dunno what it was about the Fitz yesterday,” retorted Toby. “Must have been bacteria in the air.”

  Gemma and I threw a dubious glance at him. “Or maybe it was something in the food,” she answered pointedly.

  “But we only ate my dad’s food,” remarked Toby, “so it can’t have been that.”

  “Right. By the by, Sesame,” said Gemma, “I brought you the new program for the ballet. They reprinted them all without Jenna’s name! You’ll come and watch it, right? Friday’s the first night!”

  “Of course, I’d love to,”I lied as she rummaged through her bag. “You’ll come too, Toby, won’t you?”

  “I’d rather pull out my own toenails with a pair of rusty pincers,” he replied.

  “Great. Thanks, Toby,” said Gemma. “Look, Sess, here it is.”

  She handed me the new brochure. Still the same layout on the front page, with that C in a circle—that’s where I’d seen it first! What was it doing on Fiona’s hoodie and on the Happy Ducks catalogue?

  Inside, on the first page, was the same pompous picture of Edwin. And on the next page were a picture and a blurb of the lead, Odette, played by —

  “Anastasia Vance?” I looked blankly at Gemma.

  “Yeah, apparently, Stacy is just a nickname. Her real name’s Anastasia. Bit of a mouthful, I guess, that’s why she shortens it.”

  “Whash you chalking about? Anashtasia?” Toby intervened, munching on a greyish slice of roast beef. He failed to cut through it with his teeth, so we waited for him to swallow, watching his neck swell up and deflate again in the manner of the boa constrictor gobbling up a small elephant. “I watched it the other day when you abandoned me. You should have stayed with me and watched it too.”

  “We’re talking about a person, not about your smelly film,” said Gemma.

  “It wasn’t smelly! It was well cool! There’s this Russian guy who wants to kill everyone—and that girl, Anastasia, doesn’t even know she’s a princess, and—”

  “A princess?” I choked. “A Russian princess?”

  “Yes, of course!” exclaimed Toby. “Come on, Sesame, it’s the story of that Russian princess, you know? The one that got away when the rest of her family was killed. I’ll lend you the DVD. Maybe.”

  “A Russian princess,” I repeated. “A Tsarina. Called Anastasia.”

  And Gemma and I threw each other a glance which must have been meaningful, because Toby noticed there was something we hadn’t told him. So we told him. We told him about the time when we’d been hijacked by Dad and forced to sit through his meeting with Reverend Tan, who’d revealed his mystifyingly interrupted conversation with Tsarina.

  “Illegal activity at her department . . .” repeated Toby. “If that Stacy really is Tsarina, that means it’s happening at the computer science department. Look, it’s written here on the program—she studies computer science at Trinity College.”

  This set my sleuthing radar on full blare, and for a good reason, too. “Archie Philips is a professor of computer science at Trinity!” I exclaimed.

  “That,” said Gemma, “is one funny coincidence.”

  “But if there’s a professor of computer science at her college,” whispered Toby, “why would she tell the Chaplain about the thing she’d found out? Why not Archie Philips?”

  My sleuthing brain was on autopilot, obligingly slotting the few jigsaw pieces together. “Well, how about because she’d found out he wa
s the one doing it? So she had to find someone else to tell it to. And that’s not all there is to it. Who do you talk to when you’re stuck? Apart from your college Chaplain.”

  “Your best friend?” asked Gemma.

  “Right. Especially when your best friend is also a nosy journalist . . .”

  “Jenna Jenkins? You think she told Jenna Jenkins?”

  “Well, isn’t it a bit strange that Jenna got kidnapped by Ian Philips right after her best friend Stacy found out that Archie Philips was doing something very wrong?”

  “That,” conceded Gemma, “is one funny bunch of coincidences.”

  Coincidentally, the subject of that day’s English lesson was coincidences.

  “Now, children, we’re going to talk about coincidences. What’s a coincidence? Any idea, Lucas?”

  “It’s like, when, for example, I think ‘Wow, it’d be great if the fire alarm went off and we’d all have to leave the class and have fun outside,’ and like, right when I’m thinking about that, it would be a coincidence if the fire alarm . . .”

  BRIIIIIIINNNNNNG

  “. . . actually went off.”

  Like just now.

  “Right,” said Mr. Halitosis, a bit astounded. “Erm . . . OK, everyone, don’t run, we’re all going downstairs.”

  After ten fun minutes we were allowed back in the classroom, and Mr. Halitosis, still a bit shaken up, started again. “Right, so Lucas gave us a good example of what a coincidence can be. Any other ideas? Radha?”

  “Well, for instance, if I think ‘Wouldn’t it be a lot of fun if a massive spider dropped from the ceiling right on your head, and . . .’”

  “That will be all, thank you,” said Mr. Halitosis, throwing nervous glances at the ceiling. “Sophie, can you please give us a definition of a coincidence? Not using examples.”

  A coincidence. For instance, when a girl is called Anastasia, and somewhere else in town someone is using the screen name Tsarina. For instance, when the same green and white C in a circle keeps popping up in unrelated places. On a duck catalogue. On a ballet brochure. On a T-shirt.

  “A coincidence is when, accidentally, two or more things happen at the same time, or seem to be related,” I replied.

  “That’s a fairly good definition,” approved Mr. Halitosis. “And when does it stop being a coincidence?”

  I shrugged. “Dunno.”

  “Well, wouldn’t you say it stops being a coincidence when you can prove that it didn’t happen accidentally, but that the events are related?”

  But how do you prove it? I wrote to Toby and Gemma.

  You investigate, replied Gemma.

  When school finished, I raced up to the city center, flanked on one side by Toby on his bike and on the other by Gemma on her scooter. Destination: Trinity College.

  “So the plan is, we find Stacy Vance and pretend that we’re her biggest fans ever and that we want our Swan Lake program signed,” I shouted to Gemma. “And then, once we’re in the place, we try to find out if she is Tsarina by playing good cop, bad cop!”

  “What’s good cop, bad cop?” asked Toby, swirling around a taxi.

  “It’s a police strategy. Gemma pretends to be nice, and I pretend to be mean, and we extract the truth from Stacy Vance in this way.”

  “And what do I do?” he asked indignantly. “You girls are always doing the fun things.”

  “Well, OK, then, you play fun cop.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t even exist.”

  “It does now.”

  We reached the huge gate of Trinity College. A Porter with a bowler hat was at the door, making sure that a bunch of tourists who wanted to look around the College paid enough money to do so. We dismounted, hid behind the bum of the most gigantic tourist in the group, followed the bum inside, and started investigating the painted name boards at the bottom of students’ staircases.

  Thankfully, we didn’t have to go very far. The third board we got to simply said:

  R1

  Miss A. C. Brookland

  R2

  Mr. E. E. P. Franklin

  R3

  Mr. P. Mahal

  R4

  Miss A. Vance

  The spiral staircase unrolled under our feet, and we quickly reached R4, which was facing the door to R2.

  On to which was pinned, alongside other things, a postcard with a green and white C in a circle.

  “What is that C?” I mumbled, and Gemma shrugged.

  “Dunno, why?” asked Toby.

  “I just—” I said, trying to unpin the postcard from the door, “keep seeing it—everywhere—” and suddenly the door swung open and we were faced with someone I didn’t particularly want to see.

  “Who’s there?” said Edwin.

  “My name is Seade—Sesame Seade.”

  “Ah, I remember you,” Edwin groaned. “You were the weird kid at the rehearsal. What are you doing here?”

  “Just visiting,” I said. I looked over his shoulder. His room was a mess, with all the feathery wings in a pile, and two computers on the desk. “We want Stacy’s autograph.”

  “Children aren’t allowed in this staircase.”

  “We haven’t brought our children,” I said. “Now you’re here, can I ask you something?”

  He eyed me suspiciously. “What?”

  “What does that C mean on your door? The one in the circle?”

  He didn’t even look. He just laughed and closed the door in my face.

  “How rude!” commented Gemma. “He’s definitely not a gentleman.”

  Vengefully, I tried to rip out the C postcard, but then the door behind us opened, and Stacy Vance appeared.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  She had the most singsong voice I’d ever heard, and was wearing a sort of half-transparent white kimono. If she jumped out of the window she’d probably fly away.

  “Honorable dancer,” I said, “I’m delighted to meet you. My name is Sesame Seade, and I am your most devoted fan.”

  “That is not true,” said Gemma. “I am your most devoted fan. I even enrolled in the orchestra to be able to stare at you every evening.”

  “No!” exclaimed Toby dramatically, “I am your most . . . er . . .” And then he couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he went silent. Stacy looked at us, and then around us, as if we were accompanied by invisible parents.

  “Can we come in?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I guess so. Tea?”

  “Yes please.”

  We walked into a very well-kept room with a lot of white in it, and sat down on a muslin-covered bed, waiting politely until Stacy had boiled the kettle.

  “So what brings you here?” she asked, pouring the water into a few mugs.

  Gemma got the program out, and Stacy signed it benevolently. While she was doing this, I muttered to Gemma and Toby, “Good cop, bad cop, fun cop!”

  Gemma said, “Well, Stacy, I admire you so much. I admire your name. Anastasia . . . it sounds a bit like a Russian princess!”

  “In fact,” I added threateningly, “it’s the name of a Tsarina. And one who’s witnessed some seriously illegal activity and won’t tell anyone about it. We’ve got you cornered!”

  Smash!

  “Oh, I don’t like this good cop, bad cop, fun cop thing, Sesame,” said Toby. “You made her break her mug. There’s no way I can be fun after that.”

  Stacy started shivering so much I thought she was going to shatter in millions of pieces. “What’s all this about?” she asked. “How the hell do you know about Tsarina?”

  “We just overheard a conversation.”

  “Who?” she questioned anxiously.

  “Doesn’t matter. They don’t know. We figured it out on our own.”

  “I don’t know what you heard,” she said, “but it’s simply wrong. I was wrong. Tsarina was wrong. There was nothing going on.”

  “Nothing going on where?”

  “At the department. Nothing wrong with any software.”
/>
  “What software?”

  “Wait a minute. What do you know?”

  I thought carefully. And then I gave it my best shot.

  “We know,” I said, “that you found out something illegal was going on at the computer science department. Something affecting everyone in this university. The normal thing to do would have been to alert Professor Archie Philips, who’s a computer scientist in your college. But you couldn’t, because you knew that he was involved in it. You told Jenna Jenkins, who started to investigate the case, and because of that she disappeared. So you started telling Reverend Tan, but the Internet crashed before you could finish. And then,” I concluded, “for some reason, you didn’t tell anyone else. Maybe because you were afraid that you might disappear as well—just like Jenna.”

  Stacy’s big blue eyes were staring past me, at the door. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she articulated. “I was wrong. I thought I’d discovered something, but it turned out to be nothing. I might have told Jenna, but—there was no reason to—to investigate anything.”

  “Why are you looking at the door?” asked Gemma, and just then the door opened, and Edwin appeared, his brow as knitted as his ugly jumper. He looked at the three of us, and if looks could zap someone to the other side of the solar system, I’d currently be writing this on the chilly side of Pluto. I wondered why he’d come in just to glare at us, especially as it seemed like the only thing he wanted to say was, “Everything all right, Stace?”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  “Do you know these kids?”

  “We’re getting to know each other.”

  He sat down on the floor next to us. “Good,” he said. “You should drop by later to try on the adjusted wings, Stacy. They’re such good quality, I can’t get over how amazing they are. They’re not flimsy at all—they’re rigid inside, with a real skeleton like a bird’s wing! I’m sure they could support the weight of kids like you,” he added, looking at us smugly.