Read Floods 5 for Free Online Page B

Avid.
    â€˜No, I mean a prefect alibi,’ Grusom explained. ‘At the time of the professor’s death the Transylvania Waters Homicidal Maniacs Soccer Eleven were playing soccer across the other side of the world in Edinburgh, Scotland, against a team of high school prefects who they beat 7/3/6.’
    â€˜7/3/6? What’s the six?’
    â€˜The number of prefects left alive at the end of the game.’
    â€˜But, as always, there is yet another possibility,’ said Avid. ‘Maybe the professor’s dead body is lying about the time it died.’
    â€˜Good thinking,’ said Grusom.
    Avid began to examine the professor’s naked body with her blue torch and a large magnifying glass, starting beneath the fingernails and working towards the shoulders. First she poked under the left thumbnail with a pair of tweezers and removed several mysterious flakes of something that would probably turn out to be blue paint from the racy bonnet of a 1986 Ferrari or the lacy bonnet of a1923 Old Lady. She put them in a small plastic bag for later examination under the microscope.
    Then she read the professor’s fortune in the lines on his left hand, which said that the professor would have a long life. This was obviously seriously inaccurate. However, the lines on his right hand said, ‘Sorry about that, missed out the word “not”.’
    But it was when Avid reached the body’s wrist that she got the biggest shock.
    â€˜Excuse me, boss,’ she said as all the colour drained from her face in a deathly but extremely gorgeous way, ‘this might seem like a really stupid question, but we are absolutely certain this man is dead. Aren’t we?’
    Grusom was speechless. He reminded his incredibly-beautiful-but-maybe-not-as-brightas-he-had-originally-thought assistant of all the different ways Professor Randolf Open-Graves had been murdered.
    â€˜So I would have thought the fact that he’s dead is rather obvious,’ he concluded. Somethingabout the quirk in Avid’s eyebrow told him that she didn’t agree. ‘What are you saying? We should have checked for a pulse?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜What …? You …? Duhhh …’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Avid and, taking Grusom’s hand in hers, she pressed his index finger against the corpse’s wrist.
    Professor Randolf Open-Graves, who had been killed at least eleven times, maybe more if the team’s reserve players had been involved, had a pulse.
    â€˜I, err, I, err, I don’t say this often,’ said Grusom, ‘but if ever there was a right time, it’s now.’
    â€˜Say what, sir?’
    â€˜This,’ he said, ‘blows the case wide open.’
    Avid started scrabbling through the FSI Very, Very Advanced Handbook: Monster Bumper Edition , but there was nothing anywhere that came close to covering the situation they now found themselves in.
    The professor was obviously dead. There wereso many ways that proved it. Quite apart from the fact that this was the only corpse Grusom had ever come across that had been murdered with every single one of the Top Ten Most Popular Ways to Kill People, 20 bits of him kept falling off. This was not something that usually happened to people who were alive. Nor was there a single drop of blood in his body. 21 Nor could the professor tell Grusom how many fingers he was holding up or the name of the prime minister – both of which were the accepted tests to find out if someone is losing their mind. Nor was he breathing or making any noise at all apart from a very faint cracking sound as his bones dried out.
    Even though the professor’s hand had fallen off when they’d touched the wrist, the pulse was not a faint dying ebb, but as strong as a little mouse jumping up and down inside a pillowcase. Avidthreaded a needle and began to sew the professor’s hand back on.
    â€˜What are we going to do?’ she asked as she