Friday Barnes 2 (10 page)

Mrs Cannon and her English class pushed open the heavy green double doors leading into the library.

Inside, it was completely quiet. There wasn't a person to be seen. Except for Chen, the library monitor, who was standing at the circulation desk stamping books in silence. Friday wondered if the stamp was made of some sort of special rubber polymer that absorbed sound. As Friday's foot crossed
the threshold, a silent alarm must have been tripped because the librarian glided out of her office.

‘Hello,' said the librarian in a soft voice, which was just quiet enough to be slightly hard to hear.

‘Hello, Marjorie. We're here to look at the map,' said Mrs Cannon loudly. ‘You're looking wan today. You should get out and enjoy the sunshine. We've just been digging in the vegetable garden.'

‘I hope you're not going to trek dirt in here,' said the librarian.

‘Would you like us to leave our shoes outside?' asked Mrs Cannon.

‘No, I would not,' said the librarian. ‘I do not find the sweaty feet of children to be preferable. At least dirt can be vacuumed up. Foot sweat would have to be shampooed out.'

‘May I come in?' asked Friday, glancing over the librarian's shoulder to where her picture was pinned to the noticeboard.

‘Of course you can,' said Mrs Cannon. ‘You are an essential contributor to this assignment.'

‘I suppose you can just this once,' said the librarian begrudgingly. ‘But you must all leave your bags outside.'

‘We don't have any bags,' said Melanie. ‘Mrs Cannon thinks they encourage bad posture and crushed clothes.'

‘That's right, Melanie,' said Mrs Cannon. ‘You'll be getting an A+ for your assignment now, such excellent verbal comprehension skills.'

‘You must also pass through the metal detector,' said the librarian. ‘No scissors, knives, razors, scalpels or cutting implements of any kind are allowed in the library. Is that understood?'

The class just stared at her blankly.

‘I think she would like you to respond verbally,' said Mrs Cannon. ‘I'll count you in. On three, give her a hearty “Yes, miss.” One, two, three …'

‘Yes, miss,' chorused the class.

The librarian glowered at them all. ‘Very well. Chen, you watch the door. You lot, come this way.' The librarian walked to the end of the circulation desk and led the class across the library, through the stacks, past the individual study desks and to the back wall, where there was a small room housing the school archives.

When they arrived at this door, the librarian took a large key ring from her pocket and started searching
through the keys. Eventually she found the pink key with a picture of a fluffy duck on it and opened the door, flicking on the lights.

Friday had never been in the archive room before. There were filing cabinets along one wall, two tall rows of bookcases housing a very impressive collection of leather-bound books, and along the far wall a row of glass display cases. Everything looked perfectly neat and ordered, as though no-one had ever come in here, which Friday suspected was the case. School was boring enough in the present – archival records of the school from decades earlier took boringness to a new level.

‘Over here,' said the librarian, leading the way to the glass display cases. ‘There!' she said, pointing to a large leather-bound book.

The class gathered around and peered in through the glass. The open page contained a list of punishments given out for student infractions. There had been no suspensions back in those days. Justice had come in a precisely counted number of swipes from the cane.

The librarian opened the glass lid, took out the book and handed it to Mrs Cannon, who laid it
on the nearby reading table and flipped through to the last page.

‘Please, you should be wearing gloves,' said the librarian.

‘Here we go,' said Mrs Cannon, arriving at the back page. ‘Hang on, where is it?!' She flipped back and forth, then checked the cover. ‘The map is missing!'

‘It can't be,' said the librarian, taking the book herself and flicking through to the last page (even though she wasn't wearing gloves). ‘But that's impossible. This room is always locked, and so is the case. There is only one key for each lock and those keys are always in my pocket.'

‘May I see the page?' asked Friday. ‘Or rather, where the page was.' She reached out to take the book.

‘Gloves,' snapped the librarian, nodding towards a box containing white cotton gloves.

Friday pulled on a pair, privately reflecting that the only crime she had observed so far was that the librarian had not been locked in a mental asylum. The librarian handed her the book and Friday carried it over to the reading desk in the middle of the room, where she peered closely at the inside of the spine.

‘Someone cut it out,' Friday announced.

‘Impossible,' said the librarian. ‘No cutting implement is allowed inside the library. Scissors, knives, box cutters – they are all strictly prohibited. When I first came here all these wealthy entitled students were cutting pictures out of the encyclopaedias to stick in their school projects. They didn't even realise what they were doing was wrong because it was what they always did at home. That's why I had the metal detectors installed.'

‘Really?' asked Melanie. ‘I always thought it was because you were afraid someone would become enraged by a library fine and make an assassination attempt.'

‘Someone must have torn it out,' said Ian.

‘No,' said the Friday. ‘There are no dog-eared tear marks. This is an old book. The paper was made in an old-fashioned way. You couldn't tear a page out perfectly.' She reached into her pocket and pulled out a jeweller's eyepiece (made of plastic so it had gone past the metal detector). Friday bent down and looked very closely at the page.

‘Don't breathe on the paper fibres,' pleaded the librarian.

‘If you want her to solve the case, she will have to breathe,' said Mrs Cannon.

‘Then try to make them dry breaths,' said the librarian.

‘This is very odd,' said Friday. Her face was only millimetres from the page she was looking at. ‘I can see the very thinnest remnants of the page from where it was removed. But it's strange. It appears to be cut because the line is so straight. But it also appears to be torn because, on a microscopic level at least, the fibres are ragged where the page was removed.'

‘And look at that,' said Melanie.

‘What?' said Friday.

‘The last punishment entry on the last page,' said Melanie, pointing to the book. ‘E.M. Dowell and A.J. Dean …'

‘That's the Vice Principal,' interrupted Friday.

‘They each got six strokes of the cane,' continued Melanie.

‘For what?' asked Ian.

‘It doesn't say,' said Melanie. ‘It's torn off.'

‘The rest must be on the back of the stolen map,' said Friday.

‘Or perhaps the map is on the back of the
stolen evidence of the Vice Principal's wicked past,' suggested Ian.

‘Intriguing,' said Friday. ‘Anyway, it proves that the Vice Principal was lying when he said he didn't know E.M. Dowell. They got up to some sort of mischief together.'

‘Who cares?' said the librarian. ‘That was years ago. I want to know who vandalised my book now!'

‘Let's see what we can uncover,' said Friday. ‘Everyone out of the way. I need to search the room, and I don't want any more disturbance to the dust particles or carpet fibres until my investigation is complete.'

Friday got down on her hands and knees and began systematically crawling up and down in neat lines, as if she were cutting a lawn with her knees. The whole time she kept the jeweller's glass in her eye and occasionally she would bend down until her nose brushed the carpet for a really close look.

This process took a while, which annoyed the librarian. She had just glanced at her watch for the ninth time and was about to snap, ‘Is this really necessary?' or ‘Why are you wasting my time?' when Friday suddenly yelled ‘A-ha!', dropped down flat on
her face and stretched her fingers underneath a filing cabinet.

‘What is it?' asked the librarian.

‘We'll see,' said Friday. She was stretching as far as she could but couldn't quite reach. ‘Do you have a pen?' she asked.

‘Students aren't allowed to have pens in the library,' chided the librarian. ‘Not since the time Ian Wainscott wrote a defamatory retort in Winston Churchill's
History of Britain
.'

‘Churchill was fat,' protested Ian. ‘It's a historical fact.'

‘I just need something long and skinny,' said Friday.

‘I'll tip it back for you,' said Melanie, stepping behind the cabinet, grabbing it by the top and tilting the whole four-drawer structure backwards.

‘Don't do that, it's heavy!' exclaimed the librarian.

‘I've got it,' exclaimed Friday as she reached under the cabinet.

‘Oops,' said Melanie as the weight of the filing cabinet became too much for her. She stepped aside and the whole thing crashed on the floor.

‘What have you done?!' wailed the librarian.

‘Sorry,' said Melanie. ‘I'm in a low percentile for upper-body strength.'

‘Never mind that,' said Friday. ‘Look what I've found.'

Everyone turned to see what Friday was holding in her hand.

‘Big whoop, it's a piece of string,' said Mirabella.

‘Yes,' said Friday, rubbing the string between her fingertips, ‘but more importantly, it's a
damp
piece of string.'

‘What has that got to do with anything?' demanded the librarian. ‘So the cleaner has been negligent in cleaning under the filing cabinets. Even I, one of the few sticklers for proper standards and rules left in this school, cannot get cross with a cleaner for missing a small piece of string hidden unreachably far underneath a filing cabinet.' The librarian turned on Melanie. ‘Dropping a filing cabinet full of artefacts unique to the school history is, however, a different matter.'

‘But this piece of string is how the thief stole the map,' said Friday.

‘What are you talking about?' asked the librarian.

‘First we need to ask – what do we know about this piece of string?' said Friday.

Mirabella and her friends groaned.

‘Here we go,' said Ian.

‘Someone be a dear and fetch me a chair,' said Mrs Cannon. ‘I'm guessing this is going to be a lengthy explanation and my legs don't care for standing for prolonged periods.'

‘This type of 100 per cent cotton string is commonly used in cooking,' said Friday. ‘Being cotton, it is highly absorbent.'

The librarian rubbed her temple as she struggled to contain her rage. ‘It's times like this that I wish the Headmaster would approve my request to have security guards assigned to the library,' said the librarian. ‘Preferably armed ones.'

‘What else is string?' asked Friday.

‘It's handy if you can't find your shoelace,' said Peregrine.

‘Yes, but mathematically,' said Friday, ‘the beautiful thing about a piece of string is that if you make it taut –' Friday held both ends of the string and pulled them tight ‘– it forms a perfectly straight line.'

‘What has that got to do with the stolen map?' demanded the librarian.

‘The map was cut out of the book,' said Friday.
‘It's impossible to get a cutting device into the library. And water is the enemy of paper.'

‘It is?' asked Melanie.

‘Yes,' said Friday. ‘Paper is just pressed wood pulp. It's more of a physical bond than a chemical one. If you add water to paper the paper absorbs it and expands, weakening the physical bonds that hold the paper whole. That's what the thief did. He or she took this piece of string, stuck it in their mouth, walked into the library perfectly innocently, picked the door lock, then the cabinet lock, took the piece of string out, pulled it taut, laid it along the paper and let chemistry do its work.'

Friday demonstrated, placing the damp string across a page and holding it down. ‘The paper was weakened in a perfectly straight line, so that it almost fell out of the book.' She pulled the next page out, neatly separating it from the spine.

‘A perfect cut,' said Melanie.

‘You did it again!' exclaimed the librarian.

‘Well, I had to demonstrate,' said Friday.

‘You vandalised the book!' shrieked the librarian.

‘But I haven't stolen the page,' said Friday. ‘You can sticky-tape it back in.'

‘Sticky tape?! Sticky tape?!' The librarian's face was turning so red it looked as if she could have some sort of cerebral failure at any moment.

‘Perhaps we'd better leave,' said Melanie.

‘Good idea,' said Mrs Cannon. ‘After all our work on this assignment, we had better go back to the classroom and reflect on what we have learned.'

‘Does that mean we can nap, miss?' asked Peregrine.

‘Of course, my dear boy,' said Mrs Cannon. ‘But do try to dream about literature, so that the Vice Principal can't accuse you of wasting your time.'