Kieran was also running a scan of Westron’s communications with parents, looking for key terms, another on an analysis of links between diamond mining and trustees sitting on the school’s board, and two little personal ones, tracking NASA’s Mars programme and the CERN’s hunt for the Higgs. The space left over in his brain was devoted to writing an essay on Pride and Prejudice for English. Joe pressed print on his French assignment. ‘You know, Key, you never did explain about those bluebottles. What case was it?’ ‘A Victorian one in the old papers—murder in the greenhouse. The solution hinged on how long the body had been lying there next to the carnivorous plants.’ ‘Gruesome. I like it.’ ‘They found flies decomposing in the plants but the little greenhouse had been sealed from the outside and carbon monoxide pumped in. I was looking at how long it took the plants to attract the flies in a confined space, timing each species, and then noted how long the bodies take to be digested.
