Part 11 (1/2)

'Yeah! Excellent!'

Yeah! Excellent! was just what Gina was thinking as she hurried up to Iris dorm after the phone call, a big smile plastered across her face, to tell Amy about this latest exciting development in the Gina/Dermot saga. Scarlett? Scarlett was nothing now. Well, no, that wasn't true: Scarlett was already a pile of notes, dialogue and scenes coming together in a little notebook on her desk in the boarding-house study room.

When she burst into the dorm, she found Min lying on her bed, nose buried in some textbook, and Amy at her chest of drawers, about to tackle one of her favourite ch.o.r.es: the tidying and rearranging of her lovely luxury items. She even had a little face-cloth in her hand, so she could polish her make-up cases and the expensive gold-topped bottles of cleanser and moisturizer.

'What's up?' Amy asked, her eyes on the blue and gold leather box that held her prized diamond pendant. It had been quite a few days since she'd worn it last in fact Amy suddenly couldn't remember exactly when she'd last felt the cool touch of the gold palm tree against her neck. Just to rea.s.sure herself, and to cast a satisfied smile on those lovely stones, she took the box in her hand and gently eased open the lid.

'I've got a date with Dermot,' Gina began excitedly. 'He phoned! We've made up and he wants to go out on-'

But she couldn't finish her sentence because Amy's sharp gasp cut right across it.

'Aargh!'

Both Min and Gina looked over with concern. Had Amy hurt herself?

She was staring at the box in disbelief. 'It's empty!' she exclaimed, horrified. 'My necklace has gone!'

'No!' Min was the first to speak. 'It can't have!'

'Maybe you put it somewhere else?' Gina suggested; then, realizing how shocked her friend was, she offered, 'I'll help you look. Where else could it be?'

The next twenty minutes were spent in a panicky but nevertheless thorough search of Amy's jewellery boxes, Amy's drawers, the dorm wardrobe, even the pockets of all Amy's clothes.

Finally they had to admit that the necklace wasn't there.

Amy was on the verge of tears. 'I loved it!' she exclaimed. 'I just loved it so much. It was the first piece of really special jewellery that my dad has ever bought for me! Oh, G.o.d! Where has it gone? Where could it be?'

After another frantic search of every possible location and hiding place in the dorm, Amy flung herself down on her bed and, in a burst of sadness and fury, cried out, 'Why do I get the feeling that Penny Boswell-Hackett has something to do with this?'

Chapter Twenty.

Lockers at St Jude's weren't locked, but they were still private. It just didn't do to go looking in other people's lockers. It wasn't a school rule, but it was part of the school code. If anyone ever looked in someone else's locker, they needed the owner's permission and a very good reason or else serious trouble would follow.

So the next day, when cla.s.ses ended, Amy and Gina felt ill at ease hanging about in the Upper Fifth locker room.

'What are we going to say we're here for?' Gina asked nervously. 'You know . . . if someone sees us.'

'If someone sees us,' Amy repeated with emphasis, 'then we say we're waiting for someone who's at music practice because we're walking into town with them. Honestly, this will take two minutes. Don't be such a baby!'

'I'm not!' Gina snapped, then added, 'If I'm such a baby, maybe you should have got your little mini-me, Rosie, to come and do this job with you.'

'Oh shut up, Gina,' said Amy. 'Rosie's driving me up the wall.' Almost under her breath, she muttered, 'How do you let someone know you don't want to see quite so much of them without being really mean?'

'I don't know,' Gina told her snippily. 'I guess it's not a problem I've had: being sooooo popular.'

'Shut up,' Amy snapped again. 'Just stand at the door and make sure the coast is clear. That's all I'm asking you to do. You aren't going to have your hands in the till; you aren't going to be in trouble if someone comes in . . . If,' Amy repeated when she saw the worried look on Gina's face.

She had already searched through Penny's desk in the lunch break and now she was going to search her locker.

She didn't hold out much hope. The thing about day girls was that they went home. If they had stolen your prized possessions, they weren't going to leave them hanging around the school for long, were they? No. They were going to run home with them as fast as their little legs could carry them.

Still, Amy had reasoned, she had to do something. She had ransacked the entire Iris dorm to no avail. She had put up MISSING! posters all over the boarding house. The necklace was definitely stolen.

'Yes, stolen,' she kept telling her friends. 'Diamond necklaces do not get lost.'

Penny had it. She was convinced of that! Somehow she must have taken her necklace off or dropped it, and then Penny had got hold of it. Anyone else would have given Amy her necklace back.

'OK, I can't see anyone,' Gina announced, reluctant to be drawn into this.

The door of Penny's locker was now open and Amy was surprised to see so many books and stacks of paper in front of her.

'Oh, mince!' she exclaimed. 'Half the contents of the school library are in here it's going to take me ages to search through all this.'

'Well, search quickly,' Gina hissed.

Amy speedily began to empty the locker. She hated Penny so much, she almost didn't want to touch her things. She certainly did not, under any circ.u.mstances, want to be caught doing this.

'What is all this stuff?' she asked as she began to sort through the papers.

'Just hurry up you're looking for a necklace, not reading Penny: The Collected Works,' Gina snapped.

The locker was empty now. There were books, papers, a hockey stick, a school cardigan and an umbrella on the floor beside it. Amy ran a hand over the shelves just to double check, but there was nowhere that a diamond necklace could be hidden.

She hadn't really expected to find it though, had she? She replaced the hockey stick, the umbrella and the cardigan. Then she lifted up the first of the books, intending to put them back. It was just something about the words printed on the papers between them that caught her eye: An original work by . . .

She stopped and gave it some consideration. She fanned the papers out in her hand: The Dinner, an original work by Tim O'Malley, and then, on freshly printed sheets beside them, Dinner with Peter, by Penny B-H. Amy began to read. By page two, ignoring the hisses from Gina, she knew that Penny was rewriting some not-very-well-known play to enter into the house drama compet.i.tion.

She was cheating!

'Come and look at this!' Amy instructed Gina. 'C'mon I'll keep watch at the door. I just need to know I'm not imagining this and that Penny Boswell- Hackett really is cheating. Come on!' She thrust the pages into Gina's hands and took over at the door look-out post.

Gina turned them over, taking in the similarities between the two plays. Yes, many of the words had been changed but the sense still remained the same.

'Sit down, Mr Pym, and let me pour you a gla.s.s of wine,' for instance, had been turned into: 'Mr Baker, take a seat and let me get you a drink.' And so it went on for the whole page.

'OhmiG.o.d!' Gina muttered under her breath. 'I can't believe she'd do this. Does she honestly think no one will notice? That no one in the entire school has ever heard of this writer?'

Amy came over and read out the name of the real playwright: 'Tim O'Malley well, he doesn't sound that well known. She's hoping she'll get away with it.'

At that moment Gina looked up into Penny's locker and spied the hockey stick. 'That's a hockey stick,' she said to Amy anxiously.

'Yes! You're really coming on, Gina. Soon you'll be able to recognize a lacrosse stick too,' Amy joked back.

'That's Penny's hockey stick' Gina was pointing at the locker now 'and didn't Niffy send us an email to say there was a Scottish team hockey practice but she wasn't going to come up to it . . . And wasn't it on Wednesday evening? Which would be today?'