Scam on the Cam (4 page)

“Sure,” scoffed the giant, “best idea I've ever heard. Like we've got time to waste, when we're trying to get everything together before next week.”

And he walked away with T. rex-like footsteps, making the whole boathouse shake.

Will smiled awkwardly.

“Rob Dawes,” he said to us, “is in the reserve crew. He's, um, quite a character.”

“Why does he call you Waldo?” asked Toby.

“Oh,” said Will, “just because, well, I guess . . .”

“Because he looks exactly like Waldo in
Where's Waldo?
” said a voice just behind us. “Do you also want to say that in your school newspaper?”

We twirled around and were faced with what Julius Hawthorne would have looked like in eight years' time with a short, curly blond wig. We guessed that this probably meant we
were now facing Gwendoline Hawthorne.

“Ah, Gwen,” said Will. “Yes,” he chuckled to us, “it's Martin, one of our rowers (well, one of our ex-rowers—he got the virus) who thought up that nickname for me. Funny, huh? And, you know, everyone now calls me—”

“Can we have that debriefing session?” snapped Gwendoline. “Or do you have an interview planned with the local kindergarten?”

“Sure,” said Will, “sure. Are the guys ready?”

“They're waiting for you. We're all waiting.”

“Okeydoke, sorry—coming, coming,” said Will in his singsong voice. “Sorry, kids—meeting time. Everyone's a bit stressed because of the dropouts, you see. We can't have anyone else there; meetings are top secret. What if you're spies sent from Oxford, you know? Ha-ha! Just kidding. Maybe I'll see you around some other time? Sorry again. Feel free to drop by if you have any more questions. Bye-bye! Bye-bye!”

He showed us out and vanished again into the staircase. The white boat was gently tapping
along the bank, next to a couple of angry-looking swans. Propelled by our splendid muscles and by hunger, we got back to my house and settled down on my bed with mugs of hot chocolate and hot-cross buns.

“Well,” said Gemma, “we haven't learned much, apart from the fact that everyone's stressed out about the virus.”

“I've taken some way cool pictures with that telescopic zoom, though,” said Toby. “Look—that's Gemma's earwax!”

We looked, and it wasn't pretty. Toby swooshed through a dozen random pictures.

“What's that one?” I asked. “Looks like it was taken through a half-open door.”

“Dunno. Oh, yeah, it's Gwendoline's office, I think.”

“Can you zoom in?”

He pressed the screen.

And then Gemma said, “What's that old metal key on the desk?”

And then Toby said, “Why is there an Oxford University bag in there?”

I'll say something for Mr. Halitosis: when he's got an idea, he sticks to it. He sticks to it almost as much as his sweaty shirts stick to his chest (but not quite as much as his boogers stick to the end of his nose). The next morning, just as we were walking into the classroom all porridged-up and yawning, he welcomed us with a formidable roar.

“This afternoon after class, children, you're going to the river with me and rowing and rowing until you get good enough to beat the Laurels boys!”

“That's not super convenient, Mr. Barnes,” I said, “because Gemma, Toby and I had plans for this afternoon.”

“Such as what, Sophie Seade?” he asked, getting dangerously close to my airspace. “What kind of havoc were you going to wreak this time?”

“None whatsoever,” I said. “We're writing an article for the
Goodall Days
. On the university rowing team.”

“You three doing something productive? I don't believe a word of it. And that wouldn't dispense you from training. You'll be in pairs: Gemma and Sophie, Toby and Lily, Emerald and Solal.”

“In
pairs
?” I choked. “You're expecting me to
row
?”

“A little bit of exercise won't do you any harm, my dear child,” said Mr. Halitosis. “
Mens sana in corpore sano
: a healthy mind in a healthy body. That's what one should always strive for.”

“And failing that, become a primary school teacher,” I muttered. “All right, team—we need to talk.”

Except we couldn't, because class had started, and we had to resort to the good old strategy of passing little notes around, which was all the more complicated as it was dictation time.

“A smorgasbord of heterogeneous epithets,” dictated Mr. Halitosis, “was the ubiquitous idiosyncrasy of this metaphysician's phraseology . . .”

Okay
, I penciled on the lines of my music notebook.
This afternoon, Toby, you keep Halitosis occupied. Gemz and I will go and investigate the boathouse and elucidate that Oxford bag question
.

“. . . but his pseudognostic logorrhea, full of mammoth anacolutha and pachydermic
pleonasms . . . ”

No need
, wrote Gemma hurriedly in bright red ink on the music sheet.
I've figured out why Gwen's got an Oxford bag
.

Why??
added Toby in fountain pen.

“. . . was, per se, siphoned of all signified, and, qua
paideia
, superfetatory and sans
sprezzatura
 . . . ”

Yesterday
, replied Gemma, getting as red as her ink,
I looked her up on the Internet. She went to university in Oxford. She's coaching the Cambridge team now, but there's nothing surprising with her still owning an Oxford bag
.

What????!!!
wrote Toby, who's got a soft spot for exclamation points and question marks.
She's an ex-Oxford student????? Well, if that's not a motive to want the whole Cambridge team to fail!!!!!

And he added a whole line of !s to the music sheet, which made it look like an uninspired composer had gone brutally insane.

“. . . which both bamboozled and flummoxed, but also galvanized, the zealous areopagus of
his exegetes.”

That's a ridiculous claim
, wrote Gemma, redder now than the ink.
She's the team's coach, she'd have no reason to want them to lose
.

“All done?” thundered Mr. Halitosis. “Three seconds to check that you've written your name on your sheet, and I'm collecting them!”

Toby panicked, quickly scribbled ‘Tobais Aplepleyard' at the top of his sheet, and completed the dictation with whatever he could remember, ending up with “both bamboos and hammocks are jealous of Exeter.”

“Well,” I whispered to Gemma and Toby as Mr. Halitosis was touring the classroom wrenching dictation sheets from everyone, “whether that's true or not, I'd still like to have a look at that office. And to see if that old metal key might fit into, you know . . .”

“. . . the pirate chest,” completed Toby.

“Sesame, you are relentlessly hopeless.”

“I'm trying my best!”

“Try harder! You're going to crash us into a barge. Take a small stroke. A SMALL stroke!”

Plonk
.

“Well, at least now we're next to the bank.”

“Only the tip of the boat is touching it. Take another stroke!”

“No, wait—if I reach out to the bank, I can pull us in . . .”

“Careful! You're going to tip us oveeeer—”

A couple of minutes and a century later, under the sarcastic gaze of our two swan acolytes, we managed to moor our small rowboat to the bank. We made sure that it was hidden from the other side of the river by the hippie hair of the weeping willow, and got off.

The pirate chest was still there, and still locked.

“I hope Toby's doing his best to keep Halitosis angry at the other end of the river,” murmured Gemma as we tiptoed behind the silent boathouses.

“Don't worry. He's a natural. Duck!”

“Sesame, we can't waste time looking at the ducks.”

“No, I mean
duck
! There are people coming!”

I grabbed her by the collar and we dived down into a bush. The university team, including the ever-smiley Will, the grim-looking Rob and Gwendoline the snow queen, were all getting into a van. I guessed they were going to Ely to train on the river there.

“Excellent,” I said as the van roared past us and disappeared into the distance. “There won't be anyone in there. Let's go!”

All the boathouse doors were locked, which was a happy occurrence as I'd been yearning for an opportunity to climb up buildings. We made our way to the back of the house, found a drainpipe, then a diagonal wooden beam, and a few minutes later we were on the little balcony at the front of the house. Someone had left a small window open, probably hoping to empty the house of some of its smelliness, and we squeezed inside disappointingly easily.

“I hope they close it next time,” I said, “it will
give me an excuse to use my skeleton key.”

The house was dark and silent. We'd landed in the changing rooms, full of discarded towels, water bottles and men's underwear, which we didn't look at. There were also boxes of biscuits and chocolates, which I managed not to steal from (because Gemma held my hands behind my back), and a smorgasbord of heterogeneous items including more bottles of antibacterial gel, a red-and-white stripy hat, a Cambridge teddy bear and a discarded copy of
UniGossip
.

“This way,” I whispered to Gemma, and we walked into Gwendoline's office. The old metal key wasn't on the desk anymore, but we soon found it hanging from a little hook next to the door.

It fell into my pocket.

As for the Oxford bag, it was still on a chair but didn't contain anything at all. “Anything else of interest?” I asked Gemma, who was looking around.

“No. I'm telling you, you're completely wrong. There's no reason why Gwendoline should be
up to no good. She's the coach; she wants them to win!”

“Well, let's see if that key fits into that chest, and then we'll decide. You're right, maybe it's completely innocent. Maybe she just keeps her clothes there. Or a body chopped into several pieces.”

I dodged Gemma's incendiary glare (it ricocheted off the wall, left through the window and set a branch of a nearby tree on fire), and we wormed our way out of the house through the changing room window again. A few acrobatic moves later, we were about to touch the ground, ready to run to the weeping willow and what might be a perfectly innocent pirate chest.

Except we couldn't run, because we couldn't touch the ground.

Because we were hovering in midair.

Caught by the very sturdy, very hairy and very angry arms of someone whose deep and thunderous voice in our ears said, with a strong accent:

“
Eh bien!
Finally I've found you, you damned
zieves!”

Painfully, I managed to turn my head around to look at our captor.

And I must confess I trembled a little.

Because he had a gold earring, and a beard, and long hair, and a red bandana. I've been in tricky situations before, as you may or may not remember.