The London Eye Mystery: Chapters 11–19

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.

If you’re too close, you can’t see the pods go round properly without getting them muddled.

This is because our senses are not foolproof.

In fact, some people believe that one hundred per cent certainty is impossible to achieve.

This is a process where probability based on past observation allows us to predict things like weather patterns

And in the vast majority of cases, young people who disappear like Salim are found within forty-eight hours.

No camera can see everything or everybody, but there’s no sign of anything untoward happening that morning.

A heavy feeling like you get when you eat more calories than you can burn off efficiently came down inside of me.

I remembered Salim’s father only barely.

‘I’ve some interesting theories, which might—’

I imagined a great anvil-shaped cloud forming over southeast London and hot air rising in convection currents.

It took me a moment to realize she was imitating me.

He could be stranded in another time or even a parallel universe.

‘And that’s the daftest of the lot.’

Then I had what people call an inspiration.

Then when Mum got home, she ran up and down stairs with cups of tea, flowers and magazines and Mum said she didn’t know how she’d have coped without her.

She said the more agony you feel, the more time slows down.

I thought about God and immortal souls and eternity.

A kind of lost innocence in his face.

In detective stories, when the sleuth revisits the scene of the crime, he nearly always finds a clue that has been overlooked by the ordinary police.

It reminded me of the time Dad had played the back half of a donkey in the school pantomime.

Her words were ordinary but her face was a Siberian permafrost.

When I try to explain my theories about weather systems, or other remarkable phenomena of the universe, and Kat tells me to shut up, it’s Mum who tells Kat not to be rude.

While Kat was in the chemist’s Dad and I waited outside and he told me what a B-movie was and how films like Creature from the Black Lagoon or Cat Women of the Moon, which Dad has in his collection, were made on low budgets with poor-quality props and actors and were so bad that they were funny and had a cult following.

I was asking Dad how many fans it took to make something move from being side-stream to mainstream when Kat reappeared brandishing a plastic bottle of blue liquid.

I’d looked at Kat’s little finger, and imagined Dad going around it, in miniature, stretched and pummelled into an odd-looking, living ring.

The Thames estuary dissolved into cloud.

I thought of the last dodo dying on a remote rock.

A young man with a London Eye T-shirt, a member of staff, stood at the door beckoning us to come out.

What he didn’t see, but I did, was the top of a wallet of newly processed photos, bulging from the pocket of Kat’s fur-collared jacket.

The world’s most famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, said that once you have eliminated all the possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.

My pencil hovered over the list.

But all I could see was the wrong'way-round Z and a line of boys, all Salim look-alikes, smiling and waving and saying goodbye and walking to the edge of a precipice.

It looked as if a corner of the London Eye was emerging from my shoulder.

Pity must have been pleased because we had four enormous pizzas at the pizza restaurant nearby.