Sleuth on Skates (15 page)

Mum looked at Dad, who looked at Mum. “I'm sure it does,” said Mum, sounding unsure. “Anyway, we'll go tomorrow. Say
yes, Mummy.”

“Yes, Mummy.”

“Good night, then.”

“The problem with Sophie is that she's a reluctant little Aliboron,” said Dad as they closed the door.

As soon as their footsteps had faded away down the staircase, I leapt out of the window
and on to the little terrace, slid down my tree, and roller-skated till the city was just a brown blur of gargoyles, bikes and railings under the sandy streetlamps.

There was one person in the world I absolutely wanted to meet.

Well, two people. J.K. Rowling first, always. And then Jenna Jenkins. Whose address I knew by heart:

Jenna Jenkins

Little pink cottage on the river

Grantchester

Only she could detangle the big knot of Cs and swans and money and explain the mysterious not-kidnapping and release. If I could get her to speak, I'd understand everything.

There are four ways to get to Grantchester. Firstly, you can drive there. But I haven't got my driving licence yet. Secondly,
you can skate there. But I didn't have my wrist protections on so it would have been dangerous. Thirdly, you can fly there in the manner of Superman. But as mentioned before, I never asked for such superpowers when I decided to become Cambridge's number one supersleuth.

Fourthly, you can sail there. And for that, you need a ship. And I knew exactly where to find a ship.

So there I was, in the middle of the night, carrying a canary-yellow canoe on my back in the manner of the armadillo.

“Water, water everywhere!” I chanted as I dropped the canoe in the river. I then lowered myself into the wobbly vessel, put on a life jacket and grabbed the paddle.

The Greek-statue-man had been right. It was the easiest craft to steer in marine history. You just plunged one side of the paddle in the water on the right of the canoe, like this—and then on the other side, like that—and it raced upstream in the manner of wild salmon.

“Grantchester, here I come! I shall discover
your heretofore undiscovered lands, and name them Sesamia!”

The night was a black bell splattered with stars. On the banks of the river, the grass grew thick and tangled, and croaked “ribbit ribbit” when the glistening ripples of water reached it. Sometimes the black water plopped at me, and as I reached the heretofore undiscovered banks of Grantchester an immense white owl descended like a ghost on the river and snatched a fish that no one else had noticed. It was a wild world.

But gradually I started seeing houses again, and the night became lighter. I'd reached the village. Sitting quietly at the bottom of their little gardens, the cottages of Grantchester appeared, some of them still broken by squares of yellow light or the stormy bluish glow of a television.

One problem with the night is that everything looks gray in it. Yellow looks gray; red looks gray; try blue, it also looks gray; gray looks very gray; even white looks gray; and pink, unfortunately, also looks gray.

I had no way of telling a pink cottage from a neon-yellow one.

“Another very disorganized mission,” I scolded myself as I stopped paddling to scratch my chin. “I'm not a very good sleuth.”

“Quack.”

“Why, I wouldn't go as far as to say I'm a quack, thank you very much.”

“Quack.”

“This is getting insulting!”

“Quack.”

I looked around to face my detractor.

And ended up nose to beak with the pregnant duck.

Now, that's the part when most people will say I'm lying or wrong, that it wasn't the same pregnant duck as the one I'd saved and shared strawberry sweets with. Let me get this straight. I have no scientific evidence that it actually was my pregnant duck. I didn't do a DNA test or take her fingerprints. But look at it
this way. I can't see any valid reason why any other duck than the one I saved from the claws of Peter Mortimer would have helped me on my mission. If you can think of a valid reason, let me know at this address:

Sesame Seade

Master's Lodge

Christ's College

Cambridge CB2 3BU

UK

So my pregnant duck quacked at me, and I was so happy to see her I quacked back, which surprised her a little. And then she joyously went on swimming, her little tail waggling from left to right like Mum's forefinger when she says “Don't do this, Sophie.” I followed her, searing through the black waters. A few minutes later she stopped in front of a pretty little back garden and jumped out of the water on to the mooring platform.

I heaved myself on to the bank—my lower
body still inside the canoe—and crawled on the grass where I struggled out of the boat in the manner of the hermit crab leaving its shell for a bigger one. I hid the canoe and the paddle behind a big bush of reeds and walked up to the back of cottage in my socks. The house was mostly dark, but one of the top floor windows was bathed in milky white light. I climbed on a compost bin and lifted myself up on the bow-window. The duck quacked at me in encouragement. The soft light from inside the house poured on to the window sill, painting it back to its daytime color—pink.

I carefully folded my finger and, with the tip of the first knuckle, tapped the glass three short times.

Inside, something ruffled.

I tapped another three short times.

Inside, something shuffled.

I tapped another three short times.

Inside, something scuffled.

And suddenly the sash-window slid up, and I was dragged inside by powerful hands, which pulled me to a powerful chest, holding a powerful sword right under my little neck!

(It was actually Jenna's quite small hands, pulling me to her quite skinny chest, holding a pen-knife. But in the heat of the action, it feels much scarier.)

“Who are you?” she hissed.

“Sesame Seade,” I hissed back (my name is easily hissed).

“What are you doing here?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Who sent you?”

“No one. No one. Certainly not Cooperture.”

She let go of me and turned me around. “You're just a kid,” she observed, a bit baffled. “How did you get here?”

“I canoed up the Cam.”

Now I was inside, I could see where the white light came from—a phone on the desk. There was no other light switched on in the bedroom, which was a sweet little cottage bedroom with many flower patterns.

Jenna Jenkins sat on the bed and sighed. “I'm not even surprised. I have no idea what's going on these days.”

“I've come to ask you about this whole affair,”
I said, sitting down cross-legged on the floor. “I know lots of things about what happened, but some pieces of the jigsaw are still missing.”

“What do you know?”

“You never went to London. You were kidnapped by Professor Ian Philips and his brother, Archie Philips, and spent three days in a broom cupboard at the Fitzwilliam Museum.”

Her eyes widened, but she didn't say anything.

I went on, “Stacy Vance, your best friend, discovered that something fishy was going on at the computer science department—something which Archie Philips was involved in. She told you, and you started investigating the case for
UniGossip
. You found out that it had all to do with Cooperture's plans to smother Cambridge colleges in banknotes, helped by Ian Philips who organized the meetings. And you were about to tell Jeremy Hopkins about it when you suddenly vanished. Three days later, you reappeared like nothing had happened and faked depression. As for Stacy, she's now pretending there wasn't
anything weird going on at all, and planning to spend the end of the week cheerfully skipping across a stage in a tatty tutu.”

Jenna was just looking at her fingers. I waited for her to speak, and finally she simply said, “What don't you know?”

“Well, for a start, I don't know what Cooperture and the Philipses have actually done that's so wrong that they need to convert a broom cupboard into a dark dungeon to lock up anyone who might have found out. Secondly, I don't know how they managed to kidnap you. I also don't know how you found out Cooperture were involved. Finally, I don't know why you didn't go straight to the police after being released by Professor Philips—if he truly released you, that is, and you didn't run away.”

“You're not a bad sleuth, you know?” she mumbled. “OK, I'll answer some of your questions. It all started one evening when Stacy decided to have a bit of fun breaking into password-protected parts of the computer science department's network. She
stumbled upon a piece of very suspicious software belonging to Archie Philips. She saw immediately that it wasn't anything legal. And she decided to tell me about it.”

“Why tell you and not the police?”

“Well, see, she was stuck. Firstly, she'd found it illegally—it's not exactly OK to break into protected bits of a network. But also, she didn't know if Archie had been working on it for the wrong reasons, or if it was just an exercise in programming. So I decided to investigate. I went to the department to spy on Archie Philips, and after a while I overheard a phone conversation between him and someone else. Archie said that the software was now ready, and that his job stopped there—it was now the task of the other person, the one he was calling, to get Cooperture in touch with the colleges.”