Sleuth on Skates by Clementine Beauvais

Author:Clementine Beauvais
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Holiday House
Published: 2013-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Still frowning with incomprehension, I joined Gemma and Toby on the school field.

“What’s wrong?” asked Gemma.

“Firstly, PE. Secondly, Jenna Jenkins has mysteriously reappeared. You’ll never believe it.”

I explained everything to them, and they gaped at the tale of my midnight escapade.

“I don’t get it,” said Toby eventually. “If Jenna Jenkins says she was in London, who was locked in the cupboard?”

“It can’t be anyone else. No one else was missing! Jenna Jenkins is nose-lengtheningly lying in the manner of Pinocchio. She was in that cupboard: I smelt her.”

Toby said, tying his shoelaces, “Maybe you got it all wrong, Sesame. Maybe it wasn’t your mum’s perfume, just the smell of cleaning products.”

“Are you saying my mum smells like a freshly-bleached bathroom?”

“Listen,” replied Gemma, “am I the only one who thinks we should drop the case? Whatever happened to her, Jenna Jenkins is now alive and well. Whatever the Professors are doing is their own business. Firstly, it’s probably boring, like most businesses. Secondly, they’ve proven they’re not against locking up people in cupboards, and I don’t really want to try that out.”

“At least,” I remarked, “being locked up in a cupboard would give one a good excuse not to go to PE.”

Gemma and Toby got up and started warming up for sprint. Mr. Halitosis was already jumping up and down to try to get rid of his beer belly, screaming, “Come on, children! You can do it! You’ve got it in you!”

“I can’t run, Mr. Barnes, I’ve sprained my ankle.”

“A likely story, Sophie! Next time you’ll tell me you’ve injured your ponytail.”

“It kind of hurts too, actually.”

“Run! Running empties your head.”

“That explains it,” I muttered.

I ran for about ten minutes, but it didn’t empty my head. In fact, my skull was positively purring in the manner of Peter Mortimer when his stomach is being stroked. The overload of mysteries was twisting my brains into plaits.

There was no doubt that the Philips brothers were a criminal couple of crooks. But apart from the fact that one sported a goatee and the other one a moustache, I didn’t have any way of proving it to the world. Jenna Jenkins had said she hadn’t been locked up, and if I talked about the dodgy conversation I’d overheard, my parents would choose both not to believe me and to punish me for skating to the Fitz on my own in the middle of the night. Parents are contradictory like that.

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