The Case of the Missing Treasure Read online

  Hazel cleared her throat.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ said Hazel, ‘a key isn’t just something that goes into a lock. It’s another word for cypher – the thing that lets you break a code. And the Morse code part says STONE.’

  ‘Oh!’ said George.

  ‘Exactly!’ said Hazel.

  ‘All right, no need to get excited, I know what it is,’ I said, because I did. I had in fact thought of it first, and knew where we ought to go.

  I led us into the museum, through the white-and-black marble entrance, up shallow marble steps and into the dusty halls of the museum itself. Lots of clever-looking grown-ups moved past us purposefully, and there was a scholarly hush to the air. I stuck my chin out, trying to look twenty, and marched through the rooms into the Egyptian sculpture gallery, making sure as I did so to keep an eye out for any suspicious clues or people.

  In general, I find museums dull. I do not much care for pots and pans and small jewels. But the series of mysterious thefts had made me more interested in them – and I was also quite pleased to be in one of the Egyptian rooms. The Egyptians are how all people from history should be, huge and fierce, and their sculptures make me feel like a queen.

  ‘Aren’t the British government ever ashamed of how much they steal?’ asked George, staring around at the red and yellow and black statues. ‘The British Museum has thousands more objects than it can ever display, all stored away underground, but the collectors still keep on bringing back more.’

  ‘Shhh!’ said Hazel, blushing. ‘You’re British!’

  ‘It’s not stealing, it’s finders keepers,’ I said. ‘Anyway, we look after them properly.’

  ‘It’s absolutely stealing, no matter how people look after the things they steal,’ said George, raising an eyebrow. ‘But I suppose we’re here to inspect the Rosetta Stone, not argue.’

  ‘Of course we are,’ I said. You see, the Rosetta Stone is a huge piece of rock with three kinds of writing on it: Greek and two sorts of Egyptian. A Frenchman called Mr Champollion was the first person to realize that each bit of writing said the same thing, which meant that it could be used as a key to finally read the kind of picture writing called hieroglyphs. The stone is black and rather triangular, and sticks up like an enormous tooth in the centre of the sculpture gallery.

  We all began to hunt about for the next clue. I peered at all sides of the stone, and the floor around it (a gentleman in a tweed suit said, ‘Hold hard, miss!’ as I pushed past him), and then began to examine the brass railing.

  I was getting rather frustrated when I heard George say, ‘I’ve got it!’ I looked up and saw him peeling something from the underside of the stone’s information plaque.

  ‘No, I’ve got it!’ cried Alexander a moment later. He had moved away from us and was pulling something out from between the slats of a grate at the side of the room.

  Hazel and I looked from Alexander to George.

  ‘You can’t both have it,’ I said. ‘Someone must have got the wrong bit of paper.’

  George frowned. ‘Mine’s another of those poems,’ he said. ‘And then there’s something beneath it – I think they’re hieroglyphs.’

  He held up his piece of paper, and we all looked at it. It certainly matched the other two – although Uncle Felix’s poem-writing had got sillier than ever.

  Three for a girl, four for a boy,

  Five and six for a dragon’s toy.

  Something to be hoarded, something to enjoy …

  And on the other side was the letter D.

  It did look like the next clue.

  ‘All right, what do you have?’ I asked Alexander.

  ‘It isn’t the same as the others at all,’ he said, sounding puzzled. ‘I think I must have picked up … a tourist’s note, or something. Look!’

  Beware the mummy! The old nemesis is great! Hear the awful tale, the end nigh!

  And on the other side were strings of numbers:

  1897, 0401. 95

  1897, 0316. 1

  1898, 1201. 20

  I got a chill all up and down my spine. The hairs on my arms shivered.

  ‘That isn’t Uncle Felix’s clue at all,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t,’ agreed George. ‘But I think it is a code.’

  ‘Hey, you’re right!’ said Alexander. ‘Just look at the first letter of each word after Beware the mummy.’

  I looked. I have to admit that all I saw at first were words, but then I squinted and I suddenly understood.

  ‘T – O – N – I – G – H – T – A – T – T – E – N,’ I spelled out.

  ‘Tonight at ten!’ agreed George.

  We all looked at each other, and I felt electric. ‘We’ve found someone else’s message,’ I whispered. ‘Hazel, copy it, copy it exactly! What if – what if this has something to do with the robberies? The papers think that they’re all break-ins, but that picture I saw in the newspaper was all wrong. The glass was on the ground outside the museum, not on the floor inside! I think they’re inside jobs, made to look like ordinary robberies.’

  ‘We noticed the glass too!’ said Alexander. ‘That would fit!’

  ‘If that’s so, then it’s not just one thief, but a group of them,’ I said excitedly. ‘Or the thief always has accomplices who work at the museums. What if—’

  ‘What if the British Museum is next on the list to be robbed?’ Hazel gasped. ‘And this note is the thief telling his accomplice where to meet him this evening!’

  ‘The British Museum is almost the only London museum not to have been attacked yet,’ said George. ‘It’s not a bad idea, Daisy!’

  ‘Quite true, it’s a very good one,’ I said. My heart was beating very fast, like a rabbit running. ‘Uncle Felix may think that he’s sent us to the only safe museum in London, but I think that he has in fact brought us to an extremely interesting place. We must put the message back and then follow its clue at once. Detective Society – Pinkertons – I think we have stumbled on a most important mystery!’

  ‘We have to split up,’ said George, as though he were in charge. Of course, I am the only one who could possibly be in charge, but George pretends not to know that.

  ‘If we’re going to investigate this note, we have to make sure we keep our cover,’ he continued. ‘Some of us must go on solving Uncle Felix’s clues too, otherwise he’ll work out what we’ve really been up to.’

  ‘You can,’ I said at once. ‘You and Alexander.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said George infuriatingly. ‘One from each society, otherwise you two’ll have all the fun.’ It is sometimes a bother that George and I understand each other so well.

  ‘You and Hazel, then,’ I said. This was a careful calculation – I know that I am not nearly as good at breaking codes as Hazel, just as George has shown himself to be quicker at puzzles than Alexander. I also very much wanted to solve the real mystery, and did not care at all about Uncle Felix’s childish treasure hunt.

  ‘All right,’ said George. ‘Now, does anyone know how to read hieroglyphs?’

  ‘I do,’ said Hazel. We all looked at her. ‘At least, a little. Aunt Lucy’s been teaching me about them. I think I can manage to solve Uncle Felix’s clue.’

  This made me remember that if I’m not careful Hazel will know more than me, and that would never do.

  Hazel squinted at the five hieroglyphs. ‘That’s a sort of K noise at the beginning,’ she said. ‘And an S at the end … and I think an N before that, and something that looks like an I?’

  ‘Hold on, I know!’ said George. ‘The bit about dragons and hoarding. Dragons hoard treasure, and treasure is coins. COINS! And five and six are for silver and gold in that nursery rhyme, the one that begins with ‘one for sorrow …’. We’ve cracked it!’

  George and Hazel beamed at each other, and I thought that I had chosen very well in putting them together.

  ‘Now, look,’ said George, ‘before we go off after the clues, I’ve got
one more thing to say. I think I might know which mummy the note’s talking about. You know I like unsolved mysteries?’

  ‘Of course we do!’ I said.

  ‘All right,’ said George, standing up straighter than ever. ‘Listen. There’s a mummy here that’s called the Unlucky Mummy, because it’s supposed to be cursed. It was first brought back from Egypt in the 1890s by four young men. Two of them died getting it back to England and the other two died a few months later. It was taken in by a friend of theirs, but only a few months later he brought it to the British Museum in despair. He said that it had made his daughter ill, and smashed plates in his house just like a poltergeist.’

  ‘That’s not true!’ I said, seeing Hazel gulping. Hazel hates ghost stories.

  ‘It probably isn’t!’ said George, shrugging expressively. ‘It’s in lots of books, though. Anyway, the next part of the story is as follows: in 1912 the British Museum tried to send it to America for an exhibition. But guess which ship they put it on?’

  ‘The Titanic!’ cried Alexander.

  ‘Exactly!’ said George.

  ‘This is absolutely not true at all!’ I protested. ‘If it was, it would be at the bottom of the sea, not in the mummy room.’

  ‘Of course that part isn’t true!’ said George. ‘But it’s a brilliant story, and lots of people believe it. They’re always saying that they feel an odd presence in the mummy room. Mediums even do seances in there, to see if they can contact the Unlucky Mummy’s evil spirit. It’s bunkum, but there’s one thing that is a fact: most people are afraid of the mummy room in general and the Unlucky Mummy in particular, which makes the mummy room the perfect place to hold a secret meeting – especially at night! Even the guards don’t like to go in there.’

  Trust George, I thought, to somehow bring even the silliest of stories to a very sensible conclusion.

  ‘Very useful,’ I said graciously. ‘Now, will you go away to the coin room and solve the treasure hunt before we run out of time?’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said George, clapping me on the shoulder. ‘Come on, Hazel, upstairs to the coin room!’

  As Hazel hurried out of the Egyptian gallery with George, she looked back at Alexander and blushed. It really does infuriate me that, around Alexander, Hazel turns back into the shy little girl I first met at Deepdean years ago, and not the downright fearsome detective she has become. He is no good for her at all. He really isn’t, Hazel. I’m only saying it in your best interests.

  ‘All right,’ I said, standing like the leader of the group, which I was, then turned to Alexander. ‘The important thing now is to uncover more about this clue. Come on, Wats—Alexander.’ (For there is only one person in the world who is worthy of that nickname.) ‘We must go and investigate this cursed mummy. And, while we do, we must also come up with a list of suspects. It’s clear that the person who left the note could be any member of staff or visitor – but who could they leave it for? Who might be able to get into the museum at ten o’clock at night, after it’s closed?’

  ‘A visitor might hide until after closing,’ offered Alexander, brushing the sandy hair back from his forehead. ‘But I guess that’s unlikely. OK, how about one of the museum staff? A keeper, or a guard.’

  ‘A guard isn’t a bad idea,’ I said grudgingly. ‘Someone who wouldn’t look odd wandering around after dark. Now, where are these mummies?’

  I had to admit that, even though I don’t believe in ghosts, the mummy room was eerie. Cases loomed at us out of the dimness, menacingly still, and all the wrinkly professors and hungry-looking students and tired nannies dragging little children about the gallery seemed unusually subdued.

  Alexander was rushing around, disturbing the dust and all the other visitors as he peered excitedly at the labels next to the mummy cases.

  I tried to look as though I didn’t know who he was, but he rather ruined this by shouting, ‘Hey, Daisy, it’s this one!’ and waving his arm at me in its too-short shirtsleeve.

  ‘Shush!’ I said. ‘You’ll make people suspicious!’

  ‘Not me,’ said Alexander, grinning infuriatingly. ‘I’m just an American kid who likes mummies. What’s suspicious about that? Come and look! It’s spooky.’

  As I said, I don’t believe in ghosts. That is all Hazel. But … looking up into the fixed, flat-eyed glare of the Unlucky Mummy made the back of my neck feel distinctly uncomfortable. Her face was very blank and calm, and her hands were crossed over her patterned and painted breast. There were winged figures all down her body, and they looked unpleasant.

  ‘Just think!’ said Alexander. ‘This case used to hold a real dead body.’

  ‘And this room is full of them!’ I said. ‘I wonder if any of them were murdered.’

  Then I scowled, because I had caught myself agreeing with Alexander about something, and that would never do.

  ‘We must search this room for further clues,’ I announced. ‘We have to solve the mystery of those strings of numbers, after all.’

  ‘I thought they might be locations,’ said Alexander. ‘You know, latitudes and longitudes. But they don’t look quite right.’

  I refuse to say it to him, but perhaps Alexander is not the worst detective in the world. I was very glad, though, when it was me who solved the mystery of the numbers.

  I was peering into a small case loaded with jewellery. At first my eyes were dazzled by the bright gold rings and chains, but then I looked at the scraps of paper next to each one. Each label had a description and two numbers, a short one and a longer one – and they exactly matched the pattern of our numbers.

  ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Alexander, come here!’

  Once we’d made that breakthrough, it was not hard to discover what the numbers belonged to. The first was next to a thick gold signet ring; the second was next to a slender gold and garnet necklace; and the last was next to a grey scarab beetle, engraved with the image of a hawk.

  ‘So, what does it mean?’ asked Alexander.

  ‘Well, obviously,’ I said, not exactly knowing what I was going to say next, ‘obviously … they’re …’ And then I knew. ‘It’s a list!’ I cried. ‘A shopping list, like Bridget or our housekeeper Mrs Doherty would make, only disguised. They’re the things the thief has asked for from his contact here.’

  ‘Of course!’ said Alexander enthusiastically. ‘That must be it! But – hey, they’re only little things, just like the ones stolen from the other museums. Don’t you think that’s weird? I mean, if you were breaking into the British Museum, wouldn’t you steal more important objects?’

  ‘I expect they’re extremely valuable,’ I said – but really I had to admit that Alexander was right. They did seem awfully little things to break into a museum for. Was there more to this mystery than we had yet deduced?

  Hazel and George came running in then, breathless and very pleased with themselves.

  ‘We solved them all!’ said Hazel triumphantly.

  ‘Hazel solved most of them,’ said George. ‘I just watched.’

  ‘Coin room, then chessmen, then Elgin Marbles, then Assyrian lions,’ said Hazel, ticking them off on her fingers. ‘And the letters: V, C, D, Q, I, O. They must spell out something, but we don’t know what yet.’

  I blinked. ‘I know what they mean,’ I said, and I got a funny twinge, because perhaps I shouldn’t have been so rude about Uncle Felix’s birthday present. ‘Now, where is Uncle Felix waiting for us?’

  ‘There you are!’ I said, marching over with the other three behind me.

  Uncle Felix turned in mock surprise from where he was posing next to one of the statues in the Greek room, his long, smooth face fitting in perfectly with the senator he was in front of.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said, screwing in his monocle and looking down at me (less far down than he used to – I have grown so much that now I nearly reach his shoulder). ‘Forty-five minutes to solve the clues. Now, I have a present for you. I assume you know what it is?’

  ‘Vidocq,’ I said, scow
ling as hard as I could so as not to show how pleased I was. ‘The French policeman who invented being a detective. You can’t have bought me him, since he’s dead and it’s not polite to buy people anyway, so I suppose you’ve got me the book he wrote.’

  ‘The first English edition,’ said Uncle Felix. ‘I thought it was fitting for my detective niece. Here you are.’

  I do not hug Uncle Felix often – he is not a hugging sort of person, and neither am I – but I hugged him then.

  ‘Now, I thought the four of you might like to go and have some tea,’ said Uncle Felix. ‘I have to— Well, something has come up at work.’

  ‘Oh, is it the museum thief?’ asked Alexander eagerly. George poked him, but it was too late.

  ‘None of your business,’ said Uncle Felix firmly, taking a step back and glaring at us. ‘Do you want tea or not?’

  Suddenly I found myself feeling cross with him all over again. It was not fair that Uncle Felix should call me a detective with one breath and then tell me I wasn’t old enough to detect with the next. If I had been unsure about discussing the message we had found with Uncle Felix, or about following the clue ourselves, I wasn’t any more.

  I looked around the Greek gallery – at the old lady wrapped up in a great grey scarf, the little boy pointing at all the rude bits of the statues while his nanny tried to drag him away, and the guard standing to attention beside the door. None of them seemed very suspicious, but I have learned that you cannot count on people’s appearances at all. Was the thief’s accomplice hiding in plain sight?

  ‘Here,’ said Uncle Felix, holding out his hand and interrupting my thoughts. ‘For your tea.’ It was a ten-shilling note.

  ‘Thank you, Uncle,’ I said coolly, taking the note between my fingers as though it were a dead mouse. ‘We shall go and get some ices.’

  ‘Uncle Felix is treating us like children!’ I said bitterly as we walked out of the museum, past a cleaning woman mopping the floor, then a tweedy lady making notes in a book, and finally past a policeman pacing to and fro on the steps. When I saw him, I knew that the police must be worried about a break-in here soon.