The London Eye Mystery

I heard the post drop as usual on the doormat. I was on Shreddie number three, and the radio weather forecast was saying it was set fair but with a risk of showers in the southeast. Kat was eating toast standing up, wriggling. It wasn’t that she had fleas, although that’s what it looked like. She was listening to her weirdo music on headphones. Which meant she wouldn’t hear the weather and wouldn’t wear a raincoat or bring her umbrella to school. Which meant that she would get wet and I wouldn’t and this was good.
Dad was hopping round in one sock, complaining about how the washing machine had eaten all his socks and he was late. Mum was looking through the laundry bag for a spare.
‘Ted, get the post,’ Mum said. She was in her nurse’s uniform and even I know that when her words come out short and sharp like that, you do what she asks, even though I hate leaving my Shreddies to turn to mush.
I came back with six envelopes. Kat saw me and snatched them off me and picked out a big brown envelope and a small white one. I could see our school emblem on the white one. It is like a squashed-up X and over it is a bishop’s hat, which is called a mitre. Kat tried to hide it behind the big brown envelope, but Mum saw her.
‘Not so fast, Katrina,’ Mum said. When Mum calls Kat Katrina, you know that trouble is coming.
Kat’s lips pressed up tight. She handed over the post, all items except the brown envelope, which she held up for all to see that it was addressed to her, Katrina Spark. She opened it and a catalogue came out. It was called Hair Flair. She walked over to the door, head nodding.
I ate Shreddies numbers seven through seventeen. Dad started humming the theme tune of Laurel and Hardy, his favourite thing to watch on TV. He’d got the other sock on and was buttering toast and his hair stood on end and Mum would have said he looked ‘the spit’ of Stan. ‘The spit’ is a way to say ‘exactly like’ but don’t ask me why. Anyway, Stan has brown hair and Dad’s hair is fair, like mine, so he doesn’t look exactly like Stan at all.
‘Katrina!’ Mum bellowed.
The eighteenth Shreddie fell off my spoon.
‘What?’
‘This letter from your school…’
‘What letter from my school?’
‘This letter. The one you tried to hide.’
‘What about it?’
‘It says you were missing last week, without a sick note. Last Tuesday.’
‘Oh. Yeah.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, what?’
‘Where were you?”
‘She was AWOL, Mum,’ I suggested. Kat and Mum stared at me. ‘AWOL, like in the army,’ I explained. ‘Absent Without Leave.’
‘Get stuffed, you creep,’ Kat hissed. She went out and slammed the door after her.
The radio programme switched back to the news. ‘Turn that thing off, Ted,’ Mum said. I fiddled with the knob, but she pulled the plug out of the socket instead. There was silence. I heard Dad munching some toast.
‘She’s going off the rails, Ben,’ Mum said to Dad.
‘Off the rails,’ I repeated, thinking of train accidents. I suppose Mum was saying something about Katrina being AWOL. Maybe ‘off the rails’ was another way of saying ‘skiving’, which means not going to school when you should. But I didn’t dare check, not with Mum in that mood.
‘Off the rails, and nobody cares,’ she said.