Scam on the Cam

by Clémentine Beauvais

  But why? Why would he want the Cambridge team to be poisoned like that, when he was clearly so keen to win the race that he’d locked me inside the trunk of a van so that it wouldn’t get canceled?

  Just as I was pondering upon this incomprehensible act of evil, crunchy noises outside the van indicated that two people were approaching.

  “I can’t find it anywhere,” said Gwendoline, “so it must have fallen off my bag and be somewhere in the boot.”

  “Are you sure you brought it?” asked Julius.

  “Of course,” she scoffed. “It’s the team’s mascot! Our little Cambridge teddy bear. I wouldn’t have left it in Cambridge for the world.”

  “Well,” said Julius, “hurry up, we haven’t got very long.”

  Presently the boot opened, and there was light. And two faces topped with blond hair.

  “Sesame!” chorused the two siblings.

  I would have replied, as I’m usually quite polite, but I didn’t exactly have the time. As fast as lightning, I leapt out of the boot—but clearly not fast enough, as Gwen caught me . . .

  . . . and I slipped out of her arms like a bar of soap, in a splatter of oil!

  Unlike my phone, I didn’t shatter into pieces as I fell to the ground, but swiftly did a few forward rolls. Julius was right behind me as I got up again—but WHIZZ!—he slipped and skidded on the trail of oil that I’d left on the ground and SLAM!—he fell heavily on his back.

  I ran away through the parking lot. The weather was all lovely and bright. The sun was nice and fresh in the sky like a tangerine sorbet. For a late afternoon sun, it didn’t look tired at all.

  In fact, it didn’t look like a late afternoon sun. It looked just as if it was . . .

  “The morning?” I gasped, running into one London street and then another, and tumbling down a flight of steps. “It’s Saturday morning? Then when Will opened the trunk earlier, I’d slept the whole night in that van? But then it means . . .”

  . . . and right then I had to stop as I’d reached a howling, screaming, laughing, cheering crowd, glued to the barriers overlooking the river Thames . . .

  “. . . then it means . . .”

  . . . and I ran down bank after bank after bank of people pressed against each other, a tidal wave of dark blue and light blue, shaking flags in the air . . .

  “. . . then it means . . .”

  The Boat Race is NOW!

  XI

  “Sorry, sir, but when does the Boat Race start?” I asked a random Oxford supporter, painted dark blue from head to toe in the manner of a Smurf.

  “The men’s first crews? They’re racing in about ten minutes,” he said. “The women’s teams have just raced, Cambridge won. Look, the men are getting ready!” he added, pointing at a giant screen above the crowd.

  Indeed on the screen everyone could see the Cambridge and the Oxford teams, all of them looking remarkably nervous, standing in two neat lines next to the river, surrounded by journalists. The poisonous Will Sutcliffe was there, equipped with his cox box, and just then Gwendoline arrived and started to pat the shoulders of all the rowers in the Cambridge crew.

  “And the coach of the Cambridge team is here,” roared the presenter, his voice magnified by the amplifiers on either side of the screen. “Gwendoline Hawthorne, twenty-two years old, is encouraging her boys to beat Oxford! She also seems to be hugging what looks like an oily teddy bear. Anyway, in the midst of rumors about the general state of health of her team, it looks like Oxford may have the psychological advantage . . .”

  “Where is it?” I asked hurriedly. “The starting point of the race?”

  “Oh, up there,” said the Oxford fan, pointing vaguely at the river. “But I wouldn’t go there, if I were you—no point! You won’t see anything. You should stay here and watch them pass by!”

  “I’m not interested in watching them pass by. I’m interested in stopping them from racing!” I exclaimed, and started to run.

  Well, that was the intention. Because I ran into a very compact group of Cambridge supporters, crawled between their legs, emerged within a wave of Oxford fans, squeezed between them and proceeded in this extremely inconvenient fashion until I finally managed to pop out of the giant crowd and actually start to run.

  Seven minutes now! And I had no idea how far I was from the starting point. If only I’d had my roller skates! But that treacherous Will must have left them in his room.

  So I had to run.

  In my socks.

  The problem is, whether in socks or not, as you may or may not know—and I admit it freely, because I have many other qualities—I’m not a very good runner.

  Not a very good runner . . . at . . . all.

  Not . . . even . . . a little . . . bit.

  I’d managed a minute and a half of sprinting before it started feeling like I was about to spit out my own lungs, while both my kidneys were shattering into millions of pieces, not to mention my extraordinarily painful knee joints. In my mind I could hear Mr. Halitosis shouting at me, “Faster, Sophie Seade, faster! Your jogging style reminds me of a seal hauling itself onto an iceberg!”

  I understood now that he was cruelly right.

  Panting, I stopped somewhere along the bank and wheezed and coughed and cursed myself. Ah! Wouldst that I were a professional marathon runner! But alas, not a drop of that talent in my otherwise excellent blood: it had to let other people have their chance too.

  Leaning over the barrier, I spotted the starting point of the Boat Race. It was astronomically far from where I was standing. No way at all I’d get there in five minutes.

  It was all over. The criminal Cambridge team would race with a criminal cox and a criminal coach.

  I couldn’t stop them.

  Unless . . .

  Unless I could somehow get to that little Zodiac that was moored down there near the river.

  Unless I could get to it before its owner, who was standing on the bank looking at the river through binoculars, noticed what I was doing.

  Unless I could get to it and manage to find out how to make it start before anyone could stop me.

  I had to be fast.

  “Hey! Hey, you! That kid’s just jumped on my boat! Hey!”

  “Come on,” I whispered to the engine, “come on, how do you work? How do you start?”

  And once again my fabulously well-connected brain saved the day, because it somehow seemed to remember what it had seen Gwendoline do the other day on the motorboat in Ely, even though I couldn’t even remember looking at her then.

  It told me calmly to turn the key in the ignition.

  It then told me to pull on the rope, several times, until the engine started to putt-putt in the manner of Dad having found Peter Mortimer’s offering of half a squirrel on his pillow.

  It then told me to grab onto the rudder.

  And then it told me to GO!

  SPLASH! went the water behind me as the owner of the Zodiac fell into the Thames while trying to jump onto his boat.

  VROOM! went the Zodiac on the water in a very straight line until I figured out how to steer it.

  It was going slightly faster than a falling meteorite, and stood almost vertical on the water, but supersleuths like me are endowed with a splendid sense of balance. In about twelve seconds, I was as wet as a halibut. Of course, I couldn’t resist doing a few circles on the water and then accelerating a little bit more, but you wouldn’t have resisted it either.

  But I did remember that I was on a mission.

  Conveniently, the starting point of the race was getting closer and closer—and to my horror, I spotted the two teams settling into the boats and strapping their feet into place.

  So I slashed through the water, slaloming around the journalists’ boats, speeding up nearer and nearer to the start . . .

  “Stop that boat!” shouted someone.

  “And there seems to be an incident near the start of the Boat Race,” said the voice of the presenter in the amplifiers. “An unidentified Z
odiac is absolutely rushing toward the Cambridge and Oxford boats . . . Oh my goodness! It’s going to hit them! . . . No, it isn’t! It’s braking! . . . It’s stopping near the bank . . . Well, the police are now running down in full gear to welcome our unwanted guest . . .”

  Silence.

  Then:

  “What on Earth . . . ? It’s a little girl!”

  There wouldn’t have been more police officers if I’d been trying to steal the Queen. I looked up, half-expecting to see a dozen more parachuting down with loaded Kalashnikovs, but unfortunately I only saw seagulls and pigeons.

  In the middle of the river, the two long rowboats were rocked by the downwash from my Zodiac, but all the rowers and the two coxes were staring at the bank. On the bank, there was me, there were journalists, there were the police and a crowd of hundreds of people, each of them staring at me with eyes like this: O O.

  You know me. I’m not completely against being the center of attention.

  “Hello hello!” I chanted. “Sorry to interrupt. May I borrow a microphone?”

  “She’s asking for a microphone!” exclaimed the presenter’s voice through the speakers. “Who is this kid?”

  Two police officers were already frog-marching me to the top of the bank, but a murmur rose from the crowd of journalists. One BBC presenter with a camera drew closer to us, shouting, “She’s a little girl! You can’t arrest her like that, in front of the whole country!”

  “I’m not in the least little,” I pointed out; “in fact I’m quite tall for my age, which is eleven and a half years old.”

  I was now surrounded with cameras and journalists, and could see my own face on the huge screen above. Shame about the oil and the water, which made my hair all sleek and tidy instead of letting it express its usual wild personality.

  Meanwhile, the journalists were throwing interesting questions at me:

  “What are you trying to do by this action? Where are your parents? Have you stolen this boat? Are you protesting against the perpetuation of sheer elitism and class supremacy which the Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race embodies as an annual reminder and celebration of the hegemony of the intellectual ruling classes?”

  I said, “Let me explain.”

  And then there was silence, and I saw that it was good.

  So I went on:

  “Friends, Londonians, countrymen. And countrywomen. And countrychildren. This Boat Race is rigged! The Cambridge crew is integrally doped. Without the rowers’ knowledge, their coach, Gwendoline Hawthorne, helped by her brother Julius, has been mixing performance-enhancing drugs into their food. On top of that, their cox, Will Sutcliffe, also known as Wally, has, for reasons unclear, been steadily poisoning some selected members of the first crew, and also some unsuspecting members of the public, such as me, my sidekicks, my editor in chief and a pirate. In order to pay for the poison that he administered through the skin by the means of fake antibacterial gel, he robbed jewelry from barges on the Cam for over a month.”

  No noise was to be heard, apart from the clicking of the cameras and the seagulls’ laughter. It was super satisfying.

  “To sum up,” I concluded, “this Boat Race cannot be allowed to take place!”

  And suddenly the noise was deafening, and I was carried away by the policemen who had greeted me, while the presenter’s voice above my head was screaming, “And it looks like the race is delayed! The two crews have been asked to row back to the bank and disembark! Are they about to drug-test them? Drug-testing rowers in the Boat Race is incredibly rare—could this child be right?”

  It was much quieter inside the room where the officers took me, and where I had to reveal to them a variety of tedious details such as my name, date of birth and where on Earth my parents may be.

  “They must be at home in Cambridge,” I said. “But probably not watching the Boat Race, so I wouldn’t worry; like every Saturday morning, Dad must be writing a sermon and Mum must be doing some equations to relax. I’ll be back before they even notice I’ve been up to something.”

  But the police officer insisted on calling them. It wasn’t wise, as he almost lost his eardrum once he’d told Dad about what I’d been up to. From the other side of the room, even I heard what Dad said, and it wasn’t a bunch of words he would have happily repeated in front of his churchgoers.

  “Your parents are coming to fetch you,” he said after hanging up, massaging his ear.

  “Well, that’s good, I guess. I didn’t feel like another ride in that sleeping bag.”

  “They’re not very pleased,” he pointed out.

  “They very rarely are. Even when I got first prize at kindergarten for best robot made out of toilet rolls, they were just like, ‘Have you learned to read yet?’ Of course I had already, but I didn’t tell them because I’m not the kind to brag about being able to read at three years old, even though one must admit it’s quite exceptional.”

  “I see. You’re a bit of a handful, aren’t you?” he murmured.

  “Police officers in Cambridge have just called,” said a policewoman walking into the room. “They’ve found child-sized roller skates in Will Sutcliffe’s room, as well as the stolen jewelry and tubes of antibacterial gel, which is currently being analyzed. They’ve been to the cellars of St. Catharine’s and have found a chest with bags of powder in it, which is also being analyzed.”

  “Well,” said the policeman, “looks like your version of the events is slowly being corroborated, young lady.”

  “Of course, since nothing in the whole history of the world has ever been truer than what I said. Have you got any food, preferably chocolate-based? If not, I’ll have to resort to eating my own arm.”

  Happily, they had a whole box of teacakes, which I tucked into ravenously, covering the floor with little balls of foil wrapping and my face with chocolate. My arm, meanwhile, was sighing with relief that it wasn’t going to get munched on.

  “The journalists want to see the girl again,” said the policewoman a little bit later, looking completely exhausted.

  “Duty calls!” I sighed, following her outside. “It’s the price of success.”

  I answered a million questions. I told them about being a sausage roll in the trunk of a van, about frog racing, about being kidnapped by pirates and about the terrible loss of my Phone4Kids phone. I told them about Gemma’s earrings which she should really get back or else she’d lose her power over adults, and about poor Jeremy who must be watching this between two fits of sickness; hello Jeremy! In short, I told them everything.

  Finally the police got the phone call from Cambridge confirming that the antibacterial gel indeed contained poison, and that the powder in the chest was indeed dope. The drug tests on the Cambridge crew revealed that they were all drugged. So Will and Gwendoline were swiftly driven to the guillotine and beheaded.

  Well, not really, but they did end up in court, just like their fellow lawbreakers arrested in my previous adventures.

  And then there was an Announcement:

  “Ladies and gentlemen. Due to recent developments, the Cambridge team has no cox, no coach and no crew. As a result, they are forfeiting. The Boat Race cannot take place, and Oxford is this year’s winner by default.”

  “NOT SO FAST!” howled a voice in the crowd.

  Everyone turned around, and my jaw dropped so low that I felt the soft caress of the wet floor on my chin.

  “Mr. Halitosis?”

  XII

  “There seems to be a new development,” said the presenter in the microphone, “as what looks like a group of eight primary school children, accompanied by their . . . er . . . relatively big-boned teacher, are now making their way to the bank!”

  “This race must be run!” spluttered Mr. Halitosis into a journalist’s microphone. “I mean, rowed. Well, you know what I mean. It must be rowed by people who know the meaning of hard work and effort! It must be rowed by people who aren’t drugged!”

  “Well,” I said, “if you mean us, we have been eati
ng Mr. Appleyard’s food for five years.”

  “Hush, Sophie!” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the Cambridge team that will row against Oxford!”

  And he gestured toward our crew, calling, “Gemma! Lily! Solal! Emerald! Ben! Jamie! Kristina! and at bow, Toby! and as cox, Sophie!”

  “And after all, why not?” said the presenter’s voice as everyone around us was mumbling and muttering in the manner of light and dark blue bees. “We all came to see a race!”

  “We saw you on TV,” whispered Toby to me, “and we thought it was a shame to waste a good opportunity to row. So we called everyone and Mr. Halitosis.”

  “But you hate rowing!”

  “I know,” he said. “I’ll have to get over it, though. At least for today.”

  He would indeed, as the two rowboats, the dark Oxford blue and the light Cambridge blue, were being wheeled out of the hangar again!

  And Will’s cox box was being strapped around my head!

  And a few minutes later, I was facing Gemma, at stroke, and the whole of the river Thames, and the whole of the UK, in our boat, rocked by the waves, parallel to the Oxford boat, and eagerly waiting for the starting shot to go—

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  POW!

  “Don’t say we won, Sesame. It would be a lie. And it’s easy for anyone to check, anyway.”

  “Okay, all right, we didn’t win. But we finished!”

  “We did. And not very long after the Oxford crew!”

  “Not very long at all! Well, they had time to have a little shower.”

  “A biggish shower, yes. And a sandwich.”

  “Maybe a sandwich or two. But we finished!”

  “We did! You can say that in the book.”

  Following Gemma’s advice, I’m not going to pretend we won. But then you wouldn’t have believed me, would you? I only have clever readers.

  But there was so much lashing and washing and slashing of the waves!

  So many screams and shouts and howls and lung-splitting calls from the banks!