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one of the deserted attic rooms,’ said Avid after everyone, apart from the dead professor, had come round.
    â€˜Excellent,’ said Grusom. ‘Let’s get the body up there immediately before someone else wanders off with it.’

Getting the body up to the pathology lab wasn’t as easy as it should have been. Quite apart from the fact that the room was on the sixth floor and only accessible by a really narrow winding staircase, bits of the body kept falling off.
    It took Grusom and Avid – with Winchflat and Merlinmary following behind picking up fingers and ears and, at one point, the whole head – over an hour before they had Professor Randolf Open-Graves safely laid out on the slab ready for a serious going-over with high-powered blue torches, very sharp knives and a big magnet.
    They almost gave up on finding the left foot, but Merlinmary enlisted Satanella to help, and her super-sensitive nose tracked the left foot’s scent until they finally found it behind the bike shed, being chewed by the school dog, Emile Zola. 19
    When Winchflat and Merlinmary had left the laboratory, under strict instructions not to tell anyone where the laboratory was – which would have been difficult because every single person in the whole valley, as well as most of the rats, cats, birds, dogs, suitcases, insects, ghosts, zombies and plants already knew – Grusom and Avid got to work.
    â€˜Right,’ said Grusom, ‘the first thing we have to ascertain, which we should have done right at the start, is actual cause of death.’
    â€˜I suspect poison,’ said Avid.
    â€˜Yes, we should always suspect poison,’ said Grusom. ‘Poison is nasty evil stuff and one should always be suspicious of it.’
    â€˜No, boss,’ Avid explained. ‘I mean, I suspect that the professor was killed with poison.’
    â€˜So how do you explain the bullet hole in his chest?’
    â€˜I had noticed it, boss,’ said Avid. ‘It is my belief that the victim was killed twice.’
    â€˜Or maybe three times,’ said Grusom. He removed the professor’s shirt to reveal multiple stab wounds.
    â€˜Or four,’ said Avid, pointing to the strangulation marks around the corpse’s neck.
    â€˜Well, I’ll say this,’ Grusom said. ‘Our killer was very thorough – extremely conscientious, even.’
    â€˜Unless there were four different killers?’
    â€˜But surely the second killer would have realised the professor was already dead and not bothered,’ Grusom suggested.
    â€˜Possibly, though all four of them could have committed the crime at exactly the same time.’
    â€˜This bears all the hallmarks of the McLaundry Killer Quartet,’ said Grusom. ‘When we start digging around inside the victim, though, I suspect we’ll find he was killed more than four times.’
    â€˜What makes you think that, boss?’ said Avid, staring at Grusom with wide-eyed adoration.
    â€˜Two things,’ said Grusom.
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜One, I have an uneasy hunch.’
    â€˜You can get ointment for that,’ said Avid.
    â€˜And two,’ Grusom continued, ‘the crossbow dart in the back of the neck, the tiny incision inside the left ear, the spear in his left thigh, the terrible shark bite on his ankle covering some previous dog bites, and the remains of a sandwich full of broken glass in the victim’s back pocket.’
    â€˜So our man could have been killed as many as nine or ten times?’
    â€˜I think we’ll find that he was actually killed eleven times,’ said Grusom.
    â€˜Maybe a football or cricket team?’ Avid suggested. ‘Or possibly one and a half highly trained killer octopuses?’
    â€˜Yes. Of course, the Transylvania Waters Homicidal Maniacs Soccer Eleven spring instantly to mind, but they have a prefect alibi.’

    â€˜Don’t you mean a perfect alibi?’ said