Secret of the Skull

by Simon Cheshire

  ‘I’d better be getting home,’ said Izzy. ‘Extra homework to do, don’t forget.’

  She stood up to go, then paused. From her bag, she produced a jumbo-sized bar of chocolate. She placed it on the bed beside me.

  ‘You didn’t really think I wouldn’t bring you anything, did you?’ She grinned. ‘I could tell you were wondering why I’d been home before coming over. I didn’t want that thing melting in my bag all day, did I?’

  I smiled and blew my nose.

  A Page From My Notebook

  (Page slightly illegible as dabbed in chocolatey fingermarks, ahem, ahem.)

  FACT 1: The missing book is not large.

  FACT 2: The missing book is not worth anything very much.

  FACT 3: The missing book is . . . er, missing.

  Some observations:

  Fact 1 means it could easily be slipped into a school bag.

  In theory, ANYONE in the class could have taken it.

  BUT! As Izzy said, why steal it? Nobody appears to have a MOTIVE, a reason for nicking the thing. Fact 2 would seem to rule that out.

  If money isn’t a motive, could it be that someone is simply out to upset Mrs Penzler? BUT! As Izzy also said, would anyone in our class want to be that cruel? It doesn’t seem likely.

  Bob Thompson would be that cruel. No question. BUT! He wouldn’t steal the book and he wouldn’t thump someone into stealing it for him. Why? He didn’t even know it was there! And if he HAD known about it, he’d also have known it was worthless, so he STILL wouldn’t have nicked it.

  There is one other possible explanation for the theft: that whoever took it THOUGHT, wrongly, that it WAS valuable. Should that be the line of enquiry I pursue?

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING book preyed on my mind that night. I still couldn’t get to sleep, what with the coughing and the sneezing and the WHA-CHOOOOOO-ing. The problem swirled around inside my head like an irritating tune you can’t stop humming.

  At about eleven on Thursday morning, I texted my other great friend, George ‘Muddy’ Whitehouse, St Egbert’s School’s leading inventor of all things gadgety. I needed a detailed account of what had happened in our classroom while I’d been away. I needed a reliable witness!

  My text asked him to give some careful thought to the exact sequence of events on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday. And then to come and see me straight after school. Well, straight after the Winter Fayre, which was straight after school.

  ‘Hi!’ I said. ‘Have you brought me anything?’

  He looked confused. ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve just been shuffling around a school hall full with things to buy – haven’t you got me anything at all?’

  ‘I didn’t get anything for you, you cheeky —

  ‘What did you get then?’ I asked.

  ‘Wrapping paper, cards, birthday pressies for my aunties and three boxes of sponge cake with icing on top. And my mother doesn’t like any of them.’

  ‘Wasn’t she there?’ I said.

  ‘No, she stayed in the car,’ grumbled Muddy. ‘Said she couldn’t face the Winter Fayre again. Gave me a list. I told her if she didn’t like the cakes I chose, hard luck. That’s what you get for being a yellow-bellied chicken!’

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  ‘DO WE REALLY HAVE TO do this now?’ said Izzy, on the phone. ‘I was going to go to bed soon. I think I’m getting your cold. A day too late. The Winter Fayre was awful.’

  ‘So I hear,’ I said. ‘I’m feeling a little bit better now.’

  Izzy muttered something I couldn’t quite catch.

  ‘I’ll put you on speaker,’ I said.

  Once Izzy, Muddy and I could all hear each other, I propped myself up against my pillows. It seemed that Izzy, much to my surprise (and hers), was herself the vital witness who would crack the case.

  ‘What we need here, Izzy,’ I said, ‘is an exact description of the point during Tuesday afternoon when Mrs Penzler showed the class that book. The point at which Muddy was in the loo. And the most important question we need answering is: Was Bob Thompson anywhere near at the time?’

  ‘Bob Thompson?’ said Izzy. ‘Why? What’s he got to do with this? He isn’t even in our class.’

  ‘But did you or anyone else see him that afternoon?’ I said.

  Izzy went quiet for a minute or two. ‘I think he did put his head around the door,’ said Izzy.

  ‘I never knew that!’ said Muddy.

  ‘He was delivering a message from Mrs McEwan,’ said Izzy. ‘But I can’t remember when th
at was.’

  I turned to Muddy. ‘You missed Bob Thompson and Mrs Penzler talking about the book? How long were you in the loo for?’

  Muddy went red in the face. ‘I got up late. I didn’t have time to go before I left home.’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘At least now we know Bob appeared while you were in the toilet, which was also when Mrs Penzler showed the class the book.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Izzy. ‘I can’t be sure about exactly when he appeared. It might have been before Mrs Penzler showed us the book, or it might have been later on. I honestly can’t remember.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘just run through what Mrs Penzler did. As exactly as you can.’

  Izzy let out a slow breath. ‘Er, right . . . Mrs Penzler was talking about the new history topic. She said we’d be doing stuff about the 1950s . . . and, lemme think, the moon landings . . .’

  ‘What were her exact words?’ I asked.

  ‘Good grief, I can’t remember that!’ said Izzy. ‘Well, not accurately.’

  ‘Approximately, then,’ I said. ‘As close as you can. Skip to when she showed you the book.’

  ‘She opened the drawer of her desk,’ said Izzy. ‘She took out the book and she walked around the desk to stand in front of us. She held the book up in one hand. She said . . . it was something like . . . I just can’t recall the first bit, but she said something like, “This belonged to my father, who was also a teacher. He taught at a school in Dorset, on the south coast. His father was a teacher, and his father before him. The book has no value in itself, none at all, but it’s very precious to me. In fact, it’s my most treasured possession. I’m going to leave it on the shelf over there. You’re all free to take a look through it, but do please be careful with it. It will give you a feel for what lessons were like all those years ago and gaining an insight like that is worth a great deal. So please treat this book with great respect.” And then she put it on one of the shelves by the door.’

  ‘Now think carefully,’ I said. ‘Did Bob Thompson appear just after that?’

  ‘Now I’ve gone over it again,’ said Izzy, ‘I think maybe he did. Maybe a minute later? We’d moved on to something else.’