What Makes A Detective.

Chapter 5

Quinne arrived at the library to find Toby rifling through one of the big fairytale books. As the elder brother caught his breath, the younger slammed the book down on a table excitedly.

"There!" he exclaimed. "I thought so! Some of the pages have been ripped out!"

Tarquin leant over his brother's shoulder.

"But why those pages?" he asked.

"I don't know" Toby replied, making a note of the page number and flicking back to the contents. His finger skimmed down the table, but then stopped dead.

"Quinne?" he breathed.

"What?" his brother asked, seemingly oblivious to what Toby had spotted.

"Look at the story that's missing" Toby prompted, heart in mouth. Just to show his brother further proof, he flicked back and forward in the old book, from the missing pages to the contents again.

"Through The Looking Glass?" Tarquin said bluntly. "It's..."

"The sequel to Alice In Wonderland" Toby finished. "Alice in Wonderland. Alice. Alice Through The Looking Glass, and a looking glass can also be mirror. So technically, Alice went through the looking glass when she was hit over the head."

The penny dropped.

"That's insane" Tarquin breathed.

"It's got to be relevant in some way to her death!" Toby pointed out excitedly. "I don't know how, but it has to be, doesn't it?"

"Check some of the other books" his brother ordered quickly. "See if it's just this one."

"Cos either way, it's still relevant. We just need to find out which way" Toby realised aloud, and Quinne looked suprisedly at him.

"Yeah."

The two of them rifled quickly through the shelves, until Quinne slammed another book down on top of the first.

"This one's gone too, Toby."

"And this." Toby pointed to where a gap in the shelving lay, on the right of which was the original Alice In Wonderland.

"Right" Quinne sighed heavily, picking up the books again and stocking them back on the shelves. "What do we do?"

"We try and find a copy of Through The Looking Glass" Toby replied firmly. "See if it can't give us any other clues."

"How will reading a book help?" Tarquin questioned, as the two of them left the library again, trying their best to get home before their mother realized they were gone.

"I'll know it when I read it" Toby replied. "But as of yet, I can't be sure."

The two of them successfully sneaked back into the Snug without their mother noticing, and whilst Tarquin pulled down their copy of the fairytales Toby began pulling pages out of a notebook.

"So" he said aloud. "Alice Carroll is killed, and we've got two main possible leads on her death. The physical ones, which as of yet we haven't pieced together, and the fact that all the copies of Through The Looking Glass, a fairytale written by Lewis Carroll about a girl called Alice, have gone missing from the local library, a book which seems to have some parallels with the killing."

As he had been speaking, he had drawn a rather crude version of Alice's body the way he had found it, and had pinned it up on their shared notice board after taking everything else down. Now, he translated what he had just spoken aloud into words, and stuck that to the left of the picture.