Floods 5 (3 page)

‘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 actually 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.

‘We must stay here tonight,' he said. ‘The detector hairs in my nose tell me there is an evil presence in the school and I think it will try to follow us home.'

‘This is a wizard school,' said Merlinmary. ‘Of course there's an evil presence here.'

‘No, this is different,' said Winchflat. ‘This evil presence has come from outside and it has come specifically for us.'

‘What?' said Satanella. ‘Surely you don't mean that pathetic Grusom character?'

‘No, no. It's something unseen, something to do with the dead professor,' said Winchflat.

‘That's got nothing to do with us,' said Morbid. ‘I mean, the body was here when we arrived this morning.'

‘Except,' said Merlinmary, ‘we didn't arrive this morning, did we? We were here all night.'

‘Yes, but I still don't see what it's got to do with us,' said Satanella.

‘Neither do I,' said Winchflat. ‘I just have this overwhelming feeling that we must stay away from home.'

‘Well, we'd better ring Mum and tell her,' said Morbid.

‘No. We must stay totally away from home – no phone calls, no email, not even a carrier vulture,' Winchflat insisted. ‘We are being watched.'

Although there seemed to be no evidence to back up Winchflat's strange feeling, everyone knew that when the hairs in his nose tingled there was danger about. Winchflat's hairy nose had saved them from all sorts of accidents and had never been wrong.

‘We'll split up and meet in the catacombs after everyone else has gone home,' he said.