Chapter 11

Ani says, ‘Let’s make a list of what we remember from the crime scene. Then we’ll compare. I know I saw everything. You didn’t, but it’s fine because you’re still a SIT.’

Is she trying to be nice? Maybe she’s so unaware that she still comes across as condescending.

Dad peers his head into Ani’s room. ‘We’re ordering takeaway. What do you feel like?’

Dad nods then looks at me. I can’t get used to his eyes when they’re mirrors of mine.

‘Aloo gobi and naan, please,’ I say. ‘If the takeout place does curry, that is.’ I hope the food comes on time otherwise my thoughts will feel scrambled. Or maybe I can convince myself that in vacation mode, schedules and routines get thrown out the window.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, Dad,’ Ani says. ‘We’re trying to solve something here.’

While Mom would’ve told her off, Dad simply stops and smiles. He glances between us as if our teamwork is something he’s wanted to see for a long time. That’s even though he knows nothing about the investigation – Ani told Dad she’s reopening her Amelia Earhart case, and that I’m helping her. I don’t think it’s crossed his mind that there’s an unsolved murder that sleuthing-obsessed Ani wants to solve – he’s likely still too shocked from Mrs Dimas’s – or, er, Mrs Kostas’s – identities. Still smiling, Dad leaves.

She follows him outside and I take the opportunity to glance around her room properly. During The Bleak Week, Ani kicked me out during the day, leaving me to read books in the living room. The longest I was in her room was at night when it was too dark to fully look around. Movie posters of Enola Holmes and Sherlock are near her bed. She has a vintage-looking map opposite and another in her window nook with places circled in red. On her desk is a cut-out of an old aircraft.

I tiptoe over to it, the cold floor tingling my toes. Near the aircraft, a picture of Amelia Earhart has a list of theories about her disappearance scribbled on it in Ani’s handwriting, plus sketches of an aeroplane crashing. I’m in awe of the messiness of Ani’s room – I wonder what her brain is like. My hand runs over some of the pictures.

‘Ahem.’ Ani clears her throat. ‘You don’t have clearance to view any of that.’

‘But . . . aren’t I a Sleuth-In-Training? I should be exposed to this kind of stuff.’

Ani tuts. ‘SIT,’ she repeats, as if that’ll magically make me understand. ‘Sleuth-In-Training, S-I-T, SIT. Get it now?’

‘Now, shush – we need to get down to business. Part of your TUSC induction is learning that with murder, the gateway to solving it is by finding out as much information as you can about the victim.’ I stare at her. ‘We need to paint a picture of Mrs Kostas –’

‘– and her backstory. Her real backstory. Unless this was a random attack – which, by the way, is a possibility, because Castlewick is classed as a big town. Big town, low crime rate. Mrs Kostas might as well be our poster person. Did you know that someone travelled all the way from Northern Ireland to visit Cafe Vivlio last year? That’s how popular it’s becoming. The Mayor of Castlewick knew Mrs Kostas and has eaten at Cafe Vivlio many times. In a few short years, Mrs Kostas helped Castlewick become the caffeine capital of England. Sure, the cafe’s popularity might be to do with Derek’s vlogs but Mrs Kostas’s hospitality and coffee were something. We’ll find answers in her backstory then we’ll figure out the time of death. From there, it’s a suspect list, interrogations, a confession and justice served. Easy peasy.’

‘“Sleuth stuff”, not “detective stuff”. And, I don’t know how I know. I learned from my smaller cases. And from watching Murder, She Wrote. Now, while I’ve never solved the murder of a human before –’ My eyebrows raise. Of a human before? Upon seeing my expression, she explains, ‘I’ve solved the murder of three ants, half a dog, one pigeon and two rats –’

‘Relax. They’re street rats. So harmless, they’re part of the attraction here.’

Ani shakes her head. ‘That’s confidential information that’s the property of the TUSC. Become a sleuth and maybe you’ll have clearance. Now –’

‘But how do we find out her backstory?’ It isn’t like we can simply google her names and see what comes up. From my inexperienced but logical standpoint, I’m sure we’d have to find birth records or newspapers that are in special restricted archives at the library. And I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad are not gonna be told about our investigation – not when Mom’s acting like a loose cannon about all this because she thinks Mrs Dimas/Kostas was a con woman attacking our family and Dad’s being overly nice.

‘Oh.’ I’m unable to hide my surprise. ‘I guess I do still have a lot to learn.’

Ophelia Polina Dimas. That was the name she told me and Mom and everyone in our neighbourhood in California. She said her family were from Greece and later on, she took the plunge of moving to California.

It’s been three minutes since our first discovery and I kinda wish we could go back in time and not do this investigation. It’s too intense, too much.

Even without googling, me and Ani came up with a list of the life of each pseudonym.

‘That’s a weird detail to throw in there,’ Ani says. It’s not that weird – she probably only said it is because she didn’t think of it herself.

I smudge the last word to prove my point – the ink is super wet. Even when it was dry, half of it was illegible, as if scribbled in a hurry.

‘Shut up. I’m the Director of the TUSC. And by the way, this gets us nowhere. It’s about as useless as a chocolate teapot.’

‘It means that you have a lot of unnecessary anger over an unimportant thing.’

Instead of counting on our memories, we google the names that we both knew her as. Here are our findings:

The information above is – I don’t know, like a distorted reflection of the other, like:

– The widow of a businessman and an artist – both occupations are far cries from each other

This information has come from pictureless, inactive Facebook pages and a brief mention in each of her husbands’ death notices in the electronic archives of newspaper websites. Thankfully the archives didn’t require us to sign up to view. Moreover, it’s uncanny.

As Ani and I look at her laptop screen, wide-eyed, I find that I can hear the silence. And her breathing – it whistles. We’re both too afraid to say anything.

‘No.’ Ani sighs, unlocking her phone. ‘Supersleuth’s log –’ she provides the time, date and location – ‘we’ve made our first discovery. It doesn’t make sense. Mrs Kostas/Dimas was definitely hiding something.’ She exhales, shakily.

‘But we’ve been all the way to page thirty of each name’s Google search results.’

She shrugs. Then she does a handstand, near the fan that’s trying to cool down the stuffy sunny air.

Albert Einstein once reportedly said, ‘Insanity is making the same mistakes and expecting different results.’ Searching the same names is not only insanity, but illogical too. What’s logical is looking at the variables of her names. Similar to how you crack a code, I need to search for all possible combinations.

It’s an article from an art magazine. Oh my gosh! Just skimming over the headline makes my blood run cold. ‘Ani, stop handstanding and come read this!’

She rushes over then her eyes light up. ‘What? No way! Oh cool! This was written twenty years ago, so ten years before is . . . wait, Mrs Kostas had been on the run for thirty years. A lifetime! Wow!’

World News

International art thief still on the run, ten years later

A Look Back at The Uncatchable Bonnie and Her Catchable Clyde

Anastasia Ophelia Dimas was just 16 years old when she committed her first art crime with her beau, Nikolaos Aloysius Ares, also 16. They were two crazy kids in love . . .

It started with the theft of a small rock from an exhibition in the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece then escalated to a bust, whipped from under the nose of the security guards in The Egyptian Museum of Berlin before continuing to rob galleries around the world of their priceless masterworks and statues . . . The first major painting stolen was Athena by Kostas Barnaby Dimas III.

Anastasia was the beauty who captured the Greek tabloids, with her heart-shaped mole on her face that she was poetically born with. Nikolaos was a handsome charmer with bright light-blue eyes whose slicked back hair and bright smile almost made him get away with murder. Almost.

Nikolaos was caught by police and arrested on the scene when he ‘had no choice but to shoot and kill a security guard’ at The Louvre. Since being imprisoned, he’s gained a bad reputation and has ties to assassins and abductors.

Anastasia allegedly got away, but Nikolaos insisted throughout his decades-long prison sentence that he’d killed her first. He never revealed the location of her body.

Detective Larsson took over the case after the theft of Dimas III’s Athena. Larsson doesn’t believe that Nikolaos killed Anastasia. While he doesn’t have any evidence – he alleged that Nikolaos said in prison, unrecorded, ‘Anastasia and our child are in a better place’ which another inmate confirmed hearing – Detective Larsson said he’s never going to stop until he finds Anastasia and brings her back to Greece, to face trial for her crimes.

Nikolaos died in 2010 from a stroke. He died with the secret of Anastasia’s whereabouts . . . if she’s still alive, that is. Did she even have a child? Case experts say the rumour of her being pregnant at all is just that – a rumour. Barely anyone even believes it.

‘She’s out there –’ insists Detective Larsson – ‘and I’ll find her. Even if it kills me.’

Mrs Ophelia Polina Dimas	Mrs Polina Anastasia Kostas
Born 18 May 1968	Born 19 May 1968
Born in Alexandroupolis, Greece	Born in Athens, Greece
Widow of businessman Barnaby Nikolaos Dimas	Widow of artist Ares Aloysius Kostas III

11

RIRI