Sherlock Sam and the Quantum Pair in Queenstown Read online

  ALSO IN THE SERIES

  Sherlock Sam and the Missing Heirloom in Katong

  Sherlock Sam and the Ghostly Moans in Fort Canning

  Sherlock Sam and the Sinister Letters in Bras Basah

  Sherlock Sam and the Alien Encounter on Pulau Ubin

  Sherlock Sam and the Vanished Robot in Penang

  Sherlock Sam and the Cloaked Classmate in MacRitchie

  Sherlock Sam and the Stolen Script in Balestier

  Sherlock Sam and the Fiendish Mastermind in Jurong

  Sherlock Sam and the Obento Bonanza in Tokyo

  Sherlock Sam and the Comic Book Caper in New York

  Copyright © 2016 by Adan Jimenez and Felicia Low-Jimenez

  Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Epigram Books

  All rights reserved. Published in Singapore by Epigram Books.

  www.epigrambooks.sg

  Illustrations by Drewscape

  Book layout by Yong Wen Yeu

  National Library Board,

  Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Name(s): Low, A. J.

  Title: Sherlock Sam and the quantum pair in Queenstown /

  written by A. J. Low.

  Description: Singapore : Epigram Books, [2016]

  Identifier(s): OCN 958061240

  ISBN : 978-981-1700-64-4 (paperback)

  ISBN : 978-981-1700-65-1 (ebook)

  Subject(s): LCSH: Child detectives—Singapore—Juvenile fiction. | Queenstown (Singapore)—Juvenile fiction. | Singapore—Juvenile fiction.

  Classification: DDC S823—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CHAPTER ONE

  “So Benjamin escaped again?” I asked, looking at Jimmy who was sitting crossed-legged opposite me on my bedroom floor.

  “Yep. But I think opening the gate on his own made him really tired because Auntie Gina found him taking a nap right outside his cage,” Jimmy said grinning.

  Jimmy lived with his Mama (Auntie Kim Lian), four sisters (Rose, Martha, Donna and Amy) and Auntie Gina, the family helper, in a semi-detached house in Katong. His mother was often away for business, and his Mama was the one who looked after all of them. Benjamin was Jimmy’s pet hamster—a failed, furry escape artist.

  “Are you sure you didn’t just leave the cage door open again, Jimmy?” Nazhar asked, pushing his glasses up. He was sitting at my study table, reading a book on maps that Dad had borrowed for me from the library.

  “No, no, no,” Jimmy replied, his eyes wide.

  “Moran always checks.” Moran used to be the Fiendish Mastermind’s robot but he now lived with Jimmy—it’s a complicated story.

  It was a Saturday evening, and Nazhar, Jimmy and I were waiting for dinnertime. Auntie Kim Lian and Mom were in the kitchen making one of the most delicious dishes in the entire universe. No wait, not just in the entire universe, but in all the multiverses too! They were making Auntie Kim Lian’s world famous dry mee siam! It was a legend in Peranakan food circles, and Auntie Kim Lian was attempting to teach Mom how to cook it. It was actually a great honour as Peranakan grandmothers didn’t just pass on secret family recipes to anyone. It meant that Jimmy’s grandma saw us as family. Jimmy, Nazhar and I had already peeled all the hard-boiled eggs that were required for the dish and were now just waiting for the gravy to be ready so we could start eating.

  “Did Watson and Moran also go with your dad to pick up Wendy and Eliza from Wing Chun lesson, Sherlock?” Jimmy asked. He was now lying on his back on my bed, but his head was dangling off the edge and he was looking at me from an upside-down position.

  I glanced up from the book on wormholes that I had been reading and frowned. Eliza had somehow convinced my big sister Wendy to take Wing Chun lessons with her, and Dad had gone to pick them up since Mom was busy preparing mee siam. They should be back soon, but that wasn’t what made me frown. What made me frown was the fact that Watson and Moran had not gone with my dad—they should still be in the house, yet I couldn’t hear them. I immediately got up and walked out the door to look for them. Nazhar and Jimmy looked at each other and trailed after me.

  Jimmy’s four sisters were watching an older episode of Doctor Who (the one with the Tenth Doctor and the Weeping Angels) and were too engrossed to pay any attention to us. When I got to the kitchen I saw Mom and Auntie Kim Lian looking at a very large pot of gravy. Auntie Gina was off to the side peeling prawns. There was a scent of coconut milk in the air. Everything smelled delicious. My tummy rumbled, but first I had a more urgent matter to resolve.

  No one noticed that we had entered the kitchen yet. Mom wiped her brow with the back of her hand and asked, “Wait, Auntie, so what is the proportion of salt to coconut milk? What should the exact ratio be?”

  Auntie Kim Liam waved her hands dismissively as she grabbed a handful of salt and tossed it into the mixture. “You just agak agak, then taste. If need more, then you add more; if don’t need more, then you don’t add more.”

  Mom looked vexed. I knew the food scientist in her needed precision. “But what if you need less salt? What if it’s too salty?”

  “Then you add more coconut milk or water, sayang,” Auntie Kim Lian said as she lifted a ladle filled with gravy and tasted it. She smiled and nodded, looking pleased.

  Mom looked at Auntie Gina, who grinned and shrugged her shoulders.

  “That is how I learnt it from my sister,” Auntie Kim Lian continued. She was looking at the already cooked vermicelli noodles with a critical eye.

  Mom tilted her head in surprise. “I didn’t know you had a sister, Auntie Kim Lian.”

  “Oh, yes, yes. She is older than me by four years. But she was given away to another family when she was just a baby. Back then, people were very superstitious. She was born at dawn in the year of the tiger. Hunting hour. Bad luck.”

  “But you kept in touch with her?” Mom asked.

  “Yes, because she lived very near,” Auntie Kim Lian said with a smile. “Luckily, she was adopted by our neighbours, and our families stayed in touch. Now, she visits us during Chinese New Year and we visit them during Hari Raya. We are very lucky.”

  Mom nodded. She spotted us.

  “Did you need something, Sam? I already told you that you can’t have any more eggs until dinnertime,” Mom said, wiping her hands on her apron. I noticed that her cooking notebook had been abandoned on the countertop. It was filled with crossed out scribbles and notes. I deduced that Auntie Kim Lian’s cooking methodology was chaos personified and did not incline itself to note taking.

  “Have you seen Watson and Moran, Mom?” I asked.

  Mom shook her head, distracted by Auntie Kim Lian tossing something else into the gravy in a gleefully random manner. Auntie Gina gently shooed us out of the kitchen.

  I stood in the living room and listened. I couldn’t hear Watson or Moran anywhere. That made me even more suspicious. Right then, the front door opened. Dad was back with Wendy and Eliza. Eliza, despite the fact that she had just come from an hour of Wing Chun practice, had perfectly neat hair. In fact, even her uniform was still completely unrumpled. My sister on the other hand, looked as if she had lost a battle with a flock of wild seagulls.

  “Kat! We’re home!” Dad called out. He smiled at Nazhar, Jimmy and me before wandering into the kitchen, probably drawn by the wonderful smells.

  Wendy dragged herself to the couch and slumped down. Eliza rolled her eyes and said, “
It wasn’t that bad, Wendy. Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Wendy groaned. “The instructor loves you. You got promoted to blue so fast! I think I only got promoted to the first green line because they felt sorry for me.”

  “You just need to practise more,” Eliza said, flipping one of her braids behind her shoulder.

  “Urgh. Don’t say practice makes perfect again. If I hear it one more time—”

  “Ah. Miss Wendy. Miss Eliza. It is so good to see the both of you.”

  I spun around.

  There they were. My robot and Moran. It was as if they appeared out of thin air. Had Watson given Moran the same camouflage abilities that he had?

  I glared at Watson. Ever since I found out he had the ability to upgrade himself, I never knew quite what to expect from the robot I had built from recycled parts.

  “Why-are-you-looking-at-me-like-that?” my robot asked.

  I did not like the casualness of his robotic tone.

  “What have you and Moran been up to, Watson?” I asked.

  “Moran-and-I-were-just-discussing-thepotentialof-robotics-in-this-modern-age,” Watson replied.

  “What does that mean?” Jimmy asked.

  “It means that they were up to no good,” I replied. Watson continued to look innocent— as innocent as a devious robot could look, that is. He didn’t bat his single eye.

  “We-were-also-discussing-the-marvels-ofmoderncommunication-and-how-wirelesstechnologyhas-changed-the-way-we-are-ableto-access-and-control-data.”

  I blinked. It occurred to me exactly what Watson meant.

  “Did you…did you make yourself Wi-Fi capable?” I asked my robot.

  “That is an interesting conclusion, Master Sherlock,” Moran said. “Your ability to see beyond the obvious is indeed why you are such a successful detective.”

  “But-no,” Watson said. “I-am-only-4Genabled.”

  I was going to ask Watson to explain exactly what he had done, when I heard the most wonderful sentence in the world.

  “Dinner is ready!” Auntie Gina called out from the kitchen.

  All thought of robotic world domination flew out of my head at the prospect of dry mee siam. Eliza and Nazhar each grabbed Wendy’s hands and pulled her up from her prone position on the couch, and we all gathered in the dining room. There were so many of us that Dad had to open up the foldable table and the chairs that we kept aside for parties.

  As we sat down, Dad looked at the contraption on his wrist and said, “Yes! I clocked 10,572 steps on my Walk-Man today! I can enjoy this mee siam in peace!”

  “Didn’t you also have prata and curry for lunch, dear?” Mom asked. She also had a similar watch-like thing on her wrist. I knew my parents had bought their Walk-Men during a recent electronics sale. I didn’t quite understand why they had burst out laughing at the name of the device though. The WalkMan was a fitness gadget that could track your heart rate, blood pressure and also the number of steps that you had taken in a single day. It would store all that data on a cloud that you could access from anywhere in the world as long as you had the right password. The goal was apparently to walk at least 10,000 steps a day. That seemed like a ridiculously high number of steps to me.

  “Hmm. That’s true,” Dad replied, looking crestfallen. He perked up and said, “Oh well, all that means is that I can only have three bowls of this delicious mee siam instead of four!”

  Everyone laughed.

  “How was class today, girls?” Mom asked, looking at Eliza and Wendy.

  Wendy sighed deeply into her bowl of mee siam. “My pants tripped me again.”

  “Wow. Are your pants alive, Wendy?” Jimmy asked. Amy, his youngest, tiniest sister looked horrified at the idea.

  “Don’t worry too much about it, Wendy,” Dad said, patting my sister on her shoulder. “It took me five tries to pass my driving test.” Eliza looked startled at that fact. Dad drove us around a lot.

  “And like we said about your PSLE exams this year too, Wendy,” Mom added, “just do your best. We know how hard all of you are working, which is why we thought it might be fun for you guys to spend the night here so we could all go on the pre-dawn heritage trail tomorrow!”

  Wendy nodded, but she didn’t look all too happy. Any reminder of the Primary School Leaving Examination stressed her out. I was a year behind Wendy, Eliza and Nazhar in school, but I wasn’t looking forward to it next year either. Also, like me, my sister was happiest indoors, away from the sun and nefarious mosquitos. I wanted to add that I didn’t think that waking up in the middle of the night to go on a three-hour walk was my idea of fun, but my mouth was too full of gravy and noodles to say anything.

  “Why did you pick the Queenstown Heritage Trail for us to go on, Auntie Kat?” Eliza asked.

  “It’s because my dad grew up in Queenstown. He lived with his grandmother in Block 79, which is near the railway tracks. I think we should be walking in that area too. I wanted to show you guys where he grew up!”

  Mom was really excited. She told us the story of how when she was young, whenever her dad would take her to visit her great-grandmother, she would race to the kitchen window to look at the train once she heard the loud bellowing engine pass by.

  I was super happy that Nazhar, Eliza, Jimmy and Moran were staying over tonight, but less happy that we had to be up in a few hours. It would be the middle of the night. What if I needed an emergency snack? Nothing would be open! How many packets of Khong Guan biscuits could I stuff in Watson’s not-so-secret compartment? What if Moran ran out of scones? The horror!

  “Oh, and there’s a 24-hour curry puff place that I thought we could also check out,” Mom added with a small smile. She lifted an eyebrow in my direction.

  Well. The pre-dawn heritage trail might not be as bad as I had originally thought after all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Whose fantastic idea was this again?” Mom mumbled as she fumbled around with 3-in-1 coffee packets and two mugs of steaming hot water.

  It was 1:20am, Sunday morning, and it was still completely dark outside. The crickets were chirping, but all the birds were asleep. I thought that the birds had the right idea.

  “I believe it was yours, dear,” Dad replied, resting his head on his arms on the dining room table. “Can you put two packets of coffee in mine, please? And then add another spoonful of instant black coffee?”

  Mom sleepily wandered back into the kitchen and shortly emerged with two tea bags. She passed them to Dad who looked at them in confusion before he shrugged and dunked one in his coffee. The rest of us had already had toasted cheese sandwiches and Milo. Moran had made them, much to Mom’s sleepy delight.

  Wendy, Jimmy and I were leaning against each other on the living room sofa trying not to fall back asleep. Wendy had to jostle Jimmy every so often as he would nod off. He would wake up with a start and then promptly doze off again. Nazhar, who was next to Dad at the table, kept taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. Even Eliza, who always looked preternaturally neat and tidy, was bleary-eyed but, as always, her hair was in perfect braids. In fact, the only two in the room who were remotely pleased at being up at this hour were Watson and Moran.

  “Moran-and-I-are-fully-charged-and-readytodepart,” Watson helpfully added.

  We all turned and glared at him.

  “Indeed we are, Master Watson,” Moran agreed. “Isn’t it such lovely weather for our trek? It is a wonderful idea to begin so early before the heat and humidity rise.”

  Moran did have a point, but I was too sleepy to agree.

  After Dad and Mom had finished their coffee-and-tea concoction, we left the house and piled into the new minivan that my parents had bought.

  “Is everyone comfortable?” Dad asked as he started the engine. “Also, isn’t my new TARDIS air freshener so cool?” He gestured at the mini blue box dangling from the rearview mirror.

  “You’re getting so tall, Nazhar,” Mom commented, turning around to look at my friend seated be
hind her. Mom had to pull her car seat forward to give him more legroom. “You’re going to be taller than me soon.”

  Mom was right, Nazhar did look taller. It was as if it had happened overnight. But even Jimmy and I had grown a few inches the last year too. I tried to convince Mom that I needed to eat more chicken wings in order for my body to keep on with its growth spurt, but she just gave me her patented I-am-your-mother-whoareyou-kidding look and made me a tuna sandwich on wholemeal bread instead.

  With Mom giving him directions, Dad drove us to Queenstown MRT station where the tour was supposed to start. After parking at a nearby housing estate, we walked over to the station. Wendy kept checking and doublechecking that she had brought an extra bottle of insect repellent, as mosquitos seemed to love her the most.

  “Did you bring the sunscreen as well, Eliza?” my sister asked.

  “What? No. Why would I bring sunscreen, Wendy?” Eliza replied, giving her a weird look. “The tour ends at 5am. The sun wouldn’t have risen yet.”

  “You never know,” was all Wendy said. She suddenly reached out and started slapping the air. She must have spied an imaginary mosquito or something.

  We walked over to the ground level of Queenstown MRT station and found that a group of people had already gathered. I counted 15 other people, excluding us. Two of them wore bright yellow polo t-shirts that said “Queenstown Heritage Trail” on the back. One of them had a lanyard with a tag that said Saad and the other had one that read Victor. The uncle named Victor was giving out small red radios and packets of blue headphones to the people who had gathered. The other uncle named Saad was handing out yellow tote bags. Inside the bags were a bottle of water, an umbrella and a booklet that had My Queenstown Heritage Trail printed on the front cover. The instructions before the tour said that we should all bring our own torchlights, which we did. I had tried to convince Watson to let me turn him into a giant walking light bulb but he had refused.

  When Uncle Victor reached us, he smiled and said to Dad, “Wow, that’s a lot of kids… and…er, two robots?” He paused. “Do the robots need the radio sets or can they listen in with their tech?”