The Case of the Exploding Loo (2 page)

So I’ve decided to help the police by taking over the investigation.

I begin in ICT, on our first day back at school after Christmas, by googling “spontaneous human combustion”. That’s the police’s latest theory:

Spontaneous human combustion describes the burning of a human body without an apparent external source of ignition. There have been about two hundred reported cases
worldwide over a period of around three hundred years.

“Two hundred divided by three hundred. Two over three. Two-thirds,” I race down the corridor to maths. I always travel around school at speed because a moving
target is harder to hit. “How can two-thirds of a person explode per year?” I wonder aloud as I step into the classroom.

“Easier to think of two people exploding every three years,” my maths teacher, Ms Grimm, suggests.

Either Ms Grimm has hearing like a super-bat or she’s paying far too much attention to what I have to say.

“Sit down. Books out,” she barks. “Tell me, Hawkins, have the police made any progress with their investigation into your father’s explosion?”

I shake my head, partly to say “no”, partly to say “I can’t believe you’re asking me about this”. There are some things you don’t want to discuss with
your scary maths teacher. But there’s no special treatment for kids with missing dads at Butt’s Hill Middle School.

Holly and I got the end of last term off, straight after the explosion, but I suspect that was because the head didn’t like reporters hanging around the school gates, taking photos of
Butt’s Hill students smoking, smooching and sneaking out to buy chips.

“No progress at all? What are these policemen doing?” Ms Grimm curls her lip. “You’ll need your brain in gear if you want to find out what happened, Hawkins. No more
silly questions. Start thinking. You’ll never win a Nobel Prize if you can’t apply all that information in your head to real-life situations.”

Ms Grimm talks about winning prizes a lot. She’s anti-stupid, just like Dad.

I search my memory for information on Nobel Prizes:

Every year since 1901 the Nobel Prize has been awarded for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for peace.

“You don’t need to worry,” I say as the rest of my class stampede into the cold, grey classroom and dive for the seats near the radiator. “There’s
no Nobel Prize for maths.”

But I think about Ms Grimm’s words. What if I have all the information I need to solve Dad’s disappearance inside my head and I just need to apply it?

“Seating plan,” Ms Grimm bellows at the radiator-huggers.

Everyone scuttles to their proper seat. You don’t mess with a woman who looks like she was made from the unwanted parts of several bodies – not all female and possibly not all
human.

Everyone at Butt’s Hill is scared of Ms Grimm, including the head, who has given her the biggest office in the building even though she only works Monday mornings and Friday afternoons. No
one knows what Ms Grimm does for the rest of the week. Before the explosion I made a pie chart to show the percentage of students supporting each of the most popular theories:

The figures are a bit out of date now as I’m too busy getting my head round Dad’s possible spontaneous combustion to think about Ms Grimm’s second career.
Plus, I’m starting to think we’ve all got it wrong and she’s a private investigator. We’ve only been back at school for one day and she’s already asked me about the
police enquiry three times.

I round up my two-thirds of a spontaneously combusting person to make a whole one. But that still means, of approximately fifty-six million people in the world who died last year, only one
spontaneously combusted.

My first clue:

Pleased with the progress of my investigation, I glance up at the whiteboard. It’s Science Week, so Ms Grimm has asked how we’d calculate the lowest percentage of a
mixture of gases in the air needed to create an explosion if ignited.

I’ve seen this kind of problem somewhere before. I rack my brain for the memory.

Got it! It was on Ms Grimm’s whiteboard one morning, after she’d been teaching Gifted and Talented Club the night before.

I put up my hand.

“Hawkins?”

“You could use Chair Mixing,” I say. A few people snigger as Ms Grimm pulls her this-student-is-an-idiot face.

I close my eyes so I can fix the memory of the whiteboard in my mind and read the words written on it:

“Chair Mixing – Divide the fraction of the total volume of each gas by its lower explosive limit to get the partial lower explosive limit of the mixture.” I ignore the yawns
and vomiting noises from the back of the class. “Then sum all the partial lower explosive limits and take the inverse of that sum to get the net lower explosive limit of the
mixture.”

“Perfect,” Ms Grimm nods. “Le Chatelier’s mixing rule.”

“Er . . . yes. That.” Someone must have rubbed out a few letters on the whiteboard.

“Everyone else get that?” Ms Grimm asks the class.

The vomiting noises stop and someone at the back protests, “We’re only Year Eight, Miss.”

“So is Hawkins.”

“Yeah, but she’s a mutant, Miss.” Smokin’ Joe leans forward, releasing a mouldy stench of stale cigarettes, cat wee and sweaty armpits. “Seriously, Freak Girl,
where do you get this stuff? It’s creepy.”

Creepy? Me? This, from the boy who spends his free time hanging out in the boys’ toilets, smoking cigarettes with the Toilet Trolls.

“Ms Grimm wrote it on the . . .” I tail off as I realise what I’m saying.

Can it be a coincidence? Is she the one responsible for the exploding loo? Is that why she keeps asking about the police? To find out how close they are to rumbling her?

Maybe the pie chart for Ms Grimm’s second career should look more like this:

I will be redirecting my investigation towards Ms Grimm shortly. But at the moment I’m too busy worrying about Mum. Aunty Vera says Mum’s coping badly with
Dad’s disappearance. Aunty Vera’s got it wrong. Mum’s not coping badly – she’s not coping at all. Now she’s stopped screaming and yelling, all she does is lie on
the sofa hugging stuffed Santas and staring into space.

The Santa-hugging is particularly disturbing. It’s been three weeks since Christmas and Dad would have made us pack the Christmas things away by now, declaring, “A tidy house is a
happy house.”

He said that a lot. “Maintaining a tidy home is the best way for someone of average intelligence to keep on top of things,” he’d tell Mum, patting her on the head. “I
know you try your best, dear, but if you kept the laundry room in better order you might remember to iron my boxer shorts.”

Post-explosion Mum has given up tidying. And ironing. And . . . well . . . everything really, except eating curry and lying on the couch.

This is having a worrying side effect. I don’t spend a lot of time looking at Mum’s bum, but I can’t help noticing it’s fast approaching the width of the sofa. It has
also taken on the sofa’s square edges.

On the upside, this helps Mum slide into place more easily. On the downside, Uncle Max says he’s starting to wonder if she ate Dad.

I’m ninety-seven per cent sure he’s joking.

Either way, Mum reminds me of the huge inflatable Tyrannosaurus Rex that sat outside the discount shop until it blew away in the storm last month. Like the T-Rex, Mum is big and scary from a
distance. Then, when you get closer, she’s worse than scary. She’s empty, like there’s nothing but air and breath where her thoughts should be.

The only time Mum moves these days is to shovel her mouth full of Curry in a Hurry takeaways. These have been turning up every night since the toilet explosion, even though no one orders them.
Holly called Curry in a Hurry to let them know and to ask what we owed, but they said the food was a sign of their admiration for Dad’s work. Weird, but I guess that means it’s okay to
eat them. Mum certainly seems to think so.

At first, Holly and I tried to snap Mum out of her curry coma by pulling her to her feet and making her walk around the house, but the more days that pass without Dad and the more curries that
pass between Mum’s lips, the harder it is to heave her off the couch.

Holly still makes a token effort to get Mum on her feet. I don’t. I just sink down on the sofa beside her so we can chat. Admittedly, I do most of the talking, but at least Mum
doesn’t get up and wander off the minute I mention electromagnetism or scalar waves the way everyone else does.

Besides Dad only lets us watch thirty minutes of TV a day when he’s home, so I want to catch as much as I can before he comes back. And he is coming back. I know he is.

Shrek
’s on today when we get home. I like
Shrek
. So does Holly, but she’s been pretending not to since a boy at school told her thirteen-year-olds are too old for
animated movies. Ugh, teenagers.

To be fair to
Shrek
, Holly doesn’t like anything any more. When Dad was around, she was always yelling how much she hated him for acting like she wasn’t good enough. Now
he’s gone, she’s trying to replace him by finding new things to hate.

Before
Shrek
joined her hate list, Holly’s favourite scene was the bit when Princess Fiona sings the songbird to death and it explodes, leaving nothing but its tiny yellow feet
clinging to the branch. We fast-forward that scene now.

Film and videogame characters are always blowing up and leaving only their shoes/ feet/ hooves behind:

But life is not a film or a videogame, which is a shame because make-believe characters act logically and let you know who the bad guys are.

I decide to share my first three clues with the police. Unfortunately, I’m cut off before I get the chance. This has been happening a lot recently.