The Lost Twin by Sophie Cleverly

Author:Sophie Cleverly [Mark Sennen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-12-22T05:00:00+00:00

’ve been thinking about the diary,” said Ariadne without looking up.

It was evening, and after another unsatisfying dinner and lukewarm bath I’d returned to our dorm room with a towel wrapped around my damp hair. My friend was sitting on top of her perfectly made bed sheets, chewing a pencil and balancing an open exercise book on her lap.

I shut the door quickly behind me. “Careful!” I replied. “You never know who might be lurking.”

“Oops!” Ariadne went wide-eyed. “Sorry. I didn’t think.”

I smiled at her and went to sit down at the dressing table. “It’s all right. So, did you have an idea?”

“Well, sort of. Maybe. A bit. More of a question.”

I sat for a minute, waiting for Ariadne’s brain to untangle itself. The page she was writing on was covered with scribbles and doodles.

“We’re looking for the number one of something, right? So that could be anything that there’s more than one of …”

I glanced at my reflection in the dressing-table mirror, watching my twin’s image staring back at me. I almost couldn’t believe that Scarlet had been clever enough to come up with this whole thing. Then I felt guilty at that thought and brushed it out of my mind. I shouldn’t think so lowly of my sister. After all, I was the one who’d blown the entrance exam. “There’s usually method in her madness. Maybe something that has numbers written on it.”

Ariadne paused, gripping her pencil tightly. “Um … um … stables. No, we’ve had stables. Dorms. Office drawers.” And then suddenly she cried, “Lockers!”

The pencil snapped in half. She looked at it with a baffled expression, as if not sure how it had happened, and then back at me. “Lockers have numbers on. Now, where are there lockers?”

I thought about it, as Ariadne began to write more things down with the pencil stub.

The changing rooms by the gymnasium.

The ones by the pool.

There might some in the staffroom … and so on.

Wait, not the staffroom. I was pretty sure Scarlet wouldn’t have hidden a top-secret diary page in the staffroom. She wasn’t that stupid.

“The gym and the swimming pool,” I said.

Ariadne nodded and clapped her hands together with glee, before realising that was perhaps a bit much. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. And … thank you, Ariadne. For your help.”

“It’s no problem,” she replied. “Oh, I do love mysteries!”

As the bell signalled the end of classes the next day, Ariadne and I headed for the gymnasium. It was three o’clock and there were still plenty of girls milling about the corridors.

I hadn’t been in these changing rooms before. They were through a pair of double doors to the right of the gym, and as we walked inside they appeared much the same as the swimming pool ones, all wooden benches and coat hooks. The room smelt of sweat and shoe polish.

Ariadne looked around. “There’s no one here,” she whispered.

“Then why are you whispering?”

“Oh,” she said, a little louder. “Good point.”

“We’re only here to look for your socks, after all.

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