Sleuth on Skates (18 page)

After dinner, I still hadn't heard back from Jeremy, so I went to hide under my duvet to call him from my ridiculous new phone. The ringtone went on for a long time, until Jeremy's
tired voice emerged at the end of the line.

“Hello? Who's this?'”

“It's me, Sesame.”

“Oh. Sesame. Hi.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yes. Why? Do I sound not-OK?”

“Dunno. A little bit. So?”

“So what?

“How did your meeting with Professor Philips go?”

“Oh, that.” He sighed deeply.

“Yes, that!”

“Yeah . . . Listen, Sesame. Er . . . I think we should just drop it, all right?”

“What do you mean? What did he say?”

“Lots of things. It's too complicated for you to understand. Anyway. Have you had a nice day? What are you up to?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What's going on?” Did he confess? Are you going to denounce him to the police?”

“Well, no. No point. Listen, Sess . . . It's too difficult for you to get your mind around these
things, you know, but . . . Trust me, right? We're dropping the case.”

And suddenly I understood, and it was as if I'd swallowed a chip of flint stone.

“He paid you,” I croaked. “He paid you, like he did with Jenna! He bought your silence!”

“No, it's not like that, Sesame. You're being too dramatic.”

“Jeremy, you can't do this! You have to tell the police!”

“It's a fair enough deal, when you think about it. Colleges get money to pay for better things for the students. Cooperture get their money back when people buy their clients' products. And Professor Philips gets paid for putting the two in touch.”

“No,” I choked, “seriously, you can't take his money . . .”

“I'm not technically taking his money. He's paying back my student debt and helping me get on to a great journalism course. It's a lot when you're just starting out in life, you know.”

“No, Jeremy, listen to me—it's not right!”

“Who knows what's right?” he groaned. “Don't judge me, Sesame. You'd do the same if you were me. You would.”

He said a soft “bye,” and hung up.

The Professor brothers of evil and the Cooperture terrorists of computer invasion would never rot in a rat-infested gaol. I was so dejected I didn't even laugh when Peter Mortimer dropped a dead moth in Dad's pea soup.

The next gloomy morning, I woke up gloomily, got dressed gloomily, ate breakfast gloomily, and was gloomily driven to school in the Smurfmobile.

“You look a bit gloomy,” Dad remarked. “Have you got toothache?”

“It would only be right,” I replied sourly, “after brushing them like a fanatic for three whole minutes with my phone timer.”

“That little musical piece is quite fun,” Dad chuckled.

It was, in fact, so bad that I'd spent the three minutes of tooth-brushing praying for human-eating aliens to hook me out of the bathroom and into the turquoise sky.

As we reached school, Dad pointed a warning forefinger at my nose:

“Don't get your phone stolen!”

“No risk of that, unless the nuttiest of thieves in the whole world happens to be roaming the premises.”

I'd hoped Toby and Gemma would share my indignation at Jeremy's act of high treason, but Toby still didn't really get why the Professors had done anything wrong and Gemma was so stressed about that evening's first performance of
Swan Lake
that her whole body was just a blur. There was no way I could get her to think that more tragic things were happening in our little city. Eventually, I gave up.

“You'll be all right,” I said to her seven hundred times that day, to which she replied
something different each time:

“I might sneeze into my cello and coat it with snot.”

“I swear my fingers are paralysed. I won't be able to hold the bow straight.”

“I think the weather is very dry. My cello's going to snap open in the middle of the ballet.”

At the end of the day she squeezed me in her arms as if she was a young soldier departing to the blood-splattered trenches of a remote war.

“You'll send me positive waves of energy, won't you, Sess?”

“I'll send you a tsunami of positive energy. You'll be all right.”

“I've broken the nail of my most important finger . . .”

“See you at seven, Gemz. See you at ten, Toby.”

“The food will be awesome,” Toby promised. “I saw Dad rolling little jam rolls from the tip of his fingers to the crease of his elbow!”

“So it's all settled?” asked Mum. “Gemma's mum is walking you back home after the party?”

“Yes, Mummy. She'll walk me back home, tuck me into bed and sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to me.”

“Speaking of tucking, your shirt is untucked. Tuck it in.”

“I'm sure that's not necessary.”

“Tuck it in or you're not going.”

I tucked it in.

“Right. You know that your dad and I are going to a dinner party tonight.”

“Yes, Mum. I'll be fine.”

“My grown-up little girl! Going to a ballet and a party on her own!”

On my own with Gemma's whole family and Toby's dad.

Gemma's parents drove me to the Concert Hall, where Gemma was doing yoga exercises to chill out before the show.

“Headstands are the best!” she said upside-down.

I sat down next to her parents and her little twin brothers, who started to voice their disgust for ballet in very realistic retching noises. Two rows down from us, Professor Philips the Elder and Professor Philips the Younger were sitting next to Mr. Franklin. I thought that this was an ideal opportunity for the police to skewer them all on a giant pole and grill them alive on the prison barbecue, but unfortunately nothing of the sort happened.

The show started and I quickly went into power-saving mode, daydreaming that I found a dinosaur egg in the Master's Garden and
that my parents allowed me to keep it. This entertaining story made the ballet go much faster than I expected, and when the curtain fell I felt slightly frustrated to be interrupted in the middle of giving Cookiesaurus his first bath.

“Gemma must be super pleased that she didn't make any mistakes,” I said to Mr. and Mrs. Sarland, who looked rather green, so I concluded that perhaps she might have done.

After that we migrated to the art gallery, elbowing our way past groups of musicians and dancers saying bravo to each other. Toby's dad was at the back with Toby, dishing out food and drinks. I decided to avoid the jam rolls, grabbed a strawberry, and bumped into Edwin who was carrying a huge batch of feathery wings. He disappeared with it upstairs.

“How was the show?” asked Toby.

“No idea, I was daydreaming,” I replied. “You should have come! It's a great place for daydreaming, apart from the grating rattle from the orchestra pit.”

A musician passing by fired a look of profound disgust at me, but it could have been because of the half-eaten armpit-flavoured jam roll she was grazing on. Then we all had to be quiet as Edwin, who had reappeared, was making a speech.

“And above all I am very grateful to Mr. Rudolph Franklin, my father, for sponsoring the show's costumes. Without Cooperture Ltd, our swans would have looked much less swanlike. Please give him a big round of applause.”

The Philips brothers clapped more loudly than the rest of the group put together, and I decided I'd seen enough of this rigmarole and vaguely needed the loo, which, the wall obligingly told me, was upstairs.

At the top of the creaky staircase, I found myself in front of three doors.

The first one had an “L” on it. The second one had a “G” on it. The third one had nothing on it. I became supremely confused. Did L and G mean “Ladies” and “Gentlemen,” or “Lads” and “Girls”? Why can't people express themselves
more clearly? I didn't want to push the wrong door and end up in the boys' toilet. Toby tells me it is so utterly different from the girls' toilet that I would be traumatized for life.

I assumed the third door was the toilet for people who aren't too sure whether they qualify as L or G, and pushed that one.

It wasn't a toilet. It was a dark, long room, with sculptures and paintings wrapped up in bags and bubble-wrap. In a corner was the batch of wings I'd seen Edwin carry upstairs. A wide window opened on to the street, overlooking the external wall of Sidney Sussex College. I rested my elbows on the window sill, and looked up.

“Ah!” I sighed to the open skies, “To think that the world shall never know the true nature of the Professor brothers of evil and Cooperture! To think that they will roam free amongst the innocent!”

Suddenly, the door opened, and I had only a moment to dive behind a large painting of a cow in a field before someone flicked the switch on, showering the room in dull yellow light.

“Enjoying your evening, Eddie?”

“I'll enjoy it more on Sunday, when it's all done, but it's been a good night. Did you like the show, Dad?”

“Loved it. Loved it.”

Someone opened the window, and the noise of a match cracking preceded the smell of cigarette smoke. Another voice joined in:

“May I? I left mine at home.”

“Please, Archie, feel free. Ian?”

“I don't, thank you, Rudolph.”

And just then I had a sudden bout of inspiration. Extracting my phone from my pocket, trying to make as little noise as possible, I flicked through the ridiculously small number of functions.

Call.

Text.

Phone Book.

Tooth-brushing Timer.

Alphabet Game.

Audio Message.

I selected “Audio Message” and clicked “Record.”

“That's what I call a success,” said Ian Philips.

“All thanks to Archie's wonderful software,” replied Mr. Franklin. “Do you know, it's even more powerful than we thought—we seem to be getting very detailed information on all aspects of the users' lives which can't come only from searches. It sifts through emails too, is that correct?”