The Case of the Exploding Loo (7 page)

“You can’t always be asleep. Surely sometimes you just lie there?”

“Nope. Always asleep. It must be all the effort I’m putting into finding Dad.”

“That or something someone’s putting into your Curry in a Hurry hot chocolate.” Holly shivers as the temperature drops further.

“Shhh,” Porter says. “The shoes are talking again.”

So Porter can hear them. That has to be a good thing.

“Keep these shoes close in memory of your father.”

“Unbelievable!” Holly picks up one of Dad’s shoes and bashes the other with it. “Can’t you see what’s going on, Know-All? You’re being
brainwashed!”

“Work hard,”
the shoes squeak as Holly smashes the one in her hand against the one on the wall.
“W-w-w-work . . . h-h-ha-ha-aaarrrgghhh . . .”

“You killed the talking shoes.” Porter looks impressed.

“Mercy killing,” Holly says.

Porter grins. “Death penalty!”

“Brainwashed?” I say slowly. “You think I’m being brainwashed?”

Holly nods.

“Like a prisoner of war?”

“Yeah,” Holly says. “Except you’re not a prisoner and you’re not at war.”

“And you think they’re putting something into my hot chocolate,” I say. “You mean drugs, don’t you? You think I’m a non-imprisoned, non-warring prisoner of
war
who has been drugged
!”

Who would do something like that?

I don’t notice Porter has stopped moving until I walk into the back of him. When I look up, I see a row of portable toilets. They’re familiar from Porter’s
film, but bigger than they seemed on-screen. A quick scan tells me they’re approximately ninety centimetres wide and two hundred and ten centimetres tall. The numbers are familiar. I flick
through the images in my brain until I figure out why. They’re from a maths problem I was given for extra homework a few months back.

The question gave variables like detonation velocity and material density, and asked what quantity of a particular explosive would be required to blow up a lightweight plastic box measuring
ninety by ninety by one hundred and twenty centimetres.

That wasn’t a hypothetical maths question box. It was a non-hypothetical plastic toilet.

Why didn’t I figure this out earlier? Ms Grimm is right about me being unable to connect maths to real life.

Ms Grimm!

Ms Grimm set the extra homework. She’s back as my number one suspect. The woman is obsessed with blowing things up.

Thinking hard, I trip on a pile of rubbish and fall hard, cutting my hand on broken glass. I clutch my hand against my chest.

“Help!” I whimper.

Porter starts texting, hopefully summoning emergency medical assistance.

Holly prises my fingers open and rolls her eyes at me. “I think your vital organs can still function without that millilitre of blood.”

I glance down and see a small scratch instead of the gaping wound I was expecting. Why don’t my injuries ever look as gruesome as they feel? And why am I so dizzy?

Staggering to my feet, I stumble towards the road, desperate to escape the portaloos. My head is full of black smoke belching from air vents.

Holly and Porter call my name. I can hear them running behind me but I don’t slow down.

Ow! My hand stings. I remember the online medical journal entry about “First Aid for Cuts and Scrapes”. It said,
“Raise the wounded part of the body above the heart to slow
the bleeding”.
Perhaps my blood vessels are frozen. Who knows what will happen when I get back in the warm and they defrost? I raise my arm in the air just in case.

A taxi pulls over. I try to explain that I wasn’t signalling but Porter dives into the cab and pulls me and Holly in behind him. I protest at first, but once I’m in that warm
interior, my protests die down.

The driver growls when he sees me cradling my hand. “Bleed in here and it’s a fifty quid clean-up fee. This is the second time some fool’s bled all over my cab. You even look
like the Christmas market guy, just younger and with less facial hair, which probably comes from being a child. And a girl.”

“You called me a fool,” I protest. “I’m not a fool. I have an IQ of a hundred and fifty se—”

“Shut up, Know-All.” Holly peers around the front seat at the driver. “Who did you say she looked like?”

“Like the fella that bled all over the cab after the Christmas market. Except that guy’s foot was bleeding, not his hand. Served him right for wearing flip-flops. Who wears
flip-flops in winter? Where were the guy’s shoes?”

Ah! Now I understand why Holly’s so interested.

“Do you remember where you took him?” Porter asks.

“It was months ago,” I point out. “Of course he doesn’t—”

“Grey building, up by Lindon castle,” the taxi driver says. His voice squeaks, but why would a taxi driver lie?

“Who was with him?” I ask. “One person? A group? Man or woman? What did they look like?”

“Slow down,” the cabbie protests. “I can’t remember the details. Like you say, it was months ago.” He’s squeaking again. What’s he hiding?

“Can you take us to the place you dropped him?”

The driver strokes his chin. “One drop of blood and there’s trouble.”

Holly glances at my hand. “She’s already lost her drop for today. Let’s go.”

“How much is this going to cost?” I’m worried about my calculator money.

“I’ll pay,” Porter offers.

Holly and I stare at him in surprise. Porter looks at his feet. The taxi driver nods and pulls out into the traffic. As his sleeve rides up his arm, I spot a flash of turquoise. I shake my head.
What is it with that colour?

I recognise the route the taxi’s taking. We used to come this way with Mum all the time. Her favourite shoe shop is on the right as we pull up outside the castle walls
next to a large grey stone building.

I buzz down the window and stare at the sign above the double doors.

I nod in approval and wonder why Holly’s giggling.

“You’re sure this is the right place?”

“Positive.” The cabbie points at the petrol station across the road. “That’s where I cleaned up the blood. Couldn’t get it all out, mind. You can see the stain on
the carpets.”

“Nice.” Holly doesn’t even glance down.

But I’m mesmerised by the faded proof that Dad might have sat here and may still be close.

“Come on.” Holly shoves me from behind. “Out!”

I open the car door and I’m hit by a blast of cold air.

“Holly, are you sure it was Dad?” I ask, clinging to the warmth of the taxi.

“Who else would be wandering around the Christmas market without any shoes, looking like an older, blokeier version of you?”

Holly has a point. So does her elbow, which she uses to force me out on to the pavement. I stumble into Porter, who’s frozen in place like a videogame avatar that’s had its last
action cancelled.

Side-stepping to avoid him, I bump into the ugliest statue I’ve ever seen – a misshapen, yet oddly familiar, grey-stone woman with lopsided features, bulgy eyes and a tiny, angry
mouth that makes her look like she has just sat on a wasp. The statue is new. There’s no way we could have missed something this hideous when we came here with Mum.

I study the plaque at the bottom:

Pythagoras!

This must be the other school where Ms Grimm teaches. PC Eric didn’t explain she’d founded it as well. Strange that it’s beside Mum’s favourite shoe
shop. Stranger still that it’s in the exact spot Dad may have been dropped off after the explosion. Strangest of all that Porter and I were picked up by the same driver who dropped Dad
off.

What are the chances?

My brain tingles. There’s something about the plaque. Something I should be noticing. I just need a minute. It’ll come to me.

“Hawkins?” A familiar voice grates across my thoughts. “What are you doing here?”

Ms Grimm! In the flesh, lurking behind her grey-stone twin.

I look at my feet. I look at the sky. I look at the gloomy, grey school for the gifted. I look everywhere except at Ms Grimm, which is how I spot the silhouette at a second-floor school window.
I’m too far away to see clearly, but it looks like a male figure signalling to someone, or something, over my shoulder. Then, just as suddenly, he’s gone, vanishing behind a curtain as
Ms Grimm whirls to see what caught my attention.

I check whether Holly or Porter saw the mysterious figure. No. Holly’s too busy watching me and Porter is nowhere to be seen. He’s slipped away into the shadows, vanishing as hastily
as the face in the window. The taxi driver has disappeared too. Ms Grimm seems to have that effect on people.

“Hawkins? I’m talking to you,” Ms Grimm snaps. “What are you doing here?”

“Um. Sightseeing?”

“You don’t sound very sure.”

“This is a lovely statue,” I blurt in desperation. “What an honour for you.”

“Ah, well . . .” The hard line of Ms Grimm’s mouth softens. “The school’s financial backers thought it would be a good idea.”

“And you founded a school for remarkable students. How amazing!”

Ms Grimm purrs.

“And you called it LOSERS?” Holly sniggers.

The purr becomes a growl. Ms Grimm points to the sign on the grey stone building. “No. I called it ‘Lindon-based Opportunities for the Superior Education of Remarkable
Students’.”

“L . . . O . . . S . . . E . . . R . . . S . . . LOSERS.” Holly grins. “What’s so remarkable about your students, anyway? I bet they’re the usual top-set types
– freaks and robots.”

“Oi!” I protest. “I’m in top set. So what does that make me? A freak? Or a robot?”

Until yesterday I’d have gone with popular opinion and said freak, but I can’t get the hissing shoes out of my mind. What if I’m a robot, programmed to behave in a particular
way?

Perhaps the answer is a Venn diagram with the set of freaks in one circle, the set of robots in the other and me in the overlapping bit in the middle. Noelle Hawkins – freak
and
robot.

I don’t get a chance to share my theory with Holly because Ms Grimm’s growl has become a roar. She grabs Holly by the collar and forces her into the back of a nearby
black Honda Civic.

I dive in behind my sister, worried Ms Grimm is going to shout her to death and then dump the body in a dark alley. I glance around for Porter. Still no sign.

“Insolent child,” Ms Grimm screeches, slamming into the driver’s seat and accelerating away from the kerb. “I’m taking you home.”

“Home?” That’s it? No dark alleys. My heart rate slows slightly. But only slightly. How would Ms Grimm react if I asked her, politely, to look at the road instead of glaring at
Holly?

“You need taking in hand.” Ms Grimm pokes Holly with a witchy finger that should definitely be on the steering wheel. “I’ll be speaking to your mother about grounding
you, and making sure the head keeps you in at breaks and lunchtimes.”

“You can’t do that,” Holly protests, but she doesn’t sound certain.

“You would not believe the things I can do.”

I would. I would totally believe the terrible things Ms Grimm can do. I shudder as she turns her attention to me. But she’s calmer now.

“You, Hawkins, are a different story. Easily led astray, but a brilliant mind. I am delighted to see you showing such an interest in my organisation—”