The London Eye Mystery (11 page)

Salim was in a school blazer, with a sweatshirt underneath, and a faint line of a moustache over his lips. He was not looking either happy or sad in the photograph because his lips were straight, neither up nor down.

‘That’s him,’ Aunt Gloria whispered. ‘I bought two copies so that Salim could give one to his father. To Rashid. I do it every year. I don’t know why. I don’t even know if Rashid has them framed. I don’t—’

The doorbell rang. Dad went out into the hall to see who it was and I heard voices and then in walked a tall Indian man in jeans and a green shirt.

‘Speak of the devil,’ Aunt Gloria hissed. I only heard her say this because I was standing next to her. I didn’t see anything particularly satanic about the strange man. I thought he must be another plainclothes police officer. My hand flapped.

‘What’s this?’ the man said. ‘Have you found my son?’ He looked at Aunt Gloria.

She looked at him. ‘What are
you
doing here?’

‘I’m looking for my son. What else? Trust you to lose him!’

Maybe Satan
had
entered the room after all because everybody started talking very loudly. I put my hands over my ears but I could still hear them. I counted the people in the room. Seven. I tried to guess the ages of those I didn’t know. Then I added up the ages, actual or approximate, of all present. When I arrived at the figure of 233, and worked out the average age was 33.3 recurring, everyone was still shouting their heads off. The difference between laughing your head off and shouting your head off is that with one you are happy and with the other you are angry. I like it much better when people are laughing their heads off.

Detective Inspector Pearce got up from her chair.

‘I’d better go,’ she said, but I’m not sure that anyone listened except for me and Dad, who had not joined in the shouting either. Dad showed her out to the hallway and I followed. You could still hear the raised voices in the living room.

‘Goodbye, Mr Spark,’ Detective Inspector Pearce said. ‘I’m sorry again about last night.’

I felt Dad’s arm on my shoulder tighten. ‘Will you find out who that poor boy was?’

‘We’re working on it,’ Inspector Pearce said. ‘And as for Salim, when everyone’s calmed down, can you ask them if they would agree to us calling in the press?’

‘The press?’

‘Yes. If Salim’s picture gets into the news stories, somebody who’s seen him might come forward.’

Dad nodded. ‘I’ll ask them.’

‘Inspector Pearce,’ I said. My hand flapped. ‘Salim got a call on his mobile yesterday. At approximately ten fifty a.m. He said it was from “a friend calling from Manchester to say goodbye”.’

‘Did he? How interesting.’ She smiled at me, which meant she and I could be friends. ‘If only some of my officers had half your brains, Ted.’

Then she nodded and walked down the tiny garden path to where the police car was parked. Dad and I went back to the living room. Rashid was saying that the police had burst into his busy evening surgery last night and that all his patients must have thought he was another Dr Death, which was the name newspaper editors gave to a very evil doctor who killed dozens of his patients instead of making them better for no reason other than that he liked doing this. Aunt Gloria was clinging to a cushion as if she was about to throw it at him and saying that all he ever cared about was what other people thought about him. Mum was standing up and holding Kat by the elbow and ushering us back into the hallway.

She closed the living-room door behind her.

‘God Almighty. Let’s leave them to it,’ she said.

‘Let’s go get a pizza, for pity’s sake.’

So we did. Pity must have been pleased because we had four enormous pizzas at the pizza restaurant nearby. I had a Coca-Cola and Kat had Sprite and Mum had a beer and Dad had a bottle of sparkling water. Dad and I ate all of ours, and Mum and Kat swapped their last slice and left only bits of the crust, which meant that everybody had been extremely hungry. And over the meal we did not talk about Salim. I talked about thunderstorms and why they happen and Kat showed Dad how she had removed the silver nail polish from her hands and he said he was glad Cat-Woman had gone back to the moon. When we got back, Rashid and Aunt Gloria were sitting on the sofa together arm in arm. This puzzled me until I remembered what Mum says about Kat 

and me having a love–hate relationship and I worked out that the same was true of Rashid and Aunt Gloria. Mum said to Rashid he was welcome to sleep on the couch if he wanted to and he said was she sure and she said she was and he said she was most kind and he would. And then Kat and I were told to go upstairs to bed, so we did.

Eavesdropping

Kat curled up on the lilo and went to sleep. The house went quiet.

Kat made a funny lapping noise, like a dog drinking water. I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of Salim, seeing his face with his lips turned up, fading in and out of the spokes of the London Eye. Then I remembered him saying I looked a cool dude and telling me that he got lonely. The boy on the slab. The boy on the train. Salim or not Salim.

I switched on the desk light. Kat didn’t wake. She just moaned and turned over.

I got my weather-system book off my desk and looked at the photo of Kat and me on the bridge, as taken by Salim. I don’t know much about photos, but I could see it was a good photo, not like the kind I take, because the lines around our faces were sharp, and we were exactly in the middle of the shot. A small strip of the Eye’s wheel came up from my shoulder, with seven of the thirty-two pods shining in the sunlight.

I put the photo back in its hiding place, between the chapters on cyclones and anticyclones. I thought. Cyclones go anti-clockwise. Anticyclones go clockwise. That’s if you’re in the northern hemisphere. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, it’s the other way round. It’s like water whirling down a plughole: in the northern hemisphere it whooshes anti-clockwise, in the south, clockwise. And I realized that the same is true of the London Eye. I’d always thought of it as going anti-clockwise. If you look at it from the south bank of the river, that’s how it goes. But (a big but) if you look at it from the north bank, it goes clockwise.

Whirlwinds and wheels: clockwise or anticlockwise, depending on how you look at it. Nematodes, such as earthworms: male or female, depending on how you look at it. Then there’s Dad’s favourite saying. A glass: half empty or half full, depending on how you look at it.

I scratched my head.
Depending on how you look at
 
it
–the same object can be or do opposite things at once. I remembered a picture Kat had once shown me of a waterfall. Only, the way it was painted, it looked as if the water was flowing upwards. Perhaps this was a clue to Salim’s disappearance. Perhaps Kat and I were looking at things the wrong way up, or the wrong way round.

I got excited then, because I am good at looking at things differently. When I was little, I once drew an egg as three rings: the shell, the white and the yolk. It looked like the planet Saturn and the teacher at school said it was a very unusual way to draw an egg. She said I had drawn it in cross-section as if I had x-ray eyes and could see straight through it. I tried to look at Salim riding in his pod with x-ray eyes but I could only see figures in the pod, dark shadows, turning to have their souvenir photo taken. So next I picked up the souvenir shot. After Aunt Gloria had tossed it on the floor earlier, and the police had said they didn’t want it, I’d taken it back up to my desk. I studied the African women, the big white-haired man, the fat couple and their children, the Japanese tourists. All I could see of the girl in the pink jacket who’d stood near us in the queue was her arm, waving at the camera above the other people. I could not see her boyfriend, nor the tall blonde woman with the grey-haired man who was shorter than her. It had been a crowded pod. Not everyone had fitted into the picture. Salim might have been at the back somewhere, behind the shoulders and cluttered bodies. I tried to look in between the torsos with x-ray eyes. But it was grey, murky shadow, tiny dots, nothing more. I pushed it away.

I got up and crept downstairs to the kitchen. I knew where Mum kept the salt and vinegar crisps hidden and I needed some. I took two packets out and crept back into the hallway. I paused. The living-room door was ajar and I could hear Aunt Gloria’s voice. I decided to listen in case there was a clue. Maybe Aunt Gloria knew something that she didn’t realize she knew but if I heard it I would be able to see the significance. Mum has told me it is wrong to eavesdrop on people. (Eavesdropping is a strange word. Eaves are the parts of roofs that project over the walls. The only thing that drops from them is rainwater and rainwater cannot hear.) Kat eavesdrops all the time. She lurks in the hallway when Mum and Dad are talking about serious matters such as school reports, and if I tell her it is wrong to do this, she hisses at me to get lost.

But tonight I decided to eavesdrop myself.

‘I hate waiting,’ Aunt Gloria was saying.

‘I know you do.’ It was Rashid. ‘Patience and you– they don’t go.’

‘We should call in the press, Rashid. Like Inspector Pearce says.’

‘Not yet, Gloria. I don’t want our private affairs all over the place.’

‘There you go again. Always caring about what other people think. What does it matter? What matters is Salim.’

‘OK, Gloria. We’ll call the press tomorrow. If Salim isn’t found by then.’

There was a pause. I heard a groan and the sofa creaking.

'I'd do anything just to know Salim was alive, somewhere, anywhere, unharmed,' she said.

‘He is, trust me. I feel it in my bones.’

‘I hope your bones are right,’ said Aunt Gloria.

‘Oh, Rashid. If he comes back safe, let’s be in touch more. It hasn’t been good for him, our never talking.’

‘Why are you taking him to New York, then? I nearly put an injunction on you.’

‘You didn’t!’

‘I did. You never told me what you were planning. I only learned about it from Salim.’

‘But I need the money, Rashid.’

‘I pay you every month, don’t I? As we agreed.’

‘It’s not enough. I need a good salary too.’

‘Why? To pay for all your
clothes
?’

The voices were getting louder again. I edged backwards towards the stairs.

‘You can rise as far up in your profession as you want,’ Aunt Gloria said. ‘Why can’t
I
?’

‘You’re impossible, Gloria. You only ever think of yourself.’

‘That’s a lie. I’m the one who looks after Salim, day in, day out. He’s lived with me all his life. He’s mine. He goes where I go.’

‘Salim,’ Rashid said, ‘is Salim. He doesn’t belong to either of us.’

There was a pause. I stood still. The sofa creaked again.

‘You’re right,’ Aunt Gloria said. ‘If anything happens to Salim, you say you’d never forgive me. But I’d never forgive myself.’ Her voice wobbled, as if she was going to cry. I crept up the first stair.

‘Don’t blame yourself, Gloria,’ Rashid said. Then I heard him groan. ‘Salim asked me something the last time he visited me.’

‘What?’

‘He asked if he could come to live with me.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘He did.’

‘Never. Impossible.’

‘I don’t know if he meant it. But he did ask.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said . . . that I was too busy every day at the surgery – that he was better off with his mother. That he should go to New York, it was a fine city. I said no. I didn’t even sit down and talk to him about it. He asked just as I was rushing out to a patient. I turned a deaf ear to him, Gloria.’

‘Oh, Rashid! Don’t you start. I can’t stand to see grown men cry.’

Rustles, chokes, sighs. Then I guessed what came next. My hair stood on end. They were
kissing
. From the sound of it, it was the long-tongue-like-eels kind that Kat told me about a couple of years back. She says that they do it in the movies, when their cheeks move about. That they do it in the school corridors when the teachers aren’t looking. That Mum and Dad do it when we’re not looking.

My mum threatens us with weird punishments sometimes. If I forget to change my school shirt three days running, she’ll yank it off me, screech at the state of the collar and threaten to hang me on the washing line by my toenails if I forget to change it next time. She’s joking, you realize. But if you were to ask me, what would I prefer – being hung from a washing line by my toenails, or having to be kissed by somebody like Aunt Gloria – I know which I would choose. The washing line, every time. I fled upstairs as fast as I could. I’d had enough eavesdropping for one night.

Mix and Match

I got back into bed, careful not to wake Kat. I munched on my crisps, letting them soften in my mouth before I bit into them so as to make less noise. Quietly I got out the list of theories and the photos. I thought. I bunched up the washing-line photos and put them on the desk. Then I went through the others. I finished one packet of crisps and opened a second.

Halfway through the packet I stopped munching and stared. I looked at another shot and stared at that too.

‘Kat!’ I hissed. I shook her shoulder hard. She raised herself from the pillow, holding her head between her hands. ‘Ugh. What a dream. What is it?’ She blinked up at me from the lilo.

‘The strange man, Kat,’ I said. ‘The man who sold us the ticket.’

She shook her head. ‘Yyyeerggg,’ she yawned. 

(That is what it sounded like.) ‘What about him?’

‘I’ve found him!’ I squeaked.

Kat’s eyes went round and she looked confused. So I showed her the photo that I had taken, the one that had gone wrong, with the headless bodies. I pointed to a torso of a man, with a jacket flapping over a T-shirt.

‘That’s him!’ I said.

‘How do you know? He just looks like someone in a crowd. And anyway, what’s he got to do with it?’

‘Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.’

Kat put her head to one side like I do sometimes, because it helps you to think. My theory is that it allows blood to pour into the side of the brain you need for whatever bit of thinking it is you have to do. The right-hand side is for logical deduction and analytical thinking and the left-hand side is for creative thought, and I think it is this side that inspiration comes from.