Scam on the Cam (5 page)

But never before had I been kidnapped by an authentic pirate.

Legs still dangling in the air, we were taken by the pirate to his ship. But rather than a fearsome caravel, it was a barge on the side of the river.

And rather than a skull and crossbones, it was flying a French flag and a Union Jack.

And rather than being called
Slaughterer of the Seven Seas
, it was called
La Sardine Souriante
, which, vague memories of French lessons with Mademoiselle Corentin told me, meant
The Smiling Sardine
.

There wasn't a shadow of a sardine anywhere on the barge, however. But there was a rotund pirate woman fixing something on the roof, and a small pirate child who was playing with a
chocolate-brown Labrador on the plank.

“I've found the zieves!” declared the pirate to his wife.

“What do you mean?” she laughed, looking at us. “Marcel, those are children!”

“I caught zem hand in ze bag!”

“Not true,” I said, “you caught us as we were making our way down from the balcony.”

“It's a French expression,” the pirate lady explained. “He means red-handed. Marcel, seriously, what's that about? Put them down.”

“Zey'd broken into ze university boathouse,” he said, and he put us down on the ground.

“But look,” said his wife, “they can't be the thieves. They're way too young. And the one we spotted last time was definitely a boy.”

“Zey could have accomplices,” said Marcel.

“We're completely not thieves,” I said. “See, we don't even have a bag or anything with us.”

“Empty your pockets!” said the pirate.

Gemma and I grimaced. In my pocket was the key. What if he guessed I'd stolen the key? What if it was the key to his pirate chest? What if Gwendoline had stolen the key from him to start with? I had to think even faster than Peter Pan.

“Tell me—did the thief look like that?” I asked, randomly pointing into the distance.

Everyone turned around to look, and I flung the key into the Cam. It disappeared with a little plop.

“Not at all,” said the pirate, “zat would be completely absurd.”

And indeed it would, as the passerby I'd accidentally designated was an old lady in an
electric wheelchair with a tartan blanket on her lap.

“Ah well,” I said, “I was just trying to help. But no, look, I've got nothing in my pockets.”

Gemma turned hers inside out too, and the pirate lady said to her husband, “You see, darling, it can't be them.”

“What's that about, anyway?” I asked. “Have there been thefts around the area recently?”

“Oh yes,” said the pirate lady. “Lots of burglaries in the barges. Some of my old jewelry was stolen, and Marcel's watch, and even some electronic equipment. And it's happened to many other people in barges along this corner of the river.”

“Have you told the police?” said Gemma.

“Of course,” smiled the woman. “But they're not too concerned with what happens to people like us, it seems.”

“Do you know anything about pirate chests?” I asked.

“Pirate chests?” repeated Marcel, and he burst out laughing. “We might look like pirates,
but we're not,
ma petite fille
.”

That was extremely disappointing, but also meant we weren't in immediate danger of being made to walk the plank.

“Okay,” I said, “it was really nice to meet you. Thanks for everything. I hope you catch your zieves. And now we need to run, or else our teacher will skin us alive with a nail file.”

“Wow,” said Gemma as we walked back to our rowboat. “That was close. Where did you put the key?”

“I had to throw it into the river.”

“What? Are you mad?”

“Well, what else was I supposed to do with it? Swallow it? I wouldn't have looked forward to getting it back at the other end.”

“But now we don't have it anymore!”

“Well observed. But it can't be helped, I'm afraid.”

Glumly, Gemma started fiddling with her ears, which is what she does when she's being all pensive and intellectual. Suddenly, in the manner of an opera diva, she screamed,
“Heavens! My earrings!”

“What about them?”

“My pearl earrings!”

“Yes, I know what they're made of. Everyone in the world knows.”

“They're gone!”

I looked at her ears, and indeed there were no pearls bulging from them to indicate that she was a respectable young girl.

“Are you sure you were wearing them today?” I asked. “Thinking about it, I don't remember seeing them this morning.”

“I always wear them,” she said. “I never take them off.”

“Seriously, Gemz, this morning I thought,
There's something different about Gemma Sarland today. She's the same, and yet different. She's herself, and yet strangely Other
. It was the earrings, I'm sure. You must have left them at home.”

She shook her head but looked unsure.

“I'll check tonight,” she said, “but I doubt it. I think I lost them at the boathouse.”

“Maybe they fell off when the pirate captured us.”

“He wasn't a pirate, he was a French barge owner. He's a person just like us, and his life choice is just as good as all other life choices. You've got to stop calling him a pirate; it's highly insulting.”

Having thus proven that losing her pearl earrings hadn't deprived her of random bouts of weirdness, she got back into the boat and we haphazardly rowed back to the Laurels' boathouse.

Toby was standing outside pretending to look innocent, which we immediately guessed meant he had hidden a frog inside his hoodie pocket.

“Have you hidden a frog inside your hoodie pocket, Toby?” I asked as we brushed past him carrying the boat on our shoulders.

“Yes,” he said. “So, how did your mission go? I kept Halitosis very busy, just like you asked. I almost capsized us three times, and one of those on purpose. Lily was furious. As for Halitosis, he's currently trying to calm himself down.”

He pointed at Halitosis, who was lying under a nearby tree and breathing into a paper bag. We all spared a minute to pray that the paper from the bag wouldn't ever end up recycled into any kind of food wrapping.

“The mission went quite badly,” I said. “We stole the key, but got kidnapped by a pirate who was a French barge owner and called us zieves, so we had to throw the key into the Cam, and as a result we couldn't open the chest that didn't belong to the pirate anyway, since he wasn't one.”

“Tough luck,” said Toby sympathetically.

“And I lost my earrings,” said Gemma.

“Oh yes,” said Toby, “I was going to ask you
where they were when you arrived this morning, and then I forgot.”

‘This morning?” repeated Gemma. “I didn't have them on when I got to school?”

“I told you!” I told her. “You'll find them at home tonight, and since absence makes the heart grow fonder you'll love them even more than before. And who knows, they might have made lots of tiny baby pearls when you weren't watching.”

But Gemma wasn't listening: she was looking into the distance with an expression of such pain that I suspected for a minute the imminent arrival of the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse. But when I turned around I realized it was much less exciting than that; it was, in fact, the pangs of despised love. For yonder near the stream were Julius Hawthorne and Lily Murray (Toby's unfortunate rowing partner and owner of an impressive marmalade mesh of red hair) who were laughing and cooing together, gazing at each other from the corner of their long-lashed eyes in the manner of two badly drawn Disney
princesses.

“I can't believe this,” said Gemma. “She can't even play Dvořák on the cello.” I left her to her lovelorn state, because I was quite keen to have a look at Toby's frog. It was a lovely shade of green, like my mum's face when she gets the bill for something I've broken, and had two perfectly humid eyes, just like Mum again when she's signing the check to pay the bill.

“It's super fast, you know,” said Toby, petting its sleek back. “I'm sure it's faster than any frog I've ever seen.”

“I didn't know you were in the habit of speed-checking amphibians,” I said. “Where did you catch it?”

“Oh, next to the university boathouse, when we finally passed by it earlier. You must have been inside then.”

While we were playing with the frog, Mr. Halitosis awoke from his paper bag–induced calm, got to his feet and threatened to slice us into slim strips of meat for a giant stir-fry if we weren't ready to go back to
Goodall in two seconds. Not being one for soy sauce, I rushed into the Laurels' boathouse to get my clothes and bag.

As I checked my phone, coming out into the sunshine, I saw that I had a lovely little text waiting from me from
Susie
, all warm and exciting like a mini-blueberry muffin:
Fourth & fifth rowers of the university team taken ill and in hospital. How's the investigation going? Jeremy x

Running back to Toby and Gemma, I found the latter sidekick in a state of dangerous hyperventilation, repeating, “He came to talk to me! He came to talk to me!”

“Who did?” I asked.

“Julius!”

“Caesar?”

“No, Hawthorne!”

“Ah,” I said. “Maybe he guessed you could play Dvořák in the end.”

“He told me he'd only come here to talk to me! He knew that we were training, and he wanted to talk to me! He came here to talk to me!”

“To say what?” asked Toby.

“Just that,” said Gemma.

“He came here just to tell you that he'd come here just to talk to you?”

“Yes!” she marveled. “Isn't that wonderful?”

“The boy is profoundly deranged, as I always suspected,” I said. “But that's okay, since he seems to have found an equally insane kindred spirit.”

“And then,” reminisced Gemma, “I asked him if he could give me his phone number, and he did!”

Toby and I tried to be as discreet as possible while we coughed and retched and went, “Urgh! argh! disgusting! yuck!,” but I think Gemma still heard us.