The Case of the Exploding Brains (12 page)

“Do you think they’ve gone?” Deep Voice is disturbingly close.

“If they were ever here,” Female Voice replies. “Come on. It’s one o’clock in the morning. I want to go to bed. I don’t understand what we’re doing
here.”

“I told you. I saw a light on. We should check the house, just to be certain.” Deep Voice is taking no chances.

I swallow a scream as they twitch the curtain.

Bang! Kerrrrrang!
Sounds like a pan smashing again kitchen tiles.

The Voices disappear in the direction of the noise.

I peer between the curtains and see Holly standing in the doorway, beckoning me towards the stairs. I shake my head violently.

“I’m going back out to check the garden again,” Deep Voice declares from the kitchen.

Archimedes!
I’ll be framed in the window if he goes out there. Stuck for other options, I dart towards Holly and follow her across the hallway and up the stairs.

“Why are we going
up
?” I hiss. “Surely we should be going
out.
”

“They locked the door behind them,” Holly hisses back. “Besides, we haven’t searched up here. We have to find that brain ray.”

“Bonkers,” I mutter. “You are stark, raving bonkers.”

Taking a deep breath, I race with Holly across the wide, exposed landing between the stairs and the first bedroom door. She pushes the door and shoots me a triumphant grin when she spots the
bedroom’s wastepaper bin.

“This . . .” – she bends to pull out a sheet of brown paper – “ . . . is the packaging paper they used for my sunglasses. And look, there’s a sender’s
stamp from the Science Museum. The brain ray must be here somewhere. Maybe the Space Rock too?”

We search the wardrobes, the drawers, under the bed (shuddering at the sight of the turquoise duvet). We look everywhere we can think of, taking care to put things back the way we found them.
Holly even perches on the edge of the en-suite bath and stretches up to push the ceiling panels out the way. Nothing.

“This is stupid.” I sulk. “There’s nothing here.”

Holly opens the bathroom cabinet and makes a sound I’ve never heard from her before: part sob, part suppressed-squeal, and part little-bit-of-sick-coming-into-mouth.

“What?” I move closer. “Have you found the Space Rock?”

Holly shakes her head and points at the back of the cabinet door. I follow the direction of her finger and squeak when I realise that the white plastic casing is covered with
a photo montage
of Dad
!

Pictures of Dad deep in thought; snaps of Dad poring over his inventions; screen grabs of Dad on the various TV shows he used to appear on. Some of the pictures look really old. In the centre of
the display is a shot of two students outside a university building in Oxford.

“
Ramanujan!
Is that Dad on the right?”

“Yup,” Holly says absently, staring in horror at the girl on the left. A strange-looking girl with lopsided features, bulgy eyes and a tiny angry, just-sat-on-a-wasp mouth.

“No!” I peer closer. “It can’t be . . . ?”

Holly nods miserably. “Ms Grimm!”

“I remember her telling me they were at university together, but I didn’t know they knew each other.
Urgh!
The Grimm Reaper has a shrine to Dad in her bathroom cabinet. This
is too freaky.”

Holly puts her finger to her lips and points towards the door as footsteps approach.

Will this never end?

I slide under the bed, staring at the dangling turquoise duvet. Where’s Holly? Do the footsteps I can hear belong to her or to the Voices? It’s impossible to tell above the thudding
of my heart.

“Don’t forget to check under the beds,” Deep Voice shouts from the landing.

Great. Now where? Apart from the bin, the bed, the drawers and the wardrobe, the room is bare. I’m not trapping myself in the wardrobe. No way . . . Wait! There are glass doors. Key in the
lock. Must lead somewhere. To a balcony? Maybe the Voices won’t go out on to the balcony. Especially if I lock it behind me.

Keeping low, I crawl over to the doors and reach up to turn the key in the lock. But my hands are shaking and the key won’t budge. The footsteps cross the landing. I’m taking too
long. At the last minute, the key turns and I squeeze through the small gap, just as the door creaks open in the next room along.

As I try to lock the door behind me, something brushes past me and a hand presses over my mouth, muffling the sound of my scream.

“Shh! It’s me,” Holly whispers in my ear. “Quick, give me the key, I’ll lock it.”

“Archimedes!
Holly!” I hiss when she removes her hand. “What are you? Some kind of cat burglar?”

She looks like she’s about to smother me again, so I add quickly, “I mean like a skilled thief, not a pet-stealing nutter.”

“I know what a cat burglar is,” Holly hisses. “I just thought if I ignored you then you might stop babbling. Now, give me the key. Your fingers are shaking.”

I drop the key into Holly’s hands-of-steel. She locks the door and pulls me back into the shadows as we attempt to shrink into the smallest space possible. The light flicks on in the
bedroom. Moments later, the balcony door rattles. We have no cover; if they come out here, it’s over. I close my eyes and sink down into a squatting position, hugging my knees.

“Locked.” Deep Voice carries through the glass.

I shift my arms so they’re covering my ears. I don’t know how long I stay like that, but I don’t hear anything more until Holly pulls my elbows down and murmurs,
“They’ve gone.”

I blink, reminding myself to breathe. “I can’t take any more of this. There’s no way I’m going back inside that house.”

“How else are you planning to get off the balcony? Parachute?”

I glance down, wishing I had a parachute and that was an option.

Holly points to the couple coming out of the front door. Deep Voice is shorter than I expected, but that’s all I notice. My attention is on the car that’s just pulled up to the kerb.
A distorted silhouette emerges and I can tell by Holly’s sharp intake of breath that she’s experiencing the same shock of recognition.

“Ms Grimm!” Holly squeaks “We have to confront her. I’m not hiding here in the shadows.”

“We’re not hiding,” I murmur. “We’re spying. You said it yourself, if we confront her about the brain ray then she’ll just lie. And she’ll know
we’re on to her. We have to keep the upper hand.”

I’m impressed by how convincing that sounds. It even silences Holly – but probably not for long. My sister has two modes:

I need to move fast. Calmer now, I tell Holly to unlock the balcony doors, and by a combination of pushing and scuttling, I manoeuvre her through the bedroom, down the stairs and out the back
window, just as the creak of the front door announces Ms Grimm’s entry.

We arrive home at two in the morning to find Porter lurking in the front garden, peering through the bay window.

My mouth curls up at the corners and my hands do a little happy dance. I’ve missed him. Holly’s expression is impossible to read – and not only because it’s dark.

She sneaks up behind him and hisses, “Lost your keys?”

He makes a shrill, high-pitched sound that helps me understand the meaning of the phrase ‘squealed like a pig’.

“What are you doing here?” Holly pulls on a bramble and lets it snap back, dangerously close to Porter’s head. “Trying to sneak in without us noticing?”

Porter ignores the bramble and rubs at the window pane. “I just spotted a smear on the glass.”

“It’s ridiculous o’clock in the morning and you’ve nipped round to clean the windows?” Holly sneers. “I thought you’d decided to leave us and move into
your new family home.”

I shake my head. There were no traces of Porter in Ms Grimm’s new house. “Where have you been, Porter?”

“Out.”

“Out?” I repeat. “For three days?”

“I’ve been at LOSERS,” Porter admits, looking down at the lawn. “Even though they shut the boarding house after the explosion, some of the rooms have been cleaned up. Mr
Kumar said I could stay for a few days during the holiday. I needed space to think.”

“You knew, didn’t you?” Holly challenges him. “You knew your mother was back.”

“She never went away,” Porter says. “She bought a new house with some of the money she made from LOSERS, but didn’t register it in her name, so no one knows where to find
her.”

“7 Albion Road,” Holly and I say, simultaneously.

Porter’s mouth drops open. “How . . .? Never mind. Okay, no one
except you two
knows where to find her.”

“Why didn’t you tell us you’d seen her?” Holly asks.

“Because I haven’t.”

“Don’t lie.” Holly reaches for another bramble.

“I’m not lying.” Porter’s moves out of prickly branch zone. “I’ve been to her house – many times – especially since your dad said that thing about
the museum volunteers. But she won’t let me in. She told me not to come back in case someone follows me.” His voice wobbles and he rubs his eyes angrily.

Holly and I stare at Porter in disbelief, causing him to flush an interesting shade of red. I picture the Dulux colour chart and decide he’s ‘Ruby Starlet’.

“She’s been working in the Science Museum,” Holly points out. “She can’t be that worried about being spotted.”

“Yeah, thanks. Making me feel loads better,” Porter mutters dejectedly.

“Maybe she’s wearing some kind of disguise.” Holly ignores Porter’s obvious misery – she’s not known for her empathy skills. “Did you get a chance to
ask her about the Science Museum while she was telling you to go away?”

Porter nods. “She said she wasn’t there on the day of the school trip.”

“She lied,” I tell him, feeling bad when his face goes all crumply. “She’s on the CCTV footage, just before the camera goes blank.”

“She must have done it for your dad,” Porter mutters. “She has a thing for him.”

I cringe, wishing I could delete the cabinet-shrine from my mind. Curse my photographic memory.

“Why do you always try and make excuses for her?” I ask Porter.

“Why do you always try and make excuses for
him
?” he retorts.

“Touché,” Holly says. “The fact is you’re both idiots, and you’re both far too easy to manipulate. We have to ask Dad what happened to the Space
Rock.”

“We?”

“Yes. We’re a team.” She narrows her eyes at Porter. “Even you. So stop lurking about in the garden and come inside.”

“Being a team is good.” I smile at Porter, not wanting to spoil the moment. “But I was asking what you meant by ‘
We
have to ask Dad’?”

Holly kicks the hedge as a thorn on the bramble cuts into her thumb. “I meant that Porter was right about you always making excuses for Dad. So, I’m coming with you on the next
visit.”

Ada Lovelace
. This is going to get messy.

Days Left to Save the Earth: 6

I secretly enjoy seeing Holly’s nervousness as we enter the prison. I stride in confidently to take my chair, this time at Table Six. Holly drops down beside me, then
stands up, then sits back down and starts tapping a frantic rhythm with her foot. If she’d shown any interest in learning Morse code with me, I’d think she was beating out an SOS
call.

Vigil-Aunty puts a hand on Holly’s leg and tells her to calm down. Holly puts a hand on Vigil-Aunty’s hand and tells her to go and stand by the vending machine because we want to
speak to Dad privately. Vigil-Aunty blows air through her nose like a rhino preparing to attack, but grudgingly gets up and heads across to the other side of the room, just as Dad hobbles into the
Visiting Hall.

Holly’s eyes widen in shock at the sight of him. I’m less disturbed because I’ve noticed something – well, two somethings – about his injuries:

I put together a few clues and come up with my first theory:

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