Sleuth on Skates (5 page)

Professor Philips coughed and Mum said, “Sophie, go home, please. We're actually in an important meeting.”

“Please can I please go and watch Gemma's rehearsal of
Swan Lake
tonight at six please?”

Mum's eyebrows said “No” but in the atmosphere of general amusement she eventually muttered, “All right then. Where is it?”

“West Road Concert Hall!”

“How will you get there?”

“I'll go with Gemma really fast and we won't talk to any strangers!”

“How will you get back?”

“I'll ask Dad to pick me up!”

Mum rolled her eyes, nodded and let me go, for which I was grateful.

“How was it?” asked Gemma as I squeezed my feet into my roller skates for the third time that day.

“Catastrophic. I bumped into my mum.”

Gemma shuddered from head to toe. She's scared of my mum. I used to be scared of my mum too, until I started scaring her back.

“Well,” she said, readjusting her tie, “I had a more useful time waiting here outside. You'll never guess what I found on the pavement.”

“How many guesses do I get?”

“Three.”

“A small piglet.”

“No.”

“A smoky meteorite.”

“No.”

“The Crown Jewels.”

“Almost. Look.”

I looked, and it was a crumpled-up five-pound note. “That's super lucky of you!” I exclaimed. “What are you going to do with it? Of course you can do whatever you want and don't need to share with me whatever you buy with it.”

“Of course I'll share,” she said (thankfully). “If you hadn't asked me to wait here I wouldn't have been bored enough to look at the pavement. Come on, let's get a box of tangy tangerine strings at the old sweet shop.”

So we picked up speed again and whooshed past a cluster of tourists and overtook a
pushchair-pushing person and almost got run over by a gangly student on a bike and slalomed around a man in a wheelchair with a robotic voice.

And then the worst happened.

‘Sophie Margaret Catriona Seade!'

Seriously! Parents!

I braked wearily and turned around to face Dad.

“What on Earth are you doing in the street on your own?”

“Good afternoon, dearest Papa. How coincidentally beautiful to find you here! It must be the Almighty guiding my steps to you. And I am not alone! Gemma's here too.”

He twirled around but didn't
see Gemma, who was hiding behind a burly student because she's also scared of Dad.

“Right there,” I said, and she had to show herself, looking meek. “You see, Daddy, Gemma won the pavement lottery and we were about to splash out on tangy tangerine strings.”

“Certainly not. Does Mum know you're here?”

“Your mum, or my mum?”

“Who do you think?”

“Here
here
, or here in
Cambridge
?”

“Where do you think? Listen, Sophie, I don't have time for this. But since I strongly suspect that Mum—your mother, my wife, Professor Seade—has absolutely no clue that you and Gemma are roaming the city center like street urchins . . .”

“We're not that prickly!”

“. . . you shall both come with me and stay with me during my meeting with Reverend Tan.'

“But Daddy . . .”

“Hush!” he hushed in a way that made us both follow him in silence. He pushed a glass door to a church converted into a café and
sat us down at a table.

No tangy tangerine strings would tingle our tongues today. We shot surly glares at Dad, who asked, “All right. What do you want?”

“An electric guitar.”

“What do you want to drink?”

“Whisky.”

“Goodness!” he eructed, and he went up to the counter. “Two glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice and a cappuccino, please. Oh, hello, Frederick.”

Frederick, alias Reverend Tan, had just walked in. Like Dad, he was wearing a dog collar. Unlike Dad, he still had all his hair and no wrinkles. Unlike Dad, he didn't look angry. In fact, he looked positively terrified.

“My daughter Sophie and her friend Gemma,” groaned Dad as he and Reverend Tan sat down at a nearby table. “Girls, this is Reverend Tan, the Chaplain of Trinity College.”

I stopped slurping and said, “How do you do? I'm Sesame.”

Gemma said, “How delightful to meet you.
I'm Gemma.”

Dad said, “Do your homework.”

We got our books and notebooks out of our bags and Gemma started trying to figure out what Pythagoras was about and how to use his theorem to answer the questions properly.

“Darling daddy, do you have a pen I can borrow?”

“You don't have any pens? What's that pencil-case for?”

“Well, see, it does contain pens, but also a grasshopper, so if I open it now it'll go hopping everywhere.”

Dad blew out a lot of air, fished out an expensive fountain pen from a pocket of his shirt and said, “Now you'd better be silent.”

Since I had such a good pen, I couldn't waste the ink on geometry, so I started writing a poem of despair and anguish at the absence of Jeremy Hopkins and the possible imprisonment of Jenna Jenkins in a dark rat-infested cave. It was stupendously goosebump-inducing.

Meanwhile, Dad and Reverend Tan were talking, and part of my brain was listening
to them while the other part of it was being poetic. That's another thing you can do when the number of connections in your brain is more or less equal to the number of stars in the universe.

“What is it, Frederick?” murmured Dad. “Your message got me worried. Is it that bad?”

“It is a serious matter, and I don't know enough about it, nor feel that I can do anything about it. It's a question of . . .”

He turned his head towards Gemma and me, and I went into removed-from-the-world-of-the-living mode. His voice was so low I had to intensely strain my stirrup, which is the smallest bone in the body (located in the ear), in order to hear it.

“I have evidence . . .” he whispered, “Well, . . . at least, a student has told me that she has witnessed serious illegal activity at her department.”

“Which student?” whispered Dad.

“I cannot say, David.”

“Frederick, in such a situation . . .”

“I don't mean that I feel I shouldn't. I mean
I don't know who she is.”

He glanced at me again (seriously, do I look more suspicious than Gemma?) so I pretended to stare at an ugly abstract painting on the wall that looked like someone had thrown up Smarties on a canvas.

“You see,” he said, “I've set up an online anonymous chatroom called Ask-a-Vicar. Anyone in the university can talk to me one-on-one,
on any matter, every evening, over the Internet. Yesterday night, a person using the screen name ‘Tsarina' started talking to me. She said she was a female student—she wouldn't say any more. And then went on to tell me that she knew someone was doing something illegal at her department. Something that could have an impact on the whole university. But before she could tell me what it was—literally just as she was about to say it—the college's Internet suddenly went down, and I never managed to speak to her again.”

I felt like I'd stumbled from a fairly fun dream into a much spookier one. Jenna Jenkins, I thought. It must be Jenna Jenkins. But yesterday, she'd already gone missing . . .

“Jenna Jenkins,” murmured Dad as if he'd read my thoughts. “Have you heard . . . ?”

“It was not Jenna,” said Reverend Tan, shaking his head. “I know her—she's interviewed me in the past for her magazine. And I'd heard about her disappearance, so I thought of her immediately. But it couldn't have been her.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Jenna's dyslexic, she's told me a few times how difficult it is when you want to be a journalist. But that girl—the one I talked to on the Internet—her spelling was impeccable.”

Dad looked dubious for a moment, as if it was easy-peasy for a dyslexic to fake impeccable spelling. Then he said, “Well, Frederick, I think you should pass this conversation to the police. They'll be able to trace it back to the computer and—”

Frederick gave a sour laugh. “I would be thrilled to pass everything to the police. Unfortunately, my computer was stolen from my room this very morning.”

Thankfully, Dad let Gemma and me go to West Road Concert Hall on our own. I think this was mainly because he thinks highly of Gemma.

“Right, Sophie, I'll pick you up at 7:30.”

“Sir, yes, Sir!”

“You are actually going to this rehearsal, right? You're not going to run away?”

“Sir, no, Sir!”

He gave the clouds a God-give-me-strength sort of look, my forehead a kiss, and started walking back. Gemma unfolded her scooter in a few clicks, and we rushed forth into the city.

“What was that about?” she asked in a wobbly voice as she scooted over an irregularly-cobbled patch of pavement. “Illegal activity? What kind?”

“You were listening?”