“Anyway, keep it quiet,” I warned them. “Don’t go and trumpet it around the galaxy like it’s public knowledge. If the Professors learn that we’ve found them out, they’ll escape to the South American jungle and will never be found again! I’ve written to Jeremy to tell him to go to the police. I know he’s only a student, but he’s eight years older than us, so they’ll believe him eight times more.”
Toby and Gemma promised to keep quiet, and the school bell drilled nicely through our ears.
In French class the most incredible and unexpected thing happened.
There was a knock on the door. (That wasn’t the incredible bit.)
“Entrez!” said the French teaching assistant, Mademoiselle Corentin.
The door opened, and Mrs. Appleyard entra.
“Hello,” said Mrs. Appleyard, looking a bit bemused. “I . . . er . . . have a letter for Sesame Seade.”
“Une lettre?” repeated Mademoiselle Corentin. “Pour mademoiselle Seade?”
“Er . . . oui,” Mrs. Appleyard assumed. “A young man just dropped by to give it to her.”
“Un jeune homme vient de passer pour vous la lui donner?” said Mademoiselle Corentin.
“Right,” Mrs. Appleyard guessed. “Apparently it’s urgent.”
“Apparemment c’est urgent?” said Mademoiselle Corentin.
“Here it is, anyway,” retorted Mrs. Appleyard who was visibly getting tired of the conversation.
“La voilà donc,” Mademoiselle Corentin translated. “Mademoiselle Seade! Une lettre pour vous.”
“Merci very much!” I replied, grabbing the envelope.
The whole class was gaping at me as if I’d just received a letter from Hogwarts. It was addressed to Sesame Seade, Goodall School. I walked back to my seat and ripped the envelope open under the disapproving eye of Mademoiselle Corentin, who went back to telling us about the word for “camembert.”
Inside was a phone number and a short note:
This was huge news. Not only had I received a secret message in the middle of French class, but it was from a boy and had an x at the end. I could have swooned if I’d been a bit of a ninny. I showed it to Toby and Gemma and they did thumbs-up like maniacs.
Right. Do you want to come over to my house after school? Toby wrote in the margin of his exercise book.
Can’t, I replied in felt-tip on my eraser, my parents are coming to pick me up to (there I ran out of space and wrote the rest on my hand) buy a mobile phone.
At last! exclaimed Gemma on last week’s French test. Which one are you getting?
A disastrously disgusting one, I pencilled on the desk, wiping it with my left hand as I went along as Mademoiselle Corentin would bulldoze me to absolute flatness if she saw me. One of the Phone4Kidz range!
HAHAHA! Toby and Gemma wrote.
Don’t be too sad, Gemma added. They have cool alphabet games!
I collapsed on the desk in profound misery.
At four o’clock, to add to the intensely humiliating life I was already living, Mum and Dad were waiting outside the school gates with open arms and exclamations of “Yoo-hoo! Sophie!”
“Good afternoon, parents. No need to hold my hand. I trust you’ve had a nice day.”
“What’s that on your hand?” chimed Dad. “Buy a mobile phone—isn’t she sweet! As if it was her responsibility!”
“Look, here we are!” exclaimed Mum. “The Carphone Warehouse! Super cool!”
“Please, Mum, no ‘super cools’.”
“Hello-o-o!” Dad sang to a salesman who looked like he was only a few weeks older than me. “We’re looking for a mobile phone for our little girl.”
“Less of the little, please,” I implored.
“Our range of phones is there, we have this new smartphone with 3D video calls . . .”
“Tut-tut,” Mum tut-tutted. “We know what we want.” And she produced the Phone4Kidz catalogue. I retreated into a corner in the manner of a hibernating hamster and covered my red face with my hands.
“Are you sure?” the salesman asked. “They’re really bare, these phones—no applications, no time-fillers . . .”
“Time-fillers!” Dad snorted. “That is the problem with your generation, young man—instead of using time productively, you just fill it!”
“This is torture,” I informed a baby in a pram right next to me.
“Right,” said the salesman, throwing a sad glance at me, “here’s the Phone4Kidz range.”
Mum and Dad browsed through the accursed collection, marvelling at their complete lack of functions, except for . . .
“Isn’t this clever! A timer for tooth-brushing!”
“And this, look! An alphabet game!”
“You can also record a three-minute message on the phone,” said the salesman, “stating your address and phone number for instance, which your daughter can play to adults if she gets lost.”
“Wow!”
I started to hope for a nuclear bomb to be dropped on Cambridge by a rival university. Before it could happen, though, Mum and Dad decided this was their absolute favorite phone, ensured that I liked it by asking me to confirm that I liked it, and parted with £25 plus a £10 top-up to be able to leave the shop with their new treasure.
After dinner, I still hadn’t heard back from Jeremy, so I went to hide under my duvet to call him from my ridiculous new phone. The ringtone went on for a long time, until Jeremy’s tired voice emerged at the end of the line.
“Hello? Who’s this?’”
“It’s me, Sesame.”
“Oh. Sesame. Hi.”
“Are you OK?”
“Yes. Why? Do I sound not-OK?”
“Dunno. A little bit. So?”
“So what?
“How did your meeting with Professor Philips go?”
“Oh, that.” He sighed deeply.
“Yes, that!”
“Yeah . . . Listen, Sesame. Er . . . I think we should just drop it, all right?”
“What do you mean? What did he say?”
“Lots of things. It’s too complicated for you to understand. Anyway. Have you had a nice day? What are you up to?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What’s going on?” Did he confess? Are you going to denounce him to the police?”
“Well, no. No point. Listen, Sess . . . It’s too difficult for you to get your mind around these things, you know, but . . . Trust me, right? We’re dropping the case.”
And suddenly I understood, and it was as if I’d swallowed a chip of flint stone.
“He paid you,” I croaked. “He paid you, like he did with Jenna! He bought your silence!”
“No, it’s not like that, Sesame. You’re being too dramatic.”
“Jeremy, you can’t do this! You have to tell the police!”
“It’s a fair enough deal, when you think about it. Colleges get money to pay for better things for the students. Cooperture get their money back when people buy their clients’ products. And Professor Philips gets paid for putting the two in touch.”
“No,” I choked, “seriously, you can’t take his money . . .”
“I’m not technically taking his money. He’s paying back my student debt and helping me get on to a great journalism course. It’s a lot when you’re just starting out in life, you know.”
“No, Jeremy, listen to me—it’s not right!”
“Who knows what’s right?” he groaned. “Don’t judge me, Sesame. You’d do the same if you were me. You would.”
He said a soft “bye,” and hung up.
X
The Professor brothers of evil and the Cooperture terrorists of computer invasion would never rot in a rat-infested gaol. I was so dejected I didn’t even laugh when Peter Mortimer dropped a dead moth in Dad’s pea soup.
The next gloomy morning, I woke up gloomily, got dressed gloomily, ate breakfast gloomily, and was gloomily driven to school in the Smurfmobile.
“You look a bit gloomy,” Dad remarked. “Have you got tooth
ache?”
“It would only be right,” I replied sourly, “after brushing them like a fanatic for three whole minutes with my phone timer.”
“That little musical piece is quite fun,” Dad chuckled.
It was, in fact, so bad that I’d spent the three minutes of tooth-brushing praying for human-eating aliens to hook me out of the bathroom and into the turquoise sky.
As we reached school, Dad pointed a warning forefinger at my nose:
“Don’t get your phone stolen!”
“No risk of that, unless the nuttiest of thieves in the whole world happens to be roaming the premises.”
I’d hoped Toby and Gemma would share my indignation at Jeremy’s act of high treason, but Toby still didn’t really get why the Professors had done anything wrong and Gemma was so stressed about that evening’s first performance of Swan Lake that her whole body was just a blur. There was no way I could get her to think that more tragic things were happening in our little city. Eventually, I gave up.
“You’ll be all right,” I said to her seven hundred times that day, to which she replied something different each time:
“I might sneeze into my cello and coat it with snot.”
“I swear my fingers are paralysed. I won’t be able to hold the bow straight.”
“I think the weather is very dry. My cello’s going to snap open in the middle of the ballet.”
At the end of the day she squeezed me in her arms as if she was a young soldier departing to the blood-splattered trenches of a remote war.
“You’ll send me positive waves of energy, won’t you, Sess?”
“I’ll send you a tsunami of positive energy. You’ll be all right.”
“I’ve broken the nail of my most important finger . . .”
“See you at seven, Gemz. See you at ten, Toby.”
“The food will be awesome,” Toby promised. “I saw Dad rolling little jam rolls from the tip of his fingers to the crease of his elbow!”
“So it’s all settled?” asked Mum. “Gemma’s mum is walking you back home after the party?”
“Yes, Mummy. She’ll walk me back home, tuck me into bed and sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to me.”
“Speaking of tucking, your shirt is untucked. Tuck it in.”
“I’m sure that’s not necessary.”
“Tuck it in or you’re not going.”
I tucked it in.
“Right. You know that your dad and I are going to a dinner party tonight.”
“Yes, Mum. I’ll be fine.”
“My grown-up little girl! Going to a ballet and a party on her own!”
On my own with Gemma’s whole family and Toby’s dad.
Gemma’s parents drove me to the Concert Hall, where Gemma was doing yoga exercises to chill out before the show.
“Headstands are the best!” she said upside-down.
I sat down next to her parents and her little twin brothers, who started to voice their disgust for ballet in very realistic retching noises. Two rows down from us, Professor Philips the Elder and Professor Philips the Younger were sitting next to Mr. Franklin. I thought that this was an ideal opportunity for the police to skewer them all on a giant pole and grill them alive on the prison barbecue, but unfortunately nothing of the sort happened.
The show started and I quickly went into power-saving mode, daydreaming that I found a dinosaur egg in the Master’s Garden and that my parents allowed me to keep it. This entertaining story made the ballet go much faster than I expected, and when the curtain fell I felt slightly frustrated to be interrupted in the middle of giving Cookiesaurus his first bath.
“Gemma must be super pleased that she didn’t make any mistakes,” I said to Mr. and Mrs. Sarland, who looked rather green, so I concluded that perhaps she might have done.
After that we migrated to the art gallery, elbowing our way past groups of musicians and dancers saying bravo to each other. Toby’s dad was at the back with Toby, dishing out food and drinks. I decided to avoid the jam rolls, grabbed a strawberry, and bumped into Edwin who was carrying a huge batch of feathery wings. He disappeared with it upstairs.
“How was the show?” asked Toby.
“No idea, I was daydreaming,” I replied. “You should have come! It’s a great place for daydreaming, apart from the grating rattle from the orchestra pit.”
A musician passing by fired a look of profound disgust at me, but it could have been because of the half-eaten armpit-flavoured jam roll she was grazing on. Then we all had to be quiet as Edwin, who had reappeared, was making a speech.
“And above all I am very grateful to Mr. Rudolph Franklin, my father, for sponsoring the show’s costumes. Without Cooperture Ltd, our swans would have looked much less swanlike. Please give him a big round of applause.”
The Philips brothers clapped more loudly than the rest of the group put together, and I decided I’d seen enough of this rigmarole and vaguely needed the loo, which, the wall obligingly told me, was upstairs.
At the top of the creaky staircase, I found myself in front of three doors.
The first one had an “L” on it. The second one had a “G” on it. The third one had nothing on it. I became supremely confused. Did L and G mean “Ladies” and “Gentlemen,” or “Lads” and “Girls”? Why can’t people express themselves more clearly? I didn’t want to push the wrong door and end up in the boys’ toilet. Toby tells me it is so utterly different from the girls’ toilet that I would be traumatized for life.
I assumed the third door was the toilet for people who aren’t too sure whether they qualify as L or G, and pushed that one.
It wasn’t a toilet. It was a dark, long room, with sculptures and paintings wrapped up in bags and bubble-wrap. In a corner was the batch of wings I’d seen Edwin carry upstairs. A wide window opened on to the street, overlooking the external wall of Sidney Sussex College. I rested my elbows on the window sill, and looked up.
“Ah!” I sighed to the open skies, “To think that the world shall never know the true nature of the Professor brothers of evil and Cooperture! To think that they will roam free amongst the innocent!”
Suddenly, the door opened, and I had only a moment to dive behind a large painting of a cow in a field before someone flicked the switch on, showering the room in dull yellow light.
“Enjoying your evening, Eddie?”
“I’ll enjoy it more on Sunday, when it’s all done, but it’s been a good night. Did you like the show, Dad?”
“Loved it. Loved it.”
Someone opened the window, and the noise of a match cracking preceded the smell of cigarette smoke. Another voice joined in:
“May I? I left mine at home.”
“Please, Archie, feel free. Ian?”
“I don’t, thank you, Rudolph.”
And just then I had a sudden bout of inspiration. Extracting my phone from my pocket, trying to make as little noise as possible, I flicked through the ridiculously small number of functions.
Call.
Text.
Phone Book.
Tooth-brushing Timer.
Alphabet Game.
Audio Message.
I selected “Audio Message” and clicked “Record.”
“That’s what I call a success,” said Ian Philips.
“All thanks to Archie’s wonderful software,” replied Mr. Franklin. “Do you know, it’s even more powerful than we thought—we seem to be getting very detailed information on all aspects of the users’ lives which can’t come only from searches. It sifts through emails too, is that correct?”
“Absolutely,” Archie said. “If the word ‘horse’ appears several times in someone’s emails, or in their searches, they’re filed as riders.”
“Are your clients happy, Dad?”
“Yes, we’ve already had a rise in Cambridge sales. Of course, they don’t know how we manage to target customers so efficiently. And once we widen it to other universities . . . and perhaps other institutions . . .”
“It’s easy, when you’ve been in the place for a long time,” replied Ian Philips. “I’m a trusted member of the university. All I had to do was convince them that it’s perfectly innocent.”
“Which you managed superbly, I must say,” remarked Mr. Franklin. “Edwin, Ian told me there had been an issue with a student guessing what was happening?”
“It’s all under control, Dad. It’s Stacy, the lead in the ballet—she ran into Archie’s program in the computer science department when he was still working on it and she told that other girl – Jenna Jenkins—what she’d found.”
“Ah! That’s where it all came from.”
“Archie was testing the software on the Trinity College network last Sunday, and he intercepted a conversation between Stacy and Reverend Tan—the college Chaplain. Thankfully, Archie managed to cut the connection before she told him anything of importance. I broke into his room and stole his computer a while later, just in case he’d recorded the conversation. And yesterday I went to Norwich to throw it in a rubbish tip. No one will ever find it.”
“Very good. Very good. That Stacy, she’s not going to tell anyone?”
“No. I negotiated with her. I’m putting her in touch with National Ballet people, kick-starting her career.”
“And Jenna Jenkins?”
“We’re safe there too,” said Ian Philips soothingly. “There’s nothing money can’t buy. Actually, only yesterday I was contacted by another student who knew everything—no idea how. As easily convinced as the Jenkins girl. We’ve got it all under control.”
“Well then—to our success!”
“To our success!”
Glasses clinking.
And suddenly another, more unexpected, noise.
You have reached the limit for audio recording. You have reached the limit for audio recording. You have reached the limit for audio recording.
Followed by the ridiculous tooth-brushing tune.
Sleuth on Skates Page 9