The Poisoned Arrow (11 page)

M
Y PHONE RANG SHORTLY AFTER
I got home. It was my other great friend Isobel ‘Izzy’ Moustique, and she had a favour
to ask me.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Aww, go on,’ she pleaded. ‘My mum will take us over to the cinema. But she’s got a business meeting to get to, and I’ve got nobody to see the movie
with.’

‘See it on your own.’

‘I don’t want to see it on my own. Going to the movies is something you do with friends.’

‘Well ask a friend who isn’t me,’ I said.

‘I already have,’ grumbled Izzy. ‘They’re all busy. You’re right at the bottom of my list.’

‘Nice.’

‘Aww, go on. Might be the best film you’ve ever seen.’

‘What’s it called?’ I asked, suspiciously.

‘
Blood Beasts of Mars.
’

‘See you in ten minutes.’

At least it’ll take my mind off the Hardyman case,
I thought.
At least it sounds like it’ll have plenty of monsters and battles in it, I thought. Maybe even a car chase or
two.

Wrong. It was a weedy love story about an earthling who looks after a wounded alien, full of weepy violin music and sunsets and yuueeek bleaghh euikkkk!

‘That is the most misleading movie title in the history of movies!’ I moaned, as we left the cinema. ‘You
knew
it was going to be like that, didn’t you?’

Izzy pulled an exaggerated who-li’l-ol’-me? face. ‘But it was so
moving
—’

‘Yawn!’

‘So
romantic
—’

‘Double yawn!’

‘He gave up his life as a space marine,’ sighed Izzy, ‘so that they could be in each other’s arms. Well, tentacles, anyway. Ahhhhh! Oh, there’s the car, I can see
Mum waving.’

Wait a minute.

‘Say that again,’ I said.

‘I said I can see the car,’ replied Izzy.

‘No, before that . . . Good grief, that’s the answer!’

I hadn’t wasted two hours of my life sitting through that rubbish movie after all. Suddenly, I had the key to the whole Hardyman mystery! It revolved around three vital elements:

1
. Blood Beasts of Mars
,

2. Dr Shroeder needing a wee last Monday morning, and

3. A bottle of nail polish.

How much of the puzzle have you pieced together?

At nine a.m. the following morning, eight people gathered in Dr Shroeder’s office at the university – there was me, Dr Shroeder, Nat Hardyman and his mum, Deborah
Ashworth, Matt, Jack and Anil. I’d also asked Dr Shroeder if he could invite along whichever police officer it was who’d dusted for fingerprints on the morning of the theft. But they
hadn’t arrived yet.

‘What’s this about?’ said Deborah Ashworth. ‘I’ve got an exam to revise for. Why aren’t the rest of the advanced maths group here?’

‘Everything will be clear in a few minutes,’ I said.

‘I’m not even supposed to be on campus,’ said Nat. ‘The head of department said I was banned until further notice.’

‘You won’t be for much longer,’ I reassured him. He didn’t look reassured one little bit. If anything, he looked extremely nervous and uncomfortable.

‘Perhaps you could get on with saying whatever it is you’ve called us here to say?’ suggested Dr Shroeder.

‘OK,’ I began. I a-hemmed, feeling rather nervous myself.

I was taking a leap in the dark. I had good reasons for thinking that my deductions were correct, but there were still some parts of the mystery I couldn’t be certain about. If I was
wrong, if I’d made a mistake in my investigations, I was about to make myself look like a complete and utter idiot.

‘OK,’ I began again. ‘I’ll start by saying that Nat Hardyman, whatever he might say, and whatever his three friends here might say, is innocent of the crime.’

I could see that Nat was about to say ‘No, I’m not’, but then thought better of it. He glanced around the room, at the others, then dropped his gaze to the floor.

‘So who
is
guilty, then?’ said Dr Shroeder.

‘We need to reconstruct what happened last Monday morning,’ I said. ‘You arrived here, Dr Shroeder, at your office, as you normally would. You got out your new computer, but
then you realised you needed to go to the loo. So off you went.

‘Students often call to see you at that time in the morning. Monday was no exception. While you were gone, a student turned up. You weren’t here. Now, under normal circumstances,
they might simply have waited for you to return. Or they might have come back later. But on Monday, that student spotted an unexpected opportunity and gave in to a sudden temptation. They picked up
your computer and walked out with it.’

‘Yes, it was Nat,’ said Matt.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t Nat. But Nat was here. Or rather, Nat was outside, in the corridor. By chance, he’d also come along to see Dr Shroeder. What it was about,
I don’t know. I don’t know what the thief originally came here to ask either, but I guess that’s something that can wait until later.

‘Nat happened to come through the door at the end of the corridor, just as the thief was leaving this room. He saw who it was. He saw the guilty look on the thief’s face, he saw the
laptop, and he remembered something he’d just heard a fellow student mention.

‘At this point, I should say, I’m having to make one or two logical leaps. I don’t know how Nat heard what he heard a fellow student mention. He’ll have to tell us that
himself.’

‘So who was this thief?’ said Deborah Ashworth. ‘I think we’d all like to know.’

I paused for a moment. ‘All the way through this investigation,’ I said, ‘I’ve been wondering who could possibly have forced Nat to admit to a crime he didn’t
commit. And after I saw a really soppy film yesterday, the truth suddenly dawned on me. The truth is, he forced himself.’

‘Himself?’ said Mrs Hardyman. ‘How? He’s such a good boy. Are you saying he bullied himself into a false confession?’

‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘As you’ve said, Mrs Hardyman, Nat’s never been in trouble in his life. He’s not exactly used to hatching plots, so he did it all
rather clumsily. His aim was to stop the thief being found out. He was willing to get into serious trouble and risk his entire future to protect that person.’

‘Protect who?’ gasped Dr Shroeder.

‘Do you want to tell them, Nat?’ I said. ‘Or shall I? She knows what you’ve done and she doesn’t seem to care. She’ll let you take the blame. You owe her
nothing.’

Nat shifted uneasily. A couple of times, he seemed about to speak. At last he said, in a faltering voice, ‘No. I won’t say anything.’

‘Who is this “she”?’ said Dr Shroeder. ‘Who is he protecting?’

I waited a few seconds. Just in case she felt like doing the right thing and owning up. Hmm, apparently she didn’t.

‘Deborah Ashworth,’ I said.

She hooted with laughter. ‘Oh, that’s ridiculous. Why would I steal Dr Shroeder’s laptop? I’ve got an identical one myself!’

‘You
did
have,’ I said. ‘At the weekend, you accidentally tipped nail polish into it.’

‘I fixed it!’ Deborah protested.

‘According to my friend, Muddy, that would be very difficult. Beyond his capabilities. And, to be quite honest, if something technical is beyond my friend Muddy, it’s beyond just
about everyone. Yet, apparently, you not only fixed it, you fixed it almost overnight.’

Deborah pulled the laptop from a bag at her feet. ‘This is my computer. There’s no way you can prove otherwise.’

‘Wait, I don’t understand,’ said Mrs Hardyman. ‘Why would Nat cover up for this girl?’

‘Because he loves her,’ I said. ‘That’s where we come back to that soppy film I saw yesterday. Some people will do the craziest things for love. In this case, Nat was
willing to be thrown out of university, maybe even end up with a police record, to show Deborah how much he loves her. He thought he might be able to change her mind about him. He thought that,
just maybe, she’d stop thinking of him as a nerd if he did something like that for her sake, and that she might fall in love with him too.’

‘Nat?’ said Mrs Hardyman in a quiet voice. ‘Is this true?’

Nat seemed to be looking in every possible direction at once, except at us. He ran his hands through his neatly combed hair, pulling at it sharply.

‘Outside this building,’ he said, barely above a whisper, ‘on Monday morning, I was talking to a couple of the girls on my course about what we’d done at the weekend. One
of them told me about Debbie’s accident with her computer. I knew it couldn’t have been fixed. When I came inside, as soon as I saw the one under her arm, I knew it had to be Dr
Shroeder’s.’

‘That’s a lie,’ said Deborah sharply.

‘She looked at me,’ said Nat sadly. ‘Straight at me. Both of us knew what was going on, just from each other’s faces. I said, “I won’t tell.” She walked
away.’

I looked across at Nat’s three friends. They looked almost as agonised as Nat himself.

‘So why did these three back up his story?’ cried Mrs Hardyman. ‘Some friends they are!’

‘They backed up his story
because
they’re his friends,’ I said. ‘He asked them to.’

‘I told you it was a stupid idea, Nat,’ grumbled Matt. ‘I said it wouldn’t work.’

‘Nat thought that, if he went to the police and owned up to the crime, then he’d be charged and that would be that,’ I said. ‘But once again, Mrs Hardyman, because
he’s a good boy who’s never been in trouble in his life, he didn’t realise that the police would want more than a simple confession.

‘So, after they let him go late on Monday, he called his three friends from home. He asked them to come forward as witnesses. And so, on Tuesday morning, bingo, out of the blue, there were
suddenly three people backing up Nat’s version of events. My guess is that they were very reluctant to go along with Nat’s idea – as shown by the way they didn’t want to
talk to anyone but the police about it – but they did it out of loyalty to their friend. They knew how much Nat loves Deborah.’

‘And we told him she wouldn’t care,’ said Anil. ‘The girl’s got a heart of stone.’

‘Listen,’ cried Deborah, ‘this is all lies. This computer belongs to me!’

‘We’ve no way of proving otherwise,’ said Dr Shroeder. ‘Miss Ashworth has had one of these laptops for a while. I can’t see that there would be any difference
between mine and hers.’

‘Oh yes there is,’ I said. ‘Miss Ashworth, would you put the computer on this workbench and raise its screen?’

Deborah glared at the rest of us for a moment, then with a huff and a shake of her head she did as I asked. ‘There! Happy?’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Now, could you pull the two little catches that hold the keyboard in place and lift it out?’

‘What for?’ she said.

‘To prove whose computer this really is,’ I said. ‘Umm, Dr Shroeder, is that police officer going to get here soon?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Dr Shroeder. ‘She said she’d be along as soon as possible.’

Making a show of how good she was being by cooperating, Deborah lifted the computer’s keyboard, exposing a hole through which the machine’s innards could be seen.

‘Happy now?’ she said, frostily. ‘Standard components.’

‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘If everybody could make sure they don’t actually touch the computer now? Thank you.’

I’d thought of a good way to demonstrate that this was indeed Dr Shroeder’s computer, based on something he’d told me the day before.

Have you spotted it?

‘Dr Shroeder,’ I said, ‘you know more about these things than I do. Could you point out where the hard drive is?’

Dr Shroeder frowned slightly, puzzled by my request. ‘It’s the small silver box on the right-hand side. The one with a white label on it. But why?’

‘Do you remember what you told me yesterday?’ I said.

Suddenly, Dr Shroeder snapped his fingers and grinned. ‘I told you I’d upgraded the hard drive! Yes, I see! The thief wouldn’t have known that.
That
drive there
is
the exact model I installed.’

‘Me too,’ said Deborah flatly. ‘I also installed the same upgrade.’

‘You did? Yourself?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ snapped Deborah.

‘You didn’t get Dr Shroeder to do it for you?’