Читать книгу The Curse of the Ancient Mask - Simon Cheshire - Страница 8

CHAPTER ONE

MY NAME IS SAXBY SMART, and I’m a private detective. I go to St Egbert’s School, my office is in the garden shed, and these are my case files. Unlike some detectives, I don’t have a sidekick, so that part I’m leaving up to you – pay attention, I’ll ask questions.

My full name is Saxby Doyle Christie Chandler Ellin Allan Smart. Yes, believe it or not, I’m named after all my dad’s favourite crime writers. The Allan is from Edgar Allan Poe. I mean, even my dad wouldn’t call his kid Poe Smart! Mind you, he called me Saxby Smart . . . (Saxby isn’t a crime writer, by the way, Saxby is apparently a ye olde English name, originally pillaged from the Vikings.)

Dad is a great fan of crime fiction, and ever since I could read I’ve worked my way through his library of great detective stories. He has an impressive collection. It was all those stories that made me want to be a detective in the first place. I loved them just as much as he does. Which, I guess, is another reason I’m beginning my case files here: to show you that I can be just as good a sleuth as Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple.

You might think my dad was a detective himself, but actually he’s a bus driver. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a bus driver. In fact, he loves being a bus driver. And I love him being a bus driver, because it means all the local bus drivers know me, and that’s very useful when you’re a schoolboy detective trying to get around town following clues.

What I mean is that he only reads detective stories. I live them.

My mum? She programs computer games for a living. She works from home and spends all day in her office, which is the cupboard under the stairs. And that’s all there is to say, really.

I only mention my parents at all to let you know that I’ve got some. They play no part in any of my great cases, and won’t be appearing much in these pages.

This is the story of my first really interesting case. Up to that point, I’d dealt with quite easy stuff: The Adventure of the Misplaced Action Figure, or The Case of the Eaten Biscuits are examples from my files which come to mind. But The Curse of the Ancient Mask was something altogether more puzzling. What made it interesting was that I wrapped up the whole case using only a plastic bucket full of water.

It started one very hot Saturday, and I was in my Crime Headquarters. I call it my Crime HQ, but really it’s a shed. In the garden of my house. It’s a small garden, and a small shed, and I have to share this shed with the lawnmower and assorted other gardening-type things. I have an old desk in there, and a cabinet full of case notes and papers. Most importantly of all, I have my Thinking Chair. It’s a battered old leather armchair, which used to be red but which has worn into a sort of off-brown. I sit in it, and I put my feet up on the desk, and I gaze out of the shed’s perspex window at the sky, and I think. Every detective should have a Thinking Chair. I’m sure Philip Marlowe would have had things tied up in the space of a short story if only he’d had a Thinking Chair.

Anyway, on that particular very hot Saturday, I was rearranging some of my notes when there was a knock at the shed door. The painted wooden notice on the door, the one which says Saxby Smart – Private Detective: KEEP OUT, fell off with a clatter. I keep nailing it up, but I’m no good at that sort of thing, so it keeps falling off again.

The door was opened by a girl from my class at school, Jasmine Winchester. She was red and flustered from a long walk, and she wafted herself cool with her hands while she knocked some of the grassy mud off her shoes.

‘Hi, Saxby. Sorry, this dropped off your door,’ she said, picking up the notice.

Jasmine is a very tall girl, the sort who overtakes everyone else in height at about the age of three and never lets the rest of us catch up. I’m pretty average-looking myself – average height, average fair hair, average spectacles – but Jasmine is one of those people you can always pick out of a crowd. Mostly because she’s poking up out of the top of it.

‘I know walking along by the riverbank looks like a shortcut,’ I said, ‘but it’s quicker to get here if you stick to the path across the park.’

She stopped wafting and stared at me. ‘How on earth did you know I’d walked along by the river?’

She looked impressed when I told her. It was a simple deduction: there was grassy mud on her shoes, she’d obviously walked some distance – because she was hot – and on a hot day, you’d only pick up mud where the ground was still damp.

‘How can I help you?’ I asked. I offered her my chair, and I perched on the desk (I told you there’s not enough room in that shed . . .).

‘Well,’ she said, taking a deep breath, ‘I can see why everyone at school says you’re a good detective . . .’

‘True.’

‘. . . so I need your help to solve a mystery. My dad is cursed.’