Scam on the Cam (7 page)

There was cauliflower gratin for lunch. It looked like human brains in a sauce made from pug dribble, and tasted just a little bit less nice. Toby, whose dad had cooked the dreadful concoction, was blissfully finishing Gemma's
plate after licking mine clean. “I can't believe it,” I said. “Why on Earth would Julius tell you that he thinks Rob is poisoning everyone?”

“He and I have no secrets from each other,” said Gemma dreamily.

“But it makes no sense! Will said it was a virus in the river. There's no reason why anyone in the crew should think it's purposeful poisoning.”

“Well, he's guessed. He's clever like that.”

“Why tell
you
, though?”

“I understand why you're jealous, Sess,” said Gemma. “But one day you too will find someone like him to tell you secrets, I promise.”

I shook with horror at the thought of a Julius Hawthorne replica muttering things into my ear. “No, but I mean, why should he tell you and not his sister, or the police?”

“Maybe he has. I'm sure he's done everything he thinks is right.”

“Indubitably,” I sniggered. “It's very weird. Anyway, since I'm going to St. Cat's tonight, I'll try to leave the parents somewhere and sneak into Rob Dawes's room. What are you doing, Toby?”

“Just saving a little bit for my frogs,” he replied, conscientiously scraping some brains into his pencil sharpener. “I've got another one now, I caught it in the pond behind the school. They're getting along great together.”

One sidekick lost to love, the other to frog rearing. As usual, I was alone with my mission.

If your parents are anything like mine, they probably think you should permanently look three years younger than you are, but act forty years older. This is why I was made, that evening, to wear a red corduroy dress, tiny shoes and a ridiculous metal hair clip with a flower on it, but asked to revise my French grammar, geographical vocabulary and advanced math in order to be able to converse with the erudite people of St. Catharine's as if I was just as old and wrinkled as them.

“And sit up, for goodness' sake, remember to sit up,” said Mum for the hundredth time as we walked into St. Cat's.

“I will. You look uniquely gorgeous tonight, mesmerizing Mother,” I said. “That coral necklace is super tip-top.”

“Thanks,” Mum muttered.

“Of course, it's extremely bad to wear coral. Did you know coral is an animal?
Viz
, you're currently wearing a dead animal. Plus, it's an endangered one. Most of the coral in the world is already dying, and with it all the sea-life thingies that live in it. So because of your necklace, lots of little fishes are dead right now, or going ‘I don't feel very well today, due to lack of coral.'”

“Yes, thank you, Sophie,” said Mum.

“Don't worry, though. All that aquatic slaughter is justified. You're the hottest momma on the block with that necklace.”

“David,” said Mum to Dad, “please tell your daughter to be quiet.”

“Be quiet, Sophie,” said Dad, and we walked into Formal Hall.

Formal halls, in case you don't know, are huge dining halls in colleges, where profs and
students eat when they feel like having long, tedious conversations with one another, all wearing black gowns. This is instead of staying home dipping fish sticks in ketchup while reading detective stories, which is what I'll do every evening of my life from the minute I turn eighteen.

As I was sitting down, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I looked at it discreetly: it was a text from Gemma, saying,

I was just composing a response when an old lady exclaimed, sitting down next to me, “Ah! You must be Agnes and David's daughter, Sophie!”

“Not Sophie,” I replied, “Sesame.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” she said, shaking my hand. “It must be your sister they told me about—a clever but devilishly uncontrollable little girl, from what I understand.”

“Oh yes,” I sighed, “she's a handful, bless her. We have to keep her constantly locked up. But she's got cryptic crosswords to keep her busy, and we give her slices of meat to munch on through the bars of her cage three times a day.”

“Gracious heavens!” the lady cried.

That's when I noticed something familiar about the plates and the cutlery.

That familiar thing was the college crest, engraved on them.

And that college crest was unmistakably the round, gold, many-beamed rudder that Toby had drawn from his hypnotic memories of the pirate chest.

“And what are you doing in class these days, my dear child?” inquired the lady next to me.

Still trying to figure out why the pirate chest would have the crest of St. Cat's on it, I explained I was at an edgy school with a very modern curriculum comprising Carpentry, Ancient Aztec and the geography of Saturn. While she marveled, I was keeping an eye on my parents, whose glasses of wine kept getting refilled by a watchful waiter. When the port arrived, they were both as rosy as Mum's coral necklace of death, and Dad had started talking in spoonerisms.

It was time to slip out.

“If you'll excuse me,” I murmured to my neighbor, “I should very much like to pay a visit to the bathroom.”

And I left Formal Hall and threw myself into the dark corridors of St. Catharine's.

This was a college I'd never been to before, but being endowed with a brain which, as you may or may not have heard, contains as many possible connections as there are stars in the universe, I was able to find my way through it quite easily.

Well, let's say I was lucky enough that the third staircase I got to had a slate that said

Swiftly, I tiptoed upstairs and followed the corridor. The door to F5 was entirely covered with pictures of rowboats, the rowing team and newspaper cuttings about rowing. This probably meant that it was indeed the lair of Rob Dawes. And this assumption was confirmed by the thunderous voice of the very man, coming from inside the room. Judging from the absence of audible replies to his sentences, he was either talking on the phone or had become completely
mad and was loudly chatting to himself.

“Yes, yes, I know, it's very unexpected! . . . But amazing, right? Amazing! . . . Yes, in the first boat, I'm in the first boat now! Just like I told you . . . Yes, that means I'll be on the Thames next week, rowing against Oxford!” He laughed. “How many different ways will I have to tell you this? I'm-in-the-first-boat! . . . Thank you, thank you . . . Me too . . . What? Oh yeah . . . Yeah, really mysterious, that virus . . . No, don't worry, I'm not catching it, I'm being really careful . . . I know, I know . . .”

So the illnesses of the fourth and fifth rowers in the first crew had meant that Rob Dawes had been pulled from the reserve crew to race against Oxford.

As I was trying to determine whether he sounded genuinely surprised or was just an excellent actor and serial poisoner, my ear pressed against the many rowing pictures on the door, a strange sight at the end of the dark corridor caught my eye.

That strange sight was a black silhouette, holding on to one handle of a pirate chest, followed by the pirate chest itself, the second handle of which was held by another black silhouette.

Then this baffling sight disappeared again.

I raced down the corridor, begging my ridiculous shiny shoes to be as silent as possible. If this was the pirate chest of all pirate chests, no wonder it had disappeared from underneath the weeping willow! But who was carrying it?

I caught up with them in the next tiny stone staircase, where the two silhouettes were painfully negotiating their spirally way down with the pirate chest. Their identities were easily revealed: from where I stood, a dozen steps
higher than them, I could clearly make out the angelic blondness of the two stealthy carriers.

Gwendoline and Julius Hawthorne.

I followed them discreetly as they made their huffy and puffy way through another corridor, and then down another staircase. We were underground now, in a creepy, dusty passage spangled with wooden doors: Wine Cellar 2, Private, Archives 1956–1975 . . .

One single naked lightbulb dangled from the arched ceiling, throwing a gloomy yellow-gray light on the walls. In the light was dancing the huge shadow of a tiny spider, which was happily walking on the lightbulb in the manner of a fakir. Finally the siblings dropped the chest onto the floor—it made a huge thud that lifted a little sheep of dust into the air—and Gwendoline rubbed her hands together.

“It's damn heavy!” she said.

“At least we didn't bump into anyone,” said Julius.

Gwendoline got a key out of her pocket and
opened the door they were facing. I inched closer to it as they got hold of the chest again and passed the doorstep. The door said Lost Objects.

I just had time to walk in and dive between a musty old curtain and a revoltingly cobwebby coatrack covered in coats probably dating from the time of Anne Boleyn's early childhood. Gwendoline brushed past me and closed the door, and then I was alone with them in this shadowy, sneezingly dusty cellar—alone with them and the pirate chest.

I peeped around the ancient curtain.

“Okay,” said Gwendoline. “Give me the tools.”

Julius opened his backpack and handed his sister a hammer and a long, slim metal bar. She stuck the metal bar just underneath the lock and started hammering at it as energetically as if the closed chest contained a year's supply of gummy bears.

We waited, and waited and waited. I would have fallen asleep, if it hadn't been for the deafening racket she was making.