We turned around and our jaws dropped—there was Granddad perfectly disguised as a detective, with a little checked cloak and cap, a magnifying glass, pipe and sideburns.
“I’ve been a qualified detective my whole life,” said Granddad with a condescending look on his face, as he polished the pipe on his sleeve.
“I’m delighted to hear it,” replied Mister Carozo, shaking his hand.
And right then and there he hired him to carry out his investigation.
“All suspicions fall on the accused, Dailan Kifki!” cried Mister Dwarf.
“Not so fast,” Granddad replied calmly. “The guilty party might be the football.”
“No, sir! The football is playing nice and calmly in the garden!”
“Allow me to examine this football,” insisted Granddad, the pipe between his teeth.
I leant out the window and asked Dailan Kifki to hand me the ball, which he did most obediently.
Granddad examined it from all angles with his magnifying glass and muttered:
“Let’s wait for the police to show up and take this football away as a suspect.”
“I will absolutely not permit that, by sampiolín!” roared the dwarf.
But Granddad interrupted him, very calmly, and said:
“We shall proceed with the investigation. First we need to know where the whole commotion came from and what physical damage has taken place.”
“I think the noise came from the living room,” I said. “All the little cups in here are still in one piece.”
“Then let us go through to the living room,” said Granddad calmly, pointing the way with his pipe.
And off the three of us went, hand in hand.
There was no longer a living room.
There was only a pile of shattered fragments of glass in every colour. There was no trace left of the football’s glass crib. Nor of the frames of those lovely crazy windows that moved like a kaleidoscope.
The three of us fell silent, looking down at the toes of our shoes.
I felt a big tear escaping. It rolled down my cheek and burst with a clink against the broken glass that carpeted the floor.
Mister Carozo was quite still, his hat in his hand and his head bowed.
I stroked him a bit to comfort him, because I could easily imagine just how sad he must have been feeling.
Such a beautiful living room. One of a kind.
“Who was it?” he whimpered. “Who broke my lovely little living room? Who did it?”
“Sir,” said Granddad, putting a hand on his shoulder, “this is one of the greatest mysteries in the history of Gulubú. But we will solve it, with the help of my pipe, my magnifying glass, and my extraordinary intelligence.”
Granddad was becoming more modest every day.
He took a little notebook from the back pocket of his big golf trousers and wrote:
THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING ROOM
“The first thing we have to do,” he said next, putting the notebook away again, “is question everyone who is in the vicinity of the house.”
“But we’ll never finish that, Granddad! There are, like, eight hundred thousand people!”
“And somewhere among them,” said Granddad, sucking on his pipe, “is the guilty party.”
We went out into the garden, where our whole retinue was camped out under the trees in the clover.
Everybody was behaving all absent-minded and innocent, which looked very suspicious if you ask me.
Granddad climbed up onto a tree trunk and, standing in front of his audience, he said in a big, calm voice:
“A terrible calamity has just taken place in this castle.”
“What calamity?” everyone asked, looking all innocent again, even though it was right there under their noses: the living room smashed into little pieces.
“Certain criminal elements have destroyed Mister Carozo’s living room,” said Granddad.
“Oooooh, have they really?” everyone said, as though they hadn’t noticed.
“We didn’t see a thing,” said one ambassador, who I’m sure was a shameless liar.
“And you didn’t hear the noise either?” asked Granddad.
“No,” said the Superintendent, “because we were all singing zambas.”
“I would most earnestly entreat you,” said Granddad, “to assist me in this investigation, so that we might avoid the injustice of condemning an innocent man.”
“Of course, of course. We’re at your service,” everyone said.
“I would ask you then to move a bit farther off,” said Granddad, “and keep a bit of distance from the site of the catastrophe, because I’m going to be using my magnifying glass to study the marks on the ground.”
Everyone moved back in silence, while Granddad got down on his hands and knees and set about studying the ground with his powerful English magnifying glass.
Mister Carozo stood with me and cried, covering his eyes with my pinafore.