Poor Mister Carozo!
I stroked the little dwarf’s head and tried to console him.
“Don’t worry yourself, Mister Carozo. Between us we’ll be able to put your living room back together.”
“And till then, where’s the football going to sleep?” he asked, hiccuping inconsolably.
“She can sleep at the foot of your bed, Mister Carozo.”
“No, she doesn’t like that. In the middle of the night she has bad dreams, and then she jumps on my bed and startles me.”
“Don’t upset yourself. Granddad will discover the guilty party, and he’ll make him rebuild the room as a punishment.”
“My lovely little room with its crazy windows in every colour…”
In order to distract him, I invited him into the kitchen to prepare some yummy oats soup for Dailan Kifki.
I thought it strange that I hadn’t seen a single servant anywhere in the castle, or a single cook in the kitchen.
“You can’t see them, but I’ve got lots,” the dwarf explained.
I had to cook on my knees because the kitchen was so small.
When we went out to take the soup to Dailan Kifki, Granddad was crawling around the ruined living room, sniffing at the floor like a bloodhound and squinting at it through his magnifying glass.
“An ant,” said Granddad, and made a note in his little notebook.
“A cockroach wearing a wig,” said Granddad, making a note of this suspicious discovery, too.
“An embarrassed-looking earthworm.” And he made another note.
This is never going to end! I thought to myself, alarmed.
All of a sudden, Granddad stopped and buried his nose in the ground.
He looked with his magnifying glass, and looked again. He compared what he was looking at with the ant, the cockroach and the worm. He got out a ruler and a pair of compasses and took a careful measurement of whatever he was looking at, made another note in his notebook, then came over and whispered in my ear:
“I think I’ve got it.”
“The culprit, Granddad?”
“Aha!”
“And it isn’t Dailan Kifki, is it?”
“We’ll see about that very soon,” he said, calmly. “I’ve found a footprint with a circumference of one centimetre in diameter. Now we just need to measure Dailan Kifki’s feet. If they’re the same size, he’s certainly the guilty party. There are many identical tracks.”
“I think Dailan Kifki’s feet are a bit bigger than that, Granddad.”
“That’s what I’ve got to check with my ruler and compasses. Bring me the accused at once!”
I went to fetch Dailan Kifki, who had finished his soup, and led him by the ear to appear before the detective.
“Very good,” said Granddad. “Let us proceed to the chronological, numismatical, peripatetical investigation of the fingerprints of this proboscidean, in a philatelical comparison with the parallelepipedical and symptomatical tracks found in the neighbouring terrain.”
Which must have meant he was going to see if Dailan Kifki’s feet matched the prints he’d found in the mud.
Granddad took out his little notebook and checked the measurements of the footprints: one centimetre.
Then he took his ruler and compasses and, with my help, bent one of Dailan Kifki’s legs and carefully measured the sole of his foot.
“Forty-eight centimetres, fifteen millimetres,” said Granddad, and made a note in his notebook.
“You see?” I said. “They aren’t his footprints.”
“Just to be sure, let’s test them out in practice.”
And he positioned Dailan Kifki’s foot over one of the small holes he had discovered in the ground.
“There are precisely forty-seven centimetres and fifteen millimetres to spare,” he said. “Therefore these footprints do not belong to the accused.”
I gave a sigh of relief.
The footprints were small round holes, arranged regularly.
Those weren’t made by shoes, I thought to myself, or by a skateboard, or by chickens.
“These footprints are very odd,” I said to Granddad. “If you ask me, they’re the prints of an animal with only one foot.”
“Nonsense!” he said. “Have you ever seen an animal with only one foot?”
“Well, let me think…”—and I put my finger to my forehead and started to think—“Snails don’t have any, flies have several—but anyway why would they bother walking if they can fly… Tables do have legs, but they aren’t animals…”
“That’s it!” Granddad interrupted me. “You’re right, the guilty party might have one or more feet but not be an animal at all!”
“Just one foot…” My head hurt from so much thinking. Then… “I’ve got it, Granddad!” I cried suddenly, overjoyed. “An umbrella!”
“That’s it!” cried Granddad, hugging me, his eyes filling with tears. “These are umbrella footprints! I suspected it all along!”
“But Granddad,” I said, trying to calm him down, “you aren’t telling me that a poor umbrella could have caused such an earthquake?”
“Oh no?” replied Granddad mysteriously.
And he walked over to where the busybodies were, and the dignitaries, and the neighbours, and all the people drinking mate with perfectly innocent expressions on their faces.
But he stopped halfway, took out his little notebook, and wrote:
THE CASE OF THE KILLER UMBRELLA