The London Eye Mystery (18 page)

‘You’re saying it’s my fault. That I’ve brought this on myself.’

‘No, Glo, not that, but maybe going to New York, for Salim, that was a step too—’

‘It wasn’t, it wasn’t,’ Aunt Gloria cried out. ‘I know my own boy. He wouldn’t do this to me, I know . . .’

She turned from the table. The sleeve of her dressing gown caught her plate and an onion bhajee went flying. Her shoulders shook. ‘I’m going to go out there and find him. I am. I don’t care if I have to walk from one end of London to the other.’ She staggered through the door into the hallway. Mum jumped up. ‘Glo! Don’t go! I didn’t mean . . .’

From where I was sitting I could see Aunt Gloria opening the front door, fiddling with the handle.

‘Get lost, Fai,’ she shouted.

‘Stop her, Ben,’ Mum said. ‘She’s out of her mind.’

Dad, looking dazed, got to his feet. Kat got up too. Rashid sat still, his mouth hanging open. Just as Aunt Gloria opened the front door, a siren came wailing up right outside. Lights flashed. There were voices in the front garden, people moving, confusion. A chair fell over and Rashid rocked on his chair and started groaning. ‘Please, God, please, no,’ he said.

A bad feeling went up my oesophagus.

The police had come, just when Detective Inspector Pearce had told me they would. But I hadn’t expected the siren.

And it didn’t sound like the sirens did when I’d played ambulances with Kat.

It sounded real and near and loud and bad.
The boy on the train. The boy on the slab. Salim or
not Salim.
I put my hands over my ears.
The general
synopsis at nineteen hundred: low Fitzroy a thousand
and eight expected just west of Rockall
. . . 

The Boy on the Train Again

Detective Inspector Pearce entered the house, leading Aunt Gloria by the elbow. She guided her into the kitchen and sat her down.

‘She looks like she needs a warm drink,’ the inspector said. ‘She’s in a state of shock.’ Kat poured a cup of tea. Rashid got up to give his place to Aunt Gloria. He sat her down and stroked her hair. Her hands shook and her lips chattered together as if she’d just come in from a snowstorm although it was warm and humid outside, about eighteen degrees.

‘Is there news?’ Mum said.

Detective Inspector Pearce didn’t reply until Aunt Gloria had taken a sip of her drink.

I felt Kat’s hand in mine, gripping hard. Inspector Pearce shook her head. ‘Some news, but neither good, nor bad. It’s more an update. Courtesy of Ted.’

Everybody stared at me.

‘Ted?’ said Mum.

‘Ted?’ said Dad.

‘Ted?’ said Kat.

I didn’t say anything. I looked at the kitchen floor.

‘Ted has worked out what happened to Salim the day he disappeared,’ Detective Inspector Pearce continued. ‘His conclusions agreed with where our enquiries were heading, but I have to say he got there before us.’

‘Ted!’ Kat said again. Her mouth was open and her jaw hung down.

‘We followed up on what Ted told us, but as yet we still don’t know where Salim is.’

Aunt Gloria moaned and put her head in her hands.

‘But we know who the boy on the train was.’

‘Salim?’ said Mum.

Detective Inspector Pearce’s hands went apart.

‘Not Salim,’ she said. ‘This is the boy on the train, here.’

Another woman police officer, in uniform, came into the room. With her was a boy, about Salim’s age, but not Salim. He was half hiding behind the officer’s tall body. He was chubby around the cheeks, dark-haired and Asian-looking, although it was hard to see him properly as he wore the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and part of his face.

‘
You!
’ Aunt Gloria gasped.

‘Hello, Marcus,’ I said.

Weather Detection

I suppose you want to know how I worked it out. Or maybe your brain works on a different operating system from other people’s like mine and you’ve worked it out too.

I’d done nothing but think from two minutes past noon on the day Salim disappeared, Monday, to when I’d phoned the police at 18.04, Wednesday. That’s fifty-four hours and two minutes of thinking, if you count sleeping time, which I do. You go on thinking in your sleep.

I’d gone over the nine theories again and again. We’d discounted theories one, two and eight by checking them out. Salim couldn’t have stayed on the pod for another ride, nor had my watch gone wrong, nor could he have hidden under somebody’s clothes without our noticing. Kat had convinced me that theory nine, that Salim had never got on the pod in the first place, was wrong. Theories five and seven (spontaneous combustion and the time warp) Kat had dismissed out of hand. I hadn’t. But there was another reason I’d finally agreed to cross them off, one I hadn’t told Kat. I’d counted the number of people who’d got on the pod. Twenty-one. And I counted the number who’d got off. Twenty-one. I realized that if Salim had spontaneously combusted or slipped into a time warp, only
twenty
people would have got off.

That left theories three, four and six. Three and four both depended on us having somehow missed Salim when he got out. I’d told the police there was only about a 2 per cent chance of our having missed him. Which meant there was a 98 per cent chance that Salim had emerged from the pod in disguise. At first we’d thought this theory unlikely. But the more I considered it over the fifty-four hours and two minutes, the more possible it seemed. When we went up in the London Eye with Dad the next day, I’d noticed a time when you could put a disguise on with nobody noticing. It’s when everyone turns to have their souvenir shot taken. Everyone faces one way for almost a full minute until the flash goes off. 

So I’d given the souvenir shot of Salim’s pod that Kat bought another look. I kept coming back to the pink sleeve – the one that we thought was the girl in the pink fluffy jacket at the back of the picture, waving at the camera. I don’t know when I first realized. Maybe it was the eighteen pictures that Kat took of our washing line when she was using up Salim’s film, with the sleeves of sweatshirts, jumpers and blouses waving in the wind. Or maybe it was the way I’d seen Kat struggle into her fur-collared jacket, the morning she’d rushed out to get the photos of the strange man enlarged. The sleeve in the souvenir shot was not somebody waving. It was somebody changing.

A pink sleeve. Waving or drowning. Waving or changing. It depended on how you looked at it. The girl in the pink fluffy jacket was Salim’s accomplice. They’d swapped identities in the pod. A wig, a jacket, sunglasses. That was all it needed. And I remembered Aunt Gloria saying how Salim was a practical joker. Not a theoretical joker, like me, but a practical one, which means he actually carried out his jokes. Maybe this was a practical joke on a big scale.

For a brief period I wondered if Salim had a girlfriend. A girlfriend whom nobody had mentioned. Maybe a girlfriend even Aunt Gloria didn’t know about. A factor X in the equation. The Coriolis force. The thing that had deflected Salim off his course. Then, in the fifty-four hours and two minutes of thinking time, another possibility occurred to me.

Marcus. The ‘Paki-Boy’. The ‘mosher’. The boy in
The Tempest
.

Salim said a ‘mate’ had called him
from Manchester
while we were crossing the Jubilee footbridge on the way to the Eye. Later we’d heard from the police that everybody questioned in Manchester, including Marcus, had said they’d not heard from Salim since he’d left. It was an inconsistency. Someone was lying.

Marcus, maybe.

The police reported on Salim’s friends’ alibis the day he disappeared. Marcus’s mum had said he was on a day out with the scouts. So I thought, maybe Marcus was out with the scouts the way Kat and I had gone swimming, or the way Kat was supposed to be at school that day when really she’d gone up to town to have her Hair Flair consultation. I didn’t know much about Marcus. Only that he and Salim were friends. That they were both half Asian, at an all-boys school. That they were moshers, which means casual, cool dudes. That they’d starred in
The
Tempest
at school. Salim had played Ferdinand. Somebody must have played the only female role –

Miranda, who Kat had told me was a dishrag. Maybe it was Marcus. Maybe that’s how they’d had the idea. Marcus. Very likely.

When the girl had got off the motorbike at the scooter show freestyle jumps, everybody had assumed she was a man, until she’d taken off her helmet and loosed her long hair. Maybe Kat and I had done the reverse: assumed the person in the pink fluffy jacket was a woman, just because she had long hair. Male or female, it depended how you looked at it.

Marcus. Almost certainly.

Of the twenty-one people leaving the pod, there had been no extra woman, no female who could have emerged from under the wig and sunglasses disguise. But there had been a lad. The lad we’d taken for the girl in the pink fluffy jacket’s boyfriend. The boy with chubby, brownish cheeks.

Marcus. Definitely.

That’s when I remembered Salim shaving off his moustache. If he was to become the girl in the pink fluffy jacket, he needed to be clean-shaven. As did Marcus. Everything pointed to Marcus. Then the final jigsaw piece fell into place: what the woman security guard said as we left Earl’s Court. I didn’t slot it into the rest of the pattern until the eightyseventh kick of the garden shed. Kat had asked her where the strange man called Christy had gone. She’d replied he’d gone home with a stomach bug. A bug she didn’t believe in.
With him it’s always the same

. . . Sick this, dentist that, dead uncle the other. Never
rains but it pours . . . Just like his name.
Detective Inspector Pearce had mentioned Marcus’s surname to us only once, but once was enough. Enough for me, at least, because I am going to be a meteorologist when I grow up. The name Flood had struck me as interesting all along. The strange man had lied to us in Earl’s Court and lied to us again in Mile End. Both times he’d known more than he said. He and Marcus were related. They were both called Flood. For some reason he had helped Marcus and Salim carry out their practical joke, maybe because that’s all he thought it was. But it wasn’t just a practical joke. It was also part of a bigger plan. A plan for Salim to run away. Because I think everybody knew by then. Salim hadn’t been abducted. He’d vanished by his own choice. He’d never wanted to go to New York. A clue to this had been the guidebook in his backpack. There were no creases on the spine, which meant Salim had never opened it. Which meant going to New York didn’t make him excited. But the London Eye did. And vanishing while riding it was the best and most exciting way of running away he could think of.

A weather detective is somebody who uses observations and measurements to make theories, and if the theories are right, they will correctly predict weather patterns. Finding out what had happened to Salim and where he was likely to be was exactly like that. I made observations and constructed theories and then found out more facts with Kat’s help, and when the facts and the theories fitted, I thought we’d be able to track Salim down, just like you track a storm system and predict where it will make landfall.

Only something had gone wrong.

Salim hadn’t appeared at the end of the trail. There was only Marcus.

And Marcus stood in the kitchen staring at the floor, and when everybody started talking at once to him, he started crying. His head was down but you could hear him and see his shoulders moving. And I got a very bad feeling in my oesophagus again.

Salim Supreme

Aunt Gloria loomed over Marcus in her dressing gown like a force-ten gale. ‘What do you know, Marcus? Where’s Salim?’ She grabbed Marcus’s sleeve. ‘Say something! Speak!’

Detective Inspector Pearce led her back to her chair. Mum brought Marcus a drink of lemonade and led him to another chair, but he refused to sit down or take the drink. He shook his head and his hood fell back. Then he wiped his face on his sleeve and looked up and stared at me. I remembered to lift up my lips, which Mr Shepherd says to do when you meet somebody new because it means you can be their friend. But Marcus’s lips didn’t move, which meant he didn’t want to be my friend.

‘Marcus is here to say sorry,’ Detective Inspector Pearce said. ‘He was too frightened to come forward earlier. He thought he’d get into trouble. Now he’s told us what he knows. I have here the statement he made earlier. And his story starts out just as Ted worked it out.’ She nodded at Kat. ‘With Kat’s help, I understand.’

‘My help?’ said Kat.

‘I’d never have worked it out without you, Kat,’ I said.

Detective Inspector Pearce continued. ‘Marcus’s mum is outside in a squad car, with another officer, waiting. She wanted you to hear his story too. When he’s done, we’ll take them home.’

‘But I don’t understand . . .’ Rashid squeezed his knuckles into his head.

‘Marcus and Salim spent several hours together the day Salim disappeared,’ Inspector Pearce explained. ‘Didn’t you, Marcus?’

Marcus nodded.

‘By arrangement. Then Marcus went back to Manchester on his own. Salim didn’t go. But he was supposed to, wasn’t he, Marcus?’

Marcus nodded again.

‘You see, Salim had planned to run away.’

‘No,’ Aunt Gloria moaned, putting her head in her hands.

‘But he didn’t. Not in the end. He changed his mind.’

Aunt Gloria looked up. ‘He changed his mind,’

she said softly. She nodded. ‘That’s right. He changed his mind.’

‘Do you want to explain, Marcus?’ Detective Inspector Pearce asked. ‘Or would you rather I read out your statement?’

There was a pause. Marcus put his hood back up so his face was hidden again. A voice you could hardly hear said, ‘The statement, miss.’ So Detective Inspector Pearce read out Marcus’s statement and this is what it said.

POLICE TRANSCRIPT OF STATEMENT MADE

BY WITNESS MARCUS FLOOD

My name is Marcus Flood and this is the truth. Salim is my best mate because before he joined my school last September they called me PakiBoy but now they don’t. I’m not from Pakistan. My mam’s from Bangladesh and my dad’s Irish but that didn’t stop Jason Smart grabbing my sandwiches every day and saying what’s the curried goat like today, Paki-Boy, and throwing them on the floor even though they were just cheese and tomato.