‘C’mon, move!’
We scurried out of the room, taking care to make sure the door was shut behind us. We walked as calmly as our screaming nerves would allow.
We passed Moss on the stairs. He didn’t give us so much as a second glance. We tried not to stare at him with raw fear in our eyes. He patted his chest and burped quietly to himself.
‘That was close,’ whispered Muddy, as we arrived at reception.
‘The police are on their way,’ said Susan’s mum. Several of Susan’s friends were still in the admin office, keeping guard on Mr Beeks. The rest of us zipped across the reception area and sat on the wide leather sofas that were next to the leaflet display stand.
We tried to look casual, as if we were simply lounging about without a care in the world. I don’t think we succeeded very well. Most of us were looking around like a bunch of meercats on red alert. Izzy tried playing a game on her phone and kept dropping it. Muddy had picked up a magazine from the coffee table beside the sofas and was reading it upside down. The magazine was upside down, I mean, not Muddy.
Minutes passed. Every second felt like a hundred million years. A couple of hotel guests checked in and a couple of hotel guests went out and diners came and went from the restaurant.
Eight fifty p.m. I felt a shock of cold air as the glass entrance door swung open. I turned to see a tall, angular woman crossing the lobby. She had a beautifully sculptured face and long, brown hair. Her sharply tailored outfit had narrow lapels at the neck and her broad trousers flapped around her high-heeled shoes. She went over to the reception desk.
‘Hello,’ she said to Susan’s mum. ‘I believe I’m expected by a Mr Moss you have staying here? My name is Heather.’
I suddenly noticed that Muddy was staring at her. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen someone gape so open-mouthed at anything.
He nudged me in the ribs as ‘Heather’ headed for the stairs and out of sight. ‘Now that’s what I call a spy,’ he breathed. ‘I think I’m in love.’
A lot happened in the next five minutes. The police arrived. Some of them piled into the admin office to collar Beeks, some of them hurried towards the restaurant to collar Black Suit Man. ‘Heather’ reappeared, frogmarching a handcuffed Moss in front of her.
All three villains (Black Suit Man with gravy stains all down his legs) were escorted out of the hotel, past where I, Muddy, Izzy, Susan and the other girls were still perched on the sofas. The villains were bundled out into the freezing night air, towards a flashing shimmer of police car lights which glinted off the snow.
As if a switch had been thrown, the girls all started chattering at once. They agreed that this was definitely the best birthday sleepover any of them had ever been to, ever. With a flurry of ‘Bye’s and ‘See ya, guys’s they went up to their room. Susan’s mum stood behind the reception desk with a look on her face which said, ‘Yes, this is definitely the weirdest evening I’ve ever had, ever’.
Muddy slung his bag of gizmos over his shoulder. ‘Bye, Saxby,’ he said, still a bit awestruck by the memory of Heather, or whatever her real name might have been. ‘An actual spy. I don’t think I can ever thank you enough.’
By now, I was feeling as crumpled and worn out as a pre-owned tissue. I was about to head home myself, when I caught sight of a short figure wrapped in an overcoat, lurking beside the leaflet stand.
It was Inspector Godalming, he of the whistling false teeth and the birdish walk. I walked across the lobby to him, shaking my head slowly, hand slapped to my forehead.
Remember that one and only vague clue I had to the identity of the mysterious texter? It hadn’t been what he’d said, so much as the fact that he’d said it at all. The texter had to be someone in the know, someone who had access to the kind of information he’d given me. (And as soon as he’d told me that ‘Heather’ was from MI5, I’d realised that my initial fears were unfounded and that the texter was one of the good guys after all – the smugglers would have wanted to make sure MI5’s plan went wrong.)
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘You sent me those texts.’
‘Yesh, I’m afraid sho, shonny,’ said Inspector Godalming. (We’ll take the badly-fitting dentures as read from now on, otherwise it’s a bit of a spelling nightmare!) ‘I thought you might have known it was me once you saw Sergeant Willis.’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘The man in the black suit?’
‘He was a police officer? Of course! That’s where I’d seen him before! With you. He was there when you arrested Elsa Moreaux. Argh, I should have realised!’ I thought for a moment. ‘And that’s why you called on me. You knew a police officer was mixed up with Beeks’s scheme to steal the diamonds. So I take it you didn’t know which police officer?’
‘Correct,’ said the Inspector. ‘And that’s one reason I called on you. Beeks has been in trouble before, but there was no way he could have known about the diamonds unless someone under my command had told him about them. As I had no idea who that was, any enquiries at the police station ran a high risk of alerting the guilty officer to the fact that they were being investigated and that someone at the hotel had learned of Beeks’s plan.’
‘So who was your source of information inside the hotel?’ I said.
‘The restaurant’s head waiter,’ said the Inspector.
‘Vernon. You know, I barely even considered it was him!’ (Did you?) ‘But why was it me you contacted? You’ve always gone on about how much you disapprove of me “interfering in police work”!’
‘Yes, well,’ muttered Inspector Godalming, bristling with embarrassment like a parrot flapping on its perch.
‘I would have used a grown-up private eye, but if a member of my own squad was a bad apple, I couldn’t be sure that any investigator wasn’t one too. And in any case, I knew young Susan’s father from his days in the police force. I know she goes to the same school as you, so I knew you’d have no difficulty being here without raising Beeks’s suspicions.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Which only leaves the MI5 connection . . .’
‘The security services had been tracking those smugglers for months,’ said the Inspector. ‘This meeting tonight was their one and only chance to catch Moss red-handed. They contacted us, told us what was going on and warned us that nothing, absolutely nothing, must get in the way of them arresting him. There couldn’t be the faintest whiff of a cop within five miles of this place tonight, not until Moss was captured. We even had to delay responding to Susan’s mother’s call until we got the nod.’
‘But your bad apple, Sergeant Willis, threw a spanner in the works,’ I said. ‘He told Beeks about the diamonds, Beeks devised the robbery and the pair of them were set to walk off with the gems.’
‘Correct,’ said the Inspector. ‘When I found out, through Vernon, I was in a right panic. I couldn’t be seen to interfere with tonight’s events, or MI5 would come down on us like a ton of bricks. But I also couldn’t risk
Beeks succeeding, or MI5 would still have come down on us like a ton of bricks.’
‘So you texted me,’ I said, ‘and kept your identity secret from me until it was all over.’
‘Couldn’t risk you blabbering something at the wrong moment now, could I, sonny? You nearly blew the entire operation as it was!’
‘Er, yes, well,’ I mumbled. Now it was my turn to feel embarrassed. ‘No harm done, eh? All’s well that ends well.’
I turned to go.
‘Needless to say, sonny,’ said Inspector Godalming, his shoulders twitching inside his overcoat, ‘none of this ever happened. Officially. Right?’
I grinned. ‘As ever. Can’t have brilliant schoolboy detectives interfering with police work, can we?’
I had a long and icy walk home, but something kept me smiling all the way.
Case closed.
CASE FILE TWENTY-FOUR:
THE GUY
WHO CAME IN
FROM THE COLD
CHAPTER
&nb
sp; ONE
I HAVE A VERY LOUD SNEEZE. I can’t help it.
I have a sneeze which makes people leap up, yelping, as if a major environmental disaster had suddenly started shaking the building. I don’t mean to make people jump. I just do. That’s just how my nose is.
I was making everyone jump at school one Tuesday morning. I was feeling dreadful. All that sitting around in my shed in the freezing weather (and all that tramping about in the snow on the trail of assorted bad guys) had finally caught up with me. I had officially got the World’s Snottiest Cold. By lunchtime, our form tutor Mrs Penzler had had enough.
‘Saxby,’ she cried, pulling her shoulders back and covering her ears, ‘I could hear you sneezing all the way from the main hall!’
‘Sorry, Mrs Penzler,’ I said. Although, with my thickly bunged-up sinuses, what I actually said was, ‘Sobby, Bisses Benzlub.’
‘Why don’t you go home, Saxby?’ she said. Mrs Penzler doesn’t really do sympathy, so this was more like a direct order. ‘Come back to school when you’re better.’
‘Yedd, Bisses Benzlub. WHA-CHOOOOO!’
The entire class jumped. I think the floor may have wobbled too.
By the time I got home, I was feeling even worse. I had some chicken soup. I don’t know why. People are always offering you chicken soup when you’re ill, so it seemed like the thing to do.
I went to bed. Crawled to bed, to be honest.
The window in my room is quite high off the floor. So as I lay there, all I could see outside was a dull, blank rectangle of sky. There wasn’t a sound coming from anywhere and I had that peculiar, cut-off feeling you get when you’re at home on a school day. You know the feeling I mean?
I spent the rest of the day snuggled up in bed, reading a very interesting book about real-life police investigations. Partly, this was research for the Detective Handbook I keep meaning to write, but mostly it was because I was too bunged-up and sneezy to sleep.
Anyway, this book had some fascinating things to say about witnesses to crimes. All too often, said the book, witnesses may not even realise they are witnesses. It may be that nobody knows the importance of something they’ve seen or heard. It’s only when a detective comes along, gathers up all the evidence, and notices connections, that the complete picture can be seen.
As it turned out, this observation was to be hugely important over the next few days. A new case file was about to come to my attention. As case files go, it was quite a small and easy-to-solve one, but it’s worth telling you about because it’s a good example of how an entire problem can be sorted out with the help of a reliable witness or two.
What I didn’t realise, lying there sneezing, was that I’d have to solve this particular puzzle without moving from my bed.
CHAPTER
TWO
‘WHA-CHOOOOO!’
‘What the —
‘WHA-CHOOOOOOOO! Sorry.’
‘I think I’ve gone deaf.’
My great friend Isobel ‘Izzy’ Moustique, our school’s Number One Boffin, sat at the far end of my bed. At arm’s length, she held out some more paper tissues for me.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Catch it, bin it, kill it,’ she muttered. ‘And in your case, Saxby, put a sock in it as well.’
‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, recoiling slightly at what my nose had just left on the tissues.
‘You’re not feeling any better then?’ Izzy asked.
‘No, I feel lousy,’ I grumbled. ‘I’ve finished reading my book, the telly’s broken and there’s no more chicken soup. Have you brought me anything?’
She raised a finger. ‘Yes, I have.’
From the self-decorated canvas bag that rested beside her ankles, she drew out a large paper file.
‘Homework,’ she said, handing it over. ‘When Mrs Penzler heard I was coming over to see you tonight, she gave me this to give to you.’
‘Oh. How kind. Thank you enormously,’ I said. Can you detect the tiny little hint of grumpy sarcasm in my voice?
‘It’s not my fault,’ said Izzy. ‘Mrs Penzler’s been in a mood all day.’
‘She’s in a mood most days,’ I said.
‘No, I mean a real mood,’ said Izzy. ‘Extra maths tests, the lot.’
‘Why?’
Izzy started to fiddle with the chunky rings that dotted her fingers. She’d obviously been home before coming to see me because she was wearing her usual out-of-school mixture of bright colours and flared cuffs. I wondered why she hadn’t come straight from school.
‘Oh, it’s . . . I dunno, just one of her moods,’ she said.
‘No, it isn’t. I can tell,’ I persisted. ‘What’s happened?’
Izzy squidged her face around a bit before replying.
‘There’s a book gone missing. It’s one Mrs Penzler brought from home.’
‘What sort of book?’ I said, wiping my nose with another tissue.
‘Yesterday, after you went home,’ said Izzy, ‘we started a new history topic. We’re doing British Society and Culture after World War II. And before you say anything, some of it looks like it’s going to be quite interesting.’
‘Does it include crime?’
‘No.’
‘I see. Carry on.’
‘So. New topic. Mrs Penzler produced this slightly tatty old book. It’s a school English textbook from about sixty years ago, which belonged to her father. It turns out she comes from a long line of teachers.’
‘Poor woman,’ I mumbled. Mrs Penzler was as tough as a school carrot, so it wasn’t often anyone ever said that about her. ‘It’s sixty years old and it belonged to her dad? How old is she, exactly?’
‘Oooh, about two hundred and forty?’ said Izzy. ‘She said it’s her most treasured possession.’
‘A school textbook? Poor woman.’
‘Stop interrupting,’ said Izzy. ‘She said this textbook would be good background information for us. It would give us an idea of the sort of things that were studied at school all those years ago. She left it on the row of shelves beside the door and said we could take a look at it whenever we liked, so long as it didn’t leave the classroom, OK. One or two of us had a look before we went home yesterday and I saw a couple more taking a look first thing this morning before registration. Then, late this afternoon, Mrs Penzler asked where it was. Nobody knew. It wasn’t on the shelf. “Who’s got it?” she said. No hands up, nothing. And she blew her top.’
‘And out comes the extra homework,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ said Izzy. ‘It’s put everyone on edge. Mrs Penzler can be a bit of a grouch, but it’s not as if we all dislike her or anything. None of us would steal something of hers. She started going on about how she can’t trust her own class any more, and how sad it was that one of us could take something she values so much. She got quite teary.’
‘Mrs Penzler?’ I gasped.
‘Yes, Mrs Penzler! The whole class is feeling sorry for her one minute and glaring suspiciously at each other the next. I dread to think what things are going to be like in that classroom tomorrow. You’re well out of it. And you’ll miss the Winter Fayre tomorrow, you lucky —
‘Wooo-hoo! I’d forgotten about the Winter Fayre,’ I said. ‘Missing that is the best news I’ve had all term.’
The St Egbert’s School Winter Fayre was an annual torture which took place on the coldest, darkest, most miserable day of the entire school year. Pupils, teachers, parents and other family members would cram into the main hall after lessons. They would shuffle from one feeble stall to another, buying assorted tat and revolting-looking homemade cakes. Everyone would get jostled, bad tempered and boiling hot in their winter coats. Then the next day, the Head would declare what a marvellous success it had been and how it had raised a record amount of cash for school funds.
‘Could you cough on me a bit,’ said Izzy, ‘so I’ll have an excuse to miss it too?’
‘Tell me about this textbook first,’ I said. ‘I assume it’s a valuable item
, being so old?’
‘No, just the opposite,’ said Izzy. ‘That’s the mystery. It’s worthless. You might as well steal a toilet roll. It has huge sentimental value for Mrs Penzler, but that’s it.’ ‘Hmmm,’ I said. ‘That’s odd. Describe it.’ ‘It’s a small, pale green hardback. Quite tatty, battered at the edges. It’s about three centimetres thick, about ten centimetres wide and about twenty centimetres high.’ ‘Not a large object, then?’ I said.
‘No,’ Izzy said, shrugging. ‘Pretty standard book size.’ ‘And who knew it was there, on the shelf?’ ‘Only Mrs Penzler and our class. Nobody else. That’s why she’s sure one of us took it.’
‘Nobody could have seen it there and thought it was worth nicking?’
‘I doubt it,’ said Izzy. ‘Like I said, it’s a tatty old thing.’
‘Has anything else happened today?’ I said. ‘Anything unusual been going on?’
‘Actually, yes,’ said Izzy. ‘Bob Thompson’s been acting weird, but that’s nothing to do with the book.’
‘Weird? How?’
‘Well, sort of . . . helpful, pleasant. Rather creepy, really.’
‘Bob Thompson? Being nice? Eurgh, yeah, gives you the shudders.’
Bob Thompson was the school’s premier league bully. He looked like a walking block of concrete with a head poking out of the top – the sort of person you’d expect to see chewing on broken bottles and new-born kittens. Luckily, his class was at the other end of the school. (For more information on Bob Thompson, see my earlier case file, The Hangman’s Lair.)
‘Why’s he being nice?’ I asked.
‘I guess the Head’s threatening him with permanent exclusion again,’ said Izzy. ‘He’s been running errands for teachers and helping out with the Winter Fayre. But that’s the only other unusual thing that’s been going on.’
‘Hmmm,’ I said. ‘Well, if Bob Thompson has been volunteering for the Winter Fayre, that’s one more reason not to go!’
Secret of the Skull Page 9
