I froze.
“Toby. It’s not just about frogs.”
“Isn’t it? What’s it about, then?”
I looked at Gemma. “Tell him, Gemz.”
“Sure,” she said. “It’s about . . . Well . . . Why don’t you tell us, Sesame?”
“What?” I groaned. “You haven’t guessed? Sometimes I despair of having such shortsighted sidekicks. Okay, so—frogs are faster around the boathouse. What’s in the water there in high concentrations? The water from the boathouse, of course—the sewers lead there.”
“That’s disgusting,” said Gemma. “The frogs are drinking sewer water?”
“Probably not coming from the toilet, but the water coming from the kitchens, certainly.”
“And?”
“And what if this water coming from the kitchen is loaded with something that makes people stronger? That makes people faster?”
Gemma’s jaw dropped. “Drugs?”
“Yes. Some kind of dope. Some kind of drug that makes the rowers more efficient. Some kind of drug that someone inside the boathouse is giving them—mixing into their food.”
“But that’s forbidden,” objected Toby.
“Quite. Very forbidden. So this person has to be very discreet. So discreet, in fact, that no one knows, apart from this person, that this is happening. Even the rowers don’t know that they’re being drugged. So the stocks of dope have to be hidden in a safe place, not in the boathouse, but in . . .”
“. . . the pirate chest!” whispered Gemma.
“And the drug has to be mixed to something else, something that makes it easy to give to the rowers without them noticing, such as . . .”
“. . . the protein shake!” whispered Toby.
“And so that the taste isn’t too weird, that drug has to be mixed with a vast amount of . . .”
“. . . fine white sugar,” whispered Gemma.
“And the people who are doing it are clearly, uncontroversially and undeniably . . .”
“Gwendoline and Julius Hawthorne,” whispered Toby.
“Yes. Gwendoline and Julius Hawthorne, carrying their pirate chest around St. Cat’s cellars, which is where they found it in the first place. Julius who’s been spotted by the pirates jumping from barge to barge, stealing jewels . . . to pay for the drugs! And Gwendoline who mixes drugs into the protein shakes . . .”
We all looked at each other. Everything was silent. Even the frogs had stopped swimming and were exchanging meaningful glances over the water with their huge, bulbous eyes.
“But there’s just one thing I don’t understand,” said Toby after a while. “I thought we were looking for a serial poisoner?”
IX
“Well, we were,” I admitted. “But . . . maybe we’re not anymore. Maybe it’s just a virus, as we always said. Anyway, we’ve got bigger fish to fry now. We need to decide what we’re going to do about this.”
“Denounce them to the police,” said Toby.
“But then the Boat Race will be canceled!” moaned Gemma. “And what if you’re wrong, Sesame? What if there’s something else we haven’t thought about? You could kiss goodbye to your supersleuth career if you claimed that and it wasn’t true!”
“Gemma’s right,” I said. ‘We need to get someone on our side first, and fact-check. We need to find someone nice. Someone who’d understand. Someone who could check things for us. Someone who knows how it works.”
“Jeremy?” suggested Toby.
“Jeremy still isn’t calling, so we can assume that he’s probably being kept in jail or something.”
“How about Wally?” said Toby. “Or Will, rather. He’s nice.”
“Yes! Good idea. I’ll go and see him now.”
“What? It’s almost four o’clock! Your parents will want you back at some point,” said Toby. “Especially as they don’t even know you’ve gone.”
“Zounds! I’d forgotten about them. How vexing. Listen—why don’t you tell your parents that we’re all staying over at yours tonight, to talk about how rubbish it is to be ill and to catch up on our homework. I’ll call my parents from your phone and tell them I’m sleeping at yours. Then I’ll leave, and if your parents ask where I am, just stuff the guest bed with pillows and say that I’ve fallen asleep.”
“Okeydoke,” said Toby. “Stay in touch!”
I quickly called my parents and explained. They were furious that I’d gone without telling them, and refused to let me sleep over. I insisted. They refused again. I insisted again. They refused again. I insisted a bit more. They accepted.
So then I squeezed my feet into my purple roller skates, and skated through town to find Will’s room at Homerton College.
Will was in his room when I knocked. He looked like he needed a good chamomile tea and a long night’s sleep. He also looked like I was the last person in the world he wanted to see, apart perhaps from Death itself with his mighty scythe.
“Hey,” I said. “Can I come in?”
“What are you doing here, Sesame?”
“I need your help.”
“I’m leaving with the team in half an hour. We’re spending the night in London before the race tomorrow morning.”
“I won’t need more than half an hour.”
He let me in. His room was full of pictures of the rowing team, and of posters of brightly colored tropical frogs. I sat down on his desk chair. On his desk was a draft of his thesis, entitled “Lipophilic alkaloid in the Phyllobates Terribilis: A study of toxicity for human epiderm.”
“That sounds crazy complicated,” I small-talked.
“It’s just jargon,” said Will. “It means I’m studying the ways in which these little tropical frogs produce a very active toxin—a sort of poison, if you will—which comes directly from their skin, and can penetrate human skin too. It can be very dangerous—if you so much as touch them, you could die.”
“Wicked. You’ll have to talk to my friend Toby. He’d be very interested. He loves frogs. He’s got two.”
Will laughed, “I’ve got over thirty at the lab. And I had to buy some more recently.”
“You’ll have to give Toby a tour of your lab!” I exclaimed. “Anyway, back to business. What happened at the police station? Is Jeremy being kept in a dark dungeon and having to catch his own cockroaches for dinner?”
“No,” sighed Will. “Unfortunately, Jeremy and Marcel fell extremely sick almost as soon as we got to the police station. They had to be taken to the doctor’s urgently. Well, you know what it’s like, you had the bug for a week.”
“Oh, poor Jeremy. That explains why he wasn’t calling me. What did the police say?”
“Well, Marcel and Jeremy were sick literally on the doorstep of the police station, so we didn’t even have time to go in and talk to the police. And I didn’t know anything about this affair, so . . . we’ll see about that after the Boat Race, when they’ve both recovered.”
“What happened to the jewelry?”
“Oh, I have it here,” said Will. “I’ll keep it until they’re both better and we can go to the police again.”
“Okay. Don’t give it back to Julius and Gwendoline,” I advised.
“Julius and Gwendoline? What do you mean?”
“That they’re the ones who stole the jewelry. To pay for dope.”
“To pay for what?” laughed Will.
“They’re mixing drugs into the crew’s food. Performance-enhancing drugs. All the rowers on the team are doped.”
And I explained everything: the pirate chest, the night at St. Cat’s, the barge people’s jewelry being stolen, the frogs.
Will was silent as a stone. Then he said, ‘That’s very serious. Very, very serious, Sesame.”
“I know,” I said. “What shall we do? We’ll have to denounce them to the police and cancel the race, surely.”
He started shaking like a washing machine. “Let’s . . . let’s not be too hasty. This race means a lot to all of us, you know.”
“Yes, b
ut it’s cheating. It’s not a real race anymore. The Cambridge team is drugged.”
He sat down on the bed, took off his glasses and pressed his eyelids for so long that I worried he might accidentally push his eyeballs too far into his skull and lose them forever.
“Okay,” he said finally. “You’re absolutely right: we need to go to the police. Too bad about the race.”
I nodded and stood up. “I’m proud of you, Will! A real sportsman.”
He had tears in his eyes. “At least I’ve still got my little frogs,” he said, looking amorously at a picture on the wall of a little blue frog.
I turned around to look at it. “It’s very cute,” I said to make him feel better about it. “It’s got really good taste in colors, too. I’d love to wear electric blue clothes like that, but my parents will never let me, because their favorite color is maroon and I always tell them . . .”
I stopped, because I’d noticed a weird shadow on the wall. As if someone behind me was raising their arms, holding something heavy . . .
And then I had a bit of a headache, and for the second time in less than a week, everything went
X
“How dare he hit a skull that contains a brain that has as many connections in it as there are stars in the universe?”
This question remained unanswered, for I happened to be talking to a bunch of bags and luggage, which I could barely see anyway, as me and my dumb leathery companions were locked inside the trunk of a van.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been locked inside the trunk of a van, but it’s quite hustly and bustly in there. Not exactly the kind of place you’d elect for a cup of tea, unless you wanted it to go everywhere but your mouth. And it’s pretty cold, too. And it’s pretty dark. And it’s ferociously noisy.
And I’d been unconscious for long enough that I couldn’t fall asleep again even if I tried. Technically, it’s true that I was in a sleeping bag, but the bag was zipped up and I was inside all tied up with rope, with just my eyes peering at the top, so the situation wasn’t particularly doze-inducing.
“Ouch!” I ouched as the van braked and a bag flew at me and fell on top of my head.
This time, it felt like the van had stopped for good, as the engine died down. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been unconscious, but I guessed we must have just arrived in London, where the crew was to stay in a hotel for the night. I heard the doors slamming, and Gwendoline’s curt voice, muffled by the noise of the dying engine, saying, “You get the bags out of the van, Wally.”
“Okey doke, Gwen!” said Will’s cheerful voice.
He opened the boot, and light flowed in.
“I’m awake!” I said.
“Shut up or you won’t be awake for long,” he replied.
“I didn’t have very good dreams,” I said. “There was this lingering ache next to my ear, I wonder why.”
“I said shut up.”
“What are you going to do with me? Please don’t kill me. My grandparents would be sad, I’m their only granddaughter.”
“I. Said. Shut. Up.”
He got all the bags out and hauled some on his shoulders.
“It’s not very comfortable in here,” I said. “On a scale of ‘bed of nails’ to ‘mattress of pure cotton wool,’ it’s much closer to the former.”
“Poor darling,” he groaned.
“I’m hungry, too. I haven’t found the minibar.”
He rolled his eyes, and closed the trunk again.
It’s funny how reassuring a bunch of bags and suitcases can be.
You only realize it once you’re all alone without any bags and suitcases around.
It’s funny how reassuring the noise of the engine and the hustle and bustle of being driven around can be.
You only realize it once you’re in a dark, quiet, motionless nothingness of a place.
“Don’t panic, Sesame Seade,” I commanded. “Don’t think about panicking. Think about how to get out of the locked trunk of a van when you’re tied up in a sleeping bag in a manner very much resembling that of a sausage roll.”
I began to crawl along like a worm, and then decided to upgrade to caterpillar, getting my legs close to my head and then far again. The trunk was big. I caterpillared my way through one side of it. Nothing there. Then the other, near the door, where I met some sort of cuddly toy that had been abandoned there. Then the next side, and finally the last . . .
And that’s when I bumped into something hard, which fell to the side with a metallic CLUNK, filling the place with an atrocious smell.
“Oh mirth and eternal joy,” I sighed. “It’s like being trapped in a locked room with Halitosis. What is this repulsive stuff?”
This repulsive stuff was now slowly imbibing the side of the sleeping bag, and filtering through it all the way to my skin.
“Cripes on a pair of purple roller skates,” I cursed. “Engine oil! Who keeps engine oil inside one’s trunk? Well, everyone, I guess, but still. I don’t need any ointment, thank you very much, despite my sausage-roll state.”
And now I was disgustingly oily.
“Well, at least,” I noted with some satisfaction, “the oil has loosened the rope inside a little bit. It’s definitely more comfortable this way. Maybe I’ll even be able to sleep . . . Wait a minute. It’s LOOSENING the ROPE!”
So I began to pull. And push. And tweak. And turn. And squiggle and wiggle and wriggle. And in the manner of the caterpillar slowly sliding out of its cocoon to emerge as a beautiful butterfly, I freed one hand, then the other hand, unzipped the zipper and was OUT!
(Except, of course, that butterflies don’t have hands and cocoons don’t have zippers; just pointing this out in case I get accused of spreading falsities.)
“And now, my faithful mobile phone, you’re going to call Mum and Dad,” I said.
I extracted the faithful mobile phone from my pocket and clicked “Call Mum.”
“Unfortunately,” said a voice at the other end of the line, “it looks like you haven’t got enough credit to make this call. Why not top up by calling . . .”
“Bother and double bother and triple bother with bother cream on top,” I pestered. “All Gemma’s fault for babbling on about Toby’s mosaic on the phone to me the other time. Well, I can still call the police, since emergency numbers don’t cost anything.”
So I dialed 911, and a voice on the other end of the line said, “Hello there. It looks like you’re calling us from a Phone4Kids phone. Are you a child? Are you sure you really want to call the emergency services? It’s a very serious offense to call them if you’re not really in a situation of emergency, you know. Have you told an adult that you’re making this call? If not, you really should try and find an adult who can make it instead of you. If you really want to proceed to the emergency services, key 1.”
“Yes, yes, I do, you useless, terrible, atrocious, not-in-the-least-useful phone,” I grumbled.
And I tried to press 1. Except my hands were covered in oil, so the phone joyfully leapt out of my fist in the manner of an Olympic diver, and crashed onto the floor of the trunk, exploding into a great number of pieces, most of which drowned in the oil.
“I cannot believe this!” I shouted. “The only time I want you alive and well, you go and die on me! You morbidly catastrophic piece of technology! You epicly abominable machine sent to destroy the Earth! I hate you and I hate the day my parents first laid eyes on you!”
My imprecations didn’t seem to motivate the dead device to be alive again. I sat down, still as greasy as a French fry, and sulked. How dare Will do that to me? He who was so nice, so sweet. Will-Wally, always smiling, always positive, always—
“Wally,” I said to the dark trunk. “Wally. Why does that ring a bell?”
May I? interrupted my well-connected neurons in the form of a polite brain butler. I should like to suggest that you were vaguely reminded of the Where’s Wally? books the last time you saw that red-and-white woolly hat.
“Yes, that’
s it,” I said. “It did look like Wally’s hat in the books. I was going to say it, but Toby interrupted me. What about it?”
Could it be because Will looks like Wally that he owns a red-and-white hat, perhaps as a joke from his fellow team members? Just a thought, of course, added my brain butler hastily.
“What do you mean?” I asked it. “What’s Will got to do with that? It’s Gwen and Julius’s stolen jewelry in that hat.”
Well, Madam, whispered the amiable neuronal butler, perhaps I wouldn’t be so hasty. It struck me that the pirate described the zief, in fact, not as blond like Julius, but as brown-haired, like Toby. And like . . .
“. . . like WILL!” I shouted. “Will, who’s short, small and brown-haired! Will, who was the only one on the staircase with us when Gemma’s earrings got stolen! Will, the jewelry thief? But why?”
I seem to recall that you said once that those burglaries might have been performed in order to pay for the poison, but I may be too ambitious in my hypothesis.
“The poison,” I murmured. “Will would be the poisoner, too? But how?”
My brain butler coughed a little bit, and said, I shall leave you to mull over it. As for myself, I think I have a frog in my throat.
Frog.
FROG.
Will studies frogs.
Will studies how frogs’ skins produce poison, which in turn can intoxicate humans by touching their skins.
Will, who could, with a little bit of money, buy more of the frogs, recently . . .
. . . and gather enough of the poison to distill it, and put into something small and easy to carry, such as . . .
“A tube of antibacterial gel!” I shouted. “That’s it! All the while we were thinking about food, all the while—but the poison was in the gel that Will was giving people to disinfect their hands! He gave it to Gemma, Toby and me as he was driving us home—he must have felt threatened by our findings—and I bet he did the same to Jeremy and Marcel as he drove them to the police station! Of course, things could have become a bit problematic for him if the police had seen the jewelry and traced it back to him . . .”
Scam on the Cam Page 7