Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I said that it was probably an aneurysm .

A heart attack is when some of the muscles in the heart stop getting blood and die. There are two main types of heart attack. The first is an embolism . That is when a blood clot blocks one of the blood vessels taking blood to the muscles in the heart. And you can stop this from happening by taking aspirin and eating fish. Which is why Eskimos don’t get this sort of heart attack, because they eat fish and fish stops their blood from clotting, but if they cut themselves badly they can bleed to death.

But an aneurysm is when a blood vessel breaks and the blood doesn’t get to the heart muscles because it is leaking. And some people get aneurysms just because there is a weak bit in their blood vessels, like Mrs. Hardisty, who lived at number 72 in our street, who had a weak bit in the blood vessels in her neck and died just because she turned her head round to reverse her car into a parking space.

On the other hand, it could have been an embolism, because your blood clots much more easily when you are lying down for a long time, like when you are in hospital.

Father said, “I’m sorry, Christopher, I’m really sorry.”

But it wasn’t his fault.

Then Mrs. Shears came over and cooked supper for us. And she was wearing sandals and jeans and a T-shirt which had the words WINDSURFand CORFUand a picture of a windsurfer on it.

And Father was sitting down and she stood next to him and held his head against her bosoms and said, “Come on, Ed. We’re going to get you through this.”

And then she made us spaghetti and tomato sauce.

And after dinner she played Scrabble with me and I beat her 247 points to 134.

59.I decided that I was going to find out who killed Wellington even though Father had told me to stay out of other people’s business.

This is because I do not always do what I am told.

And this is because when people tell you what to do it is usually confusing and does not make sense.

For example, people often say “Be quiet,” but they don’t tell you how long to be quiet for. Or you see a sign which says KEEP OFF THE GRASSbut it should say KEEP OFF THE GRASS AROUND THIS SIGNor KEEP OFF ALL THE GRASS IN THIS PARKbecause there is lots of grass you are allowed to walk on.

Also people break rules all the time. For example, Father often drives at over 30 mph in a 30 mph zone and sometimes he drives when he has been drinking and often he doesn’t wear his seat belt when he is driving his van. And in the Bible it says Thou shall not kill but there were the Crusades and two world wars and the Gulf War and there were Christians killing people in all of them.

Also I don’t know what Father means when he says “Stay out of other people’s business” because I do not know what he means by “other people’s business” because I do lots of things with other people, at school and in the shop and on the bus, and his job is going into other people’s houses and fixing their boilers and their heating. And all of these things are other people’s business.

Siobhan understands. When she tells me not to do something she tells me exactly what it is that I am not allowed to do. And I like this.

For example, she once said, “You must never punch Sarah or hit her in any way, Christopher. Even if she hits you first. If she does hit you again, move away from her and stand still and count from 1 to 50, then come and tell me what she has done, or tell one of the other members of staff what she has done.”

Or, for example, she once said, “If you want to go on the swings and there are already people on the swings, you must never push them off. You must ask them if you can have a go. And then you must wait until they have finished.”

But when other people tell you what you can’t do they don’t do it like this. So I decide for myself what I am going to do and what I am not going to do.

That evening I went round to Mrs. Shears’s house and knocked on the door and waited for her to answer it.

When she opened the door she was holding a mug of tea and she was wearing sheepskin slippers and she had been watching a quiz program on the television because there was a television on and I could hear someone saying, “The capital city of Venezuela is… (a) Maracas, (b) Caracas, (c) Bogota or (d) Georgetown.” And I knew that it was Caracas.

She said, “Christopher, I really don’t think I want to see you right now.”

I said, “I didn’t kill Wellington.”

And she replied, “What are you doing here?”

I said, “I wanted to come and tell you that I didn’t kill Wellington. And also I want to find out who killed him.”

Some of her tea spilled onto the carpet.

I said, “Do you know who killed Wellington?”

She didn’t answer my question. She just said, “Goodbye, Christopher,” and closed the door.

Then I decided to do some detective work.

I could see that she was watching me and waiting for me to leave because I could see her standing in her hall on the other side of the frosted glass in her front door. So I walked down the path and out of the garden. Then I turned round and saw that she wasn’t standing in her hall any longer. I made sure that there was no one watching and climbed over the wall and walked down the side of the house into her back garden to the shed where she kept all her gardening tools.

The shed was locked with a padlock and I couldn’t go inside so I walked round to the window in the side. Then I had some good luck. When I looked through the window I could see a fork that looked exactly the same as the fork that had been sticking out of Wellington. It was lying on the bench by the window and it had been cleaned because there was no blood on the spikes. I could see some other tools as well, a spade and a rake and one of those long clippers people use for cutting branches which are too high to reach. And they all had the same green plastic handles like the fork. This meant that the fork belonged to Mrs. Shears. Either that or it was a Red Herring, which is a clue which makes you come to a wrong conclusion or something which looks like a clue but isn’t.

I wondered if Mrs. Shears had killed Wellington herself. But if she had killed Wellington herself, why had she come out of the house shouting, “What in fuck’s name have you done to my dog?”

I thought that Mrs. Shears probably didn’t kill Wellington. But whoever had killed him had probably killed him with Mrs. Shears’s fork. And the shed was locked. This meant that it was someone who had the key to Mrs. Shears’s shed, or that she had left it unlocked, or that she had left her fork lying around in the garden.

I heard a noise and turned round and saw Mrs. Shears standing on the lawn looking at me.

I said, “I came to see if the fork was in the shed.”

And she said, “If you don’t go now I will call the police again.”

So I went home.

When I got home I said hello to Father and went upstairs and fed Toby, my rat, and felt happy because I was being a detective and finding things out.

61.Mrs. Forbes at school said that when Mother died she had gone to heaven. That was because Mrs. Forbes is very old and she believes in heaven. And she wears tracksuit trousers because she says that they are more comfortable than normal trousers. And one of her legs is very slightly shorter than the other one because of an accident on a motorbike.

But when Mother died she didn’t go to heaven because heaven doesn’t exist.

Mrs. Peters’s husband is a vicar called the Reverend Peters, and he comes to our school sometimes to talk to us, and I asked him where heaven was and he said, “It’s not in our universe. It’s another kind of place altogether.”