Sleuth on Skates (12 page)

I gave him the furious glare he deserved and started running again, Toby and Gemma on my heels.

“He . . . forced her . . . to write . . . the letter . . . before he let her out of the cupboard—and Mum believed it!”

“Really, Sesame, you're so unfit,” said Gemma. “You sound like a tired Labrador.”

“I . . . have . . . a stitch . . .” I stopped. “Mr. Barnes, I have a stitch which might very well tear up my stomach if I go on running. Can I stop please?”

“No.”

I started again. “Jenna . . . did not have a . . . ouch! a nervous . . . breakdown! She . . . was . . . kidnapped!”

“But why would Professor Philips go through all the trouble if he was going to release her?” asked Toby. “And why didn't she go straight to the police once she was free? It doesn't make sense!”

“How . . . can you speak . . . so smoothly . . . when running? We have . . . to find out what they were up to. . . . Maybe they threatened to kill Jenna . . . if she said anything . . . to the police.”

“That's absurd,” said Gemma. “No one ever kills anyone in this city. I'm sure it wasn't the same letter. Maybe Professor Philips is dyslexic too!”

“No . . . way! Jenna . . . was forced . . . to write this letter . . . just as I'm being forced . . . to run around this stupid track. And I'll . . . prove it.”

But before I could prove it, we had lunch. Well, technically, no one apart from Toby had lunch. We just stared at our plates hungrily and refused to eat. Over in the corner, Mr. Appleyard was looking at his hands a bit meekly.

“Are you sure you're not hungry?”Toby asked, spluttering bits of cabbage. “It's really good!”

“I'm giving my wounded stomach a rest,” said Gemma pointedly.

“Yeah, dunno what it was about the Fitz yesterday,” retorted Toby. “Must have been bacteria in the air.”

Gemma and I threw a dubious glance at him. “Or maybe it was something in the food,” she answered pointedly.

“But we only ate my dad's food,” remarked Toby, “so it can't have been that.”

“Right. By the by, Sesame,” said Gemma, “I brought you the new program for the ballet. They reprinted them all without Jenna's name! You'll come and watch it,
right? Friday's the first night!”

“Of course, I'd love to,”I lied as she rummaged through her bag. “You'll come too, Toby, won't you?”

“I'd rather pull out my own toenails with a pair of rusty pincers,” he replied.

“Great. Thanks, Toby,” said Gemma. “Look, Sess, here it is.”

She handed me the new brochure. Still the same layout on the front page, with that C in a circle—that's where I'd seen it first! What was it doing on Fiona's hoodie and on the Happy Ducks catalogue?

Inside, on the first page, was the same pompous picture of Edwin. And on the next page were a picture and a blurb of the lead, Odette, played by —

“Anastasia Vance?” I looked blankly at Gemma.

“Yeah, apparently, Stacy is just a nickname. Her real name's Anastasia. Bit of a mouthful, I guess, that's why she shortens it.”

“Whash you chalking about? Anashtasia?”
Toby intervened, munching on a greyish slice of roast beef. He failed to cut through it with his teeth, so we waited for him to swallow, watching his neck swell up and deflate again in the manner of the boa constrictor gobbling up a small elephant. “I watched it the other day when you abandoned me. You should have stayed with me and watched it too.”

“We're talking about a person, not about your smelly film,” said Gemma.

“It wasn't smelly! It was well cool! There's this Russian guy who wants to kill everyone—and that girl, Anastasia, doesn't even know she's a princess, and—”

“A princess?” I choked. “A Russian princess?”

“Yes, of course!” exclaimed Toby. “Come on, Sesame, it's the story of that Russian princess, you know? The one that got away when the rest of her family was killed. I'll lend you the DVD. Maybe.”

“A Russian princess,” I repeated. “A Tsarina. Called Anastasia.”

And Gemma and I threw each other a glance which must have been meaningful, because Toby noticed there was something we hadn't told him. So we told him. We told him about the time when we'd been hijacked by Dad and forced to sit through his meeting with Reverend Tan, who'd revealed his mystifyingly interrupted conversation with Tsarina.

“Illegal activity at her department . . .” repeated Toby. “If that Stacy really is Tsarina, that means it's happening at the computer science department. Look, it's written here on the program—she studies computer science at Trinity College.”

This set my sleuthing radar on full blare, and for a good reason, too. “Archie Philips is a professor of computer science at Trinity!” I exclaimed.

“That,” said Gemma, “is one funny coincidence.”

“But if there's a professor of computer science at her college,” whispered Toby, “why would she tell the Chaplain about the thing she'd found out? Why not Archie Philips?”

My sleuthing brain was on autopilot, obligingly slotting the few jigsaw pieces together. “Well, how about because she'd found out
he
was the one doing it? So she had to find someone else to tell it to. And that's not all there is to it. Who do you talk to when you're stuck? Apart from your college Chaplain.”

“Your best friend?” asked Gemma.

“Right. Especially when your best friend is also a nosy journalist . . .”

“Jenna Jenkins? You think she told Jenna Jenkins?”

“Well, isn't it a bit strange that Jenna got kidnapped by Ian Philips right after her best friend Stacy found out that Archie Philips was doing something very wrong?”

“That,” conceded Gemma, “is one funny bunch of coincidences.”

Coincidentally, the subject of that day's English lesson was coincidences.

“Now, children, we're going to talk about coincidences. What's a coincidence? Any idea, Lucas?”

“It's like, when, for example, I think ‘Wow, it'd be great if the fire alarm went off and we'd all have to leave the class and have fun outside,' and like, right when I'm thinking about that, it would be a coincidence if the fire alarm . . .”

BRIIIIIIINNNNNNG

“. . . actually went off.”

Like just now.

“Right,” said Mr. Halitosis, a bit astounded. “Erm . . . OK, everyone, don't run, we're all going downstairs.”

After ten fun minutes we were allowed back in the classroom, and Mr. Halitosis, still a bit shaken up, started again. “Right, so Lucas gave us a good example of what a coincidence can be. Any other ideas? Radha?”

“Well, for instance, if I think ‘Wouldn't it be a lot of fun if a massive spider dropped from the ceiling right on your head, and . . .'”

“That will be all, thank you,” said Mr. Halitosis, throwing nervous glances at the ceiling. “Sophie, can you please give us a definition of a coincidence? Not using examples.”

A coincidence. For instance, when a girl is called Anastasia, and somewhere else in town someone is using the screen name Tsarina. For instance, when the same green and white C in a circle keeps popping up in unrelated places. On a duck catalogue. On a ballet brochure. On a T-shirt.

“A coincidence is when, accidentally, two or more things happen at the same time, or seem to be related,” I replied.

“That's a fairly good definition,” approved Mr. Halitosis. “And when does it stop being a coincidence?”

I shrugged. “Dunno.”

“Well, wouldn't you say it stops being a coincidence when you can prove that it
didn't happen accidentally, but that the events are related?”

But how do you prove it?
I wrote to Toby and Gemma.

You investigate,
replied Gemma.

When school finished, I raced up to the city center, flanked on one side by Toby on his bike and on the other by Gemma on her scooter. Destination: Trinity College.

“So the plan is, we find Stacy Vance and pretend that we're her biggest fans ever and that we want our
Swan Lake
program signed,”
I shouted to Gemma. “And then, once we're in the place, we try to find out if she is Tsarina by playing good cop, bad cop!”

“What's good cop, bad cop?” asked Toby, swirling around a taxi.

“It's a police strategy. Gemma pretends to be nice, and I pretend to be mean, and we extract the truth from Stacy Vance in this way.”

“And what do
I
do?” he asked indignantly. “You girls are always doing the fun things.”

“Well, OK, then, you play fun cop.”

“I'm sure it doesn't even exist.”

“It does now.”

We reached the huge gate of Trinity College. A Porter with a bowler hat was at the door, making sure that a bunch of tourists who wanted to look around the College paid enough money to do so. We dismounted, hid behind the bum of the most gigantic tourist in the group, followed the bum inside, and started investigating the painted name boards at the bottom of students' staircases.