‘I wonder what grows when you plant a bus ticket,’ Grusom said, trying to lighten the mood with FSI joke number 127.18
Merlinmary laughed with a That-Was-A-Totally-Crap-Joke-But-I-Don’t-Want-To-Upset-You laugh and walked towards a beam of light that was shining down from a hole in the roof of the catacomb.
The light was sunshine, and at the top of the hole they found Elanora Bedlam poking about in a grave.
‘Hello, dear,’ she said, looking down at Merlinmary. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen that strange forensic man, have you? He seems to have vanished and all hell is about to break loose – his assistant’s threatening to call in proper policemen from OUTSIDE.’
She said OUTSIDE as if it was in capital letters and a really bad thing, which of course it was. People from OUTSIDE were the last thing Quicklime College wanted in the valley and police from OUTSIDE would be double-triple-quadruple times worse with all their poking about asking questions. If that were to happen, the school would be forced to do lots and lots of heavy duty magic and build a massive new catacomb to bury all the Not-Breathing-Any-More policemen and other OUTSIDERS. This of course would mean lots more OUTSIDERS would come to find what happened to the first lot and there was no knowing where it would all end.
‘He’s down here with me,’ said Merlinmary.
‘Phew, what a relief,’ said Elanora Bedlam.
‘Get me out of here,’ said Grusom and, turning to Merlinmary, he added, ‘We’ll talk about you kidnapping me later.’
No we won’t, Merlinmary thought, and she did a special You-Will-Now-Totally-Forget-I-Ever-Tied-You-Up-And-If-You-So-Much-As-Try-To-Remember-It-I-Will-Turn-You-Into-Toast spell.
Elanora Bedlam lowered a ladder down the hole and Grusom climbed out. At that same moment, his assistant walked into the cemetery. Seeing her boss appear from a grave was too much for Avid and she fainted, falling over Professor Open-Graves’s feet, which in turn made his dead body fall on top of her.
Avid regained consciousness, saw she was lying under a dead body, and fainted again.
Seeing all this, Grusom assumed that somehow the dead professor had come back to life and killed his beautiful assistant, and he fainted too.
‘I have set up a temporary pathology lab in one of the deserted attic rooms,’ said Avid after everyone, apart from the dead professor, had come round.
‘Excellent,’ said Grusom. ‘Let’s get the body up there immediately before someone else wanders off with it.’
Getting the body up to the pathology lab wasn’t as easy as it should have been. Quite apart from the fact that the room was on the sixth floor and only accessible by a really narrow winding staircase, bits of the body kept falling off.
It took Grusom and Avid – with Winchflat and Merlinmary following behind picking up fingers and ears and, at one point, the whole head – over an hour before they had Professor Randolf Open-Graves safely laid out on the slab ready for a serious going-over with high-powered blue torches, very sharp knives and a big magnet.
They almost gave up on finding the left foot, but Merlinmary enlisted Satanella to help, and her super-sensitive nose tracked the left foot’s scent until they finally found it behind the bike shed, being chewed by the school dog, Emile Zola.19
When Winchflat and Merlinmary had left the laboratory, under strict instructions not to tell anyone where the laboratory was – which would have been difficult because every single person in the whole valley, as well as most of the rats, cats, birds, dogs, suitcases, insects, ghosts, zombies and plants already knew – Grusom and Avid got to work.
‘Right,’ said Grusom, ‘the first thing we have to ascertain, which we should have done right at the start, is actual cause of death.’
‘I suspect poison,’ said Avid.
‘Yes, we should always suspect poison,’ said Grusom. ‘Poison is nasty evil stuff and one should always be suspicious of it.’
‘No, boss,’ Avid explained. ‘I mean, I suspect that the professor was killed with poison.’
‘So how do you explain the bullet hole in his chest?’
‘I had noticed it, boss,’ said Avid. ‘It is my belief that the victim was killed twice.’
‘Or maybe three times,’ said Grusom. He removed the professor’s shirt to reveal multiple stab wounds.
‘Or four,’ said Avid, pointing to the strangulation marks around the corpse’s neck.
‘Well, I’ll say this,’ Grusom said. ‘Our killer was very thorough – extremely conscientious, even.’
‘Unless there were four different killers?’
‘But surely the second killer would have realised the professor was already dead and not bothered,’ Grusom suggested.
‘Possibly, though all four of them could have committed the crime at exactly the same time.’
‘This bears all the hallmarks of the McLaundry Killer Quartet,’ said Grusom. ‘When we start digging around inside the victim, though, I suspect we’ll find he was killed more than four times.’
‘What makes you think that, boss?’ said Avid, staring at Grusom with wide-eyed adoration.
‘Two things,’ said Grusom.
‘Yes?’
‘One, I have an uneasy hunch.’
‘You can get ointment for that,’ said Avid.
‘And two,’ Grusom continued, ‘the crossbow dart in the back of the neck, the tiny incision inside the left ear, the spear in his left thigh, the terrible shark bite on his ankle covering some previous dog bites, and the remains of a sandwich full of broken glass in the victim’s back pocket.’
‘So our man could have been killed as many as nine or ten times?’
‘I think we’ll find that he was actually killed eleven times,’ said Grusom.
‘Maybe a football or cricket team?’ Avid suggested. ‘Or possibly one and a half highly trained killer octopuses?’
‘Yes. Of course, the Transylvania Waters Homicidal Maniacs Soccer Eleven spring instantly to mind, but they have a prefect alibi.’
‘Don’t you mean a perfect alibi?’ said Avid.
‘No, I mean a prefect alibi,’ Grusom explained. ‘At the time of the professor’s death the Transylvania Waters Homicidal Maniacs Soccer Eleven were playing soccer across the other side of the world in Edinburgh, Scotland, against a team of high school prefects who they beat 7/3/6.’
‘7/3/6? What’s the six?’
‘The number of prefects left alive at the end of the game.’
‘But, as always, there is yet another possibility,’ said Avid. ‘Maybe the professor’s dead body is lying about the time it died.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Grusom.
Avid began to examine the professor’s naked body with her blue torch and a large magnifying glass, starting beneath the fingernails and working towards the shoulders. First she poked under the left thumbnail with a pair of tweezers and removed several mysterious flakes of something that would probably turn out to be blue paint from the racy bonnet of a 1986 Ferrari or the lacy bonnet of a 1923 Old Lady. She put them in a small plastic bag for later examination under the microscope.
Then she read the professor’s fortune in the lines on his left hand, which said that the professor would have a long life. This was obviously seriously inaccurate. However, the lines on his right hand said, ‘Sorry about that, missed out the word “not”.’
But it was when Avid reached the body’s wrist that she got the biggest shock.
‘Excuse me, boss,’ she said as all the colour drained from her face in a deathly but extremely gorgeous way, ‘this might seem like a really stupid question, but we are absolutely certain this man is dead. Aren’t we?’
Grusom was speechless. He reminded his incredibly-beautiful-but-maybe-not-as-brightas-he-had-originally-thought assistant of all the different ways Professor Randolf Open-Graves had been murdered.
‘So I would have thought the fact that he’s dead is rather obvious,’ he concluded. Something about the quirk in Avid’s eyebrow told him that she didn’t a
gree. ‘What are you saying? We should have checked for a pulse?’
‘Yes.’
‘What …? You …? Duhhh …’
‘Yes,’ said Avid and, taking Grusom’s hand in hers, she pressed his index finger against the corpse’s wrist.
Professor Randolf Open-Graves, who had been killed at least eleven times, maybe more if the team’s reserve players had been involved, had a pulse.
‘I, err, I, err, I don’t say this often,’ said Grusom, ‘but if ever there was a right time, it’s now.’
‘Say what, sir?’
‘This,’ he said, ‘blows the case wide open.’
Avid started scrabbling through the FSI Very, Very Advanced Handbook: Monster Bumper Edition, but there was nothing anywhere that came close to covering the situation they now found themselves in.
The professor was obviously dead. There were so many ways that proved it. Quite apart from the fact that this was the only corpse Grusom had ever come across that had been murdered with every single one of the Top Ten Most Popular Ways to Kill People,20 bits of him kept falling off. This was not something that usually happened to people who were alive. Nor was there a single drop of blood in his body.21 Nor could the professor tell Grusom how many fingers he was holding up or the name of the prime minister – both of which were the accepted tests to find out if someone is losing their mind. Nor was he breathing or making any noise at all apart from a very faint cracking sound as his bones dried out.
Even though the professor’s hand had fallen off when they’d touched the wrist, the pulse was not a faint dying ebb, but as strong as a little mouse jumping up and down inside a pillowcase. Avid threaded a needle and began to sew the professor’s hand back on.
‘What are we going to do?’ she asked as she hurriedly stitched up the professor’s chest where she had previously slashed it open for easier access to his insides.
‘Well, what are the guidelines in these situations?’ said Grusom, playing for time.
‘There aren’t any.’
‘OK, let’s check our options,’ said Grusom. ‘A pulse means a heartbeat. A heartbeat means life and life means consciousness. The obvious thing we should do is treat the professor’s wounds and nurse him back to health.’
Avid stuck an elastoplast over the bullet hole.
‘Of course,’ Grusom continued, ‘if we can revive him then he should be able to tell us who killed him.’
‘Except that he wouldn’t be dead any more.’
‘True.’
‘And anyway, they might have crept up behind him or it might have been dark. He might not have seen his assailants.’
‘Right, well,’ Grusom said, at a loss for words. ‘First we must, umm, err, ascertain exactly how dead Professor Randolf Open-Graves is.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Avid. ‘Aren’t you either dead or not dead? You can’t be a bit dead, can you?’
‘Normally, no,’ said Grusom, ‘but you must remember where we are. This valley has the highest wizardy and witchy concentration anywhere on Earth. Every day there are dozens of strange people here, some of whom, I imagine, are capable of things that neither of us could even begin to imagine.’
‘You’re right,’ said Avid. ‘I suppose it means the seventeen million, fourteen thousand and eleven scientific facts we learned at FSI School could be meaningless.’
‘Exactly,’ said Grusom. ‘And that just can’t be true. So let’s ignore the pulse, assume he is dead and move on – though I suppose we’d better sew back on all the bits that have fallen off, just in case he’s still alive.’
But the professor was dead. All of him was completely and totally one hundred per cent dead, deceased and not alive. The pulse, which vanished shortly afterwards, was not his. In fact, it belonged to Transylvania Waters’ most evil spy, the Hearse Whisperer, who was hiding in the dead professor’s body for reasons that will be revealed shortly.
Joining the professor back together again was easier said than done, as anyone who has ever tried it will know. As soon as you stick a needle and thread through old skin, it splits. Staples are no better unless you can get them to stick into bone. The only reliable way to join bits of dead body together is with Dr Julian Frankenstein’s Two-Pack Low-Fat Corpse Adhesive.22 Grusom and Avid did not have any in their kits, though, so did the best they could with brown parcel tape.
‘First we need to examine the crime scene and look for prints,’ Grusom said. ‘You do that while I check the flakes from the fingernails with my Super-High-Power-Expert-Electron-Microscope.’
‘That’s fine, boss,’ said Avid, ‘but we don’t know where the murder or murders took place.’
‘In a case like that,’ said Grusom, ‘the body is the crime scene. So examine that for fingerprints.’
Within two hours Avid had a perfect set of prints.
‘Amazing,’ said Grusom. ‘I’m impressed. Where did you find them?’
‘On the end of the victim’s fingers, boss,’ said Avid. ‘And before you hit your head against the wall and roll your eyes, the prints do not belong to the professor.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely. His own prints are all over his body and clothes and possessions. The ones on the ends of his fingers do not match them at all.’
‘It couldn’t be that perhaps you’ve got it the wrong way round?’ Grusom suggested. ‘And all those other prints are the killer’s?’
‘Well, naturally that was my first thought, but when I found prints inside the professor’s ears and right up his nose, I knew they had to be his,’ said Avid. ‘I mean, I’ve never heard of a murderer clearing the wax out of his victim’s ears and picking his nose before killing him.’
‘Except for the Lake Eerie Earwax Killer of ’83,’ said Grusom. ‘But he never touched his victims’ noses and besides, he died in a massive earwax fire at his secret hideaway in the Big Forest.’
In forensic science there is, unfortunately, no end to all the possibilities. For example: could the Lake Eerie Earwax Killer of ’83 have left behind a child who was now wreaking havoc on the world for his father’s early demise?
‘No,’ said Grusom, thinking it through. ‘The Lake Eerie Earwax Killer of ’83 never married and had no children. He did have a small poodle, but I can’t see Fifi-Waxybelle doing anything like this. Stealing cutlets from butchers’ shops was more her line.’
The most likely and yet the most unlikely fact was that whoever killed Professor Randolf Open-Graves only touched the tips of his fingers.
In the situation where a perfect set of prints are found, they are immediately faxed or emailed to a great big secret database that has EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD’S fingerprints on it. Of course, all the major governments pretend this database doesn’t exist.
‘The prints belong to a pair of twins,’ said Avid when the message came back from the top secret database that doesn’t exist. ‘And they are pupils at this school.’
‘Morbid and Silent Flood?’ said the headmaster when Grusom confronted him in his office. ‘I doubt it.’
As far as the headmaster and most of the teachers were concerned, the Flood children were the school’s star pupils. He could not believe that they could have been involved in the professor’s demise. And yet history had shown that even the prettiest, nicest, best behaved, cleverest people who loved puppies and went out of their way to help old ladies across the road even when they didn’t want to go, quite often turned out to be psychotic axe-murderers. Though of course the professor did not appear to have been killed with an axe.
‘I think you’re barking up the wrong tree there,’ he said.
‘Absolutely,’ said Satanella Flood, who was sitting under the headmaster’s desk chewing her way through his shoe. ‘And if there are any trees that need barking up, that’s my job.’
A dog that talks? I don’t think so, Grusom thought. Amazing disguise, though.
‘Back to class, please, Satanella Flood,’ said the headmaster as Satanella’s che
wing reached his toe. She trotted reluctantly out of the room.
Grusom put two and two together and got five. Five Flood children. Five suspects. Merlinmary had kidnapped him in the catacombs.23 Creepy Winchflat Flood had brought him Elanora Bedlam’s cookbook. These twins, Morbid and Silent, must have had access to the body. And now a girl pretending to be a dog. Obviously the whole family was involved.
On the other hand, if the professor had been murdered eleven times it would mean each of the Flood children at Quicklime College had killed him twice, with one left over. Unless they all killed him two-and-one-fifths times each.
If Grusom had a weak link – and if the truth be known, his entire brain was held together with weak links – it was that he was rubbish at mathematics, like most incredibly clever people are. That’s why calculators were invented by someone incredibly clever.
The headmaster sent for the deputy headmaster, who, being a vampire, could only come out after dark or he would melt. As most of the children went home before it got dark, he did not seem the ideal candidate for the job. He had, however, sucked the blood out of all the other candidates and was therefore judged to be the perfect candidate for the job. The school genius, Winchflat, had solved the problem with a brilliant invention, a special paper bag that the deputy wore over his head to protect him from even the brightest sunlight.24
‘Normally, headmaster,’ the deputy said, ‘I would agree with you completely. I have found the Floods to be upright citizens, who always live by the magic code of witchcraft, which as you know includes clause three, sub-section eight, which says that no witch or wizard may ever cause any harm to a Belgian professor.’
‘Exactly,’ nodded the headmaster.
‘However,’ the deputy continued, ‘on the night the professor died, at the naughty hour of 3.13 am I saw all five of the Flood students out the back of the school, past the carnivorous nettle patch, by the very edge of the Dark Forest … and they were digging a deep hole.’
Floods 5 Page 4