Arranged around the cluttered-to-bursting room at Zoe’s apartment were Zoe, her cousin Joe, Joe’s dad Barry Albieri, Barry’s sister Sally Albieri, and their sister Mary Rogers. I thought I might lean casually against the bookcase, in an effort to look confident and detective like. However, there was so much stuff piled onto it I decided not to, in case I knocked the whole thing over.
“Get on with it,” growled Barry Albieri. “I don’t like being here when these two are still accusing me of arson.”
“Yeah,” growled Joe.
“We’re not accusing you,” protested Mary.
“I should hope not, when you did it!” cried Barry.
“That’s not fair!” said Sally. “All Mary wants to do is…”
Barry started talking over Sally, Mary started talking over Barry, and Joe started talking over everyone. Zoe had her hands over her ears.
I whistled loudly. They all shut up.
“Right!” I said. “Have we all finished? Good! Now then, let’s get at the truth, shall we?”
All five of them went back to giving me that you’d-better-be-right stare. I cleared my throat.
“What I have to tell you,” I said, after a dramatic pause, “is not something you’ll enjoy hearing. It certainly isn’t something I’m going to enjoy saying. But it’s the truth. What the consequences of the truth will be is up to you. All I can do is reveal what I’ve found, and what I’ve found has to be the cruelest piece of deception I’ve ever come across.”
Their stares turned into nervous curiosity.
“As you well know,” I said, “last Saturday night, the bookshop downstairs was destroyed. Mary Rogers and Zoe are facing a bleak future if the police continue to believe that Mary burned the shop herself, as part of an insurance scam. But I can tell you now that Mary Rogers is innocent.”
Barry Albieri shifted forward on his seat. “You watch what you’re saying, lad,” he mumbled darkly.
“I always do,” I said. “This case, this mystery, revolves around nothing more than simple greed. And greed for nothing more than money, at that. The central problem is this: how could Mary Rogers be in two places at once? Answer: she wasn’t. She was in London the entire evening. We have video evidence.”
“But that video evidence also shows me and Auntie Sally being in London too!” cried Zoe. “So that means…”
All eyes turned to Barry. He was about to explode with rage, but I quickly continued.
“And, although we have no actual evidence, there’s no reason to suppose that Barry Albieri wasn’t at home all evening, exactly as he claims. Why? Consider this. Here’s a timetable of events for Saturday night. I was able to piece it together thanks to some help from a couple of friends of mine, and a remark about split-second timing that one of them made.”
From my pocket, I produced the railway schedule Izzy had e-mailed to me, and the timings from Muddy’s up-and-down the street walking I’d jotted in my notebook.
“Here’s the timetable. I leave for London by train at 5:15 p.m., or 17:15, as Chilcott Rail Passenger Services puts it. I arrive in London at 6:15 p.m. It is, so Zoe told me, a five-minute walk from the London station to the TV studios, so I arrive at the studios at around 6:20 p.m. or so.
“At 7 p.m., the semifinals of Dance Insanity begin, live on TV. I’m seen, in the crowd, yelling and waving my arms around. My presence there, at that time, is now on video. But! Five minutes later, I sneak away from the studio again, arriving back at the station just in time to catch the 7:15 p.m. train.
“I get back at 8:15 p.m. I walk to the bookshop—another five minutes or so, roughly 8:20 p.m. I let myself in by the back door. The nearby dog knows me and doesn’t sound an alarm. On my way to the shop, I’ve collected a can of gasoline, and I start sloshing it around.
“At 8:34 p.m. exactly, I’m spotted by Joe Albieri and his friends, who happen to be walking past, completely unexpectedly. I light the gasoline and run. By the time Joe has reached the back door, I’m gone and the shop is a disaster area.
“I return to the station. I catch the 8:45 p.m. train, arriving back in London at 9:45 p.m. I have to hurry, but I can just make it back into the studio in time for the start of the 9:55 p.m. results show. Once again, there I am, on camera.
“At the end of the evening, I catch the 10:45 p.m. train, and get back here at something close to midnight. Oh dear, I exclaim in horror, the bookshop has been set afire. Can’t have been me, I was in London. In fact, I was on camera in London. Perfect alibi.”
“Zoe!” gasped Sally Albieri. “Oh my God, Zoe! How could you!”
“Itwasn’tmeitwasn’tmeitwasn’tme!” cried Zoe, in a panic.
“Oh Zoe, no!” cried Mary Rogers. “But wait! Zoe was sitting right behind me. She can’t have sneaked out!”
“And she didn’t,” I said. “It’s possible that you, Zoe, and your mom were working together on this, backing up each other’s stories. But the London trip was Auntie Sally’s idea.”
“Are you suggesting…?” stammered Sally. “How dare you! If that idea wasn’t such nonsense, I’d…I’d…”
“But,” said Zoe, “Auntie Sally couldn’t have planned to sneak away unless…”
“Unless she’d lied about those tickets,” I said. “She told you they were the only ones she could get, but in fact she made sure that she was sitting at one end of the audience, out of sight of you two at the other end of the audience, so that she could sneak away without being seen by either of you.”
“But why take us along at all?” said Zoe. “We might have noticed she’d gone.”
“True. That was a risk.” I said. “But if she was going to carry out her plan, she needed to make sure you were well away from home. And that you wouldn’t be coming back until late, and that you’d be able to back up her alibi, just in case the cameras went in unexpected directions and didn’t get a good look at her.”
“No, no, no, no, no,” piped up Joe. “It was Mary. I saw Mary in the bookshop!”
“No,” I said, “you saw Sally. Wearing her sister’s black and white jacket.”
“What?” cried Joe. “What for? What’s the point of that?”
“Sally writes crime novels,” I said. “She’s used to thinking these things through from all angles. She realized that, if the burning of the shop was investigated by the police, they’d want to find out who was in the area at the time. Sally knew that there could be a dozen or more security cameras on her route to the bookshop. At the railway stations, for instance, or on the streets. You told me, Zoe, how you’d had to leave your bags and coats in the TV studio’s checkroom. When she sneaked out, Sally simply reclaimed Mary’s jacket as her own, then gave it back at the checkroom on her return.”
“I can’t believe it,” gasped Mary Rogers. “She was trying to frame me? My own sister?”
“I think it was more a case of covering her own tracks,” I said. “She wanted to make sure that, if the police got involved, they’d look at the fuzzy pictures you get off most security cameras and make exactly the same mistake as Joe did.”
“So…Sally planted that footprint too?” said Barry.
“As another way to point suspicion away from her,” said Zoe.
“Exactly,” I said. “It was a just-in-case thing, really. Mary, Sally, and Barry all live in messy homes, like this one, so it would have been easy for her to walk off with one of Barry’s shoes last time she visited—the fact that he initials everything was brilliantly convenient for her.
“I have to admit, at one point I suspected that Barry had dressed up as Mary! After all, you three triplets have the same slight build, and all of you have that hair explosion thing going on! But, you see, Barry had no motive. He had no reason to do it.”
“And neither have I!” cried Sally, getting to her feet, her features twisted with anger. “I’ve heard quite enough of this!”
“Siddown!” growled Barry. “You ain’t heard nothing yet!”
“So why did she do it?” said Zoe.
“Like I said—greed.” I shrugged. “I’m sure you triplets don’t need me to remind you about that terrible row, about ten years ago? The huge falling-out you had over where all that money had disappeared to? I’m afraid Sally’s had it all along. How she stole it, I have no idea, but…”
“That is an outrageous accusation!” shouted Sally. “You haven’t the slightest shred of proof!”
“No,” I said quietly. “I have to admit, I don’t. But I can point out that your luxury lifestyle and your likely income are waaaay out of line with each other.”
“My books are enormously successful!” cried Sally.
From my school bag, I took the calculations and sales figures that Izzy had given me. “I’m really sorry to say this, but I think that’s another lie.”
“I don’t understand,” said Zoe. “What’s this got to do with the fire?”
Sally finally sat down again. Her face was battling itself over whether to show anger or horror.
“I’ve already pointed out that you three triplets all live in messy houses,” I said. “It explains how Sally could steal one of Barry’s shoes unnoticed, and it also explains how Mary managed to take the wrong box of books for her shop from Sally’s place a few weeks ago. Sally went ballistic about that. Why? Because one of the books that Mary took and put out for sale in her shop had something hidden inside it.
“I don’t know what that something was. It might have been a bank statement, or a savings-and-loan book, or simply a scribbled note. But it incriminated Sally. Whatever it was, it showed the world that Sally Albieri had suddenly got hold of a huge amount of money ten years ago.
“She was furious when she knew it had gone. Someone would pick that book up. Someone would open it and the secret would be out. She had to get it back. But how? In the chaos of her own clutter, she couldn’t even be sure which book it was in! And how was she going to find it among the many thousands in the shop? By the time she’d have managed to sneakily check through every shelf, it would probably have been too late.
“She decided that the only thing she could do was destroy her sister’s shop, and with it the whatever-it-was. Everything would be reduced to ashes, or soggy mush. Either way, she’d be safe from suspicion again. Her brother and sister would never know she’d stolen that money. She could go on lying to them about how much money she was making from her books.
“It was a meticulously planned crime, right down to the false evidence of the jacket and the footprint. It only went wrong because of one unexpected thing.”
“What was that?” said Zoe.
“It was what finally made me suspect Sally. The video of Saturday night’s Dance Insanity shows her wearing one of her frilly shirts, but the cuffs have vanished by the start of the results show. My guess is that she spilled some gasoline on them. The smell would have given her away, so she had to remove them before she got back to London.”
For a moment or two, there was an uneasy silence in the room.
“Sally,” said Mary Rogers, “say it’s not true. It can’t be true.”
The battle seemed to be over on Sally Albieri’s face. Sadness had been the surprise winner. “It was a letter from my bank manager,” she muttered at last. “I don’t know why I’d even kept it. Sheer big-headedness, I suppose. Oh well, that’ll teach me to live in a pigsty.”
Quietly, I packed my evidence away in my school-bag and headed for the stairs. I felt it was time to leave Zoe’s family to sort things out for themselves, now that they knew the truth about last Saturday night. It quite upset me, having to point the finger at someone I’d so admired, as well as having to throw the Rogers/Albieri clan into turmoil with such unpleasant news.
Soon, I was back at my garden shed. I tried to ignore the gooey mess that had once been the painted sign on my door and went inside. I flopped into my Thinking Chair, put my feet up on the desk, and added a few observations to my notebook.
I was reminded of another bit from another Sherlock Holmes story, one called “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Sherlock Holmes, who was never one for girlfriends, ends up having an affectionate respect for a female swindler called Irene Adler. I suppose Sally Albieri was my Irene Adler. She committed a heartless crime, but you almost had to admire her ingenuity.
You know, there was another story that gave me the final clue in this case. A book called Inspector Rumbelow Catches the Train, by A. E. Wilmslow, otherwise known as Sally Albieri. The Inspector catches the bad guy by proving he was on the 8:22 p.m. to Birmingham, when everyone else said he was at the theater. Funny, I might never have spotted the whole truth without reading that book.
Case closed.
Case File Nine:
The Lunchbox of Notre Dame
Chapter One
Every year at St. Egbert’s School, one entire year group gets packed off to North Wales for a week. Seven days of mud, rain, mountains, rivers, and porridge. It’s supposed to be fun. It “builds team spirit,” as our class teacher, Mrs. Penzler, puts it.
As you may have gathered, I’m not exactly the outdoors type. While the rest of my year group were crossing days off on their calendars and wishing the end of November could get here a bit quicker, I was facing the prospect of Countryside Week with absolute dread. Spending a week trudging through fields and climbing up rock faces was my idea of torture!
However, three weeks before the trip, Mrs. Penzler announced to my class that Countryside Week would have to be cancelled, owing to extensive flood damage at the place where we’d been due to stay. You can imagine the response in the classroom: twenty-nine “Ooh noooo”s and one (silent) “Yippee.” I played along with the general air of dismay: “Ohhhh, yeaah, it’s such a shame.” “Ohhh, yes, me too—I was so looking forward to it,” “Ohhh, what a shame,” etc, etc.
Mrs. Penzler tapped her ruler on the nearest desk for quiet. Twenty-nine faces stared back at her with glum disappointment, and one face stared back at her with absolute delight hidden under a mask of glum disappointment. Silence descended on the classroom like heavy rain.
“However,” she said, after a pause for dramatic effect.
Twenty-nine faces perked up a bit. One face started to droop. I was getting a terrible feeling that she was about to announce alternative arrangements.
“However, the principal has been able to make alternative arrangements.”
There was a ripple of approval through the room. Oh no, I thought to myself, heart sinking, we’re going anyway! We’re going to end up on some mountain-side that civilization forgot, aren’t we? We’re going to be sent to some miserable, mud-soaked corner of nowhere…
“We’re going to Paris instead,” said Mrs. Penzler.
I almost fell on the floor with relief. Then I almost fell on the floor with joy. The rest of the class was pretty happy about it too. (Even my archenemy, that low-down rat Harry Lovecraft, forgot about his normal weasel smirk and started looking excited.) It took Mrs. Penzler a couple of minutes to settle us all back down again.
“The travel company we’d booked through didn’t have an equivalent trip available,” said Mrs. Penzler, handing out information sheets for us to take home. “But they did have a last-minute cancellation for Paris. And with extra funding from the school’s Friends Association added into the budget, the principal has decided that visiting Paris for the week would be an ideal way to boost your knowledge of French language and culture. These letters will explain all the details—make sure they’re given to parents tonight, please. Oh, and before you ask, no, we’re not going to be spending so much as a single minute in Disneyland.”
“Awww,” went everyone.
Result! So much for all that ghastly hill-walking! Ha haaa! A whole week in the City of Light! The Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and those really tasty little bread rolls with the chocolate bits inside!
Little did I know that, even on the streets of Paris, my detective skills would need to be as sharp as ever…
Chapter Two
The only
drawback of going to Paris was that I’d miss the trial of the century. Our school trip was going to start on the same day that the notorious gangster Frank “Iceman” DeSalle would go on trial for a list of crimes longer than a line in the post office.
There was likely to be huge media interest, and I’d been looking forward to following the twists and turns of the whole courtroom drama. Iceman’s gang had made some hilariously stupid mistakes (they’d have been caught in five minutes if I’d been on the case). They were finally tracked down through coded messages they were sending each other on the networking Web site FaceSpace.
However, coverage of the trial was unlikely to be of interest anywhere outside the UK, and so I’d have to settle for catching up on events once we got back from France. There’d be the Internet news sites to read, of course, but I doubted I’d have the time for them. In any case, somehow that didn’t seem quite the same, a bit like watching a movie with the sound off.
Oh well. Never mind.
So, Monday morning, 8:25 a.m. Thirty kids, plus assorted teachers and a couple of parent volunteers, piled into a coach in the school car park, drove to London, caught the Eurostar at St. Pancras Station train to Paris, got on to another coach, went through molasses-thick traffic to Hotel Marseilles, and lugged suitcases up three flights of stairs.
Six and a half hours, start to finish. Twenty-four packed lunches eaten before we got to London, five packed lunches thrown up in the middle of the Channel Tunnel due to travel sickness, and one feeble cry of “Oh no, I’ve left my suitcase at home” from a kid at the back of the coach.
And I don’t think any of us stopped chattering from the moment we arrived at the parking lot to the moment we got to the hotel. Mostly, I chatted with my great friends Muddy Whitehouse and Izzy Moustique. Although Izzy also spent quite a while chatting with a girl named Danielle Plummley, who’d only enrolled in the school the week before the Paris announcement and was consequently a bit more nervous about going on the trip than the rest of us.
The Pirate's Blood and Other Case Files Page 8
