The Case of the Exploding Brains (15 page)

“No more tricks.” Ms Grimm picks up a broom and brushes us towards the door. “Someone else will fix the blasted machine. It’s the least I deserve. Now scram.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Holly declares. “Not until you tell us—”

“Out!” Ms Grimm whacks Holly with the broom, then hands it to Porter. “You can stay, son. As long as you put out the rubbish first.”

Porter looks from his mother to us, clutching the broom as if it’s the only thing keeping him attached to Earth. “But—”

“Them or me,” Ms Grimm says.

Porter looks at us and holds his broom tighter.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “Stay if you want.”

Holly nods. “I understand if you want to stay. But if you touch me with that brush, you die. The rubbish will put itself out.”

Porter laughs in a not-really-laughing-at-all kind of way, and hands the brush back to his mother. “I choose them,” he says sadly. “Because they didn’t ask me
to.”

“I don’t need a reason,” Ms Grimm snaps, but with less venom than usual. She looks more sad than angry. “I certainly don’t need a
stupid
reason. Go away.
All of you.”

She moves to start sweeping us again, but we don’t need brushing. We’re already on our way. Without thinking, I take Porter’s hand. It’s only when we reach the skip that
I realise Holly is holding his other one.

The skip! The
empty
skip.

“Rubbish!” I yell, jumping on the spot. “That’s the clue I missed in the kitchen.”

“Y’what?” Porter says, as I pull him up and down with me.

“Your mum would never let her bins overflow.” I tell him. “But the first time we ‘visited’ this house, the bin lid wasn’t shut properly and there was
something bulky inside. I remember because I stumbled straight into it. That’s where she was hiding the brain ray after the Science Museum Lost Property office sent it to her. I know
it!”

“We didn’t think to look there.”

“Of course we didn’t. Everything in this case is hidden in the last place you’d look for it. That’s how we’ll find the Moon Rock. Think of the last place
you’d look.”

“Where are you going?” I watch in horror as Holly heads for the Grimm Reaper’s side gate.

“To get the brain ray.”

“You can’t go breaking into people’s houses.”

Holly just looks at me.

“That was different. She wasn’t home then!”

“Seriously, Holly,” Porter joins in, “Mother isn’t going to let you just march in and take it. We need a plan.”

“Our plans haven’t worked out that well recently, though, have they?” Holly kicks Porter. “The last plan involved you telling your mother all about the Space Rock and
learning nothing in return.”

“My pleasure. Don’t mention it.” Porter rubs his leg. “I’ll let her break your arm next time, shall I? Come on, Holly, the Space Rock’s hardly a secret. You
only have to spend two minutes in the Science Museum to see there’s some weird telepathetic thing going on.”

“Tele
pathic
,” Holly corrects him. “What’s
pathetic
is our failure to get any information from that encounter.”

“What do you mean?” I look at Holly in surprise. “We found out everything we wanted to know.”

“What are
you
talking about?”

“We know Ms Grimm has the brain ray—” I begin.

“We knew that already,” Holly interrupts.

“Shh. Haven’t finished. We know the brain ray is broken.”

Porter looks happier. “Yeah. We
did
learn something.”

I nod and continue. “We know Ms Grimm has no idea how to fix it, meaning it poses no immediate danger, so no need to go bin-robbing just yet.”

Holly’s squishes her lips together. “Okay, I get it. No getting distracted by broken brain rays. But what about the Space Rock? There are only five days left until brain explosion
apocalypse – and we’re still in the dark.”

“I told you I hadn’t finished,” I remind her. “I was saving the Space Rock for last, but since you’ve got the patience of a jam-crazed wasp, I’ll whizz
through what we learned about it.”

I count the points out loud, using my fingers:

“You’re just making stuff up now,” Porter says.

“I don’t need to. Your mother told us.” I go through the points, one finger at a time.

“Excellent.” Holly gives me an approving grin, her mood transformed. “I didn’t realise how clever we were being! So, Sherlock, what next?”

“Shh. Wait a minute,” I say as a car pulls up on the other side of the road with its windows down, news blaring from the radio. We catch snippets as the driver scans the stations for
music.

“Breaking News . . . Fight breaks out . . . London Science Museum . . . Medics called . . . Museum Curator in coma . . . worried he might not pull through.”

Holly, Porter and I look at each other in alarm.

“What’s next,” I reply to Holly’s earlier question, “is finding that Space Rock. And fast.”

Days Left to Save the Earth: 4

I’ve always hated mornings and today is reminding me why. Everything keeps going wrong. First, Holly grabs the only yellow banana and shoves it in her mouth with an evil,
banana-shaped smile. Not fair. I hate brown bananas. They might look similar to their yellow–banana brethren but the difference between them is huge. Two words: ‘slime’ and
‘mush’. Then, when I ask if I can switch to the news channel for updates on the Science Museum and the Space Rock, Mum sits on the remote until we’ve seen the results of a lie
detector test about whether the husband of some shouty woman on TV has been texting smoochy pictures of himself to other ladies. Turns out he hasn’t. Good news for everyone except me, as the
news headlines have finished by the time his name’s been cleared.

The way my luck’s going, I’m not surprised when the man who answers the phone at the prison says we won’t be able to visit Dad again this week.

“He’s exceeded his visitation rights this month. We don’t make exceptions, even for our ‘celebrity’ inmates.”

“But I need to talk to him.”

Prison Phone Answering Man clearly doesn’t care.

Something occurs to me. “I haven’t visited often enough to exceed his allowance. Who else has been coming to see him?”

“That charity woman.”

“What charity woman?”

“The one who’s worried about the risks facing prison inmates in the extreme cold weather.”

“What extreme cold weather?” I ask. “It’s April.”

“Don’t ask me. I told her every inmate has a spare blanket on his chair in case of cold. But she insisted more blankets were needed.”

“Blankets?” I say. “What’s the name of this charity?”

“I’ve got it written down somewhere.” He rustles his papers. “Ah, here we go – ‘Saving Those Endangered by Abnormally Low Temperatures from
Harm’.”

“S-T-E-A-L-T-H,” I spell out the acronym. “Stealth Blankets. Dad was wearing one last time I visited.”

“Three of them are at it now.”

“Three prisoners dressed in Stealth Blankets?”

“Not just any prisoners either. Two of our highest category inmates. Stealth blankets, you say? Hell Raizah’s about as stealthy as an elephant with a bazooka.”

I try to dismiss the cold chill his words give me by reminding myself that I could see Dad in his blanket, both face to face and on the CCTV camera. But then I remember the bananas. Just because
Holly found a yellow one, it didn’t stop the others being brown and mushy. Similar but different.

“Have you taken pictures of the men in their blankets?”

“Are you serious?” Prison Phone Answering Man loses patience. “We’ve got better things to do than take pictures of idiot inmates who decide to waste their privilege
status by dressing up in old bedding. Now, if that’s all . . . ?”

I hang up the phone and go in search of my sister. “Holly. We need to go to the prison. Now.”

“No thanks. Dad will just annoy me again.”

“Don’t worry. We’re not actually visiting Dad – they won’t let us. We’re going to look at him. You can’t get annoyed just by looking at him.”

Holly raises an eyebrow.

“OK, fine. Don’t even look at him. I just need you to persuade the guard to let us see the CCTV footage again. I think Dad has created a blanket that makes him invisible to
cameras.”

Holly scoffs at the idea. “He was wearing his stupid blanket and we could see him. With our eyes
and
on camera.”

“Maybe it wasn’t finished then . . . Or worse,” I realise, “maybe it was a fake Stealth Blanket, designed to lull the prison guards – and me – into a false
sense of security.”

“You’re being ridiculous. Blankets can’t make people invisible.”

“Actually, they can,” I say. “Scientists have shown it’s possible to create a metamaterial capable of distorting the flow of incoming waves.”

“Geekspeak alert. Geekspeak alert.” Holly makes stupid alarm noises. “English please.”

I close my eyes and picture the research I read. “It was called the Purdue cloak and it used concentric gold rings injected with polarised cyan light—”

Holly narrows her eyes and interrupts. “I wanted less geek, not more!”

“I’m trying to explain – these tiny rings steer incoming light waves away from the object under the cloak and basically make it invisible.”

“An invisibility cloak? Seriously?” Holly clearly can’t decide whether to believe me or not. “Then why isn’t everyone wearing them?”

“Because they only work in two dimensions – so they don’t fool the human eye, only cameras. Also, the Purdue cloak weighed a tonne. So the idea was to use it to hide buildings
or vehicles. No human could possible manage to lug it around . . .”

“ . . . Except Neanderthugs!” Holly’s getting excited now.

“Perhaps Dad’s found a way to make them lighter? He’d have to wear one, after all.”

“The one he was wearing when we went to visit him didn’t look heavy,” Holly says.

“That’s why I think it was a fake Stealth Blanket, designed to get the guards used to seeing him dressed like that. Ms Grimm has dropped new, improved blankets off since then,
pretending to be from a fake charity. I need to see more recent footage. That’s why you have to make the guard show us the screen.”

“It might not be the same guy. And even if it is, it’s a long way to go if I can’t convince him.”

“You can!” I try to sound confident. “And if you can’t, we’ll set Vigil-Aunty on them.”

Unfortunately, Vigil-Aunty isn’t in scary mode. She’s still mooning over her missed opportunity with Han Solo Man. Porter saw her kissing the cover of the
Star Wars
DVD the
other day. This is not good. I need full-power Vigil-Aunty on this prison trip.

“It’s pointless being miserable about it. He’d never have kissed you, anyway,” I tell her. “Because he’s married,” I add quickly when she lifts the
Handbag of Mass Destruction. “I doubt he made a deal with his wife that allows him to kiss you.”

Vigil-Aunty’s scowl lessens slightly and, after I make her a cup of tea, she agrees to accompany us to the prison and even offers to pay for the taxi.

“That won’t be cheap,” Holly points out. “Why can’t Uncle Max drive?”

“He’s vanished,” Vigil-Aunty frowns. “I never know where he is at the moment.”

“Maybe he’s gone to Lo— Owww!” I protest as Holly kicks me.

“Maybe he’s gone where?” Vigil-Aunty asks sharply.

“The loo,” Holly jumps in. “Maybe he’s gone to the loo.”

Vigil-Aunty hits us with her handbag. “If you’ve got nothing intelligent to say, say nothing.”

Holly nods meekly.

When we climb out of the taxi at the prison, I grab her arm. “Why didn’t you want me telling Vigil-Aunty where Uncle Max has been going?”

“It’s none of our business and I don’t want to make her mad. Or sad.”

“You think he’s doing something he shouldn’t be?”

“Like I say, none of our business. Come on, let’s go.” She points to the prison gatehouse.

Annoyingly, the guard pretends not to remember us and insists his screen only monitors the perimeter. The ‘Ooh, isn’t your daughter a lucky girl’ thing doesn’t work
either. In the end, Holly is forced to resort to her traditional annoy-your-enemies-into-submission approach.

After ten minutes of the Holly horror show, Vigil-Aunty steps in. “She won’t stop, you know,” she tells the guard. “My niece can keep this up all day. But, if you let the
girls look at your screen for five minutes, I promise to remove them straight afterwards.”

The guard studies Holly, who’s still hammering away on his desk, and then looks over her head as another family approaches. With a sigh of resignation, he turns the screen to face us.

Dad has been in solitary confinement since they showed his Neanderthug documentary – for his own protection. This means his cell is monitored by CCTV, and I have the
feeling it holds a clue to the whereabouts of the Space Rock if I can just work out where to look.

I study the screen. In the left corner is a bed made of concrete. Except for the mattress. That’s not concrete – prisoners probably have a union to prevent that sort of thing.
Between bed and bars is a pointy concrete desk. The toilet, sink and water fountain are in the back right corner, and Dad is in the middle, pacing.