Scam on the Cam (10 page)

“Eat your carrot puree.”

“Bring me a rare, juicy, sinewy leg of lamb.”

“Eat this and then you can have a banana.”

“How about food for humans? I demand chicken korma and blackberry crumble.”

“Not until you are cured.”

“I am cured! I haven't thrown up in fifteen hours and twelve minutes. Thirteen now. Can I go to school?”

“No. Eat.”

I yawned, and she took advantage of the open mouth to thrust an enormous spoonful of the disgusting orange paste into it.

“You're shuch a bad nurshe,” I shpluttered. “Dad ish a mushch better nurshe than you. He'sh all shweet and caring and he shtrokes my head. Where ish he?”

“At shursh,” said Mum, “I mean church. Eat your carrots, and then shleep. I mean sleep. I'm going to work; have a nice day.”

She walked out, and I sighed. It was Friday. Toby, Gemma and I had been out of action for a whole week, and the Boat Race was tomorrow.

In sickness or in health, there was no way I'd
let the serial poisoner get away with it.

As soon as Mum had left the house, I got out my phone and went click-click-click-call.

“Hello-hello?” said Gemma's voice at the other end of the line. “Who's the lucky person who's got the honor of talking to me?”

“Sesame,” I said. “But I think you'll find
you've
got the honor of talking to
me
.”

“Hello, Sess! How long since you last threw up?”

“Fifteen hours and twenty-one minutes. You?”

“Twelve hours and two minutes.”

“We're basically cured.”

“That's what I keep telling my parents, but they won't stop feeding me white rice.”

“I'd kill for white rice! I've had carrot puree thrust down my throat for the past five days in the manner of a turkey being fattened up for Christmas.”

“I'd kill for carrot puree!” said Gemma. “I've eaten so much rice these past five days that I've become at least half-Chinese.”

“You were already half-Chinese,” I pointed out.

“I must admit that that is true, admittedly,” she admitted. “Anyway, I've just talked to Toby. He hasn't thrown up in almost twenty-two hours! And he's really fed up with eating nothing but hard-boiled eggs. He's had so many in the past five days that he's collected enough bits of shell to make a giant mosaic covering a whole wall of his bedroom.”

I tut-tutted.
“Ergo
, we are not at all sick anymore. We have to meet up and continue the investigation.”

“Yes. But how can I get out of Waterbeach?”

Waterbeach is where Gemma lives, in what looks like a many-turreted castle. It's got no beach, however, and the only water is that which falls from the sky every time you forget your umbrella. It's at least twenty-five minutes by car, which makes it one of the farthest places from Cambridge I've ever been to. Well, apart from Paris when I was in Mum's belly, and I couldn't see the Eiffel Tower very well through her skin and dress, so I slept most of the time.

“Tell your parents to drive you. Just say that the three of us are meeting up at Toby's to recover all together and catch up on homework,” I said. “And don't forget to call Toby to tell him. I'll be there in ten mins. Running out of credit! See you la—”

And then the phone went silent, my five pounds of monthly phone credit having been eaten up by that greedy Gemma.

I leapt out of bed and reached under my desk for my faithful roller skates, which looked extremely bored, having not been used for a week. Thankfully the wheels still seemed to
remember how to roll around their little axles. I slid down the big tree and escaped through the back door.

And then I whooshed through town, perhaps a little bit more wobblily than usual, but readier than ever for some serious supersleuthing.

“That is one splendid eggshell mosaic, Toby,” I congratulated him. “Three piglets tripping over marbles in a jungle. How original.”

“It's not three piglets tripping over marbles in a jungle, it's you, me and Gemma cycling, skating and scooting through Cambridge.”

“Oh. I see. Well, it's very impressionistic. Or something-istic, at least. I think you've launched a completely new type of art. It's properly Tobyfying.”

“Thank you,” said the artist. “Ah, Gemma's here!”

And indeed, Gemma, freshly disembarked from her mum's car, was walking up the alley to Toby's house. Toby's house, due to his parents being the caretaker and the cook at Goodall, is right behind Goodall, near the sports field. From
his bedroom window we could see our class playing mixed netball. Mr. Halitosis, hopping among them breathlessly like an asthmatic kangaroo, was shouting, “Come on, come on, a bit more energy! I feel like I'm watching a whole team of Sophie Seades!”

“I'm super honoured that Halitosis thinks of me even when I'm not there,” I said. “Right, team: we've still got a mystery to solve. Who's poisoning everyone? And what's in Gwendoline's pirate chest?”

“I've had some time to think about it while painting eggshells,” said Toby. “I think Rob is the one who's doing it.”

“It makes no sense,” I said. “He's already on the team.”

“I know. But listen. I have a hypotenuse.”

“Hypothesis,” I rectified. “Unless you're a right-angled triangle.”

“Shut it, Sesame. So—Rob designs a little virus with the help of someone. He puts it in chocolates, which he gives to people on the team until he can get in. But then he forgets which
chocolates have the viruses, and keeps giving them to people accidentally. Remember those chocolates he gave us the other day? They're the ones that were full of viruses.”

I whistled. “I'd forgotten about those chocolates. The virus could have been in there, it's true.”

“See,” said Toby, “my hypothermia was completely right.”

“Hypothesis. But no, I'm afraid it can't be right, Toby. If someone's clever enough to think up a plan like that, they're not going to forget where they've put the deadly bug. But of course, Rob could well have another reason to want to poison everyone—a reason that's got nothing to do with being on the first crew.”

“Maybe he's an evil mastermind,” suggested Gemma, “just doing it for fun and out of pure malevolence. Or an international terrorist employed by Lapland to destroy Cambridge.”

“Yes. Somehow, I'm not convinced.”

“Well, do you have another hypochondria?” asked Toby.

“Hypothesis. Yes, I do. I think there's something we haven't yet thought about. And to find out what it is, we have to go back to the boathouse and investigate.”

So we escaped through the kitchen window, having checked that Mr. and Mrs. Appleyard were busy doing something else (she was telling him that one and a half buckets of goose fat and six packs of butter was quite enough fat for today's school lunch). Since Gemma didn't have her scooter with her, she sat on the back of Toby's bike, and after he'd finished complaining about how heavy she was (heavier than a blue whale who's swallowed an elephant who's pregnant with twins, apparently), we crossed town and stopped at the university boathouse.

Which was, unsurprisingly, locked and empty. So close to the race, the team must be spending most of the day in Ely, rowing on the river and doing gym sessions to wind down before eating kilos of pasta.

‘They've left the changing room window open again!” I said as we reached the little balcony,
having climbed up the wooden beam.

We slithered inside, and immediately switched to supersleuth-and-sidekicks mode. My supersleuth radar, which is a sort of sixth sense you get when the stellar connections in your brain are particularly good at detecting criminal action, was on full blare.

“Here are Rob's chocolates!” called Gemma from the other side of the changing rooms. She read the label on the box. “An assortment of drop-dead delicious fondants and lip-lickingly luscious ganaches.”

“Drop-dead, I bet,” Toby sniggered.

“Bag them all,” I said. “We'll analyze them later.”

“I don't have a bag,” remarked Gemma.

We looked everywhere for an appropriate bag, but of one there was no sign.

“Just put them in that silly woolly hat,” I said, pointing at the red-and-white hat we'd seen last time, and which was lying under a bench.

Toby dived under the bench to pick it up. “It's full,” he said.

“Of what? Lice? Dandruff? Brains? It's funny, it reminds me of—”

“Oh wow,” he interrupted, looking inside it. “Not . . . quite. Look at that.”

And he emptied it on the floor.

And it went
cling-a-ling!

Ding-a-ding-a-cling-a-ling!

And showered us and the room with light.

Glitters.

Glimmers.

Shimmers.

For that woolly, silly, stripey red-and-white hat had been full of golden, silvery, diamondy, pearly . . .

“
Jewelry!
'” gasped Gemma. “Geez! Since when has that been here?”

Since when do you say ‘geez'?” asked Toby.

“The thieves,” I whispered. “Gemz—the thieves that the pirate was talking about!”

“What thieves?”

“The zieves!”

“Ah, yes, the zieves. What about them?”

“They're here! In the boathouse! Stealing from barges, burgling them! All that in order to . . .”

All the neurons in my brain lined themselves up into a nice little hypothermia. I mean,
hypothesis.

“. . . in order to pay for the poison! Yes, that's it! Since they can't make it themselves, they're paying someone else to make it for them!”

“Who?” asked Toby. “Rob?”

“No,” I said. “Not Rob. Julius and Gwendoline Hawthorne.”

“Ah, no!” protested Gemma. “Stop it with that stupid idea. You humiliated us enough last time. How many times will I need to tell you? They've got nothing to do with that!”

“I have clues, this time,” I said. “Remember what the pirate told me? That the silhouette of the thief that they'd seen was a short, small man. Why short and small? Because he's eleven years old! Gwen sends him stealing from the barges. It can't possibly have been Rob; he's huge.”

“I refuse to believe it,” said Gemma. “They want Cambridge to win. They wouldn't poison anyone.”

“Refuse to believe it all you like,” I said, “as long as you lend me your phone. I need to call Jeremy and I've run out of credit.”

She agreed reluctantly, and I dialed Susie's number.

“Hello?” said Jeremy's voice on the other end of the line.

“Hello, boss. Sesame Seade speaking.”

“What's up, Sess?”

“I've found enough clues to frame Gwendoline Hawthorne and her brother Julius.”

“Excellent news. Can you write it all down in an e-mail?”

“No, you have to come over. I'm at the university boathouse.”

“I can't possibly. I've got an essay crisis. And my foot's hurting a bit, and also I'm going out for coffee with some girl later . . .”