The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

by Mark Haddon

  Harold Snelling, who was an expert in fake photography, said

  These dancing figures are not made of paper nor any fabric; they are not painted on a photographic background—but what gets me most is that all these figures have moved during the exposure.

  But he was being stupid because paper would move during an exposure, and the exposure was very long because in the photograph you can see a little waterfall in the background and it is blurred.

  Then Sir Arthur Conan Doyle heard about the pictures and he said he believed they were real in an article in a magazine called The Strand. But he was being stupid, too, because if you look at the pictures you can see that the fairies look just like fairies in old books and they have wings and dresses and tights and shoes, which is like aliens landing on earth and being like Daleks from Doctor Who or Imperial Stormtroopers from the Death Star in Star Wars or little green men like in cartoons of aliens.

  And in 1981 a man called Joe Cooper interviewed Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths for an article in a magazine called The Unexplained and Elsie Wright said all 5 photographs had been faked and Frances Griffiths said 4 had been faked but one was real. And they said Elsie had drawn the fairies from a book called Princess Mary's Gift Book by Arthur Shepperson.

  And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.

  And it shows that something called Occam's razor is true. And Occam's razor is not a razor that men shave with but a Law, and it says

  Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

  Which is Latin and it means

  No more things should be presumed to exist than are

  absolutely necessary.

  Which means that a murder victim is usually killed by someone known to them and fairies are made out of paper and you can't talk to someone who is dead.

  149. When I went to school on Monday, Siobhan asked me why I had a bruise on the side of my face. I said that Father was angry and he had grabbed me so I had hit him and then we had a fight. Siobhan asked whether Father had hit me and I said I didn't know because I got very cross and it made my memory go strange. And then she asked if Father had hit me because he was angry. And I said he didn't hit me, he grabbed me, but he was angry. And Siobhan asked if he grabbed me hard, and I said that he had grabbed me hard. And Siobhan asked if I was frightened about going home, and I said I wasn't. And then she asked me if I wanted to talk about it anymore, and I said that I didn't. And then she said, “OK,” and we didn't talk about it anymore, because grabbing is OK if it is on your arm or your shoulder when you are angry, but you can't grab someone's hair or their face. But hitting is not allowed, except if you are already in a fight with someone, then it is not so bad.

  And when I got home from school Father was still at work, so I went into the kitchen and took the key out of the little china jug shaped like a nun and opened the back door and went outside and looked inside the dustbin to find my book.

  I wanted to get my book back because I liked writing it. I liked having a project to do and I liked it especially if it was a difficult project like a book. Also I still didn't know who had killed Wellington and my book was where I had kept all the clues that I had discovered and I did not want them to be thrown away.

  But my book wasn't in the dustbin.

  I put the lid back on the dustbin and walked down the garden to have a look in the bin where Father keeps the garden waste, such as lawn clippings and apples that have fallen off the trees, but my book wasn't in there either.

  I wondered if Father had put it into his van and driven to the tip and put it into one of the big bins there, but I did not want that to be true because then I would never see it again.

  One other possibility was that Father had hidden my book somewhere in the house. So I decided to do some detecting and see if I could find it. Except I had to keep listening really hard all the time so I would hear his van when he pulled up outside the house so he wouldn't catch me being a detective.

  I started by looking in the kitchen. My book was approximately 25 cm × 35 cm × 1 cm so it couldn't be hidden in a very small place, which meant that I didn't have to look in any really small places. I looked on top of the cupboards and down the back of drawers and under the oven and I used my special Mag-Lite torch and a piece of mirror from the utility room to help me see into the dark spaces at the back of the cupboards where the mice used to get in from the garden and have their babies.

  Then I detected in the utility room.

  Then I detected in the dining room.

  Then I detected in the living room, where I found the missing wheel from my Airfix Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-6 model under the sofa.

  Then I thought I heard Father coming through the front door and I jumped and I tried to stand up fast and I banged my knee on the corner of the coffee table and it hurt a lot, but it was only one of the drug people next door dropping something on the floor.

  Then I went upstairs, but I didn't do any detecting in my own room because I reasoned that Father wouldn't hide something from me in my own room unless he was being very clever and doing what is called a Double Bluff like in a real murder mystery novel, so I decided to look in my own room only if I couldn't find the book anywhere else.

  I detected in the bathroom, but the only place to look was in the airing cupboard and there was nothing in there.

  Which meant that the only room left to detect in was Father's bedroom. I didn't know whether I should look in there because he had told me before not to mess with anything in his room. But if he was going to hide something from me, the best place to hide it would be in his room.

  So I told myself I would not mess with things in his room. I would move them and then I would move them back. And he would never know I had done it so he wouldn't be angry.

  I started by looking under the bed. There were 7 shoes and a comb with lots of hair in it and a piece of copper pipe and a chocolate biscuit and a porn magazine called Fiesta and a dead bee and a Homer Simpson pattern tie and a wooden spoon, but not my book.

  Then I looked in the drawers on either side of the dressing table, but these only contained aspirin and nail clippers and batteries and dental floss and a tampon and tissues and a spare false tooth in case Father lost the false tooth he had to fill the gap where he knocked a tooth out when he fell off the ladder putting a bird box up in the garden, but my book wasn't in there either.

  Then I looked in his clothes cupboard. This was full of his clothes on hangers. There was also a little shelf at the top which I could see onto if I stood on the bed, but I had to take my shoes off in case I left a dirty footprint that would be a clue if Father decided to do some detecting. But the only things on the shelf were more porn magazines and a broken sandwich toaster and 12 wire coat hangers and an old hair dryer that used to belong to Mother.

  In the bottom of the cupboard was a large plastic toolbox which was full of tools for doing Do It Yourself, like a drill and a paintbrush and some screws and a hammer, but I could see these without opening the box because it was made of transparent gray plastic.

  Then I saw that there was another box underneath the toolbox, so I lifted the toolbox out of the cupboard. The other box was an old cardboard box that is called a shirt box because people used to buy shirts in them. And when I opened the shirt box I saw my book was inside it.

  Then I didn't know what to do.

  I was happy because Father hadn't thrown my book away. But if I took the book he would know I had been messing with things in his room and he would be very angry and I had promised not to mess with things in his room.

  Then I heard his van pulling up outside the house and I knew that I had to think fast and be clever. So I decided that I would leave the book where it was because I reasoned that Father wasn't going to throw it away if he had put it into the shirt box and I could carry on writing in another book that I would keep really secret and then, maybe later, he might change his mind and let me have the first book back again and
I could copy the new book into it. And if he never gave it back to me I would be able to remember most of what I had written, so I would put it all into the second secret book and if there were bits I wanted to check to make sure I had remembered them correctly I could come into his room when he was out and check.

  Then I heard Father shutting the door of the van.

  And that was when I saw the envelope.

  It was an envelope addressed to me and it was lying under my book in the shirt box with some other envelopes. I picked it up. It had never been opened. It said

  Christopher Boone

  36 Randolph Street

  Swindon

  Wiltshire

  Then I noticed that there were lots of other envelopes and they were all addressed to me. And this was interesting and confusing.

  And then I noticed how the words Christopher and Swindon were written. They were written like this

  I only know 3 people who do little circles instead of dots over the letter i. And one of them is Siobhan, and one of them was Mr. Loxely, who used to teach at the school, and one of them was Mother.

  And then I heard Father opening the front door, so I took one envelope from under the book and I put the lid back on the shirt box and I put the toolbox back on top of it and I closed the cupboard door really carefully.

  Then Father called out, “Christopher?”

  I said nothing because he might be able to hear where I was calling from. I stood up and walked around the bed to the door, holding the envelope, trying to make as little noise as possible.

  Father was standing at the bottom of the stairs and I thought he might see me, but he was flicking through the post which had come that morning so his head was pointing downward. Then he walked away from the foot of the stairs toward the kitchen and I closed the door of his room very quietly and went into my own room.

  I wanted to look at the envelope but I didn't want to make Father angry, so I hid the envelope underneath my mattress. Then I walked downstairs and said hello to Father.

  And he said, “So, what have you been up to today, young man?”

  And I said, “Today we did Life Skills with Mrs. Gray. Which was Using Money and Public Transport. And I had tomato soup for lunch, and 3 apples. And I practiced some maths in the afternoon and we went for a walk in the park with Mrs. Peters and collected leaves for making collages.”

  And Father said, “Excellent, excellent. What do you fancy for chow tonight?”

  Chow is food.

  I said I wanted baked beans and broccoli.

  And Father said, “I think that can be very easily arranged.”

  Then I sat on the sofa and I read some more of the book I was reading called Chaos by James Gleick.

  Then I went into the kitchen and had my baked beans and broccoli while Father had sausages and eggs and fried bread and a mug of tea.

  Then Father said, “I'm going to put those shelves up in the living room, if that's all right with you. I'll make a bit of a racket, I'm afraid, so if you want to watch television we're going to have to shift it upstairs.”

  And I said, “I'll go and be on my own in my room.”

  And he said, “Good man.”

  And I said, “Thank you for supper,” because that is being polite.

  And he said, “No problem, kiddo.”

  And I went up to my room.

  And when I was in my room I shut the door and I took out the envelope from underneath my mattress. I held the letter up to the light to see if I could detect what was inside the envelope, but the paper of the envelope was too thick. I wondered whether I should open the envelope because it was something I had taken from Father's room. But then I reasoned that it was addressed to me so it belonged to me so it was OK to open it.

  So I opened the envelope.

  Inside there was a letter.

  And this was what was written in the letter

  451c Chapter Road

  Willesden

  London NW2 5NG

  0208 887 8907

  Dear Christopher,

  I'm sorry it's been such a very long time since I wrote my last letter to you. I've been very busy. I've got a new job working as a secretery for a factory that makes things out of steel. You'd like it a lot. The factory is full of huge machines that make the steel and cut it and bend it into watever shapes they need. This week they're making a roof for a cafe in a shopping centre in Birmingham. It's shaped like a huge flower and they're going to stretch canvas over it to make it look like an enormus tent.

  Also we've moved into the new flat at last as you can see from the address. It's not as nice as the old one and I don't like Willesden very much, but it's easier for Roger to get to work and he's bought it (he only rented the other one), so we can get our own furnature and paint the walls the colour we want to.

  And that's why it's such a long time since I wrote my last letter to you because it's been hard work packing up all our things and then unpacking them and then getting used to this new job.

  I'm very tired now and I must go to sleep and I want to put this into the letterbox tomorrow morning, so I'll sign off now and write you another letter soon.

  You haven't written to me yet, so I know that you are probably still angry with me. I'm sorry Christopher. But I still love you. I hope you don't stay angry with me forever. And I'd love it if you were able to write me a letter (but remember to send it to the new address!).

  I think about you all the time.

  Lots of Love,

  Your Mum

  X X X X X X

  Then I was really confused because Mother had never worked as a secretary for a firm that made things out of steel. Mother had worked as a secretary for a big garage in the center of town. And Mother had never lived in London. Mother had always lived with us. And Mother had never written a letter to me before.

  There was no date on the letter so I couldn't work out when Mother had written the letter and I wondered whether someone else had written the letter and pretended to be Mother.

  And then I looked at the front of the envelope and I saw that there was a postmark and there was a date on the postmark and it was quite difficult to read, but it said

  Which meant that the letter was posted on 16 October 1997, which was 18 months after Mother had died.

  And then the door of my bedroom opened and Father said, “What are you doing?”

  I said, “I'm reading a letter.”

  And he said, “I've finished the drilling. That David Attenborough nature program's on telly if you're interested.”

  I said, “OK.”

  Then he went downstairs again.

  I looked at the letter and thought really hard. It was a mystery and I couldn't work it out. Perhaps the letter was in the wrong envelope and it had been written before Mother had died. But why was she writing from London? The longest she had been away was a week when she went to visit her cousin Ruth, who had cancer, but Ruth lived in Manchester.

  And then I thought that perhaps it wasn't a letter from Mother. Perhaps it was a letter to another person called Christopher, from that Christopher's mother.

  I was excited. When I started writing my book there was only one mystery I had to solve. Now there were two.

  I decided that I would not think about it anymore that night because I didn't have enough information and could easily Leap to the Wrong Conclusions like Mr. Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard, which is a dangerous thing to do because you should make sure you have all the available clues before you start deducing things. That way you are much less likely to make a mistake.

  I decided that I would wait until Father was out of the house. Then I would go into the cupboard in his bedroom and look at the other letters and see who they were from and what they said.

  I folded the letter and hid it under my mattress in case Father found it and got cross. Then I went downstairs and watched the television.

  151. Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just
that scientists haven't found the answer yet.

  For example, some people believe in the ghosts of people who have come back from the dead. And Uncle Terry said that he saw a ghost in a shoe shop in a shopping center in Northampton because he was going down into the basement when he saw someone dressed in gray walk across the bottom of the stairs. But when he got to the bottom of the stairs the basement was empty and there were no doors.

  When he told the lady on the till upstairs, they said it was called Tuck and he was a ghost of a Franciscan friar who used to live in the monastery which was on the same site hundreds of years ago, which was why the shopping center was called Greyfriars Shopping Center, and they were used to him and not frightened at all.

  Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people's brains, or something about the earth's magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won't be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.

  But sometimes a mystery isn't a mystery. And this is an example of a mystery which isn't a mystery.

  We have a pond at the school, with frogs in it, which are there so we can learn how to treat animals with kindness and respect, because some of the children at school are horrible to animals and think it's funny to crush worms or throw stones at cats.

  And some years there are lots of frogs in the pond, and some years there are very few. And if you drew a graph of how many frogs there were in the pond, it would look like this (but this graph is what's called hypothetical, which means that the numbers aren't the real numbers, it is just an illustration)

  And if you looked at the graph you might think that there was a really cold winter in 1987 and 1988 and 1989 and 1997, or that there was a heron which came and ate lots of the frogs (sometimes there is a heron who comes and tries to eat the frogs, but there is chicken wire over the pond to stop it).