Sleuth on Skates (6 page)

“I was all ears!”

“Me too! That's probably why we're friends. What do you think? He didn't say much, apart from the screen name. Tsarina. Do you have any idea what it could mean?”

“Well, apart from a Russian princess, no.”

“A Russian princess?”

“Yes, Sesame, a tsarina is a Russian princess. That's what they're called.”

“How do you know that?”

She replied, “I know everything about the royalty of every country.” This only surprised me a little, as she does wear pearl earrings.

“Right. So a Russian princess witnessed illegal activity at her department.”

“No. There aren't any Russian princesses any more. Russia killed all its royal family ages ago. A tragedy.”

“Weird. I wonder if this not-Russian-princess found out anything to do with Jenna Jenkins's mysterious disappearance.”

“Can't see any reason why they're related,” shrugged Gemma.

“I can't either, but my sleuthing radar is picking up suspicious signals.”

“What's a sleuthing radar?”

“A special sixth sense for signs of scam and scandal. If you need to ask, it means you haven't got it,” I declared, and squinted to try to make the signal clearer (which didn't work).

Gemma sneered, “Thank goodness for that. Apparently, having it makes you look like a right loony.”

So I switched the radar off and we reached West Road Concert Hall, from which
unpleasant musical noises were escaping. I took off my roller skates, put on my shoes and followed Gemma into the temple of tutus. Her folded-up scooter clanked melodiously against her shoulders.

Two musicians, a boy and a girl, holding immense instrument boxes, were chatting in a corner. Another three were at the bar.

“Right,” I whispered to Gemma. “This is your moment. Go and interrogate people about Jenna Jenkins.”

“Seriously, Sesame! You can't ask me that. Do it yourself.”

“No, I can't, people always think there's something fishy about me, whereas they'd beg to store their butter in your mouth if fridges didn't exist. Come on, do it—I'll pretend I'm your foreign penfriend.”

Gemma started shaking a little bit, but I poked her in the ribs and she leapt forwards and landed right next to the two instrument-holding students.

“Hey,” she mumbled, “how're things?”

“Who are you?” replied the boy in a voice that made it sound like meeting us was only slightly better than kissing a dung beetle.

“Gemma. I'm in the orchestra,” she said. “I play the cello. This is my penfriend Sesame . . . er, I mean . . . Sashimi.”

“Sashimi?”

“Yes. She's Japanese.”

The two students stared at me in mild disbelief, for which I don't blame them. There's a reason Gemma isn't Cambridge's number one self-made-supersleuth.

“Anyway,” said Gemma, “me and her, I mean she and I, were wondering if perhaps you know where Jenna Jenkins is.”

“Why?” the boy asked.

“Because,” replied Gemma in a strained voice, “because . . . well, Sashimi wants to . . . er . . . invite her to Japan . . . to dance . . . at the Emperor's annual Yule ball.”

I rolled my eyes so forcefully that I managed to get a glimpse of my own brain.

“Listen, I think I know what you're playing at,
kids,” said the girl. “You've heard that Jenna's disappeared, and you thought you'd have a little detective game. Am I right?”

Gemma said, “Yes.”

I said, “Ie!” which means “no” in Japanese, but no one understood.

“Well, I'm sure you've got better things to be doing with your time,” said the girl. “Jenna simply decided to leave Cambridge, everyone here is sure of that. Too much pressure, too much competition. Nothing mysterious at all.”

“Who's replacing her?” asked Gemma.

“Her understudy, Stacy Vance. That's what understudies are for.”

The boy checked his watch. “OK, Shauna, we'd better go. And you too, Gemma, if that's your real name. It's time.”

Forgetting that I was Japanese, I erupted, “Wait a minute—Stacy Vance? What's she like? Does she have a murderous sort of personality?”

The girl burst out laughing and turned back. ‘You've got the wrong suspect there, love. Stacy and Jenna are best friends. Stacy's
absolutely distraught that Jen's disappeared. She's been looking for her all weekend.”

And they vanished into the wings.

I paced to and fro for a while, wondering if Stacy Vance could have chopped Jenna Jenkins into tiny cubes and drowned them in the river Cam just to get to play her part, but eventually I made my way to the huge concert hall. From the orchestra pit rose the screeches and whines of the violins and cellos. I hate string instruments. The sound gets inside your head like it's sawing through your brains. I don't tell Gemma that. She was inside the pit, scraping her bow against the strings like all the others. She winked at me, and I blinked back for want of winking ability.

“What are you doing here, young lady?”

I turned around. It was a student about as tall as me and as big as me, but with a bow tie, and who looked vaguely familiar.

“I'm friends with Gemma Sarland.”

“Who?”

“The one there with the pearl earrings and shameful Mr. Men knickers.”

“What? Where?”

“There. She's wearing a skirt, you'll have to take my word for it.”

“And who are you?”

“My name is Sesame. How about you, pray?”

“Edwin. I'm the producer.” He looked at me mysteriously as if to unlock some invisible trapdoor on my forehead. “Go and sit down. It's going to start.”

He followed his own order by sitting down and getting his laptop out. I sat down a few rows up, wincing at the cacophony coming from the orchestra pit. When it failed to stop, I realized it was actually the beginning of the ballet. A dozen tutu-waggling ballerinas came onstage in a pointe walk that was so noisy it sounded like someone was enthusiastically hammering a bunch of nails into a tambourine. After a great number of what I'm assuming were grands jetés and pas de chats, someone tiptoed onstage who
could only be Stacy Vance. She was so swan-like I wouldn't have been surprised to see her fly.

After ten minutes of this frilly rigmarole, I started to tire. There's only so much tulle tulip-shaped tutu twirling one can take. So I left my seat and skipped out of the concert hall and into the wings.

In the wings, there were more wings: a huge stack of feathery wings. As I wondered what on Earth these wings could be doing there, I heard the hammering noise again and quickly jumped behind an old piano, peering around the side of it. The army of ballerinas had emerged from the dark curtains that led on to the stage, and each stopped to pick up one pair of wings, which they clipped to their backs and ironed out with their fingers like a strange flock of coquettish cockatoos.

“What do you think?” whispered one of them to another one of them.

“About what?”

“Stacy, of course!”

“She's good enough.”

The first girl nodded, and looked around. The others were busy ruffling each other's feathers. “What the hell is up with Jen? Everyone's so cool about it. Seems to me like no one actually cares where she's gone.”

“She's so unstable, Kim. You've only been here this term, you don't know. Jen's just the sort of person who'd run away from a stressful situation.”

“Really? She seemed strong enough.”

“It's all fake. She's a bundle of nerves. If you ask me, it was too much pressure. This part, plus her exams, plus
UniGossip
 . . . No wonder she couldn't cope.”

The first girl looked unconvinced, but suddenly the music changed and they had to leave again, fluttering to the stage like skinny angels. I relaxed a little, and sat down against the back of the piano.

And then realized I wasn't the only one there.

“Nice to meet you,” said the other one, “I'm Jeremy Hopkins.”

I shook his hand. “How do you do? I'm Sesame
Seade. Do you come here often?”

“It's my first time, but I won't come back, the service is terrible.”

“I'm glad I've finally bumped into you behind this piano. I had a few questions to ask you. What were you and Jenna Jenkins going to talk about during your meeting at Auntie's Tea Shop that she never went to?”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “What's all this about? How do you know about Jenna Jenkins?”

“It's not going to work if we keep asking each other questions. The basic rule of a dialogue is to alternate questions and answers.”

“Right-o, smartypants. I'll answer your question. Jen and I were supposed to meet up at Auntie's on Friday afternoon. She vanished that very morning. We were going to be talking about
UniGossip
.”

“She was going to ask you to investigate something. What was it?”

“I have no idea. We can't discuss things like that by email or text—only face to face. She'd only told me that it was something big. Very big.”

“You don't know what it was about?”

He rubbed his fingers together. “Money. What else? Anyway, what brings you here?”

“I also happen to be investigating the mysterious disappearance of Jenna Jenkins.”

“Splendid. Let's compare notes.”

He actually got his notebook out. I felt very unprofessional. “It's all in my head,” I said, and that was true—it's the best notebook I have. I
lose all the other ones. “So, what have you found out?”

“Not much more than what I've already told you. I think the last person she talked to on Friday was Edwin—he told the police he'd phoned her to discuss something costume-related. Now, what have you got?”

I was a bit embarrassed there because my findings were more or less equivalent to zero. Of course I'd had time to think of many colorful ways in which Jenna Jenkins might have been minced up, and the Tsarina mystery was interfering with them on my sleuthing radar, but none of this would convince an experienced Chief Investigator like Jeremy Hopkins. So I said, “Well, to be fair,” and stopped.

“Right,” he laughed. ‘OK, listen. I think no one's worried enough about what's happened to Jenna. Everyone seems to think she left of her own accord. But that's not the kind of thing she'd do. I know her well, it takes guts to run
UniGossip
. I think she's been forced to leave. If not worse.”

“Dead or alive, we'll find her!” I promised fervently.

“Do you even know what she looks like?”

I had to admit I didn't, and he got a photo out of his pocket. The lighting was bad but you could see a thin bird-like girl, wearing bright clothes, surrounded by a great quantity of opened and unopened presents, including a blue teddy bear, a bottle of the same perfume as my mum, and a pair of ballet shoes.

“It was taken at her birthday party, in October.”