The Case of the Exploding Loo Read online

  6

  Theories

  I’ve been considering the most important clues I’ve gathered so far and I have reached a conclusion:

  (RECAP)

  CLUE 1

  It is statistically unlikely Dad spontaneously combusted.

  +

  (RECAP)

  CLUE 3

  Smoking shoes are a movie/videogame device, not evidence.

  +

  (RECAP)

  CLUE 7

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

  =

  THEORY A

  SOMEONE HAS KIDNAPPED DAD

  When I call the police to share my theory, I get a shock. Dad’s disappearance has been officially downgraded to a “cold” case. At first, I think they’re referring to the outdoor temperature at the Christmas market, but no. Apparently cases go “cold” when there are no more leads to follow, all suspects have been ruled out and all evidence has been tested.

  “But Dad’s still missing,” I protest to PC Eric. “You’re the police. You’re supposed to find him.”

  PC Eric reveals my least favourite clue so far:

  CLUE 9

  Traces of Dad’s blood were found in burnt-out portaloo along with his shoes.

  “Your Dad hasn’t been seen for seven weeks,” PC Eric says gently. “My fellow officers have drawn the obvious conclusion.”

  “That conclusion is not obvious to me.”

  “It’s not necessarily what I believe either. But my hands are tied.”

  I stare at the phone in shocked silence. Who would do that to PC Eric?

  “Not literally,” he adds quickly. “What I mean is police procedure doesn’t always let me follow investigations as I’d like. But there’s nothing to stop you making enquiries. Perhaps you’ll collect enough evidence to convince us to re-open the case.”

  “What about my suspect? Did you find out what Ms Grimm does when she’s not teaching at Butt’s Hill?”

  “Yes.”

  “And . . . ?” This is the answer everyone’s been waiting for. “What does she do when she’s not teaching at Butt’s Hill?”

  “She teaches at a school in Lindon.”

  That’s it? That’s my answer? When she’s not teaching, she’s teaching?

  Do I need a new suspect? Does the milkman count? How can I get a cold case warmed up again?

  “This cold case thing . . .” I say. “Does it mean I can have Dad’s shoes from the explosion?”

  “I don’t see why not. One of our officers will be popping round to explain the change in investigation status to your mother. I’ll ask him to bring the shoes.”

  I pace by the front door, twirling Uncle Max’s lighter between my fingers, waiting for the officer to arrive. My plan is to set fire to the shoes the minute the officer hands them over, proving they couldn’t survive a blast that combusted an entire person.

  But things don’t work out the way I planned.

  Curry in a Hurry Man arrives just as PC2851 is heading across the front lawn, shoes in hand. Curry in a Hurry Man stumbles over something hidden in the unmown grass and knocks into the back of PC2851, spilling curry all over his police uniform. During the confusion of curry, shouting and Mum having another nosebleed, the shoes vanish.

  I search everywhere, thrusting tissues at Mum and keeping a tight grip on PC2851’s jacket. He can’t leave before my shoe bonfire. He just can’t.

  But PC2851 uses his police skills to wriggle free and he races down our front path as if it were his shoes on fire.

  Of course, Dad’s shoes reappear within minutes of PC2851’s escape. Curry in a Hurry Man returns on his moped and explains that he picked them up by mistake. By mistake? A pair of size tens? How is that possible? I can’t even be cross, because Curry in a Hurry Man is so apologetic and so desperate to make it up to me.

  “Drink!” Curry in a Hurry Man forces a styrofoam cup into my hand. “I am bringing the world’s best hot chocolate just for your good self. This I will be doing every day, thirty minutes after four, to make apologies for my oh-so-clumsy actions.”

  “Hot chocolate?” I like hot chocolate. “Yum. Thanks. There’s no need, but if you insist . . .”

  “I am insisting.” Curry in a Hurry Man bows and apologises all the way back to his moped. There’s a split second, while he’s pulling on his helmet, when his expression seems to change into a sneer, but it must be a trick of the light.

  Either way, I’ve missed my chance of convincing the police to warm up the case again.

  I sip my hot chocolate. It tastes bitter but I drink it anyway, gagging when I spot a familiar turquoise vehicle on the other side of the road.

  CLUE 10

  The Kazinsky Electronics van is parked outside our house almost every day now.

  It makes me nervous.

  Holly says that’s because everything makes me nervous. She might have a point. The van doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.

  I shuffle upstairs to my room, feeling incredibly tired all of a sudden. I fall asleep hugging Dad’s shoes. Other people have fluffy teddies to cuddle. I have a pair of slightly scorched leather lace-ups. When I wake up an hour later, the thought of burning them makes me shudder.

  I don’t know what happened while I was asleep. I never get attached to anything that doesn’t have internet access, but for the rest of the day I find my hands automatically reaching for the shoes and stroking them.

  7

  The Importance of Names

  Holly decides that if the police are no longer investigating Dad’s disappearance then we need to find our own witnesses. She designs a poster to stick up around town and asks me to scan and upload it.

  I study the poster she’s handed me. It looks familiar.

  “Did you base this on next-door’s missing cat poster?”

  “What if I did?” Holly folds her arms. “They got Sheba back, didn’t they? Are you going to sit there asking stupid questions or are you going to scan it for me?” Her kicking foot is swinging.

  I start scanning.

  We get all sorts of strange replies to the lost cat Dad poster. One seems promising, although it’s just as odd as the others:

  I am Porter. I am 14. I have information about the toilet explosion and film of the Christmas market. I can meet you to discuss it, but only in your home and only after dark. No front doors.

  “I told him to come round tonight,” Holly says, showing me the email.

  “To our house?” I squeak. “Are you completely mad? He’s probably planning to murder us in our beds.”

  “Then don’t go to bed. Come on, Know-All, this is important.”

  “Have you read this note, Holly? Only after dark? No front doors? What is he? Some kind of vampire? Doesn’t this strike you as weird?”

  “No weirder than exploding toilets and disappearing parents. Do you want to find Dad or not?”

  “Of course I do.”

  That doesn’t stop me screaming when I hear a bang later that night.

  I jump straight out of bed – I don’t want to take any chances – and check my phone.

  22:47

  I’m not tired, probably because I’ve been napping every afternoon this week. Something about the combination of stress and Curry in a Hurry hot chocolate always knocks me out.

  Wide awake now, I tiptoe across the landing to check on Holly. Her bedroom light is off but I can make out her silhouette against the window as she lifts the latch.

  “Noooooo,” I yell.

  But the dark figure pushes against the window and clambers over the sill. He moves towards me in the dark, lifting his right arm, brandishing a weapon. Without thinking, I rush at him and drive him backwards, knocking him off balance so he stumbles into Holly’s open wardrobe. I shove his chest with a strength I didn’t know I had and slam the wardrobe doors. Fingers trembling, I turn the key in the lock and trap him inside. My hands won’t stop shaking.

  Holly flicks on the bedroom lights and stare
s at me, her mouth wide open.

  The wardrobe doors rattle.

  “He’s here,” I say. “The Porter guy is here.”

  “Yeah. I got that.”

  “He’s in your wardrobe.”

  “Yeah, got that too.”

  “I’m not sure what happened,” I confess. “I kept thinking about him murdering us in our beds, so when he raised his arm . . .”

  “You barged him into my wardrobe!” Holly’s mouth twitches. “Impressive!”

  “What now?” I ask as the wardrobe doors clatter.

  “We’ll have to let him out at some point. Might be an idea to do it now, before he kills my clothes.”

  Closing my eyes and taking a calming breath, I move closer to the wardrobe. “Er, hello?”

  “Hello,” the wardrobe replies.

  “I’m going to unlock the doors and on three I want you to throw out your weapon.”

  “Weapon?”

  “The weapon you were waving around as you climbed in the window. You ready? One . . . Two . . . Three . . .”

  I open the right-hand wardrobe door, getting ready to slam it on his arm if necessary. “Throw!”

  Crash!

  Holly and I gaze at the ‘weapon’.

  Holly giggles. “Beware the deadly water bottle!”

  I unlatch the left-hand door, feeling flustered. “Okay. You can come out, slowly!”

  The door creaks open. A face peers out from between Holly’s skinny jeans and glittery vest tops; a round, symmetrical face attached to a long neck, with skin the same creamy off-white colour as our Armitage Shanks toilet.

  “Hello.” Porter unfolds himself from the wardrobe and holds out his hand. “I’m Porter Lewis. Portaloo spotter.”

  “Huh?”

  “Like a train spotter. But with fewer trains and more portable toilets.” Porter’s ears turn red as we stare at him. He thrusts his hand in his back pocket.

  “You watch . . . toilets?” I take a step back and wonder whether we should chuck him straight back out of the window. What sort of hobby is toilet-watching for a teenage boy?

  “Only portaloos. And only empty ones. They are design classics. The simple lines of the exterior and the deceptively spacious interior . . .”

  “That is one freaky hobby,” Holly narrows her eyes at Porter. “Although it does make you the best example, ever, for Know-All’s weird collection of people whose names match what they do.”

  Holly’s right. Porter Lewis the portaloo spotter beats Mr Payne the dentist and Lee King the plumber. Last week Holly tried to convince me she’d met Robin Banks the master criminal, along with his assistant, Nick de Lotte, and his brother-in-law, Robin Holmes. As if I’d believe that! Okay, maybe I did. But only for a few minutes. Until Holly fell about laughing.

  What Holly doesn’t understand is that Nominative Determinism is a “thing”, with a Wikipedia page and everything. It’s a proper theory that suggests your name can affect your job, your hobbies, even your character.

  I think about names a lot. I believe there’s a reason Dad’s name sounds like “brain” and mine sounds like “Know-All”, just as I believe Mr and Mrs Lewis decided their son’s fate when they christened him Porter.

  “A portaloo spotter?” I repeat. “Does that mean you know about portaloo explosions?”

  Porter nods.

  “There have been two unexplained toilet blasts this year: an eruption in a portaloo at an Austrian Folk Festival and the explosion at Lindon Christmas market, where I happened to be filming.”

  Porter’s voice squeaks but I guess he’s feeling awkward talking to us about the day Dad disappeared. I may have to revisit my squeaking = lying theory.

  “The Austrian investigators say toilet chemicals reacted badly with a dropped cigarette at the Folk Festival.” Porter frowns. “Why do people always blame the portaloo? Don’t they realise portaloos are—”

  “Can we stick to the point?” Holly asks. “Christmas market?”

  “Right. Sorry. Got carried away. The portaloos at the Christmas market were Splendaloos. Those guys have been supplying portable toilets since 1984 and have approximately four thousand nine hundred toilets for hire. That’s about the same number of toilets the Americans used when they first swore in Barack Obama as President. Americans have no respect for portaloos, you know. Tens of thousands of portaloos in the US are set on fire, spray-painted or tipped over every month. Tens of thousands! That’s almost five per cent of all the toilets in use over there. It’s shocking . . .”

  “The point, Porter!”

  “Sorry. But do you realise how much a new portaloo costs? Around five hundred pounds! Five hundred pounds! These toilets deserve our respect. It’s all in the name. Guess what they call portaloos in the United States? Portapotties! I mean. Seriously? How can you give something the appreciation it deserves when you refer to it as a portapotty? If they only knew—”

  “Enough!” Holly yells. “Tell us about the Christmas market explosion.”

  Porter reaches into his pocket and pulls out a computer memory stick. “Why don’t I show you instead?”

  “Show us?” I stare at him, dry-mouthed. “You filmed the actual explosion? Give me that!”

  I lunge at Porter and grab his arms. The memory stick flies through the air and lands in Holly’s sock drawer. What am I supposed to do now? I don’t want to hurt Porter, but I’m holding on to him and I’ll look stupid if I just let go.

  “I didn’t film it deliberately.” Porter uses his longer reach to grip my head and force me backwards, breaking my hold and trapping me at a distance.

  “Ow!” he yells as I bend one of his fingers back.

  “Sorry. It’s a move I learnt from an anti-bullying video on YouTube,” I explain.

  “That’s cheating. You’re the one bullying me.” Porter sucks his injured finger. “All I was doing was filming the new Splendamini 3000, a mini-portaloo. It’s an industry revolution. I didn’t realise— Oof!”

  Holly wallops both of us in the ribs. We stagger apart.

  “Enough!” she barks. “Porter, find that memory stick among my socks. Know-All, find us a place to watch it.”

  I obey, but when she turns around I stick out my tongue. I turn and catch Porter doing the same.

  8

  Film Footage

  I stomp across the landing, kicking no-longer-seasonal Christmas decorations out of the way as I lead Holly, Porter and Porter’s memory stick through the minefield of tatty tinsel and rejected Christmas tree baubles to my room. My desktop is the only place we can watch Porter’s film now Fake Insurance Man has taken Dad’s hard drive and laptop.

  I love my computer. I love all computers. My perfect world would contain no people – just me and a million computers. Dad would probably agree about the computers but he’d keep the clever people in his world. He used to say that if he ruled the country he’d banish everyone with an IQ below one hundred and twenty. Holly called him an intelligence fascist, but Dad said he’d give them a chance to increase their IQ first, which is fair. Isn’t it?

  Anyway, that’s how I got the idea for the brain ray.

  Dad and I spent a lot of our free time together imagining intelligence-increasing devices. Our first idea was for a brain cap with electrodes that plunge into the key “intelligence” areas of the brain, which studies suggest are:

  i. the left prefrontal cortex (behind the forehead)

  ii. the left temporal cortex (behind the ear )

  iii. the left parietal cortex (at the top and back of the head)

  We rejected the brain cap pretty quickly. Dad said it was because intelligence lies in the connections between areas of the brain, not in the areas themselves. But I suspect it was because he knew we’d never convince anyone to let us drill into their skull.

  My second idea was based on the fact that brains rely on electrical signals to communicate. I wondered if we could use electromagnetic energy to affect brain cells by creating an electromagnetic field.


  Dad liked the idea and we spent all our free time working on it.

  The weird thing is I haven’t thought about it much since he vanished. With Dad gone, being clever no longer seems so important. Besides, we could never figure out how to get round the dangerous side effects of electromagnetic radiation.

  “Hello?” Holly waves a hand in front of my face.

  “Sorry. Daydreaming.” I pull open my bedroom door.

  Porter’s eyes widen to almost perfect circles as he spots my multi-screen computer. I’m glad people have eyelids. It is not nice to see so much eyeball. Why does nobody except Dad understand that I need six monitors to see data the way it appears in my head?

  “It was a birthday present,” I tell Porter’s eyeballs.

  “I got a doll’s tea set that year,” Holly grumbles.

  I don’t like the way Holly and Porter are looking at me.

  “I didn’t tell Dad what to buy, did I? And watch out for Uranus,” I snap as Porter bumps his head on my Meccano planet. “It took months for me and Meccano Morris to create an accurate-scale Meccano model of the solar system for our science project. The last thing I need is you causing space to collapse in on itself.”

  I push Porter out of the way as the media player flickers into action. The film opens on the mini-portaloos. Porter has added a voiceover describing them. In detail.

  I’m starting to wonder if anyone has ever literally died of boredom, when a man wanders into shot at the edge of the screen.

  “Dad!” My hands scrabble in my bag for the scorched leather lace-ups. I lift them so they’re half covering my eyes.

  “Don’t hide behind those stupid shoes.” Holly yanks at my arm. “We need to know what happened. What has Dad got in that bag?”

  I lower the shoes, but Dad has already entered the toilet and all I see are closed doors.