Oliver and the Stolen Race Car

Spread 3

Oliver lay flat on the warm concrete and crawled along the marks with his magnifying glass. The stripes came out of the garage, crossed the yellow line… and stopped in the middle of the pit lane. As if the car had taken off.

“Cars don’t fly,” said Oliver. “So somebody lifted it. Loaded it into something big.”

“Up a ramp,” Sonya nodded.

Where the marks ended, black flecks of paint lay on the concrete. Oliver tipped them into an evidence bag.

And Sonya pulled a piece of yellow strap with a frayed, torn end out from under the barrier.

“That’s what you strap loads down with,” she said. “Somebody pulled too hard.”

Oliver wrote: “Ramp. Strap. Black paint.”

Spread 6

Lilya’s white van was parked by the stands. Lilya herself was hanging daisy garlands along the railings.

“My van? Search away!” she said in surprise, and threw open the back doors.

Inside it smelled of wet stems. Oliver climbed in between the buckets: peonies, daisies, a roll of ribbon… No car, no trophy.

Then he stood in the doorway and stretched his arms from one door to the other.

“Our car is as long as two children lying down,” he said. “Only one fits in here. And there’s no ramp.”

“So it isn’t Lilya,” said Sonya.

Lilya laughed with relief and gave them each a daisy — for luck.

Everyone had seen the daisies on its side. So whose van was it?

Spread 8

When everyone went off for tea, Oliver crouched by the car and held his magnifying glass to the evidence bag. Black flecks… and among them red ones, tiny as poppy seeds.

“The car scraped the ramp,” he whispered. “There must be a scratch on it.”

He switched on his torch and ran the yellow beam along the left side. Smooth. Along the right. Not a mark.

“Sonya, it’s a double!”

Sonya tapped the trophy. It answered with a hollow plastic “tock”.

“And the trophy’s fake too. […]”