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  The Floods 5: Prime Suspect

  ePub ISBN 9781864715699

  Kindle ISBN 9781864717020

  This work is fictitious. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

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  First published by Random House Australia 2007

  Copyright © Colin Thompson

  http://www.colinthompson.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Thompson, Colin (Colin Edward).

  Prime suspect.

  For children.

  ISBN 978 1 74166 135 4 (pbk.).

  1. Witches – Juvenile fiction. 2. Wizards – Juvenile fiction. I. Title. (Series: Thompson, Colin (Colin Edward). Floods; 5).

  A823.3

  Illustrations by Colin Thompson

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Imprint Page

  The Floods’ Family Tree

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Footnotes

  The Floods Series

  Random House

  How To Live Forever

  The Floods 6: The Great Outdoors

  It was a dark and moonless night and in the blackness something stirred.

  It was Mordonna Flood adding sugar to her coffee – which has nothing to do with the following story except that it was a dark and moonless night and things were stirring.

  The five Flood children who went to school at Quicklime College – Satanella, Merlinmary, Winchflat and the twins, Morbid and Silent – should have all been at home in Acacia Avenue, either asleep in bed or doing the sort of unmentionable things wizards and witches do at two o’clock in the morning, but they weren’t. They had all slipped off the school bus before it had left the valley and were now gathered in a secret place behind the school where the grounds gave way to the dark, menacing Patagonian forest that lined the valley.

  They were digging a deep hole.

  To avoid detection, they were digging the hole with special silent shovels, but even so, there were eyes watching them.

  Now read on1 …

  It looked as if the body had been dead for a while. Grass had started growing out of its nose and a family of Patagonian Pocket Mice had built a nest in one of the jacket sleeves. However, as Forensic Special Investigator Grusom knew, appearances could be deceptive. On closer examination the grass turned out to be plastic, and had obviously been placed there to hide the true time of death. It had fooled the mice, but Forensic Special Investigator Grusom was not a mouse.

  He took out his blue torch and shone it in the corpse’s face. The body was out in broad daylight so the torchlight was barely visible, but the blue torch was always the first thing investigators used at a crime scene and rules were rules, especially in forensic science.

  Putting on a pair of rubber gloves, Grusom began to go through the victim’s pockets.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said, holding up a small brown object and handing it to his assistant. ‘Bag this, Oily.’

  Oily put the object in his mouth and sucked it. He rolled it around with his tongue, frowned, sucked it some more then swallowed it.

  ‘I said, bag it, not eat it!’ said Grusom. ‘I wanted it analysed back in the lab.’

  ‘No need, boss,’ said Oily. ‘I can tell you all you need to know. Treacle toffee from a small town in Belgium. Unlike normal Belgian treacle toffee, which is made with one hundred per cent local produce, this one has been tampered with. It contained treacle from Transylvania Waters.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ Grusom asked.

  ‘Because only Transylvania Waters treacle contains lethal amounts of arsenic,’ said Oily and dropped down dead.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Grusom.

  The Forensic Special Investigators Department, or FSI, always kept at least ten Oily clones on hand to cover sudden Assistant-Becoming-Dead situations, which occurred about four times a week. Grusom spoke into his phone and a couple of minutes later an identical assistant arrived.

  ‘Your first observation?’ said Grusom.

  ‘Our killer was a very considerate person,’ said the new Oily.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, look where we are, chief,’ Oily replied. ‘Right outside a graveyard. I mean, we’ve got less than ten metres to go to bury the body.’

  ‘That’s another thing,’ said Grusom. ‘Don’t you think it’s strange for a school to have a graveyard?’

  The two investigators and the dead body were standing at the entrance to the graveyard at Quicklime College, the famous, yet very secretive, school located in an almost inaccessible Patagonian valley. At Quicklime’s, all the students were witches and wizards apart from a few ghosts and ogres.2 This was the school where five of the Flood children went every day.

  Because of the altitude and strange composition of the air, the body had not begun to decay as it would normally. The dead body was not lying down like dead people are supposed to, either.

  It was leaning against the left stone gatepost with an absent-minded expression on its face, as if it was waiting for a bus. What made the scene even more mysterious was that although the victim was dead in deepest South America, he had a return ticket clutched in his left hand for the journey from Bruges Town Hall to the city morgue, which was many thousands of kilometres away in Europe.3

  ‘So, do you think the victim was Belgian, chief?’ said Oily.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Grusom. ‘Though of course, he could have been a bus ticket collector.’

  This turned out to be the case, because a search of all the victim’s pockets turned up bus tickets from eighteen other countries, including Tristan da Cunha, which doesn’t have a bus service, any buses or even a road.

  ‘Possibly a forgery, chief,’ Oily suggested.

  ‘Yes, and of course that could blow the case wide open,’ said Grusom.

  ‘How so, chief?’

  ‘How so what?’

  ‘How would it blow the case wide open?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ said Grusom. ‘Blow the case wide open is just a phrase us forensic investigators use from time to time when we can’t think of anything else to say.’

  ‘So whenever you say, “This could blow the case wide open,” am I supposed to ignore it?’ Oily asked.

  ‘Correct. Unl
ess, of course, we are in a situation where something does actually blow the case wide open. Which was exactly what happened in the Suitcase-Full-Of-Dynamite-That-Got-Thrown-Onto-A-Bonfire Case,’ Grusom explained. ‘And there’s another thing.’

  ‘Where, chief?’

  ‘The last Oily called me boss, not chief. I like that better.’

  ‘Fair enough, chief,’ said Oily. ‘Err, boss.’

  ‘There’s something caught in the vic’s throat,’ said Grusom.4 ‘And what is the rule when it comes to objects in throats?’

  ‘Loosen tight clothing,’ said Oily, undoing his tie, ‘and remove all foreign objects from throat.’

  He bent down to peer into the victim’s mouth. The foreign object was a key ring. There was one key on the ring, along with a red ribbon with the words ‘Not Foreign’ written in white laundry marker pen.

  ‘Well, that settles that, then,’ said Oily. ‘It’s not a foreign object so we can leave it where it is.’

  ‘It could be a red herring,’ said Grusom.

  ‘No, boss. It’s red ribbon,’ said Oily. ‘I don’t think you could fit a herring into someone’s throat – not all in one piece, anyway.’

  Grusom sighed. ‘It’s an expression –’

  ‘No, no, it’s definitely a ribbon,’ Oily interrupted.

  ‘OK, OK! Let’s move on,’ said Grusom. He reached down and pulled a small card from the victim’s trousers. ‘It appears that our victim is a forty-seven-year-old male called Professor Randolf Open-Graves,’ said Grusom. ‘And this bus pass entitles him to travel anywhere in the city of Ghent from last Tuesday until the end of March.’

  ‘Unless Professor Open-Graves is the murderer and he accidentally – or even deliberately – left his bus pass down the victim’s trousers to throw us off the scent.’

  ‘Scent, scent?’ said Grusom. ‘What scent? No one told me about any scent.’

  ‘I don’t mean an actual scent,’ said Oily.

  ‘So someone’s stolen the scent?’

  Oily looked confused, stupid, confused again and slightly Belgian with a touch of Tasmanian and just a hint of Italian all at the same time.

  ‘No. I mean, yes. Err, no,’ he said. ‘What I meant was that maybe the bus pass belongs to the murderer and the victim is not a professor at all.’

  ‘Unlikely, considering he has “If found please return the professor to the University of Ghent” tattooed on his left wrist,’ said Grusom. ‘But if I have learned one thing as a forensic investigator, it is that one must always keep an open mind.’

  ‘Right, boss,’ said Oily. ‘So do you think the fact that it’s tattooed in italics has any significance?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Grusom, just in case Oily proved to be right.

  ‘Oh, and spare batteries,’ said Oily.

  ‘Spare batteries?’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Oily explained. ‘As well as an open mind you have to keep spare batteries for your blue torch.’

  ‘Well, yes, you’re right,’ Grusom conceded, wondering how easy it would be to get his new assistant into a Becoming-Dead situation, because, although Oily was a clone of a clone of a clone, it was obvious that clones were not all created equal.

  ‘So you’ve learned two things then, boss,’ Oily said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve learned two things. One, you have to keep an open mind and two, you must always carry a spare set of blue torch batteries,’ said Oily.

  ‘It’s an expression. It’s an expression!’ said Grusom, gritting his teeth. ‘I have actually learned millions of things.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Oily. ‘It’s like blowing the case wide open.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Umm, I, err …’

  ‘See that really thick and terribly threadbare electric cable tied to that very rusty metal girder sitting in that bucket of water over there?’ said Grusom.

  ‘Yes, boss,’ said Oily.

  ‘Well, take this big shiny screwdriver and poke it into that bit of the wire that seems to be crackling and making those huge sparks and see if it is live,’ said Grusom.

  It was.

  The next Oily clone was definitely a big improvement. For a start, she was not a man and not called Oily. In fact, she wasn’t an Oily clone at all, but a very attractive young lady with soft blonde hair and big dark eyes that Grusom had to force himself not to shine his blue torch into.

  ‘Hi, boss. I’m Avid,’ she said. ‘The Oily clones have developed a terminal Lack-Of-Intelligence fault so they’ve sent me instead.’

  Looking across at the shrivelled-up black Oily crisp that was still smouldering on the end of Grusom’s big screwdriver, she added, ‘May I say, boss, that I am very impressed with the excellent way you solved your defective Oily problem.’

  I like this girl, Grusom thought. She will go far. Though without an atlas on hand, he wasn’t prepared to guess just how far, or where, for that matter.

  ‘First impressions?’ he said.

  ‘Late forties, dashingly handsome, a legend in the field of forensic science, palms sweating slightly, which is probably due to my arrival.’

  ‘Well, err, yes,’ said Grusom, blushing. ‘I meant the victim.’

  ‘I would say male, about forty-seven give or take five hours, possibly a professor, possibly an obsessive collector of small pieces of paper – stamps or maybe bus tickets,’ said Avid.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Grusom, wondering why he’d put up with Oily clones for so long. ‘Any thoughts on time of death?’

  ‘Around nine thirty-two and thirty seconds, on a Tuesday, in a month with an “e” in it and about five seconds after he stopped breathing,’ said Avid.

  ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘Cessation of life.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ said Grusom. ‘Time for afternoon tea, I think.’

  ‘Brilliant, boss,’ said Avid. ‘If we take the thirty-seven-minute tea break and the five-minute toilet break, it will be dark enough for us to go to work with our blue torches.’

  In the twilight world of forensic science Grusom was indeed a legend. Not because of his formidable skills or dashing good looks or the size of his blue torch, but because of his unusual – some would even say weird – methods. Unlike other forensic investigators, who searched for clues with powerful microscopes, very small tweezers and logical deduction, Grusom favoured the Throwing-A-Handful-Of-Magic-Beans-Up-In-The-Air method. Unbelievably, this nearly always ended with him solving the case.

  Many other forensic investigators tried to copy Grusom’s methods, but only ended up in a Lots-Of-Beans-All-Over-The-Floor-And-Down-The-Front-Of-Their-Shirts situation. They made the mistake of using ordinary beans instead of magic beans because they didn’t believe there was such a thing as magic beans – especially not ones that came in cans of tomato sauce like Grusom’s did.

  It was because of this unusual reputation that the headmaster of Quicklime College had particularly asked for Grusom to be assigned to the case.

  ‘Someone who works like that must be a wizard,’ he said to the assembled teaching staff. ‘Ordinary people don’t have access to magic beans, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to read them.’

  If Grusom was a wizard, he was completely unaware of it. Neither of his parents showed the slightest hint of wizardry, though his father did always say that his mum’s chocolate cakes were magic. Exactly where Grusom got his supply of magic beans might be revealed later. On the other hand, it might not.5 Whenever anyone asked, Grusom would simply say that it was classified information that he was not at liberty to pass on. This sounded so true that everyone believed it and never asked him again, though among his fellow forensic investigators there was endless speculation and frequent typing of ‘where do magic beans come from’ on Google.

  ‘We don’t want anyone poking around Quicklime’s with electronic paraphernalia,’ said the headmaster. ‘Not with some of the sensitive equipment we have … er, well, er, hidden away.’

  ‘Not to
mention Cornish Elmroot with that thing in his head,’ said the Matron. ‘Don’t forget what happened last time – and that was just triggered by an iPod.’

  ‘Exactly, and it was the tiniest one of the iPods, too, with some really bad music on it,’ the headmaster agreed. ‘No, far better we rely on the magic beans method. That way no one gets hurt.’

  (The thing inside Cornish Elmroot’s head was a miniature nuclear power-plant, which was put there by his parents to keep in touch with their beloved nine-year-old son while he was away at school. Most witch and wizard parents could talk to their children by telepathy, but the Elmroots lived too far away. They lived in a distant galaxy, which meant that by the time their telepathic thoughts had travelled across space and reached Cornish, he would have left school, married and had three children. The planet was so far away that Cornish’s parents had sent him off to school several years before he had been born, so that by the time he arrived he was five years old and ready to join the kindergarten. The nuclear power-plant speeded up the whole process so they could keep in touch in real time. The trouble was that during the journey from his home planet to Earth, the power-plant had been damaged by a freak solar flare, making it incredibly sensitive to the slightest electrical field. In fact, it didn’t even need a whole electrical field. A small electrical back garden was enough to upset it.

  The iPod incident the Matron was referring to had resulted in power cuts across the whole of Patagonia and as far north as the bedside lamp in a spare bedroom two kilometres south of Buenos Aires. Since then Cornish had been made to wear a solid helmet of lead that encased his entire head. Due to the great weight of this helmet, Cornish’s head was gradually being pushed down inside his shoulders. This meant the signal was growing weaker, which in turn meant it was harder to stay in touch with his parents, who were then forced to use more and more powerful signals, which were causing all sorts of weird weather patterns on Earth, which many people mistakenly put down to global warming.)