“What’s this?”
“It’s the cow!”
“What cow?”
“That painting!”
I saw many pairs of hands lift up the frame. And there was light.
“Sesame Seade!”
“Sesame Seade!”
“Sesame Seade!”
“Sesame Seade!”
“Wow,” I said, “you all know me!”
“What are you doing here?”
“Resting behind a painting. It’s all the rage.”
Professor Ian Philips grabbed my shoulders and made me stand up surprisingly powerfully. “What was that about? The recording thing?”
“Oh, that! Oh, nothing!”
But they’d all turned quite pale, looking at my Phone4Kidz as if it had been a weapon of mass destruction.
“Sesame,” said Edwin in a slow, high-pitched voice, “give me the phone, please.”
“I can’t. My parents bought it for me only yesterday. As much as I would love an excuse to give it away, they would squeeze me like a lemon until only my dry skin’s left.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll tell your parents not to punish you,” purred Ian Philips in his mellifluous voice. “I know them well. They’re good friends of mine.”
“They wouldn’t listen to you. They don’t even listen to the European Union.”
“Right. Let’s stop playing, now,” stated Mr. Franklin, and he grasped my arm. “You’re going to be a good girl and give us this phone.”
“Don’t want!”
“Grab her!”
They each got hold of one of my limbs, which made me feel like a medieval criminal being quartered by four furious horses. Mr. Franklin covered my mouth with his hand and I struggled feverishly, kicking a vast quantity of legs, arms and faces—until I managed to wriggle free of Edwin, who was holding my right arm. Swiftly I slipped the phone into the collar of my shirt. Since—thanks to my mum—my shirt was admirably tucked in, the phone slid down and stayed stuck between my belly and my skirt in a warm little hammock.
“Abracadabra! It’s vanished into thin air,” I announced.
“Thin air my foot!” roared Mr. Franklin. “Turn her upside-down!”
They tried, but they hadn’t thought it through properly—instead of letting go one after the other they all dropped me at the same time, and I managed to slither out of their reach in the manner of the slimy eel. I then adopted the ways of the Australian kangaroo by hopping to the corner of the room, picking up one of the feathery wings on the way, to use as a shield.
“Now, Sesame, be reasonable,” said Ian Philips in his soft voice. “The information you’ve got isn’t valuable. No one’s remotely interested in hearing it, you know. It’d be much better if you recorded yourself singing a nice little song.”
“No chance! I know everything,” I said. “I talked to Jenna Jenkins and to Stacy Vance. I’m the one who told Jeremy Hopkins what’s going on. My friends Toby and Gemma know everything too. And no need to try and buy my silence. I don’t want your money. I already get five pounds a week from my parents.”
If I’d been a dog, no doubt I could have smelt their panic from my little corner. But I wasn’t particularly relaxed myself, if you really need to know. There were four of them, and I was on my own, with only a shield of fluffy feathers to protect myself when I wouldn’t have minded more aggressive weaponry.
“Catch her,” Mr. Franklin croaked. “I don’t care how.”
They leapt at me—but not swiftly enough.
The best strategy, as a lioness would tell you, would have been to close up on me from all corners of the room. Instead, the fearsome foursome clownishly ran after me together, bumping into each other and stumbling over the furniture, arms outstretched and grunting like brain-craving zombies.
Ninja-like, I slipped under a table, jumped over a statue, did a cartwheel on an old armchair, swung from the ceiling lamp, and—
—found myself face to face with Edwin, right in front of the door.
How did he get there?
I ducked to the side just in time—his arms grasped cold air—and I threw myself to the ground under Mr. Franklin’s legs. One karate kick to the left made a huge canvas collapse on to the professor brothers of evil. But Edwin had materialized out of nowhere again! He had the look of someone who wanted to rugby-tackle me.
Not fast enough!
I sprang up into the ether, and one second later, I landed next to the window.
The window was open. And on the window sill was a squirrel, who leapt swiftly away.
And suddenly something happened in my brain.
You know what I told you about the number of connections in your brain being equal to the number of stars in the universe? That’s how it works.
You see a squirrel.
This reminds you of Mrs. Appleyard’s video of gliding squirrels.
Then you notice that you’re holding feathery wings.
And then you remember Edwin saying that they’re solid little things that could hold your weight.
Your brain puts two and two together, and says, “Glide.”
I put on the wings, grabbed the straps, climbed on the window sill, and—
“No! Catch her!”
The wind slapped me as I jumped, and the gale met the wings. Immediately I slowed down, as if I was sliding on invisible rails of air—crossing the street, soaring above the walls of Sidney Sussex College.
Going down a bit quicker there, with less wind to hold me up . . .
“Oh, look!” said someone below me. “A swan!”
Down, down, down, down.
“Oh my God!” someone else exclaimed. “It’s not a swan! It’s—”
And as I crashed not very elegantly on to the soft grass of Sidney Sussex, I heard, in perfect unison, two voices which I really could have done without:
“SOPHIE MARGARET CATRIONA SEADE!”
XI
The rest is history. You probably don’t want to hear about my getting the Keys to the City from the hands of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Well, at least I hope you don’t want to hear about it, because it didn’t happen, much to my and Toby’s and Gemma’s indignation.
What happened was this: my parents, in fits, dropped their plates and glasses to pick me up from the ground. Apparently the Master of Sidney Sussex had invited them to a quiet little shebang in the college gardens. I’d sort of ruined their evening, but that’s normal. I was rushed to A&E, even though I was fine, just a few ruffled feathers and a bruise on my knee which I swear had been there before. The Fellows who were dining in the Sidney Sussex gardens, including the Vice-Chancellor, followed us to hospital in their gowns and waited outside like a troop of worried-looking ravens until I came out triumphantly.
“Victory!” I told my fan club. “Not the merest plaster anywhere on my body! Sesame Seade is not a swan, but she’s as solid as a stone!”
Then I was taken to the police station, where I produced my phone, upon which no one could refrain from laughing. I played the recording. They heard it all. They noted it all down. They told my meek-looking Mum and Dad they should have listened to me.
“I’m always telling them that, but they never listen. Do you, Mum?”
“Do I what, darling?” It’s a hopeless business.
“Can I go in your car for the car chase?” I asked.
“What car chase?” chuckled the Inspector.
“The one you’re about to have to catch the Franklins and the Philipses.”
“Don’t think there’s going to be a car chase, love,” said the Inspector, which saddened me no end.
There was no car chase. Edwin Franklin and his father, who had stayed, rather stupidly, at the art gallery, were caught there and not even handcuffed. The Philips brothers were found at the Fitzwilliam museum destroying their computers, but not quickly enough for all the information to disappear. Jenna Jenkins was woken up by a phone call from the Inspector. Stacy Vance was dragged to the police station to be interrogated.
And that was all.
I thought I would testify in court, make a tear-jerking speech, explain every little detail of my adventure! I thought Toby and Gemma would be called as witnesses! I thought I would be allowed to publicly whip Edwin, Mr. Franklin and the Philips brothers! I thought I would shake the Queen’s hand and be thanked on behalf of the whole country!
But no.
“Are you ready for school?”
“Mother! I cannot go to school today!”
“And why not, pray?”
“Because I’ve had a close brush with death and bandits! I’ve saved everyone’s Internet privacy! I’ve made one of the country’s biggest companies collapse!”
But I was pushed into the Smurfmobile like any other schoolgirl! Me, Sesame Seade, Cambridge’s number one supersleuth! But then I remembered that school meant I could tell everyone my story, and I calmed down.
“Are you super furious, Mummy?”
“Why would I be?”
“Because College has lost all the Cooperture money.”
“Well,” Mum laughed, “I’m sure we’ll get much more in compensation when the trial takes place.”
More money. More money. Even more money.
“Can I have a pocket money rise?”
“No.”
“Ten little pounds a week!”
“No.”
“Nine, then.”
“No.”
“Seven? Six and a half?”
“Six and a half, at your next birthday.”
“But that’s in six months!”
“It’ll give you time to get used to the idea of having such a fortune at your disposal.”
Later when I came back home I found an electric guitar on my bed.
My parents are sometimes cool.
And you know what, it doesn’t matter that I didn’t get the Order of the British Empire or the Nobel Prize for Peace. Supersleuths don’t need that. All they need is the satisfaction of having done a good job, which I had, with the added thrill of having used strange ways of going from one place to another, which I had. It was a bit awkward because suddenly everyone at school wanted their pictures taken with me on their very cool phones, but you get used to the popularity. And then it all died out anyway when Suzanne Windermere got her new sparkly pink braces.
“Sophie, you have a visitor,” said Dad, making it sound like an ogre was trying to force his way into my room.
“Oh, hi, Jeremy!”
“Hi, Sesame. May I come in?”
“Sure, if you don’t smash up the place like you did in your own room.”
He sat on the end of my bed. “Yeah, about the Cooperture thing, I just wanted to say . . .”
“That you’re very sorry, and that money made you mad. I know.”
“No, that’s not what I wanted to say.”
“Really? What did you want to say?”
“I wanted to say that you’re a mentalist, you absolute idiot—throwing yourself out of a window like that! Promise me you’ll never do it again!”
“All right. You can always buy me a helicopter with your next bribe.”
He went raspberry red. “OK, thanks for not telling anyone, Sesame. I, er, I really appreciate it. It wasn’t like me to say yes to those guys. So, thank you, and, well, I guess—I’m sorry, and all that.”
I replied, “You are forgiven, my child, as my dad says to everyone. Though he didn’t say it to me when I skated into that ugly jade lion in the living-room.”
“Right. I have another thing to ask you. The University’s letting Jenna come back despite the whole affair, but she’s not going to work for UniGossip any more. I’m the new Editorin-Chief. And I’d like you to be in our team of investigators. Now that we know you’re both a super sleuth and an incorruptible one.”
He whispered that, of course, because Mum and Dad downstairs would probably not approve.
“Oh, Jeremy, that would be the most beauteous thing ever! I can’t wait! Wow, I have a job—that’s just—it’s just—”
“All right, don’t be too loud. You won’t be credited in the mag, of course, but if I call you and ask you to go spy on someone . . .”
“Who’re you gonna call? Sesame Seade!’” I sang.
“Doesn’t fit. Anyway. I’ll try not to send you on missions that are too dangerous. . . .”
“I can deal with danger!”
“It’ll also mean not being seen, and not boasting when you do manage to find something.”
“Say no more! As long as I can help the community, I will. It is my mission. My burden. My responsibility.”
We shook hands and shared a Battenberg cake to seal our professional relationship. Peter Mortimer nicked Jeremy’s slice before he could eat it, which annoyed Jeremy a little, but he should have known better and wolfed it all down before the feline could.
“Right,” I said. “When do I start?”
“Well,” Jeremy replied, “as it happens, I just got a phone call this morning, and apparently, strange noises have been heard in the cellars of Clare College. . . .”
Acknowledgments
I’ve never written an acknowledgments page before, but so many people have indirectly contributed to Sesame that this time I can’t keep up the pretense that I’ve done it all on my own.
Christ’s College has been my home for the past seven years. Much like Sesame, I’ve grown up there. A very special thank-you to Don and Tod, the Porters, who did much more than lend their names, and to the Master, Professor Frank Kelly, who thinks Sesame should focus a little bit more on her science homework!
Thank you so, so much to my very precious book-lover friends, Anna, Lauren and Erin, who’ve been adorable to me over the past two years of doubts, joys and worries since I started to write in English. My mum’s also been doing that for the past twenty years since I started to write in French. Merci Maman.
Professors Maria Nikolajeva and Morag Styles have been the fairy godmothers of my graduate life. They taught me everything I know about children’s literature and never worried that I was writing books alongside my PhD thesis.
Kirsty McLachlan is the loveliest agent imaginable, and the calmest in two times of crisis: no publishers, and then too many. Her advice and suggestions are always spot-on. As for my editor, Ellen Holgate, I couldn’t have asked for a more enthusiastic, creative and witty friend to work with.
Finally, Simon, I wrote most of this book to the tune of your virtuosic piano-playing. You were one of the first to read it. I will always have so much tenderness for our years together.
Sleuth on Skates Page 10