Top-Secret Grandad and Me Page 8

  She took another huge slurp from her smoothie. “Thanks for the drink, by the way.” She smiled.

  Grandad grinned at me and put on a funny sing-song voice. “Ohhh, Jayesh Patel, taking his girlfriend out for a drink…”

  He could see his taunt was annoying me, so he kept going. “Jayesh and Sian, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

  I felt my face flush. I really wanted to tell him where to get off, but all I could do, without looking like an idiot in front of Sian, was scrunch my face up at him when she wasn’t looking.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I made contact with Morrison. He said he had a huge scoop that would blow everything out of the water, and he wanted to meet. I don’t think he realised the St Knocker Sentinel was just a school newspaper. He thought he could sell the story for loads of money. When he found out I didn’t have any he sort of stormed off.

  “I’ve been following him since. Except for the last few days. He seems to have disappeared. And I think it might be serious, because when I went to his flat, someone had already been there before me, and they’d ransacked it. They were obviously looking for something.”

  She opened out her palm to reveal the memory stick. A tiny sticker on the front read, in miniature letters: PROJ. 212.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “PROJECT 2–1–2,” she said. “It’s the code name for one of the illegal diamond mines, probably the worst of them, where kids as young as seven and eight years old are forced to work. Facts, figures, money trails – I bet it’s all in here. I’m going to blow this wide open.” She gazed dreamily into the air and moved her hand from one side to another, as if running it along a name plaque. “Sian Hanlon – master journalist!”

  Grandad chortled. “Ha! Master journalist and master detective! You and your girlfriend could be a double act: Hanlon and Patel. You better tell her about Morrison now.”

  I nodded. “The thing is – Morrison, he’s dead.”

  She stopped mid-slurp. Her eyes widened in shock. I went on to tell her about the body in the library, the dead janitor and Duke’s Laundry. Her face sickened and she pushed her smoothie aside.

  “We seem to be mixed up in something big,” she said.

  We do, I thought, but I was more interested in clearing my mum and me of murder than ridding the world of its diamond mines. At least, for now. One thing at a time. “Is there anything you can think of that might give us a lead?” I asked. “Anyone he met? Anywhere he went? Anything he mentioned, however small?”

  She considered this for a moment, and then her eyes flickered. “Yes! Maybe. There was someone. I was following him. They met in the middle of the Squinty Bridge. You know, that one with the big arch that crosses the Clyde near the Science Centre. I didn’t understand at the time, but now it makes sense.”

  “Who was it?” I asked, but then one of the waiters interrupted.

  The man was dressed as a satsuma, wearing a bullfighter’s hat and playing a pair of castanets with stylish abandon. I was expecting a Spanish accent too, but when he spoke it was in broad Glaswegian. I was a bit disappointed.

  “’Scuse me.” He was looking at Sian. “Somebody across the street just phoned in. The polis are takin’ your bike away.”

  “Oh, right!” Sian jumped to her feet and grabbed her bicycle helmet. “Back in a sec’.” She sprinted through the door and disappeared.

  “Hmm, what do you think?” asked Grandad.

  I was about to tell him too, but then a thought struck me. Something huge. Something that slapped me across the face like a giant wet fish jumping out of the Clyde. It sent a shiver up my spine, adrenalin pumping through my veins.

  I could have been wrong. It was just a hunch. I hoped I was, but I didn’t think so.

  Somebody phoned in, the waiter had said. I could have kicked myself.

  I raced outside, only to find Sian’s bike lying on the pavement, her helmet skittering across the tarmac, and her feet being dragged into the back of a van.

  “Stop!”

  The van screeched off, and the doors slammed shut as it veered round the corner.

  A white van.

  With the words Duke’s Laundry printed across the side.

  Chapter 24

  The Dead Ankles

  My first thought was to chase after the van, but it was already out of sight. And I couldn’t use Sian’s bike; it was still chained up to the railings.

  “They are heading back across the river,” said Grandad.

  “We have to get to the laundry… fast!” I said. I’d just spent most of my pocket money on comedy Spanish-style beverages, so there was no chance of a taxi. Fortunately, I had just enough for a bus ticket.

  Picking up Sian’s helmet, I raced to the nearest stop, and caught the first bus heading for Govanhill.

  “Wait!” said the driver, a very large man with red cheeks, as I tossed my coins in the slot. “A child’s fare is eighty pence.”

  “What?” I said. “No, it’s not.”

  “Aye, it is,” he said.

  “Wait,” I said. “I was on a bus yesterday and it was seventy-five pence!”

  “That was yesterday,” he replied. “And it’s eighty pence today. Look.” He pointed up at a sign, which read:

  PRICE INCREASE

  Adult £1.60

  Child 80p

  “The fares went up today.”

  This was a disaster. Seventy-five pence was all I had left. It meant I couldn’t go anywhere. “Look, driver… sir, it’s an emergency,” I said.

  “Yes,” Grandad added, “you tell him.” He leaned his head through the driver’s window, and began yelling in the man’s face. “You great galoot!”

  The driver sniffed the air, as if he’d just picked up a bad smell.

  “Was that me?” said Grandad, delighted. So delighted in fact that he started joking around. “Oh, I do apologise, it must have been that prawn vindaloo I ate the night before I died!”

  Eventually a man behind me wearing a lumberjack-style jacket stepped forward, sighing deeply and shaking his head. “Here,” he said, and popped five pence into the slot.

  The driver nodded, satisfied, and printed off my ticket.

  “One more thing!” I said to him as he issued his last bus ticket and was driving off. I rapped on his window.

  “Don’t talk to me, I’m driving!” he snapped.

  “What if it’s really important?” I asked.

  He scoffed. “Always is.”

  “There’s this girl. You see, she’s been kidnapped. And, look I know it’s hard to believe, but you have to call the police on your radio.”

  The driver burst out in sarcastic laughter. “Oh, I get it, ha ha!” He screwed up his nose and spoke in a weird squeaky voice, which I hoped was not an impression of me. “Make a fool of the driver, play a practical joke.”

  “No, really. Just radio it in, please!”

  “Hu! OK, so what’s her name, then?” he asked.

  “Sian.”

  “Sian whit?”

  I shrugged. “I can’t remember.”

  “Hah! You might have done better than that. You can’t even think up a good name. And where did it happen?”

  “This place called El Fruit-io.”

  He burst into laughter again, this time, genuine side-splitting guffaws. “You must think I sailed up the Clyde on a tea biscuit.”

  “No, really, it’s a smoothie bar. The guys are all dressed up as satsumas.”

  He laughed even harder. “I’m not falling for that. Do you know how many folk try and play jokes on me? It’s no’ fair. I didn’t become a bus driver to get laughed at all day long you know.” His face turned serious, and his cheeks were getting redder and angrier. “I became a bus driver so as I could drive buses and no’ have to talk to people. See this window?” He jabbed at the glass screen between him and me. “That’s a message. It says: DON’T TALK TO ME.”

  The man with the lumberjack coat, who had broad ox-like shoulders, barged through the
other passengers, passing straight through Grandad as he did so.

  Grandad crossed his eyes and gave a groan. “Watch it!”

  The man grabbed me by the hood of my parka and barked at the driver, “Is this boy bothering you?”

  “Aye, actually, he is,” the driver replied.

  “No!” cried Grandad. “He is the one being an idiot! You leave my grandson be.”

  “Right, that’s it! Aff the bus!” growled the man.

  “Get him oot!” cried a tiny sour-faced old lady in the front seat.

  “Wee troublemaker! Stop the bus! Chuck him off!” moaned an old man with a round face. He reached up to press the stop button.

  “Oh no you don’t!” Grandad must have done it on instinct. He reached up to catch the man’s wrist. Amazingly, he succeeded.

  The man’s eyes widened in horror as he stared at his hand, which was frozen in midair. “Wha… WHAAAAA…!”

  “Did you see that?” cried Grandad. He clapped his hands and did a really cool dance – all head bobbing and arm wiggling, like in a Bollywood movie. “I can touch things! I can actually touch things!”

  I did see it, but I was too busy being grappled by a lumberjack rhinoceros. The driver pulled over, the doors pistoned open, and the man pushed me out onto the pavement.

  As the bus drove off, Grandad shouted after it, shaking his fist, “I will look for you, I will find you, and I WILL haunt you!”

  He clasped his hands around his back and then turned to me. “That went well. So what now?”

  I couldn’t see a phonebox around anywhere to call the police. There was nothing else for it. “We run!” I said. “Or at least, I run, you float.”

  Grandad shrugged. “OK, sounds good.” He seemed to have mastered the art of floating. He was faster than me now. In fact, he kept stopping to turn and complain. “Come on, I could run faster than that when I was fifty-eight!”

  ***

  I was panting by the time I reached Duke’s Laundry. I reckoned it took me twenty-one minutes and forty seconds to get there, which must’ve been enough to get me into the Guinness Book of Records. Though I don’t suppose anyone has ever bothered to set a record for pelting it across half of Glasgow.

  There was no sign of the van outside. I burst in, my heart thumping, ready to confront Maw Cleggan. Only no one was at the desk.

  “Hello! HELLO!” I bellowed. “SIAN!”

  No answer.

  “I will go through and check,” said Grandad, ducking through the doorway into the back.

  I propped myself against the counter to get my breath back. Then I heard Grandad shouting, “JAYESH! You had better come in here!”

  I dodged behind the counter into the back. I found myself in a large, well-lit hall, filled with industrial washers and dryers. None of them were being used. The place was completely quiet.

  None of them, except one. A tumble dryer, a large commercial one. It had just come off a cycle; I could tell from the heat rising from it. Its door was lying open and a pair of feet were sticking out.

  Chubby feet wearing luminous yellow trainers.

  Maw Cleggan’s luminous yellow trainers.

  “She is dead!” I heard Grandad say. It was like an echo in my head, and everything seemed to be going in slow motion.

  Some kind of instinct made me grab her by the ankles. I’m not sure why, maybe I was going to try and pull her out.

  Just then, all the doors in the place smashed open at once.

  “GO! GO! GO!”

  A dozen armed police officers burst in, pointing guns with red laser sights around the room. Red lasers that swiftly focused on me.

  Uniformed officers wearing high-visibility vests followed close behind them. Outside, the chop-chop-chop of a helicopter could be heard hovering overhead.

  A figure in a suit stepped out from between two armed men.

  It was DI Graves, managing to look both extremely grim and extremely smug at the same time.

  “Well, well, Mr Patel.”

  “Can I help you?” Grandad and I both replied.

  She jabbed her thumb towards Maw Cleggan’s very dead ankles.

  “That’s a new one,” she said. “Death by tumble dryer.”

  Chapter 25

  The Ghostly Confession

  Interview room seven was cold and drab, its only features being a barred window high up on the wall, and a tiny radiator in the corner.

  Funnily enough, cold and drab was also how I felt at that moment, facing down DI Graves’ icy stare, especially since I’d just made myself prime suspect for three different murders.

  “So,” she said, cracking her knuckles like she was slowly snapping the backbone of a small mammal. “Is it not about time you came clean?”

  “She’s right, boy,” said Grandad, who was still straining to squeeze himself through the door, after DI Graves had slammed it in his face. “This has gone far enough. Let them deal with it. Tell her what you know, then you can go home.”

  Even I had to admit Grandad was right. I was in over my head. In the space of two days I’d somehow accumulated involvement in three murders, a kidnapping, and one or two people who wanted me dead.

  “Or,” said DI Graves, “would you prefer us to pin the murders on you? Cos it’s easy done.”

  Constable McBurnie had been sitting beside her, his arms folded, looking bored, but he suddenly sat up, as if he’d been hit by a brainwave. “Oh, could we just do that? Please?”

  “You leave my boy be!” cried Grandad, as he finally pulled himself out of the door with a…

  POP!

  He sat on the floor and sighed. “Oh, I hate doing that.”

  Graves shot McBurnie a scolding look, but he carried on. “I mean, I’m sick of this case now! Look, there was a big fight outside the butcher’s this afternoon. They’d run out of mince. A huge rammy, it was. It was spilling out onto the streets and everything. All units got scrambled, helicopters, dogs, the anti-terrorist squad. Every police officer in Pollockshields, except me! I missed it. And where am I? Here in a room interviewin’ some wee boy. I might’ve missed the biggest bust-up Glasgow’s ever seen! All because of this stupid case.”

  McBurnie stopped, and there was a moment’s silence while he looked at Graves, and then looked at me, and then back at her again. Graves didn’t respond, she just stared straight at me, the same cold look on her face.

  “Moan, moan, moan,” said Grandad. “In my day police officers did not moan, they just got on with it.”

  Eventually McBurnie tutted and slumped back in his seat again.

  “OK,” I said. “What do you want to know?”

  “First up, what took you to the laundry?” she said.

  “I was following the white van, the one that showed up on the CCTV from the school.” I leaned forward. “The CCTV you people didn’t check.”

  Was that a tinge of redness on her cheeks, I thought? Good, she should be embarrassed.

  “Ouch!” said Grandad. “You might have touched a nerve there.”

  McBurnie leaned forward and raised a finger. Another brainwave was on the way. “Could we not nick him for obstruction?”

  Grandad leaned into his face. “You! Shut up!” He pursed his lips and blew in McBurnie’s ear. The policeman threw up his hand. “Ow!” Then he looked around, confused.

  Graves ignored all this, and so did I. I told her all about Fred and Ginger, describing them in detail. I told them about how they removed Morrison’s body from the school in the rolled-up carpet.

  “Big Davie saw it too. He said he would report it for me, which I thought was a good idea, seeing as you said you never wanted to hear from me or my family again.”

  Her cheeks reddened further, while McBurnie drummed his fingers on his chin, then pointed towards Sian’s pink bicycle helmet, which sat on the table in front of me. “Hey! Have you got a licence for that bike?”

  “You don’t need a licence for a bike,” sighed Graves.

  “Oh NO?” he said dramaticall
y.

  “It’s not mine,” I said.

  “AHAAAA!!” cried McBurnie, leaping to his feet and pointing a finger of accusation right in my face. “You NICKED it!”

  “Right, that’s it!” said Grandad. He steadied himself, and launched a kick at McBurnie’s backside. His leg went straight through, but McBurnie yelped and jumped in the air. “What was that?”

  “Sit down!” ordered Graves.

  I carried on: “Someone got to Big Davie before he could report it, but I don’t know how.”

  I also told her everything I knew about Morrison and Marlin Shipping, where he worked. And finally – Sian. “The most important thing you need to do is find that white van.”

  “Why?”

  “Look, I’ve told you about ten times – Fred and Ginger took a friend of mine, a girl my age.”

  “Yes, the kidnapping,” she said.

  “A kidnapping?” said McBurnie, suddenly excited. “At last, we’re getting somewhere! Tell us more.”

  “I’m going to kick him again!” said Grandad. He drew his leg back, and launched another kick, but this time McBurnie didn’t react. “Oh, I can’t do it! That last one took it right out of me.”

  I dangled the bike helmet from its strap as I told Graves all about Sian, what school she went to and how she linked in with Morrison. “She was looking into illegal diamond mining. It was called PROJECT 212. I’m not sure how it’s connected to all this, but I’m sure it is, somehow.”

  Graves’ cheeks went white this time. “Yes, that is extremely serious information,” she said.