Free Secret of the Skull by Simon Cheshire

bit.’
    ‘How’s your leg?’ asked Susan.
    ‘Not too bad,’ he said, propping his walking stick against the desk and shuffling over to the nearest seat. ‘The doctor says it’ll be another few weeks before it’s
healed.’
    He seemed calm and friendly, not at all like someone who was planning to stage a diamond heist within the next couple of hours. He snapped his fingers and stood up again. ‘I’ve left
my phone in my coat pocket.’
    He limped across the room. I picked up his walking stick and handed it to him. It was quite thick, but very light.
    ‘Shall I fetch the phone for you?’ said Susan. ‘If your leg’s hurting?’
    ‘Bless you,’ he said, smiling at her, ‘but it’s only in the staff cloakroom down the hall. Won’t be a minute.’
    Out he went, leaving his laptop on the desk. The last couple of sleepover guests arrived and Susan finished opening her pressies. There was a hushed moment when she got to mine, a copy of a really good book I’d read recently called True Tales of Gruesome Crimes . Izzy gave me a stare, which I think was her way of signalling that I’d chosen well.
    It turned out that Susan’s sleepover party were staying in one of the unbooked rooms on the third floor. She got the keycard from her mum at reception and we all charged up to room 307.
Nice: more thick carpet, big TV, and a shiny white bathroom so big you’d need to mount an expedition to reach the toilet.
    Meanwhile, I was torn between not wanting to get involved in all the girlie talk going on, and needing to make progress with my enquiries.
    ‘Mr Beeks, he does the fixing of broken stuff around here, yes?’ I asked casually.
    ‘Yes, he’s such a nice guy,’ said Susan.
    ‘What’s with the walking stick?’
    ‘He’s torn the ligaments in his ankle and knee, playing rugby. But he’s still coming into work. Did you see his crappy old purple van in the car park?’
    ‘Yes, I did,’ I chuckled.
    Yes. I did.
    I’d suddenly spotted an important clue. Bryan Beeks hadn’t torn the ligaments in his ankle and knee at all! That injury was nothing more than acting!
    Think back to what I saw before coming into the hotel. Have you spotted the same mismatch I had?

    Apart from my own, there had been only one set of footprints in that snowy staff car park. They’d come from an old purple van, which I now knew to be Bryan Beeks’s.
They’d shown someone striding across the snow. Something that would have been impossible if he’d really hurt his leg as badly as he claimed.
    But why would anyone pretend to have an injured leg? How could that have any bearing on the robbery he was supposed to be planning? Was he going to make the smugglers think he couldn’t run
away from them, or something? It didn’t appear to make any sense. However, the mysterious texter had been right – keeping watch on Beeks was obviously a good idea.
    The girls were having a great time. One or two were sniffing approvingly at the free shampoo in the bathroom, but most of them were lounging around pretending to order fizzy cocktails or
flicking through channels on the TV. I took a peek inside the mirrored wardrobe.
    ‘Hey, there’s a room safe,’ I said.
    I heard a rapid scrambling behind me. They all crowded in to have a look.
    ‘Hey, there’s a room safe,’ they said. It was quite a large one, with a numeric keypad lock, and was bolted to the wall at the back of the wardrobe.
    ‘All the rooms have them,’ said Susan. ‘You can set your own combination. Shall we put our stuff in there while we go to dinner?’
    There was a chorus of ‘Yeah!’s. Every last one of them went straight to their overnight bag, and took out a phone and a handheld games console. After a few bleeps of its keypad, the
safe held enough technology to stock a small shop!
    By then it was past seven o’clock, and we were all hungry. Susan led us back down past reception, along the corridor-like front of the building, and into the other half of the