Scam on the Cam (16 page)

So I kept my mouth completely shut, but then I licked the corners of my lips when she wasn't looking.

And then we were given consolatory medals, congratulated by the Oxford crew, covered with safety blankets, asked another million questions, and finally, before I could say “Well done, team!” I was scooped up by Dad and carried away to the Smurfmobile, in which I fell instantly asleep.

“Knock knock!”

“Come in, it's open.”

I pushed the door a little bit and was happy to note that Jeremy's sickness hadn't changed
him a bit: his bedroom still looked like it had been traversed by two or three typhoons.

“Hello, my favorite editor in chief of all time!” I called melodiously, and sat down on a chair next to his bed. “How long since you last threw up?”

“Five hours and fifty-two minutes,” he said weakly.

“Ah, you're almost cured. I'm glad you've kept yourself occupied by doing some maggot rearing. Oh, sorry, no, it's just a discarded sandwich that got colonized.”

“I still can't believe you threw me into the arms of a poisoner,” he groaned.

“I didn't know at the time! I thought he was perfectly adorable. How's the essay going? The one that's due last week?”

“I can't find the sheet on which the essay question's written,” he said.

“Could it be that one on the desk that you used as a plate for very old fried onion rings?”

“It could be,” he admitted. “I wouldn't check if I were you. Anyway, how's celebrity treating you?”

“Rubbishly. Fame is a fickle friend, Jeremy—remember that. Not one article on me today! The whole thing died down after four days.”

“Cruel fate. You'll have to go back to being Chief Investigator for
UniGossip
.”

“I never left,” I asserted. “Meanwhile, you said you had my skates and Gemma's earrings?”

“Yes, they're over there somewhere,” he said. “I got a friend at Homerton to pick them up for you.”

I found one roller skate hidden under a pile of laundry and the other one in an empty box of chicken nuggets. I kissed and hugged them and promised them I'd never leave them alone again. The earrings were trickier to find, but after fifteen minutes of turning everything over, Jeremy remembered he'd put them inside one of the roller skates so he wouldn't forget where he'd put them.

“Well, Sesame,” said Jeremy, sitting up, “you've done it again. Supersleuthed your way to the front page of next week's
UniGossip
.”

He showed me the dummy front page, and
it was a picture of me in the cox's seat, all oily and wet, with the headline “Boat Race Scandal Smarty Pants, Supersleuth Stops Cheats, Steals Sutcliffe's Seat and Steers Ship!”

“Ah, I'm megaproud. Next to that, being on BBC Breakfast or in the
New York Times
is rubbish.”

“But that's not all there is to this special issue,” he said. “I phoned the place where Will Sutcliffe is detained, and managed to obtain an exclusive interview with him.”

“Wicked! Were you sick in the middle of it?”

“Twice,” he admitted, “but I still got him to
answer my most pressing question: why did he poison people from the crew?”

“And?”

“And he told me everything.”

Long pause.

“Come on, Jeremy, stop being a dramatic little Sarah something.”

“Okay. Well, here's the truth. He felt constantly humiliated. Since someone first started calling him Wally, all the boys in the first crew kept laughing at him and mocking him. They were so much bigger than him, too, you know—he couldn't do anything. One evening, six of them dressed him up as Wally—that's where he got the hat from—and carried him around Cambridge, from pub to pub. They played a little ‘game,' hiding him in places and asking people to look for him, shouting, ‘Where's Wally?' and ridiculing him. Will had had enough. He decided to avenge himself by kicking those six boys out of the first crew. He distilled some frog poison—just enough that it would make them sick for a week or so. He knew
that by that time, they'd already lost the chance to catch up with training. But then it went a bit too far. He thought he was going to be found out, and started poisoning more people.”

He looked at me, and we stayed silent for a while, listening to the joyful slurpy noises that the maggots were making at the foot of Jeremy's bed.

“So there you go,” he concluded. “His pride was wounded. That's the way he found to restore his dignity.”

“Bit silly of him, really,” I said. “Would you mind it a lot if people compared you to a character from a children's book?”

“Of course I would!” scoffed Jeremy.

“Well, I wouldn't,” I said. “Nothing could please me more. Anyway, editor, sir, I need to go home and catch up on all the homework, and then go see Gemma to give her earrings back to her and repair her broken heart.”

I stood up and immediately yawned.

“Tired?” asked Jeremy.

“No. Bored. It's been four days without a mission. Got any more in stock?”

“Not right now, no—I've been in bed with frog poisoning, in case you hadn't noticed.”

I shrugged, and left with a weight on my chest that comes from the formidable boredom of profound idleness. Those editors in chief who name you chief investigator and then don't give you anything to investigate, just because they've got a little stomach problem! What is a restless supersleuth to do?

I left Gonville & Caius College and was putting on my faithful roller skates to go back to Christ's, when a hand fell on to my shoulder, and a low voice behind me said into my ear:

“Miss Sesame Seade?”

“I do answer to that name,” I replied. “Who are you?”

“Important people who think you could be very useful to us.”

“How so?” I asked. “Would you like to learn to skate?”

“Not quite. We would like you to help us investigate the claim that Mr. Jeremy Hopkins, of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, may be . . .”

“May be what? A bit lazy? A bit unable to tidy up his room?”

“No. An internationally wanted criminal.”

I whistled.

And then I thought about it for a minute.

Until I eventually said, “Okay, then, sounds like my kind of mission.”

And I raised a menacing finger:

“But I do need to catch up on my homework first.”

This Sesame book could not have been written without the experience of a year-and-a-half of very mediocre but very motivated rowing. I fondly remember the shouts of our cox, Jo Hardley, the boxes of chocolate before and after races, and the smelly changing rooms. I was lucky enough to attend an outing in Ely of the Men's Lightweights, which informed the equivalent episode in this book—thank you, Sarah Smart and your team, for having me!

I am also extremely grateful to Danny Longman for sharing his inside knowledge about the Boat Race—and particularly his revelation that there are, indeed, no drug tests in this competition.

1. How is your name pronounced?

Clementeen Bovay
. But you can call me Clem.

2. What inspired you to write about Sesame?

Walking around Cambridge, I thought it would be really fun to be a child there and explore all the secret passages and sneak into forbidden rooms. I'd also always wanted to write a mystery story, and to create a superheroine without superpowers—so I put it all together and Sesame was born.

3. Were you at all like her as a child?

Yes and no. For a start, I couldn't skate at all! I was always on my scooter, though, like Gemma. Like Sesame, I always hated PE at school, couldn't run to save my life and kept passing little notes to my best friends during class. My teachers were much better-smelling than Mr. Halitosis though! I loved animals, like
Sesame, and also had a cat. But otherwise my life couldn't have been more different—I lived in Paris, my parents were much more relaxed and cool than Sesame's, and I certainly wasn't crazy enough to escape at night and do anything like roof-climbing. I was also very bookish and well behaved! I think I was much more boring than Sesame.

4. Do you have as many middle names as she does?

Actually, I have one more—my full name is Clémentine Morgane Mélusine Hécate Beauvais. In France it's quite normal to have three middle names, but mine are completely fanciful—they're names of famous enchantresses and witches of folklore and mythology. My dad's idea . . .

5. What is the most embarrassing thing your parents ever did to you when you were twelve?

My dad sings extremely loudly in the streets
and in the underground, where, according to him, “the acoustic is better.” I can't count the number of times I bumped into friends while my father was singing opera tunes at the top of his falsetto voice, going up escalators in the Paris metro or just walking down the street. I was mortified every time. Sesame's father would never dream of doing that!

6. If any readers were to visit Cambridge, where should they go?

Visiting the colleges is a nice thing to do—look up and try to spot the gargoyles, the holes and crevices in the walls, the swirly staircases behind half-open doors. . . . Cambridge is also full of lovely small museums: go to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences—it's packed with dinosaur bones and odd fossils. Then rent a punt, canoe or kayak and go to Grantchester if the weather's nice—it's a brilliant place to have a picnic.