The Case of the Missing Treasure Read online

  I kicked out with all my might, and she yelled but did not drop me.

  Then I heard several voices at once.

  ‘Put her DOWN!’ screamed Hazel, shoving her mummy case open with a bang.

  ‘Drop her! Drop her!’ shouted George and Alexander, leaping out of theirs.

  ‘You little rats!’ screamed the criminal mastermind, and she took me by the neck and shook me so hard and so ferociously that her face blurred in front of me. My throat was hurting dreadfully, and I was furious with her, and with myself. I clawed at her cheeks. She yelled, and shook me even harder, and then there was a very loud noise, and all at once I was falling to the floor and the woman’s hands were no longer around my neck.

  Although my mind is brilliant, I had been quite shaken by my adventure, and so it took me a moment to realize that the loud noise had been someone shouting. It took me another moment to make sure that I had not been hurt – and then I sat up quickly, my neck aching like anything, and looked about.

  The two women were crouching on the floor with their hands up. Hazel, looking extremely warlike, was standing between me and them, and behind her was Uncle Felix and a whole group of very menacing-looking policemen.

  ‘Uncle Felix!’ I croaked.

  ‘Daisy!’ gasped Hazel. ‘You’re all right!’ She knelt down and threw her arms about me. That hurt.

  ‘Do stop it,’ I said, through my very sore throat. ‘Haven’t I told you that heroines never die?’

  ‘Daisy Wells,’ said Uncle Felix in his coldest voice, ‘you are in more trouble than you can possibly imagine. Now, the police will be taking these two women outside to their Black Maria, and I will be helping them, and while I do so the four of you will follow me in absolute silence. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Uncle Felix,’ I said. ‘But, if you do need help, you should tell us.’

  ‘George and I can tie excellent knots … began Alexander – and withered under Uncle Felix’s glare.

  The four of us followed Uncle Felix and the policemen as they led the two women out of the museum in handcuffs. We were in the most terrible trouble, some of the worst we had ever been in, but—

  ‘We did catch the thieves,’ I whispered.

  ‘And how!’ George whispered back. ‘Pinkertons and Detective Society for ever!’

  We all beamed at each other, very secretly.

  When we got back to the flat, Uncle Felix’s wrath was terrible. I was almost impressed. He shouted at us for quite ten minutes about being impertinent idiots who thought we were detectives.

  ‘We are detectives!’ I said, again and again. ‘We caught the criminals, and I wouldn’t really have died – anyway, you were there. We left the incriminating note for you on purpose.’

  We had not, but Uncle Felix did not need to know that.

  ‘Doesn’t it prove that we are good at solving crime?’ I asked.

  ‘YOU ALMOST GOT YOURSELVES KILLED!’ bellowed Uncle Felix.

  ‘And you almost got yourself killed twice last month,’ said Aunt Lucy, who was watching the argument from a chair in the living room. ‘Felix dear, do calm down. You’ve caught the thief you were looking for, and it was an inside job, just as you thought. That woman had worked at a whole string of museums under various different aliases, and I suppose she recruited her accomplices from her old friends. A gang of criminal charwomen, how clever!’

  Uncle Felix sighed hugely. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose I did. And it was clever of you.’

  ‘It was!’ I cried.

  ‘BUT,’ he went on, ‘you must stop putting yourself in danger. You know I have to at least appear to look after you, tiresome child.’

  ‘We both do,’ said Aunt Lucy. ‘Now, Felix, do let the children explain their side of the story. I’m dying to know. Bridget has called George’s father, and he should be here in half an hour. I shall look after Daisy’s injuries while they tell us all about it.’

  Aunt Lucy smeared arnica on my bruises, and we told her how the treasure hunt had led us to uncover a real criminal plot. It sounded even more thrilling now that it was over.

  ‘I must say,’ Uncle Felix said rather grudgingly when we had finished, ‘one day you might be rather good spies.’

  ‘We’re good spies now!’ I said. ‘In fact, we’re quite brilliant.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he said drily. ‘All the same, I would prefer you to work up to it more slowly. Boys, you will be safely back at school by Monday, but – let’s see – we need to find something to occupy Hazel and Daisy; something not remotely criminal. It’s a good thing you’ll be with them, Lucy. Make sure they’re bored this week, will you?’

  I rolled my eyes. Aunt Lucy smiled.

  But that is really the funniest part of this whole story. Because our utterly boring week … turned out to be not so boring after all. In fact, it turned out to lead us straight to the Rue Theatre.

  Hazel’s Guide to the British Museum

  I’ve read through Daisy’s account of our case. There are some words that I think might be confusing for readers who do not know England as well as Daisy does, and so I have created this guide. Daisy says it is not necessary, but Daisy does not know everything (Yes I do! – Daisy), and so I have done it anyway.

  Alias – a word for a false name used by someone to hide their identity.

  Arnica – a plant that can be turned into a cream to help with cuts and bruises.

  Artefact – a precious, ancient object in a museum.

  Black Maria – a police van that takes criminals to prison.

  Bolster – a long thick roll-shaped pillow that goes behind the other pillows on a bed. If you stuff it down the length of a bed, not across it, you can make it look as though someone is still sleeping in the bed.

  Bunkum – a word meaning nonsense.

  Charwoman – another word for a cleaning woman.

  Chump – one of Daisy’s favourite words, which means idiot.

  Curator – someone who looks after objects in a museum.

  Doggerel – poetry or verse that is badly written, sometimes on purpose.

  Exeat – a long weekend when schoolchildren are allowed to leave their school and go visit family or friends.

  Keeper – a special British Museum word for curator.

  Latitude – imaginary lines around the globe showing how far north or south a place is from the Equator.

  Longitude – imaginary lines around the globe showing how far east or west a place is from the Meridian line in Greenwich, London.

  Monocle – a sort of round eyeglass that you squeeze into place over one eye.

  Pinny – an apron.

  Reading Room – a place in the British Museum where scholars can sit and read any book that has ever been published in England. It sounds like heaven.

  Shilling – twelve pence. There are twenty shillings in a pound.

  Life and Death in Ancient Egypt!

  Daisy and Hazel’s latest mystery reaches its exciting conclusion in the Mummy Room at the British Museum! The Ancient Egyptians were fascinating people, and they had very unusual attitudes to death.

  Did you know:

  In Ancient Egypt, people didn’t just bury their dead, they mummified them! The dead body was first washed in water that contained natron, a preserving salt. Then the liver, lungs, stomach and intestines would be removed and preserved. The heart was left in the body, because the Ancient Egyptians believed it would be needed in the afterlife. But the brain was removed and thrown away, because they didn’t think it was important at all! The body would then be dried out, stuffed with materials such as leaves and sawdust, and finally washed again and wrapped in linen. The liver, lungs, stomach and intestines were put into special canopic jars and buried with the body.

  The Ancient Egyptians did all this because they believed that the afterlife was a very important place, and that the spirits of the dead would go on a journey there. They thought that once this journey was completed, a person could continue to live a happy and easy life
, as long as they made sure they had the proper supplies and possessions with them in their grave. Rich people would have little clay models of their houses, their favourite pieces of furniture and even their servants made, so that when they arrived in the next world they would be able to have the same lifestyle as they had enjoyed in this one!

  But the journey of the dead wasn’t an easy one. There were many trials to overcome and monsters to fight, and spirits needed all the help they could get. Osiris – the god of the afterlife – was painted on the linen shroud and on the outside of the coffin. Amulets (good luck charms) were also wrapped in the linen to protect the body throughout its journey into the underworld.

  To be absolutely sure that a spirit stayed safe, though, they needed one more thing: the help of a spellbook, the Book of the Dead. The Book of the Dead would be the spirit’s guide through a series of gates and to the Hall of Judgement, where the jackal-headed god Anubis would weigh your heart on a set of scales. If you had behaved well in life, your heart would be lighter than a feather and you could go on to your promised happy afterlife. But if you had been a bad person, the scales would tip and your heart would be eaten by the Devourer, a terrible beast with a crocodile head, a lion body and the hind legs of a hippo.

  The Pharaohs, the kings of Ancient Egypt, were mummified in great style and often buried within pyramids. These rulers were incredibly powerful and rich. A Pharaoh was usually a man, but not always! At least six women have ruled as Pharaoh, including Cleopatra, Sobekneferu and Hatshepsut. You can’t be sure of the gender of a pharaoh just from looking at paintings and sculptures of them – often, female Pharaohs wore false wooden beards, just like male Pharaohs, to show their importance.

  Perhaps the most famous Pharaoh was Tutankhamun. Tutankhamun was just nine years old when he took the throne from his father, Akhenaten, an unusual Pharaoh who tried to ban all gods apart from the sun god, Aten. Tutankhamun was also very young when he died – analysis of his mummy suggests he was only eighteen or nineteen. Was his death an accident? Was he ill? Or was there foul play at work? Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter, a British Egyptologist. It was an incredibly rich find – unusually, it had not been plundered by grave robbers, and all its fabulous gold and jewels were still present. But legend has it that there was a curse on anyone who found the tomb, and certainly the discovery was followed by tragedy. Several of the people who were with Carter during his excavation of the tomb died mysteriously afterwards – including one from an infected mosquito bite, one from a fever he developed after visiting the tomb, and one from arsenic poisoning. It could just be a coincidence … or a case that only the Detective Society and the Junior Pinkertons could crack …

  Write Like An Egyptian!

  Find out more about the ancient alphabet:

  The word hieroglyphs is Greek – even though the alphabet is Egyptian! Hiero means ‘holy’ and glyph means ‘mark’ or ‘writing’, so the word means ‘holy writing’. It’s the writing used by Pharaohs and priests, and it can be found carved into stone or painted onto walls at temples and in pyramids and tombs.

  The Ancient Egyptians couldn’t write on the kind of paper we know today – it hadn’t been invented! Instead they used papyrus, a kind of paper made from plants called reeds, which were dried in the sun, flattened and stuck together.

  If Ancient Egyptians wanted to write down a contract or a shopping list, they wouldn’t have used hieroglyphic writing to do it. Instead, scribes used hieratic – a simplified form of hieroglyphs that’s easier to write. (Imagine it as a little like the shorthand Hazel and Alexander use!) Hieratic was eventually simplified even more into a new form of writing called demotic. But it’s thought that fewer than ten in every hundred Egyptians could actually read or write.

  The Rosetta Stone, which Daisy and Hazel visit, contains the same text written in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. It’s still in the British Museum today – so you can go and see it for yourself!

  Codebreakers!

  Can you crack these codes like Hazel and George? Use the hieroglyphic alphabet here to help!

  Clue: According to the mysterious story George tells the Detective Society, you should stay away from one of the mummies in the British Museum because it might be …

  Clue: Newspapers have been reporting break-ins to places like this all across London.

  Clue: One day, Hazel and Daisy will own the world’s finest consulting detective agency so they can solve plenty of these.

  Clue: The people who are supposed to make sure that no one steals from museums!

  Answers:

  1. CURSED

  2. MUSEUM

  3. MYSTERIES

  4. GUARDS

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

  When I was a child, my mother worked at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. I learned plenty of odd things, including the hieroglyphic alphabet, what ought to go into canopic jars and the different glazes on Greek pottery. The hieroglyphics in this book are based on the ones I used to write messages to my friends – but of course the hieroglyphic alphabet does not really map onto the modern Western alphabet. Any list of letters is a bit of a fudge, so apologies if what I have written does not tally with what you know. There are hundreds of slightly different interpretations! Thank you to my mother, Kathie Booth Stevens, for raising me among Egyptian tombs and ram statues, and for making sure that the hieroglyphic alphabet in this story is as correct as it can be for these purposes.

  When I was in my early twenties, I spent six months working at the British Museum Press on Montague Street, my very first job in publishing. Walking through the British Museum every day was an incredible experience, and that time also greatly inspired this story. I want to thank Alice, Claudia, Kate, Amanda and the rest of the British Museum Press team for giving me such a wonderful experience, and for being so kind and helpful.

  Although museums in England obviously mean a lot to me, I know that it isn’t really possible to discuss the beauty of the objects in them without acknowledging the often painful history of their acquisition. British explorers and archaeologists generally took the untroubled view that the world was theirs for the taking, and they swept up artefacts with little thought for the rights of the people who lived near the sites they were excavating. There are now movements in many countries to get back the pieces of their history that the British took, and arguments as to whether objects belong in a British museum or in the country they were found have raged for a very long time. It is hard to be absolute about something so complicated, but in general I am on George’s side.

  The Unlucky Mummy is absolutely real, and still on display at the British Museum, though the mummy room has moved from its place in the 1930s. However, if you do go to visit, I would ask you to NOT try and touch any of the objects, or climb into any mummy cases. In real life, this is frowned upon.

  As always, I would like to thank my agent, Gemma Cooper, my team at Puffin (Naomi Colthurst, Natalie Doherty, Tom Rawlinson, Harriet Venn, Sonia Razvi, Ellen Grady, Louise Dickie, Stephanie Barrett, Jane Tait, Dominica Clements), my cover illustrator, Nina Tara, and my husband, David Stevens. And thanks to my friend Anne Miller for the read-through!

  And finally, thanks to Waterstones and to booksellers across the country for their years of incredible support. I feel so lucky that you have all embraced Daisy and Hazel so enthusiastically – I owe this story to you.

  Read more

  Turn over to read an extract from Daisy

  and Hazel’s next thrilling mystery:

  Read more

  Robin Stevens

  DEATH IN THE SPOTLIGHT

  1

  My name is Hazel Wong, and I am a detective.

  When Daisy and I first began investigating mysteries, it simply didn’t seem possible that someone like me could detect. But now I cannot imagine my life without Daisy Wells and the Detective Society, without strange events and awful danger and horrid heart-pounding surprises. There is always a moment, when
we are deep in the midst of a case, when I think that I never want to detect another after that one is done. But all the same, if more than a few months go by without a murder, or a theft, or a kidnapping, I begin to feel as though something is missing.

  Even by Detective Society standards, though, we are having a most exciting few weeks. We are proper members of a real London theatre company, and thus closer to being grown-up than ever before – and as well as that, we have once again found ourselves faced with a ghastly and shocking crime. I truly do feel almost like one of the heroines of Daisy’s mystery novels.

  Of course, a book heroine would not have a spot on her nose, she would not be so fond of cakes (I do not mind about this difference, for in my opinion many heroines do not eat nearly enough), and she would have no trouble remembering her lines in a play. I have fallen short of all three of those things, and even Daisy, with her clear skin and her excellent acting, loves cake. So it is clear that we are real, and really facing our seventh murder case. I remember a time when I was surprised we had even got to three.

  I ought to explain exactly how we got here, sitting in the dusty, grease-paint-smelling stalls of the Rue Theatre, while a large, blue-hatted policeman tromps about on stage and shouts at us all to sit tight and not go anywhere.

  Of course, the policeman is here today, and so are we, because of the corpse – which is not a pleasant thing to have to write. Dead bodies are always awful. They are my least favourite part of what Daisy and I do. Daisy is sometimes impatient with me when I say this. But all the same, I am glad they upset me. I do not think I would be as good a detective if I stopped caring about the victims. Murder matters, and bothering about it helps us solve each case.