Secret of the Skull (14 page)

‘Was it really bad this year?’ I murmured, afraid.

‘Worse than ever,’ shuddered Muddy. ‘Packed out. I thought I was going to be trampled in the rush for the Pre-owned Uniform stall. I’ve been developing a personal
electric shock zapper in my laboratory, the Whitehouse Buzz-U-Back Mark II, and I very nearly used it. The teachers swiped most of the chocolate cake. You’d think they get enough of it in the
staff room, but no . . .’

‘Yeah, yeah, shut up. Have you done what I told you to do in my text? Have you given some careful thought to Tuesday and Wednesday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

‘Is that lemon squash you’ve got there?’ he said, pointing to the glass on my bedside cabinet. ‘Can I have some?’

‘That’s to soothe my poor sore throat,’ I protested.

‘Thanks,’ said Muddy and glugged back two thirds of it. ‘I’m boiled. You could have roasted a monkey in that hall. And there’s bloomin’ Bob Thompson barging
his way out at the end, kicking little kids. Anyway, right, Tuesday and Wednesday.’ He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. ‘I am ready. What do you want to know?’

‘I want to know about Bob Thompson. He kicked kids out of the way?’

‘No, that was just now. Not Tuesday or Wednesday. I thought you wanted to know about Tuesday and Wednesday?’ said Muddy.

‘Bob Thompson first,’ I said. ‘He kicked kids?’

Muddy looked puzzled. ‘He always does that. That’s what he does.’

‘Not according to Izzy. Not for the last few days, anyway,’ I said.

‘Oh, yeah, I know,’ said Muddy. ‘He has been acting weird. Sort of . . . nice. Eurgh, creepy.’

‘But obviously he’s back to normal now,’ I said.

‘Obviously. Did Izzy tell you he helped set the Fayre up? He was still being nice all the way through it, too. He kept carrying stuff out to the car park for people. Must have got too much
for him. All that politeness made him snap. He even grunted at the Head.’

Suddenly, my mind was racing fast enough to win a Formula One Grand Prix. Izzy had suggested that Bob Thompson was suddenly being nice because he was under threat of exclusion. But if he
wasn’t
being nice any more, if he was suddenly happy to go back to grunting rudely at the Head . . .

What was going on?

‘Did anything happen at the Winter Fayre?’ I said. ‘I mean, to Bob Thompson?’

‘I thought you wanted to talk about Tuesday and Wednesday?’ cried Muddy.

‘In a minute! Did anything happen?’

‘Not that I saw,’ said Muddy. ‘Like I said, he was carrying stuff for people. You know what he’s like – he was probably expecting a few parents to give him a fiver
or something.’

A-ha! A mental light snapped on in my head and shone on an important possibility. What Muddy had just said made perfect sense – Bob Thompson might have been being nice simply because he
wanted
something.

And
if
that was true . . .

There was an interesting deduction to be made here. If Bob’s sudden niceness was all about something he wanted, then it was plain to see that something
had
happened at the Winter
Fayre. There was a simple reason why Bob was his usual nasty self again.

Can you spot what it was?

‘If Bob’s gone back to his usual bullying ways,’ I muttered to myself, ‘then that suggests he doesn’t
need
to be nice any more. Which
suggests that, at the Winter Fayre, he finally
got
what he wanted.’

Muddy frowned. ‘How do you mean? Got what?’

‘Whatever it was he was after,’ I said. ‘And now we have reason to believe he was after something, instead of trying to avoid exclusion, Mrs Penzler’s missing book comes
back into the picture.’

‘Nahhh!’ cried Muddy. ‘Bob Thompson never knew about it. And even if he did, it’s not worth any money. Even he isn’t
that
stupid.’

‘Yes, I thought the same myself last night,’ I told him. ‘So perhaps we should examine what happened on Tuesday and Wednesday.’

‘Ah, at last,’ said Muddy.

‘What happened to Bob Thompson, that is. Forget about our class.’

‘
What?
’ cried Muddy. ‘Oh great, so all that thinking I’ve been doing today, that was for nothing, was it? I’ve made notes too, y’know.’ He pulled
a scraggy mound of scrap paper out of his pocket.

‘How many times did you see Bob Thompson on Tuesday and Wednesday?’

‘Er . . . none.’

‘Not outside, at lunchtime? Nowhere? Check back through your notes,’ I said.

Muddy checked his notes. ‘Oh, yes, once. He turned up in our class shortly after lunchtime yesterday. He said he was there to collect whatever we were donating to the Winter Fayre. Shirts
for the pre-owned uniform stall, odds and ends for the bric-a-brac stall, that sort of thing.’

‘So he took it all away with him?’ I asked.

‘No, it had already gone. That short kid from Mr Nailshott’s class, Whatsisface, he’d turned up for it just before lunch.’

‘So Bob Thompson didn’t take anything away with him?’

‘No, he just opened the classroom door, said what he’d come for, Mrs Penzler said Whatsisface from Mr Nailshott’s class had already been, thank you. Then he looked around for a
second, looked thoroughly miffed, and off he went. He barely set foot in the room. Surely that’s not a clue? Nothing happened.’

‘What might be significant is that he turned up at all, not what did or didn’t happen,’ I said.

‘Huh?’ said Muddy. ‘Why?’

‘Was Mrs Penzler’s book still in the classroom when he appeared?’

‘No idea.’

‘You said this was straight after lunch? Yes?’

‘Yes, about ten minutes,’ said Muddy.

‘And the whole class was there, from the minute the bell rang?’

Muddy looked at his notes. ‘Yes.’

‘Did anyone leave the room during the afternoon? No, what I mean is, was the room left empty at all?’

‘Emily Jenkins had a nosebleed aaaaaat . . .’ He turned a page of notes sideways and squinted at it. ‘. . . Two thirteen p.m.’

‘So the room was occupied for the rest of the school day? And Mrs Penzler found that the book had gone shortly before the end of lessons?’

‘That’s right. Don’t you want to hear about Emily Jenkins’s nosebleed?’

‘No.’

‘It was really yukky.’

‘I don’t care. We can at least be certain about whether the book was still in the room when Bob Thompson turned up.’

Muddy thought for a moment. ‘Can we?’

‘Yes.’

Have you worked out if it was there or not?

‘If the book had gone by the time lessons ended,’ I said, ‘and the room was occupied all afternoon, then it can’t have been there immediately after
lunchtime. Anyone who’d picked it up would have been seen. So it wasn’t there when Bob appeared.’

‘Er, yes, I was just about to say that,’ said Muddy. ‘Do you mean it was taken during the lunch break?’

‘That’s definitely the most likely possibility,’ I said. ‘Definitely.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Muddy. ‘Mrs Penzler was in the classroom all lunchtime. I know she was – she was marking Monday’s history essays and she gave them back
to us after lunch. She had her sandwiches at her desk.’

‘Oh. Bang goes that theory, then. Ah, no, wait. That means we can say for certain that the book had gone
before
lunchtime,’ I said. ‘Things are getting clearer by the
minute! The book was still there first thing?’

‘Yes, it was, I saw it when I arrived at school,’ said Muddy.

‘OK,’ I said, wiping my nose with a fresh tissue. ‘Tell me exactly who came in and out of that classroom during the morning.’

Muddy scrambled through his notes. Bits of scrunched up paper littered my bed.

‘Nine thirty a.m.,’ he said, ‘Mrs McEwan from the school office came in to deliver a load of paperwork to Mrs Penzler, put it on Mrs Penzler’s desk. Nine fifty a.m.,
Jeremy Sweetly left to go to the dentist’s. Someone went to the loo at nine seven a.m., nine fifty-one a.m., nine fifty-five a.m. . . . Do you need loo breaks?’

‘Probably not, skip those.’

‘Breaktime, still thick ice and snow outside, we all stayed indoors. Ten thirty a.m, Thingummy from the year below us came to pick up some maths books, staggered out with heavy box from
back of the class. Te n forty-five a.m., Jeremy Sweetly returned from the dentist’s, kept dribbling. Eleven a.m., the Ginger Kid from the class next door was sent in to ask Mrs Penzler if
they could borrow some scissors, left with a handful from the drawers under the window. Eleven forty-seven a.m., Whatsisface from Mr Nailshott’s class turns up to collect donations for the
Winter Fayre, gathers them from the shelves beside the door. Eleven forty-nine a.m., Mrs McEwan comes in again, asks Mrs Penzler for paperwork back, handed out by mistake, takes huge pile of stuff
from desk. When she’s gone, Mrs Penzler has a moan about all these interruptions we’re having this morning. And that’s it up to the lunchtime bell.’

There it was! Right there, for all to see. I knew at once what had happened to Mrs Penzler’s book. I couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure, but ninety per cent seemed good enough to
me.

Have you spotted it too?

‘How could you lot not have spotted it before?’ I cried.

‘Spotted what?’ said Muddy.

‘The book got mixed up in the stuff that Whatsisface from Mr Nailshott’s class collected up for the Winter Fayre. It went in with the odds and ends for the bric-a-brac stall. The
book was on the shelves by the door, Izzy told me yesterday. And you’ve just told me that the stuff for the Fayre was there too.’

Muddy snorted loudly. ‘Nooooo. The book was on a shelf by itself, the Fayre stuff was all up the other end. You’d have to be a right twit to go picking up a tatty old book like Mrs
Penzler’s, thinking it . . . Actually, I see what you mean.’

‘There’s an important principle that Sherlock Holmes sticks by in his stories,’ I said. ‘Whenever you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must
be the truth. We know the book was there first thing in the morning. We know it had gone by lunchtime. Whatsisface from Mr Nailshott’s class was the only person who went near those shelves.
He must have picked the book up by mistake.’

‘So nobody stole it!’ cried Muddy.

‘No. Somebody bought it at the Winter Fayre.’

‘Oh no, it could be anywhere by now!’ said Muddy.

‘No. Think back to Bob Thompson. He was after something and, at the Winter Fayre, he found it.’

‘That can’t be right,’ said Muddy. ‘Think back to the book. It’s worthless. And Bob didn’t even know about it, anyway.’

‘That’s the final part of the mystery,’ I said. ‘That’s the problem we need to solve next! Look at your notes. What precisely happened on Tuesday afternoon, when
Mrs Penzler showed you all the book for the first time?’

‘I don’t have notes about that,’ said Muddy.

‘Why?’

‘I wasn’t there. Loo break.’

‘
What?
Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t know it was important, did I?’ protested Muddy. ‘You’ve been going on about Bob Thompson!’

‘So who
was
there?’

‘Er, well, everyone else.’

I phoned Izzy.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR