thousand gallons.'
    'As much as that, huh?' asked Carter. 'Easily. Maybe more.'
    Carter stood up, and hitched his gunbelt over his hips. 'It doesn't look like there's 
five thousand gallons out in that hallway, though, does it? Five thousand gallons would 
have washed the whole place out, wouldn't you say?'
    'Yes. I guess it would. I didn't think of that.'
    'So the water came in, filled the place up, and then disappeared, mostly?' asked 
Carter. 'I suppose so. I don't know how.'
    'I'm not asking you how. What I'm asking is, do you think that's what happened?'
    I nodded. 'That's what happened, all right.'
    'Okay, we agree with each other,' said Carter. He stepped across Oliver's body to the 
other side of the room. 'The room was filled up with five thousand gallons of water. Then 
the water was emptied out again, almost as quick. Now, what kind of equipment could do 
something like that? Something like a pump, maybe, or a special kind of hose?'
    I thought about it. There were some firehoses that could deliver water at a rate of 
several thousand gallons a minute, but they were equipped with tremendously powerful and 
noisy pumps, and the idea of a would-be murderer driving something like that up to the 
side of the Bodines' house in the early evening, rigging it all up and switching it on, 
was totally out of the question. Apart from that, how had all these thousands of gallons 
been removed, almost straight afterwards? I didn't know of any portable pump that could 
suck up five thousand gallons in a matter of seconds.
    Oliver's drowning seemed to be pointless, purposeless, and to have been achieved by 
means that were quite impossible. I said to Sheriff Wilkes: 'I'm sorry. I can't even 
begin to guess how this was done. I would have said it couldn't have been done at all, if 
I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.'
    Carter rubbed his chin. Outside, we heard the warble of the coroner's siren, and the 
sound of his car tyres as they squealed to a halt on the driveway. Doors slammed, and 
there were footsteps and voices.
    'There's one more thing,' Dan told Carter. 'We found something strange in the 
bathroom.'
    'You don't think this is strange?' asked Carter.
    'Yes. But what we found was stranger.'
    Carter glanced at one of his deputies, and then said: 'All right. You'd better lead 
the way.'
    We trooped along the landing to the bathroom. Dan pulled back the shower curtain, and 
said: 'There. What do you make of that?'
    Carter frowned, and peered into the bath. His deputy leaned over too. Then he stood 
straight, and looked from Dan to me and back again. 'It's a bathtub,' he said, 
suspiciously.
    'Not the tub,' I said, pushing my way forward. 'The-'
    The bathtub was empty. There was no sign of the scaley carapace at all. I pulled the 
shower curtain aside even further, but it wasn't hidden anywhere there. I looked behind 
the toilet, but it wasn't there either.
    'Do you want to tell me what you're looking for?' demanded Carter. 'Or was it so 
strange you don't even know what it is?'
    'It was a carapace,' explained Dan, trying to describe it by drawing shapes in the 
air with his hands.
    'A what?'
    'An insect's breastplate, in simple language. Horny and tough, and hinged along the 
spine.'
    Sheriff Wilkes watched Dan's attempts to outline the carapace, and then raised his 
finger and thumb and held them just a few millimetres apart.
    'When you say an insect's breastplate, you mean it was round about this size, don't 
you? You don't really mean it was that big.'
    Dan looked down at his hands, almost two feet apart. Then he looked back at the 
sheriff. There was a moment when I wondered what he was going to say but then he lowered 
his arms and gave a resigned, surrendering grimace.
    'Yes,' he said, in a tired voice. 'I don't suppose I really meant that big.'
    'So what was strange about it?' Carter asked him. 'You said it was stranger than five 
thousand gallons of water in an upstairs bedroom, didn't you?'
    'Did I?'
    I laid my hand on Carter's broad, flesh-padded shoulder. 'I think that Dan's 
suffering from shock, Carter. Maybe it was just an illusion.'
    'Maybe what was just an illusion?'
    'This thing he thought he saw. This carapace.'. 'I thought you said you saw it, too.'
    I smiled weakly. 'We all make mistakes, Carter. We've both had a difficult day.'
    Carter rested his hands on his bulky hips and stared at us silently for almost half a 
minute. Then he said: 'Okay. I'll let it go this time. But if there's any suggestion that 
anybody's | concealing any material evidence, then it's going to be trouble time. You get 
me?'
    'Nobody's concealing anything, Carter,' I assured him. 'We're just as anxious to find 
out what happened here as you are.'
    'Okay. But remember what the penalty for concealing material evidence is. It's jail. 
Okay?'
    We all left the bathroom and crossed the landing again. The deputy coroner, Lawrence 
Dunn, a thin, bespectacled, grey faced man in a shiny tan suit, was coming up the stairs 
with his old brown leather bag.
    'How are you doing, Larry?' asked Carter. 'Are you ready for a second-floor drowning?'
    Lawrence Dunn sniffed, and blinked. 'Whatever it is, Carter, I'm ready for it. Hi 
there, Dan. Hi there, Mason. I gather you were the two unlucky finders. Poor young Oliver 
Bodine, huh?'
    'That's right,' said Carter. 'I've just had Erroll put out an APB for Jimmy and 
Alison.'
    'They're missing?'
    Carter led Lawrence to the drowned boy's bedroom. 'They weren't here when Mason and 
Dan arrived, and that was a good hour ago by all accounts.'
    Lawrence knelt down on the wet carpet beside Oliver's body, and opened up his bag. 
First of all he flashed a penlight into the boy's eyes, and then he checked for other 
vital signs-pulse, respiration, reflexes. It was all a formality. There was no question 
that Oliver was dead.
    'I'm going to have to take his body temperature now,' said Lawrence. 'Would one of 
you people give me a hand just to turn him over?'
    Sheriff Wilkes bent down, and between them, Lawrence and he carefully turned Oliver 
on to his face. As the boy rolled over, water ran out of the side of his mouth and out of 
his nostrils. The sheriff stood up quickly and gave the coroner an unhappy kind of a 
frown.
    'If there's one thing that scares people more than finding out that someone who was 
once alive is now dead, it's finding out that someone who was once dead is now alive,' 
said Lawrence. He cut open Oliver's Six-Million-Dollar Man pyjamas at the back and 
rummaged in his bag for his rectal thermometer. Sheriff Wilkes said: 'Larry?'