The Great Cake Mystery (4 page)

“Do you know what?” she whispered to Precious as they walked home after school one afternoon.

“No,” said Precious. “What?”

“There must be a thief at school,” Tapiwa said, looking over her shoulder in case anybody heard what she had to say. “I brought a piece of cake to school with me this morning. I left it in my bag in the hallway outside the classroom.” She paused. “I was really looking forward to eating it at break-time.”

“I love cake,” Precious said. She closed her eyes and thought of some of the cakes she enjoyed. Cakes with thick icing. Cakes
with jam on top of them. Cakes sprinkled with sugar and then dipped in little colored sugarballs. There were so many cakes … and all of them were so delicious.

“Somebody took my cake,” Tapiwa complained. “I had wrapped it in a small piece of paper. Well, it was gone, and I found the paper lying on the floor.”

Precious frowned. “Gone?”

“Eaten up,” said Tapiwa. “There were crumbs on the floor and little bits of icing. I picked them up and tasted them. I could tell that they came from my cake.”

“Did you tell the teacher?” asked Precious.

Her friend sighed. “Yes,” she said. “But I don't think that she believed me. She said, ‘Are you sure you didn't forget that you ate it?' She said that this sometimes happened. People ate a piece of cake and then forgot that they had done so.”

Precious looked at Tapiwa. Was she the sort of person to eat a piece of cake and then forget all about it? She did not think so.

“It was stolen,” Tapiwa said. “That's what happened. There's a thief in the school. Who do you think it is?”

“I don't know,” Precious said. She found it hard to imagine any member of their class doing something like that. Everybody seemed so honest. And yet, when you came to think of it, if there were grown-up thieves, then those thieves must have been children once, and perhaps they were already thieves even when they were young. Or did people
only become thieves a bit later on? It was a very interesting question, and she would have to think about it a bit more. Which was what she did as she walked home that day, under that high, hot African sun. She thought about thieves and what a detective would do about them.

he might easily have forgotten all about it—after all, it was only a piece of cake—but the next day it happened again. This time it was a piece of bread that was stolen—not an ordinary piece of bread, though: this one was covered in delicious strawberry jam. You can lose a plain piece of bread and not think twice about it, but when you lose one spread thickly with strawberry jam it's an altogether more serious matter.

The owner of this piece of bread (with jam) was a boy called Sepo. Everybody liked this boy because he had a habit of saying
funny things. If somebody can say something funny, then that often makes everybody feel happy.

If you saw such a piece of bread sitting on a plate your mouth would surely begin to water. And yes, you might imagine how delicious it would
taste. But would you really eat it if you knew it belonged to somebody else? Of course not.

It happened at lunchtime. Every day, at twelve o'clock precisely, the school cook, a very large lady called Big Mrs. Molipi (MO–LEE–PEE), would bang a saucepan with a ladle. This was the signal for all the children to sit down on the porch and wait to be given a plate of food that she had cooked with her assistant and cousin. This assistant was called Not-so-Big Mrs. Molipi, and, as the name tells us, she was much smaller than the chief cook herself. “Time for lunch!” Big Mrs. Molipi shouted in her very loud voice.

Then Not-so-Big Mrs. Molipi shouted, in a much smaller, squeakier voice, “Time for lunch!”

Big Mrs. Molipi's food was all right, but
just all right. It was, in fact, a bit boring, since she only had one recipe, it seemed, which was a sort of paste made out of corn and served with green peas and mashed turnips.

“It's very healthy,” said Big Mrs. Molipi. “So stop complaining, children, and eat up!”

“Yes,” said Not-so-Big Mrs. Molipi. “So stop complaining, children, and eat up!”

Not-so-Big Mrs. Molipi did not say anything other than what she heard her larger cousin say. She thought it was safer that way. If you said anything new, she imagined, then people could look at you, and Not-so-Big Mrs. Molipi did not like the thought of that.

It was no surprise that many of the children
liked to make lunch a little bit more interesting by bringing their own food. Some brought a bit of fruit, or a sugar doughnut, or perhaps a cookie. Then, after lunch, when they all had a bit of free time before going back into the classroom, they would eat these special treats.