Scam on the Cam (12 page)

“Calm it down,” I said, “or it'll go faster than light and create a black hole in your bathtub that will swallow up the entire Earth, and I want to know the end of this story before that can happen.”

“That's what I mean,” said Toby. “It's hugely fast.”

“So what?”

“So,” said Toby, “I was just wondering if they're hugely fast because of something they're eating around the university boathouse.”

And suddenly all the neurons in my brain started to whisper things to one another.

Whisper whisper, blah-di-blah, and don't you think, and maybe it could be, and possibly, and why not this, oh, surely not, but perhaps yes
, and suddenly all the cogs slotted into place and . . .

“GENIUS! Toby, you're a GENIUS!”

“I know,” he said modestly.

“This is EXACTLY what we've ALL been waiting for!”

“I know,” he said. “Once we've figured out what it is that makes the frogs so fast, all the frog collectors in the world will want it. We'll be rich!”

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?”

“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, but 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 . . .