For children: Young detectives investigate why a dead woman has been found in a swimming pool

Sunday evenings are grim. The light is thin and grey, the air is heavy, and the mood is as soggy as wet socks.

The evening of May 7 was all of this and more.

The sky that pressed against my bedroom window was a fluorescent purple that made me think of plastic flowers and particulate pollution. The honks and shouts from the people on the road – after too many frappuccinos in the tummy and too many hours in the mall – sounded loud and aggressive even on the 49th floor.

The scatter of boils made my arms sore and itchy. And the deliberate vagueness with which my father announced that he was heading out for a drink with “a friend” made my mood sorer and itchier. “Which friend?” I brooded, convinced that he was going out with the one person that I didn’t want him to go out with. “What’s he hiding?”

All this, though, was just the backdrop to the real crisis. The disaster du jour.

The missing scrap of paper. Which after two hours of hunting had continued to remain missing. And had no business going missing in the first place.

I had placed the piece of paper in the front right corner of my dressing table drawer last...

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