The Mystery of the Squashed Cockroach

by R. A. Spratt

  ‘The races are in five days and there are eight thousand suspects,’ said Loretta. ‘I may be stunningly beautiful and staggeringly intelligent, but even I need help with a problem of this magnitude.’

  ‘We’ll help you,’ said Fin, in his deep voice again. ‘We will?’ said April. It was not in her nature to be agreeable.

  ‘It’s only neighbourly,’ said Fin.

  ‘You’ve never wanted to be neighbourly before,’ said April. ‘When we lived in the city we had elderly neighbours who would have loved help occasionally and you never offered.’

  ‘I’ve grown as a person,’ said Fin.

  ‘You just think she’s pretty,’ accused April.

  ‘I do not!’ said Fin, turning red in the face.

  ‘You don’t?’ asked Loretta.

  ‘She is pretty,’ said Joe. ‘That’s just objectively true.’

  ‘I know,’ said Loretta with a smile.

  ‘Come on, April. Let’s help her,’ said Fin. ‘We need to get involved in some after-school activities, we might as well make cockroach murder investigating one of them. It beats violin lessons.’

  The following morning the Peski kids decided to eat breakfast in town. It wasn’t a hard decision, because after just twenty-four hours of living with Dad they had eaten all the food in his house. Even the disgusting high-fibre bran cereal was gone. Dad had offered to pick some vegetables, but no child wants to eat salad for breakfast, so Fin had persuaded Dad to give them some money instead, arguing that they should go into town and integrate with the local community while eating bacon and eggs.

  The Peski kids stood on the main street of town, considering their dining alternatives.

  ‘There’s not a lot of choice, is there?’ said Fin. There was a Chinese restaurant, the type that served food no actual Chinese person would recognise as coming from their country. Chips were included with every meal.

  ‘The Chinese restaurant isn’t open yet,’ said Joe.

  A few shops down there was the other extreme – The Leafy Green Bistro. A vegan fair-trade health food cafe that made its own bread entirely out of lentils.

  ‘I refuse to eat health food,’ said April stubbornly.

  ‘Arf!’ Pumpkin barked his agreement.

  This left only one alternative. The Good Times Cafe. The kids stared in through the front window. The cafe looked like it had been decorated in the 1950s and not updated since. Even the windows appeared not to have been cleaned in decades.

  ‘In the city they’d say this place had retro charm,’ said Fin.

  ‘Nah,’ said April. ‘They’d say it’s a dump.’

  ‘Yes, but a charming retro dump,’ said Fin.

  ‘There’s nothing charming about food poisoning,’ said April, ‘which is what we’ll get if they wash their dishes as rarely as they wash these windows.’

  ‘I don’t care. They’ve got five-dollar egg and bacon rolls,’ said Joe, pointing to a handwritten sign sticky-taped to the inside of the glass door. ‘I’m going in.’

  The inside was just as underwhelming as the exterior. All the tables were booths. Most of the vinyl seats had cracks that had been half-heartedly ‘fixed’ with gaffer tape and the walls were lined with photographs of Currawong one hundred years ago. April peered at one, then another, then turned and looked out at the street.

  ‘Currawong one hundred years ago looks exactly the same as it does now,’ said April.

  There was absolutely no difference in the street-scape. The fire station, the newsagency, the pub – they all looked exactly the same in the sepia photographs as they did in full colour out on the street.

  ‘There are cars now,’ said Fin. He pointed to the vehicles in the street. ‘In the photos, it’s horse-drawn carts.’

  April looked out the window just as a horse-drawn cart drove down the middle of the road. She smiled triumphantly.

  ‘I stand corrected,’ said Fin.

  They chose a booth after a brief wrestle over who would sit in the seat facing the door, which April won. Pumpkin scrambled up on the seat next to her and they all settled down to look at the menu.

  A sulky waitress dressed entirely in black, including black nail polish and lipstick, begrudgingly made her way over to their table. She had earbuds in with music playing so loudly the Peski kids could hear the pounding beat of death metal from where they were sitting. The waitress sighed, took one bud out of her ear and turned her notepad to a new page. Joe noticed that her name tag read ‘Hi, my name is Joy.’ He suddenly realised that Joy had been watching him as he stared at her chest. He gulped.

  ‘Well?’ said Joy.

  ‘W-w-w-w-w …’ Joe’s stammer always grew worse when he was nervous or someone frightened him.

  ‘We’ll have three egg and bacon rolls and three chocolate milkshakes, please,’ said Fin.

  ‘I want lime,’ said April.

  ‘Lime milkshakes are gross,’ said Fin.

  ‘So are you!’ said April, slapping the menu shut and kicking him under the table at the same time.

  Pumpkin started barking. He had spotted a rat under another table and ran off to chase it.

  Joy sighed again then slowly made her way over to the kitchen service hatch to pin up their order.

  ‘Do you think she suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome?’ asked Fin.

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ said April. ‘This awful town would have that effect on anybody.’

  ‘We should start work investigating the mystery of Loretta’s dead cockroach,’ said Fin.

  ‘Fine,’ said April. She pointed to two boys sitting at a booth on the other side of the diner. ‘There are two kids over there shoving leaves into a shoebox. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that either they’re weirdos with a thing for leaves, or they’ve got a cockroach in there.’

  ‘That’s Animesh and Kieran,’ said Fin. He knew this because he’d tried to memorise his classmates’ names the day before. ‘You remember, Pumpkin tore Kieran’s pants yesterday in PE.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said April. ‘Let’s just go and talk to them.’

  April slid out of the booth and set off, striding across the diner. Fin hurried to catch up with her as she confronted the two boys.

  ‘What have you got in the box?’ demanded April.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Animesh, putting his hands protectively on top of the box.

  ‘You’re lying,’ said April. ‘I saw you shoving leaves in there, so at the very least you’ve got leaves inside.’

  ‘April, maybe you should try being polite,’ muttered Fin.

  ‘Ergh,’ said April, making a disparaging noise in the back of her throat. ‘I’m not good at that, so I’m not going to bother.’

  Fin tried instead. ‘What my sister means is, sorry to intrude, but have you got a cockroach in there?’ asked Fin.

  Kieran picked up the shoebox and hugged it to his chest.

  ‘You’re new here so you don’t understand,’ said Kieran. ‘People mind their own business when it comes to cockroaches.’

  April rolled her eyes. ‘The social subtleties of this town are more complicated than the French court under Louis the fourteenth.’

  ‘Huh?’ said Animesh.

  ‘It’s because we’re new that we’re asking,’ said Fin. ‘We’ve got our own cockroach and we want to know how to prepare it for the race. What should we be feeding it? How should we be training it?’

  ‘You have to spend time with your roach. Get to know it, get to know how it thinks,’ said Kieran. He tapped the side of his forehead and squinted as he said this, as if he were really straining to think on the same wavelength as an insect right at that moment.

  ‘I bet you’ve got a head start on knowing how a cockroach thinks,’ said April. ‘You’ve got about as many brain cells.’

  ‘April,’ said Fin with a forced smile, ‘please, be nice.’

  ‘I am being nice,’ protested April. ‘I haven’t thumped anyone yet, have I?’

  ‘So have you go
t any tips for us?’ asked Fin, smiling at Kieran and Animesh.

  ‘Why are you asking them for tips?’ said April. ‘We’re meant to be asking about Loretta’s cockroach.’

  ‘You know Loretta Viswanathan?’ asked Animesh, with a look of panic on his face.

  ‘Kind of,’ said Fin. ‘She’s our next-door neighbour.’ Animesh and Kieran leapt to their feet and gathered up their bags. ‘You’re spying for the enemy!’

  ‘We only met her yesterday,’ said April. ‘It’s not like she’s our friend.’

  ‘Yeah, April doesn’t have friends,’ said Fin. ‘She’s too horrible.’

  April nodded because this was entirely true.

  ‘So she’s paying you to spy for her, is she?’ demanded Kieran. ‘That would be right. Those rich kids over at St Anthony’s will stoop to anything.’

  While April and Fin cross-examined Kieran and Animesh, Joe was eating his egg and bacon roll. The waitress may have looked like an extra from a horror movie, but the chef was clearly a maestro. The bacon was crispy and the egg was cooked ‘over easy’ so the yolk exploded and dripped down his hands as he ate. It was the perfect sandwich. Joe sighed with contentment.

  Suddenly, something flicked him on the back of the head. Joe instinctively rubbed the spot, although there was nothing there anymore. Then he looked around. There was a folded-up note lying on the seat behind him. Joe unfolded the note. It read …

  I think you’re dishy. Come with me to the Ball.

  Daisy Odinsdottir.

  Joe looked up. There was a group of girls sitting in a booth and staring at him. They all giggled and turned away. Except for one girl. She smiled. Joe pointed at her, then at the note with a questioning look on his face as if to say, ‘Is this from you?’. She nodded with a smile, blew him a kiss, then turned back to her friends.

  Joe went bright red. He was terrified. Was this some sort of practical joke? By ‘ball’ he assumed she meant a dance. But he couldn’t believe that this strange town would actually have one of those. Surely that sort of thing only happened in fairytales and movies. And why on earth would an apparently attractive girl want to go with him? She must be under some sort of misapprehension that he was much more interesting than he was. Perhaps April had been spreading wild rumours that he was a billionaire’s grandson, or seventeenth in line to the throne of Borneo. That was the type of thing April would do, thinking it was hysterically funny.

  Joe couldn’t believe a girl would actually ask him on a date. He had never been on a date before. He had thought about it, but he couldn’t see any way of going on a date without speaking, so he had never pursued the idea.

  Meanwhile, back on the other side of the diner, April was not letting up on Animesh and Kieran. ‘Just show us the cockroach,’ demanded April.

  ‘Please,’ added Fin. ‘We’re new here. We’re trying to understand your local customs so we can learn how to fit in. I thought people here in Currawong were meant to be friendly.’

  Appealing to his Currawongian spirit must have worked, because Kieran relented and carefully lifted the lid. They leaned forward to get a closer look.

  ‘It is just a box full of leaves,’ said April, rolling her eyes. ‘Wow, I didn’t see that coming.’

  ‘He’s under the leaves, nitwit,’ said Kieran scathingly. Animesh reached in and lifted a clump of leaves. That’s when they saw it. A wet brown stain pressed into the cardboard floor of the box. From the flecks of exoskeleton and disembodied legs, this flat brown stain had clearly, until recently, been a living cockroach.

  ‘Nooooo!’ cried Animesh, bursting into tears.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ said Kieran. He lifted up the rest of the leaves, but the squashed stain was the only cockroach in the box.

  ‘Look at that,’ said April. ‘There’s a footprint.’ Over the top of the squashed stain was the dusty shape of a shoe.

  ‘You!’ screamed Animesh. ‘You did this!’

  ‘I did not!’ protested April. ‘That’s just stupid. If I was going to kill your cockroach, I wouldn’t come over and chat with you afterwards, would I?’

  ‘You crazy city kids will do anything for attention,’ accused Animesh.

  ‘It can’t have been me,’ said April. ‘My shoe doesn’t match that footprint. Here look …’ She took off her shoe and held it over the footprint. It was the exact same size.

  ‘That’s a precise match!’ yelled Animesh.

  April looked at the sole of her shoe.

  ‘The tread pattern is the same too!’ accused Kieran.

  Even April was alarmed. She was racking her memory to think if she had stepped on the cockroach and forgotten about it, but that was impossible.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ said April. She sounded unsure, even to herself.

  ‘There must be loads of people with the same shoe size,’ said Fin.

  ‘Yeah, but no one else is an outsider,’ said Kieran, narrowing his eyes.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ asked April.

  ‘I think it means we’re outsiders,’ said Fin. ‘Which is technically true.’

  ‘Outsiders never understand the races,’ said Kieran. ‘They don’t get it. They don’t appreciate the honour and the history of the festival.’

  ‘They just think cockroaches are gross and want to stomp on them,’ added Animesh.

  ‘Yeah!’ said someone else in the diner. Other Currawong residents were starting to mutter and glare.

  ‘If I didn’t think I was about to become the victim of physical violence, I would find this situation interesting,’ said Fin, looking about. ‘This is clearly how lynch mobs get started.’

  Joy, the waitress, picked up the wall phone behind the counter and started dialling.

  ‘We are trying to do the right thing here. The only reason we were talking to you in the first place,’ said April, now talking to the whole diner, ‘was because we’re investigating who killed Loretta Viswanathan’s cockroach.’

  There were gasps and exclamations of shock from customers all around the cafe.

  ‘What?’ asked Fin. ‘What’s the big deal?’

  ‘Loretta Viswanathan,’ said Animesh coldly, ‘is unsportsmanlike.’

  The entire cafe looked very serious and sober about this. Even Joy managed to look more miserable at the mention of Loretta’s name.

  ‘Most professional athletes are unsportsmanlike,’ said April. ‘That’s how they get to be so good at sport.’

  ‘You’d better come along with me,’ said a man with a gruff voice.

  April turned, about to yell at whoever had the temerity to interrupt when she noticed the colour of his shirt. It was blue. She looked up. The owner of the blue shirt also had epaulets, a walkie-talkie and a gun holster. It was a police officer.

  ‘You must be the new kids I’ve heard so much about,’ said the officer. ‘I’m Senior Constable Pike and I’m the law in this town.’

  Fin failed to suppress a snigger.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Constable Pike.

  ‘You said “I’m the law in this town”,’ said Fin. ‘You sound like a sheriff in a cowboy movie.

  Constable Pike scowled. ‘We’ll talk about this down at the station.’

  Joe hurried over. He normally let April and Fin sort out their conflicts with other kids. April got into so many arguments that if he got involved in them all, he would be busy all day. But when an actual official law enforcement officer turns up, he had to step up and be the responsible big brother. ‘It’s okay, it’s j-j-just kid stuff. We’ll sort it out.’

  ‘This is not just kid stuff,’ said Constable Pike. ‘These two individuals have created a disturbance at a public dining establishment.’

  April spun around and glared at Joy. ‘You snitched?’ she accused.

  Joy glared sulkily back. ‘Ahuh,’ she confirmed.

  ‘This town is insane,’ said April.

  ‘Come with me, you three,’ said Constable Pike, taking a step towards the doorway.
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br />   ‘No,’ said Fin. ‘You can’t make us go to the police station unless you arrest us.’

  ‘That’s the way it’s going to be, is it?’ demanded Constable Pike, getting angry now. ‘So you’re city kids, all studied up on your legal rights, are you? Been reading lots of fancy law books?’

  ‘No,’ said Fin. ‘I just watch a lot of cop shows on TV.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Constable Pike. ‘Then I am arresting you.’

  ‘W-W-What for?’ asked Joe, alarmed at how this situation was billowing out of control.

  ‘Swearing at a police officer,’ said Constable Pike.

  ‘But we haven’t sworn at you,’ said Fin.

  ‘Not yet,’ muttered April.

  Constable Pike thought hard for a moment, then an idea came to him. ‘Intimidation!’

  Fin looked at April and then at the police officer, who was two feet taller and easily twice her body weight. ‘You’re intimidated by her?’

  Constable Pike appeared to be boiling with rage now. He pressed his lips together and his face turned red. He put his hand on his hips, ready to have a good yell at the Peski kids when suddenly Pumpkin launched into action. Until this point he had been distracted by eating the rat he had killed, but now he noticed that his mistress needed him and he was energised. Pumpkin bounded across the restaurant and sank his teeth into Constable Pike’s ankle.

  ‘Aaaaaggghhh!’ cried Constable Pike, trying to pull his leg away from Pumpkin. But the dog just took this to be a lovely game, and sunk his teeth in deeper as the police officer waved his leg back and forth in the air. ‘That’s it. I’m arresting you for keeping a dangerous animal!’

  Ten minutes later, the Peski kids were all assembled at the police station, which was actually a charming sandstone building with beautiful flower-boxes outside every window. There wasn’t a lot of crime in Currawong, so Constable Pike spent a fair bit of time gardening. April was handcuffed to her chair. In the end, she really had assaulted the constable when he couldn’t take the shin injuries anymore and had locked Pumpkin in a holding cell.

  Now the three Peski kids were sitting across from Constable Pike in an interview room. Mr Lang, their guidance counsellor, was also present. He had been called down from the school to stand in as a responsible adult witness. They’d called Dad first but he hadn’t answered the phone.