Apart from Cornish’s nuclear power-plant, there was other electronic stuff at Quicklime’s that they definitely did not want the outside world to know about. So Grusom was the only man for the job.
Now that he’d established that there was definitely a murder scene, Grusom called all the teaching staff, servants and other various characters into the school’s Grate Hall. He had laid a line of magic beans across the doorway and, as each person entered, they were forced to step over the magic beans under Grusom’s scrutiny. Every now and then he made someone go back over the line of beans, remove all the metal objects from their pockets and cross the line again.
Finally everyone was assembled.6
Grusom cleared his throat, then asked them this question. ‘Is there anyone here who knew the deceased, Professor Randolph Open-Graves?’
Avid scanned the room with her expert eye to see who was lying. Because this was not a roomful of ordinary human beings, her expert eye began to twitch and she felt as if she had been out in the sun too long without a hat.
No one did, or if they did they were not admitting it. And if someone had known Professor Open-Graves, they were incredibly brilliant at hiding the fact, because Grusom got no feedback at all from the beans. Not one single hair on the back of his neck so much as tingled, though he did get the feeling that there was something small and hairy wriggling in his left ear, which always happened when someone nearby was keeping a secret, or when there really was something like a cockroach or an earwig in his ear.7
‘We did have a Norman Open-Graves here many years ago,’ said the headmaster, ‘but it was a very long time ago, long before my time.’
‘And what, if I may ask, is your time, exactly?’ said Avid.
‘Half past seven,’ said the headmaster. His complete lack of hesitation did not pass Grusom unnoticed. Only someone with something to hide would have answered so quickly.
Grusom scanned the room with a pocket scanner and fed the results into his laptop. A quick analysis told him that every single person there had something to hide, even himself and his beautiful assistant. If indeed she was his assistant. Suddenly it occurred to Grusom that maybe Avid was just too perfect. He would have to keep his eye on her.
‘No one is to leave the school without my permission,’ he said.
‘What about students?’ said the headmaster. ‘Most of them go home every day after lessons.’
‘No one,’ said Grusom.
‘Does everyone have to get permission in person from you?’ asked Matron.
‘Umm, yes,’ said Grusom, ‘or from my assistant.’
‘That could take hours,’ said the Matron. ‘The last children wouldn’t get home until after it was time to leave for school again the day after tomorrow.’
‘The parents will be furious,’ said the headmaster. ‘And you must remember they’re witches and wizards with some seriously awesome powers.’
‘Look, I’m investigating a murder here,’ said Grusom. ‘I will not be threatened.’
‘No, you won’t,’ said the headmaster. ‘You’ll be turned into a toad.’
‘And that’s if you’re lucky,’ said Matron.
‘And if I’m not lucky?’
‘You’ll be turned inside out.’
‘In that case,’ said Grusom, ‘I have decided that I will be threatened and everyone under the age of sixteen may go home as normal.’
‘Some of our students are over three hundred years old,’ said Matron.
‘In that case, everyone under five foot six can leave.’
‘The Worple quads – Beryl, Beryl, Beryl and Beryl – are over three metres tall and they’re only nine,’ said the Matron.
‘And Elanora Bedlam, the cook, is only five foot tall,’ the headmaster added, ‘though she is five foot nine wide.’
‘Yes, but she doesn’t go home because she lives here,’ Matron added.
‘Well … well …’ Grusom began. ‘Beryl, Beryl, Beryl and … Beryl? Do you mean each child has the same name?’
‘Yes, they’re identical quads.’
‘But how do you tell them apart?’ said Grusom.
‘We don’t.’
When Grusom had been assigned to the case, it had looked pretty straightforward. Quicklime College was so remote that he assumed the murderer would still be there. All he would have to do was stop everyone leaving and question them one by one. Now he was beginning to wish he had taken the other case that had come into the office that day – the Body-In-The-Box-Of-Cornflakes Case, or, to be precise, the Body-In-Three-Hundred-And Twenty-Seven-Boxes-Of-Cornflakes Case.
‘OK, everyone can go now,’ said Grusom, holding up his hand for silence. ‘Though I don’t mean “go” in the sense of “go home” or “go to another town or another valley” or …’
By the time he’d finished adding to his list of places he didn’t mean, there was only him and Avid left in the room and a skinny shape lurking in the shadows that might have been a grandfather clock, but was actually a person.
‘Do you want my help?’ it said.
‘And who are you?’ said Grusom, turning to face a sickly looking, skinny teenager.
‘Winchflat Flood,’ said Winchflat Flood.
‘Can you throw any light on the case?’ said Grusom.
‘Yes,’ said Winchflat, ‘I happen to know that there is someone in the school who probably knew the deceased.’
‘Who?’
‘The school cook,’ said Winchflat. ‘Come with me.’
Grusom was immediately suspicious. What if this weird boy was the one who had killed the professor and he was leading Grusom into a trap – a trap that would kill him by turning him into a bowl of vegetable soup? The boy certainly looked like someone who might know how to do that.
‘Why don’t you bring the evidence to me here?’ he said.
‘OK,’ said Winchflat and left.
Five minutes later Winchflat reappeared carrying an enormous leather-bound book. It was obviously very, very old. It had brass corners and a brass lock that had appeared to have been forced open with a screwdriver. The leather was cracked and split and there were dozens of extra sheets of paper sticking out from between the ancient pages. This was Elanora Bedlam’s cookbook, written three hundred and twenty-seven years ago by the famous witch-cook Belladonna Bedlam, Elanora’s great-great-not-so-very-great-great-great-grandmother, and added to over the following generations of Bedlams.
Winchflat laid the book on the table and opened it. Riffling through some loose pages, he pulled out a fairly new sheet and handed it to Grusom.
‘Look,’ he said.
‘A soup recipe,’ said Grusom. ‘So what?’
‘Look closer,’ said Winchflat.
Avid grabbed the sheet from her boss and read: ‘“Granny Priscilla’s Red Cabbage Soup” blah di blah di blah di oh my goodness …’
‘See?’ said Winchflat.
‘I do indeed,’ said Avid.
‘What is it?’ said Grusom.
‘The ingredients, boss,’ said Avid. ‘They include five grams of Tristan da Cunha bus tickets and seven Giant Patagonian Thistle flowers.’
‘So?’
‘The only place the Giant Patagonian Thistle grows is in this valley.’
‘So what are we saying? Our victim was here because he wanted to make some soup?’
‘Possibly,’ said Winchflat. ‘But turn the recipe over.’
There was a family tree on the other side. It showed that Granny Priscilla Open-Graves, the inventor of the soup, was not only Professor Randolf Open-Graves’s aunt, she was also the second cousin of Quicklime’s cook, Elanora Bedlam.
‘So the cook is related to the victim, which presumably meant she knew him,’ said Grusom. ‘I knew someone wasn’t telling the truth. Go and fetch her.’
‘She’s not there,’ said Winchflat. ‘There’s no sign of her.’
When Avid asked Winchflat how he knew about the family tree on the back of the soup recipe, he tapped the side
of his nose and winked.
‘Ask no questions, hear no lies,’ he said.
‘No,’ Avid said. ‘Ask no questions, get no answers.’
‘Well, actually, there’s no mystery,’ said Winchflat. ‘I have read the entire school library and every other book I could find at Quicklime’s, including all the cookery books in the kitchen.
‘And,’ he added, ‘I remember every single word of every single thing I have ever read. All I had to do was sift through my memory looking for the words “Open-Graves”.’8
Elanora Bedlam was not in the kitchen. She was not even in the old pig-boiling cauldron where she took her afternoon nap.
The kitchen was a dark sweet-smelling place with heavy bolted oak doors leading into cellars and storerooms that held not only porridge, tea and flour, but food that crawled and throbbed and was as likely to eat you as you were to eat it. Sickly fluids oozed from underneath three of the doors. Small zombies – who looked as if they had once been rats – were soaking up the fluids with sponges and squeezing them out into a row of copper saucepans bubbling gently away on a long black stove.
The kitchens were in the oldest part of the school and had been there long before electricity had been invented. Elanora Bedlam’s ancestors, who had been the school cooks before her, hadn’t liked the sound of electricity so it had never been installed in the kitchen. No one needs an electric mixer when they can hold a bowl of cake mix in their arms and spin faster than a bullet. No one needs a fridge when they can turn blood to ice simply by breathing on it. These skills, and many others, were why the Bedlam family were the school cooks.
The kitchens of Quicklime College were not for the faint-hearted.9 Even Grusom, who had seen some terrible things in his job, couldn’t wait to get out of the place.
They decided to continue the search for Elanora in the graveyard, where the crime had taken place.
But when they reached the graveyard, the body had been moved. It had been leaning against the left gatepost at the entrance to the school graveyard.
Now it wasn’t.
Other places it wasn’t included: leaning against the right gatepost, lying on the ground, hidden under a bush, and curled up in the Giant Green Patagonian Condor’s nest in the old oak tree next to the path.
Grusom held up his hand and indicated to the others to keep quiet.
‘There’s someone in the graveyard,’ he whispered. ‘Stay behind the oak tree while I creep forward and see who it is.’
‘There are seven hundred and fifty-two people in the graveyard,’ Winchflat whispered, ‘but they are all dead and buried. Apart from Doctor Elastic, who’s been buried for charity.’
‘What? We’ll come back to that. No, I mean there’s someone most definitely alive in there,’ said Grusom. ‘Listen. It sounds like digging.’
‘Oh, that will probably be Narled,’ said Winchflat. ‘He’ll be burying the dead professor.’
Narled was the school handyman, who wasn’t so much a man as a suitcase with a mouth and a pair of arms. His main job was to go round the school clearing up rubbish and things kids had left lying around.10
‘He can’t do that,’ said Grusom, running towards the gate. ‘We haven’t done a post-mortem or anything yet!’
‘Or it could be Elanora Bedlam,’ Winchflat called after him. ‘She’s always digging things up in here. Is it Thursday? If it’s Thursday it’s probably her. We always have stew for school dinners on Friday.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Avid. ‘You mean she digs dead bodies up and cooks them?’
‘Oh no,’ said Winchflat. ‘We’re witches and wizards, not cannibals. She just sucks the marrow out of a few bones and puts it in the stew to add a bit of flavour.’
‘I think I’m going to …’ Avid began, but before anyone could find out what she was going to do, she demonstrated her incredible multitasking skills by throwing up and fainting at the same time.
Winchflat took the opportunity to slip away. Although he was a wizard and often made new creatures out of bits of other creatures, Winchflat did not like going into the school graveyard. ‘I just have a thing about seeing bits of body that might end up being bits of my dinner,’ he would say.
Grusom skidded to a halt at the gate.
It was Elanora Bedlam in the graveyard, and the dead professor was there too. As the headmaster had said, the cook was wider than she was tall. Grusom could see now why there was no fridge in the school kitchens – with Elanora around to eat all the leftovers, there was no need. Elanora’s clothes were splattered with samples of the food of sixty-four nations, and she was one of the founding members of the International Gravy Consortium, an organisation whose aim was to raise the status of gravy around the world. Around her neck on a purple ribbon there was a large battered pocket watch. This was resting on Elanora’s chest – which was so huge that her tummy had not seen the sunshine for forty years and seven small children could shelter underneath it when it rained.
Elanora had propped the professor up against one of the gravestones and, as she dug into the grave in front of her, she was chatting away to the dead body as if he was not actually dead.
‘… and of course our Great-aunt Elthreeda always preferred raspberries to strawberries, unlike Uncle Byorn …’
‘Stop right there,’ Grusom shouted.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Elanora. ‘Do I look as if I’m going anywhere?’
‘Don’t get smart with me, madam,’ Grusom snapped.
‘All right, my dear, I’ll get stupid then,’ said Elanora. ‘Boogly, boogly, giggle flump, Polly wants a cracker.’
‘Polly, hey?’ said Grusom, consulting his clipboard. ‘Who’s Polly? There’s no one with that name on my list.’
‘Can I have a word, boss?’ said Avid, placing her very soft, warm hand on Grusom’s shoulder.
‘I, umm, err …’ Grusom said.
‘Never mind,’ Avid sighed. Of course she’d heard about Grusom and his magic beans, but her boss seemed to be moving further and further away from the planet that normal people lived on.
‘Now listen, madam,’ said Grusom, turning back to Elanora. ‘Did you move the professor’s body?’
‘He looked lonely,’ said Elanora. ‘And besides, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do on account of being related and not having seen each other for a long time.’
‘Ah, so you admit that you knew him?’ said Grusom. ‘Why didn’t you tell us that before?’
‘You never asked me,’ said Elanora.
‘Yes I did,’ said Grusom. ‘Back in the Grate Hall I asked if anyone knew the professor.’
‘That’s right, but you didn’t ask if anyone was related to him,’ said Elanora.
‘But if you’re related, you must have known him.’
‘No. I never seen him before.’
‘But … but … you just said you hadn’t seen each other for a long time.’
‘That’s right,’ said Elanora. ‘I aren’t never seen him before. That’s an extremely long time.’
‘Can you excuse me for a moment?’ said Grusom weakly.
He walked out of the graveyard and back to the school. He was looking for something, and the something was a brick wall to hit his head against. He knew he felt as if he was banging his head against a brick wall, but he wanted to hit it against a real brick wall just to make sure. There was a problem with this plan. The entire school was built of ancient sandstone blocks, not bricks, and Grusom thought it probably wouldn’t feel the same banging his head against them.
‘I suppose I could say, “I feel as if I am beating my head against an ancient sandstone wall”,’ he muttered to himself, but a quick check in the FSI Handbook told him he wasn’t allowed to because there were lots of different types of sandstone and they weren’t all the same hardness, which meant hitting your head against them wouldn’t always feel the same. It was a subtle difference, but that was what forensic science was all about – the subtle differences.
Grusom actual
ly had a portable brick wall of his own that he usually took with him when he had complicated crimes to deal with and needed to hit his head against something, but because of the luggage allowance when he had come to Quicklime’s, he’d had to leave it at home.
He wondered if he was going mad, but decided he wasn’t. He was just a genius – which can often seem the same as madness.11
After wandering about for a few hours looking for a brick wall, Grusom finally found a small deserted hut that was built of bricks. It was almost totally hidden among some overgrown bushes at the edge of the forest beyond the potato beds at the far end of the furthest kitchen garden out past the sport field. The hut was half-covered in ivy so the forest looked as if it was about to swallow it. The path leading to the hut had long since vanished and it was obvious that no one had been near the place for years. Grusom hacked his way through the brambles with a special FSI Bramble-Hacker and tried to look through the single tiny window, but it was so thick with dust and cobwebs that he could see nothing.
He tore the ivy from one of the walls and began to hit his head against it. Yes, he had been right. Hitting his head against a hard brick wall was exactly the same as trying to get straightforward answers out of all the crazy people at Quicklime College.
Just before he passed out, Grusom saw something that made him open his eyes wide in amazement. This was bad timing because with his eyes wide open it meant that more of the blood pouring out of his forehead could run into them and hurt even more.
The last thing he remembered was sticking his thumb in his mouth and thinking how pretty the blue stars looked as they danced around his head. Then he fell over, but he didn’t remember that.
As the school buses left one by one, taking all the junior wizards and witches back to their homes around the planet, Winchflat pulled the other four Flood children to one side.
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