The Case of the Exploding Loo Page 2

  On the upside, this helps Mum slide into place more easily. On the downside, Uncle Max says he’s starting to wonder if she ate Dad.

  I’m ninety-seven per cent sure he’s joking.

  Either way, Mum reminds me of the huge inflatable Tyrannosaurus Rex that sat outside the discount shop until it blew away in the storm last month. Like the T-Rex, Mum is big and scary from a distance. Then, when you get closer, she’s worse than scary. She’s empty, like there’s nothing but air and breath where her thoughts should be.

  The only time Mum moves these days is to shovel her mouth full of Curry in a Hurry takeaways. These have been turning up every night since the toilet explosion, even though no one orders them. Holly called Curry in a Hurry to let them know and to ask what we owed, but they said the food was a sign of their admiration for Dad’s work. Weird, but I guess that means it’s okay to eat them. Mum certainly seems to think so.

  At first, Holly and I tried to snap Mum out of her curry coma by pulling her to her feet and making her walk around the house, but the more days that pass without Dad and the more curries that pass between Mum’s lips, the harder it is to heave her off the couch.

  Holly still makes a token effort to get Mum on her feet. I don’t. I just sink down on the sofa beside her so we can chat. Admittedly, I do most of the talking, but at least Mum doesn’t get up and wander off the minute I mention electromagnetism or scalar waves the way everyone else does.

  Besides Dad only lets us watch thirty minutes of TV a day when he’s home, so I want to catch as much as I can before he comes back. And he is coming back. I know he is.

  Shrek’s on today when we get home. I like Shrek. So does Holly, but she’s been pretending not to since a boy at school told her thirteen-year-olds are too old for animated movies. Ugh, teenagers.

  To be fair to Shrek, Holly doesn’t like anything any more. When Dad was around, she was always yelling how much she hated him for acting like she wasn’t good enough. Now he’s gone, she’s trying to replace him by finding new things to hate.

  Before Shrek joined her hate list, Holly’s favourite scene was the bit when Princess Fiona sings the songbird to death and it explodes, leaving nothing but its tiny yellow feet clinging to the branch. We fast-forward that scene now.

  Film and videogame characters are always blowing up and leaving only their shoes/ feet/ hooves behind:

  But life is not a film or a videogame, which is a shame because make-believe characters act logically and let you know who the bad guys are.

  CLUE 3

  Smoking shoes are a movie/video game device, not evidence.

  I decide to share my first three clues with the police. Unfortunately, I’m cut off before I get the chance. This has been happening a lot recently.

  Holly says it’s because I’m a stalker and the police are fed up with me ringing them five times a day. I prefer to think it’s a switchboard problem. So I call again, and again, until the phone is picked up by my favourite policeman, PC Eric. PC Eric sounds older than the other officers and sometimes forgets what he’s saying, but he’s obviously important because whenever I do get through, I’m usually passed on to him.

  PC Eric listens to my theories. “I was suspicious of the shoes at first too. But my colleagues found a report about a group of soldiers killed by anti-tank fire in the 1989 Romanian Revolution, leaving nothing but a pile of ash and several pairs of leather boots.”

  “Tell your colleagues they shouldn’t believe everything they read,” I say, “and they should investigate Ms Grimm.”

  “I’ll pass that on. I’m sure they’ll be grateful.”

  I suspect PC Eric is not being completely honest. His voice squeaks in the middle, like Uncle Max’s when he says Aunty Vera’s bum doesn’t look big in her flowery dress. I decide to spend some of the £84.73 I’ve saved for a graphing calculator (with touchscreen) on a pair of leather shoes so I can set them on fire and prove they couldn’t withstand an explosion. That should convince the police The Case of the Exploding Loo still requires the attention of their best officers.

  We have to find Dad. No one else can help me develop the brain ray we were working on when he vanished. And no one else can out-google Google.

  4

  Turquoise iPods

  When Uncle Max and Aunty Vera pop round to check on Mum, I ask Uncle Max to buy me a pair of men’s leather shoes. He looks down his nose at the twenty-pound note I’m offering.

  “You won’t get a decent brand of shoe for less than a hundred pounds.”

  “I don’t need a decent brand. Dad says people who buy designer labels never have any money.”

  “Does he?” Uncle “designer brand” Max huffs. “Well, your Uncle Max says people who blurt out every stupid thing that pops into their head never have any friends.”

  I decide to ask someone else to buy the shoes. Someone who isn’t Uncle Max, or Mum, who ’s still buried beneath Santas, listening to her new turquoise iPod.

  CLUE 4

  Mum won a free turquoise iPod with tracks already loaded onto it through the Curry in a Hurry loyalty scheme.

  This is a clue for three reasons:

  1. Mum never joined the Curry in a Hurry loyalty scheme.

  2. Although Mum gobbles up everything Curry in a Hurry delivers, we’ve still never ordered, or paid for, any of it.

  3. Turquoise is a weird colour.

  The turquoise thing gets even stranger when I spot the turquoise Kazinsky Electronics van parked on the opposite side of the road, facing our house.

  Clue or coincidence?

  “Hideous,” Aunty Vera says.

  “Mmm,” I agree. “Horrible colour.”

  Aunty Vera stares at me. “What are you talking about?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That painting.” Aunty Vera points at the enormous canvas above the fireplace. It arrived the day Dad vanished with a note saying it was a picture of Dad and should be hung on the living-room wall.

  “Why on earth did you keep it?” Aunty Vera asks.

  “Dad always keeps the gifts people send him after his TV appearances. He says it’s important to respect your fans.”

  “He had fans?”

  I don’t like my aunt’s sarcastic tone, or her use of the word “had”.

  “He has loads. He calls them the Big Brain Buffs.” I don’t tell her Holly calls them the Doo-lally Daddicts. “Anyway, this is a portrait of Dad. We can’t throw Dad in the bin.”

  Aunty Vera doesn’t look so sure. “Well, I’ve never seen anything so ugly.”

  “The note says it’s surrealist.”

  “Mad-as-a-badger-ist, more like.”

  Aunt Vera reaches for the picture. The minute she lifts it off its hook, Mum starts to scream. She keeps on screaming, not pausing for breath, until Aunty Vera rams it back in place.

  As Aunty Vera wipes the sweat from her forehead and Mum relaxes back into the sofa cushions, I try removing the painting again, just for a minute, to see how Mum reacts.

  Mum gives the same eardrum-shattering wail. I slam the picture back on the wall.

  “Pythagoras!” I shriek and then snap my mouth shut. Holly says my habit of calling out the names of famous scientists and mathematicians at times of stress is one of the reasons I have no friends except Meccano Morris. And he’s more a science club partner than a friend.

  Aunty Vera hits me with her handbag. “What did you do that for?”

  “It was an experiment. I wanted to see what Mum would do.”

  “Now you know. And know this: any more experiments in my presence and you’ll find yourself hanging above the fireplace, alongside that monstrosity.”

  Aunty Vera can be scary. Holly calls her the Vigil-Aunty, which is a funny nickname unless she hears you say it. Then it’s not so funny because she’ll hit you with her handbag. A vigilante is someone who takes the law into their own hands to avenge a crime. This makes it a good name for Aunty Vera, because if anyone committed a crime against he
r she’d vigilante them into small pieces with her Handbag of Mass Destruction.

  I gaze up at the picture. “Monstrosity” is a bit harsh, but the surreal Dad picture breaks all the mathematical rules of proportion for drawing a person:

  I’m sure it all means something. I just don’t know what.

  The background of the picture is equally strange. Behind Surreal Dad are two groups of people. The figures on the left have fuzzy features and it’s hard to tell where one person ends and another begins. The figures on the right have abnormally large heads and more distinctive features, which show them laughing.

  I thought the painting was saying people with big brains are happier until Holly said the big brain people were laughing at the other group. I don’t like that idea. It makes the picture feel mean.

  If you look closely, you can see a tiny figure half-hidden in the trees between the two groups – a girl with a golden crown perched on her extra-large head. Holly thinks she looks like me. I don’t. I don’t want to be Princess of Mean People with Big Heads.

  Surreal Dad’s left hand is holding a piece of paper covered in squares, circles and arrows, with a red cross in the top corner. Above the cross is a word with several letters missing, like a hangman clue: L _ _ _ _ S.

  CLUE 5

  I made a copy of the diagram to carry in my pocket and I’ve spent all month studying it. But I still don’t know what it means. I stare at the painting a lot. So does Mum. Maybe because it means we don’t have to look at each other.

  I shuffle behind the sofa and make a grab for Mum’s Curry in a Hurry earphones. I’m curious to find out what’s on the iPod because its arrival has meant the end of my one-sided chats with Mum about electromagnetic waves and I don’t like it.

  For one mad moment I think I hear Dad’s voice. Then Mum screams so loudly I can’t hear anything else. I drop the earphones and back away in alarm, covering my ears as I remember what happened to the songbird in Shrek.

  Aunty Vera shoves the earphones at Mum and tells Uncle Max to hammer another hook above the fireplace. As I flee from the room, I notice Mum’s nose is bleeding.

  5

  Suspects

  Mum’s nosebleeds haven’t stopped and she is steadily being absorbed into the sofa. But I can’t let myself be distracted from my investigation any longer, especially now I have a suspect. Ms Grimm ticks two important boxes:

  The Means – She knows how to blow things up.

  The Opportunity – No one knows what she’s up to for most of the week.

  However I’m struggling with the most important box of all:

  The Motive – Why would Ms Grimm want to blow up a toilet? Or hurt Dad? She’s one of the few people who share his extreme beliefs about intelligence.

  Dad’s views aren’t popular, particularly with Smokin’ Joe and the Toilet Trolls. I can understand their objection to Dad’s declaration that people with low IQs (which stands for “Intelligence Quotient”, not “Idiotic Questions” like Holly says) should be banned from voting or having children. But surely there are better ways to protest than setting fire to my textbooks and chucking my shoes into tall trees.

  It’s a good job Holly likes climbing.

  When I told Dad I was having issues at school, he said, “Many have had their greatness made for them by their enemies.”

  That’s a quote from Spanish philosopher, Baltasar Gracian. Easy for Baltasar to say. I bet no one shoved his head in the school kitchen wheelie bin, or stuck a Post-it on his back saying “kick me”.

  “It’s your fault for being pathetic,” Holly says as she helps me pull wheelie-bin spaghetti out of my hair on the way home from school a week later. “You need to stand up to bullies.”

  “It’s hard to stand up at all after a wedgie.”

  “Aren’t wedgies a boy thing?”

  “Smokin’ Joe is an equal opportunities bully,” I say, pulling a wheelie-bin carrot from behind my ear. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve tried ignoring him, like Dad suggested, but it’s not working.”

  “Never listen to Dadvice. Dad didn’t even follow it himself. Remember when the milkman told him off for calling Mum stupid? No way did those wasps find their way into the empty milk bottles by themselves. Dad wasn’t as perfect as you think. Admit it.”

  “I’m not listening.” I cover my ears with the sleeves of my school jumper and cross into our street ahead of her. “La la la.”

  “Admit it.” Holly pushes past me and races for home. “Or when we get in I’ll rearrange your books so they’re no longer in alphabetical order.”

  “Okay, I admit it. I ADMIT IT.”

  I agree, not only because I want to preserve order on my shelves, but also because I remembered the invention Dad asked me to design last year. At the time, I thought the milk-bottle wasp trap was a hypothetical thing. It wasn’t.

  CLUE 6

  Dad might not be as relaxed about his enemies as he pretends.

  What if Dad got into an argument with someone more dangerous than the milkman? I should ask the police if they’ve heard anything. I should also investigate the milkman.

  But before that, I need to figure out what that van is doing parked outside our house. What is it with all these turquoise vehicles? This one is similar to the Kazinsky Electronics van that was parked on the opposite side of the road a week ago, but with a rounder bonnet and without the big KE logo on the side.

  More worryingly, it’s being loaded with boxes through our open front door.

  “Mum?” Holly sprints the last few metres. “Mum? Are you okay?”

  A quick glance through the out-of-date Christmas lights in the bay window reassures me Mum is still slumped on the sofa, oblivious to van and driver. I’m more concerned about what’s in the boxes.

  A man in a shiny suit blocks the doorway, showing too many teeth. “Good afternoon, young ladies. I represent your father’s life insurance company.” Insurance Man wipes a hand on his shiny suit and holds it out towards us. “We’re here for ‘Removal and Disposal’. It’s a standard part of the policy.”

  Holly ignores the hand. “Why don’t we know anything about this?”

  “Because you’re just girls.” Insurance Man reveals yet more teeth as he continues to thrust his hand at us. “We deal with adults and your mother has no problem with me carrying out your father’s wishes.”

  Just girls? Bah!

  “Mum has no problem with wearing the same pyjamas, non-stop, for over a month either,” I point out. “So she’s hardly the best judge of what is and isn’t okay. Also, my dad is NOT DEAD!” Why do I have to keep reminding everyone? “So he doesn’t need a life insurance policy.”

  “Nevertheless, I have my instructions.” Insurance Man withdraws his hand and puts it in his trouser pocket. “And unless an adult objects, I will be carrying them out. My work colleagues here will deal with your complaints.”

  He beckons to two enormous men in muscle-vests who are lugging boxes down the stairs. I don’t catch their names but they sound something like Ug and Thug.

  I look up at Ug and Thug.

  Ug and Thug look down at me.

  It’s hard to put my complaints into words because:

  i. I don’t know anything about life insurance.

  ii. Ug and Thug’s bulging biceps are VERY LARGE.

  Before I can say, “So what exactly is ‘Removal and Disposal’?” Insurance Man has filled his turquoise van with boxes and (Th)Ugs and sped away.

  “Who was that?” Uncle Max arrives with one of Vigil-Aunty’s unidentified-vegetable casseroles.

  Holly grabs the casserole and slams it down on the hallway table. “A man who made me want to kick things.”

  “Ow!” Uncle Max grabs his ankle.

  “They were from Dad’s insurance company,” I explain. “They took a load of stuff for ‘Removal and Disposal’. The man said it was part of Dad’s life insurance policy.”

  “‘Removal and Disposal’?” Uncle Max barges past me.

  He y
anks open drawers and cupboards and throws a mantrum in the hallway about some missing Hugo Box cufflinks he’d had his eye on.

  “‘Removal and Disposal’?” he repeats, stamping his feet like a toddler. “That’s not even a thing.”

  If it’s not a thing, it’s a clue.

  CLUE 7

  Someone wants Dad’s belongings: cufflinks, underpants and all.

  Clue or not, I wish Fake Insurance Man had left some of Dad’s stuff behind. I miss it and I miss him. Dad, I mean, not Fake Insurance Man. I don’t miss Fake Insurance Man at all. He slammed doors and smelt of cheese. Dad smells of Imperial Leather soap and breath-mints. But it’s not just Dad’s cleanliness I miss. I miss the time we spent together discussing the latest discoveries in brain science. And I miss his help with my brain ray invention.

  I came up with the brain ray concept last year because I wanted to give people a way to increase their IQ so Dad would like them more. Dad loved the idea and we’ve been working on it ever since.

  Holly thinks it’s stupid and says I’ll never convince her or Mum to use it.

  I’ve told Holly a thousand times I didn’t invent it with Mum in mind. My voice doesn’t even squeak, but she still gives me that look that shouts, “Big fat liar”.

  I notice something while I’m shutting the drawers Uncle Max left open.

  “Hey, Holly! Fake Insurance Man took my brain ray sketches. Do you think that’s a clue?”

  “Definitely.” Holly pauses. “A clue he had to grab everything in a hurry.”

  Hmmph. I write it up anyway.

  CLUE 8

  Fake Insurance Man took the plans and sketches for the brain ray I’ve been developing with Dad.