The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd Read Free Book Online Page B

kind, you’ve to open it somehow.’ She shook the camera and shrugged. ‘Dunno how. You get the film out and take it to the camera shop to have it developed. It costs money and you have to wait. What a bloody palaver.’
    She started fingering buttons and shaking it.
    ‘I think we should give the camera back to Aunt Gloria,’ I said. ‘Because she is Salim’s next of kin.’
    ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Kat said. I was about to explain how the next of kin inherits the property of people who have died and how perhaps this also applies to the property of people who have disappeared, when the doorbell rang. Kat and I jumped up.
    ‘Salim!’ Kat said.
    She dropped the camera on the bed and we ran out of the room and down the stairs. But in the 7hallway, just coming in through the front door, which Mum was holding open, wasn’t Salim, only two grown-up people, a man and a woman. The man was in uniform, the woman wasn’t, and this meant the opposite of what you might think: that the woman was in charge. This was because she was ‘plain clothes’; he wasn’t.
    It was the police.

ELEVEN
    Margins of Error

    Minutes later, in the living room, the atmosphere was hot and close. Everyone was polite. Everybody was calm. But you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife . That’s what people say when invisible feelings vibrate in the air, like ions do just before an electric storm.
    Mum and Aunt Gloria were on the sofa. Aunt Gloria held a glass of brandy. Dad was standing, leaning back against the wall near the door. Kat and I stood beside him. The man, a detective sergeant, took notes, seated at the table. His boss, the woman, had taken another chair and was sitting in the middle of the room. She was thin and short with a blue skirt and jacket and a white blouse and her eyes moved quickly around the room like lightning strikes.
    First she said she was Detective Inspector Pearce and was in charge of finding Salim. Then she asked questions. Who everyone in the family was, why Aunt Gloria was visiting and why she planned to move to New York. Then she asked to see the contents of Salim’s backpack. She took his things out one by one. I looked on carefully because in good detective stories what people leave behind and don’t leave behind can be a clue to where they have gone. There was a spare sweater, a pair of jeans, a pair of socks, underwear, pyjamas, another sweatshirt and a tiny towel. These didn’t tell me very much. Then there was a battered paperback entitled Murder at Twelve Thousand Feet , a guidebook to New York, brand-new, with no creases, and a tiny address book. Finally there was a Swiss Army knife and a key ring with a model of the Eiffel Tower on it, but no keys.
    There were no wash things, like a toothbrush, because these were still in the bathroom, I remembered, on the shelf over the basin. Detective Inspector Pearce held up the empty key ring with her eyes scrunched up. Aunt Gloria explained that Salim had brought the key ring back from a school trip to Paris, then that she had rented out her house in Manchester and given all but her own set of keys to the tenants. At present, she said, Salim had no keys to anywhere.
    There was silence.
    Then the inspector looked over to where Kat and I were standing.
    ‘You two were the last to see Salim, I understand?’ she said.
    Kat told her in a quiet voice, not like her normal voice, all about the strange man, the free ticket, tracking the pod and waiting for Salim to come down, and how he hadn’t.
    ‘We should never have left them to get the tickets on their own,’ Mum said when Kat finished. The inspector’s hand waved through the air. What this meant I do not know. Then she turned back to Kat. ‘You say you tracked the pod?’
    Kat nodded.
    ‘For half an hour you did nothing but stare up and watch the London Eye go round?’
    ‘Well . . .’ Kat considered. ‘We walked back, so as to be able to see better. If you’re too close, you