The Pilot Who Wore a Dress Read online

  The mystery

  Terry is a young man with two girlfriends: Emma, who lives to his east, and Wendy, who lives to his west. Emma East is a petite and sultry redhead; Wendy West is a blonde volcano – cool on the outside but bubbling hot below the surface ice. Terry likes both girls equally and enjoys the company of one just as much as the other.

  Terry’s local railway station has only one platform. It is one of those ‘island’ platforms of the sort where trains on one side always go one way and trains on the other side always go the opposite way. There is an unfailingly reliable hourly service in each direction, east and west, the trains always run on time, there are the same number both ways, and no train is ever cancelled. (You’ll have noticed that this is very unlike the real world.)

  Unfortunately, Terry is completely disorganised, with no idea of the actual times of either service. In one respect this doesn’t matter, because Terry’s girlfriends never go out. They are so devoted to him that they’re always at home in their respective houses, looking out of their front window, waiting for him to visit.

  Every time Terry fancies some female company he leaves home without consulting a watch or clock, goes straight to the station, buys a ticket valid to either station, runs up the steps to the middle of the island platform, and boards the first train that comes in, whether eastbound or westbound. There’s one of each every hour and they are perfectly normal trains in every way. He catches his trains at random times and on random days. Sometimes he gets there late in the evening. Sometimes it’s early morning. Sometimes it’s lunchtime, sometimes teatime. He arrives on any and every day of the week in no particular order and he goes either east or west according to which train arrives first.

  The westbound train, going to Wendy, leaves at exactly the same time past each hour. The eastbound ‘Emma’ train does the same but leaves at a different time from the westbound ‘Wendy’ train, so Terry is never torn between the two.

  The problem

  Last year Terry saw Emma East a lot, and many more times than he saw Wendy West. In fact, he hardly saw Wendy West at all. Why?

  Tap here for the solution.

  The lorry driver slaying

  The mystery

  The Sting is a 1973 film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It covers the ups and downs of two confidence tricksters as they try their hand at everything from racing scams to cheating at cards. There are several other successful films on the same subject, which makes you wonder what it is about conmen and card-sharps that provides this mysterious allure.

  The most polished card cheats are very skilled and slick. You’ve got the ‘mechanics’, who use sleight of hand such as second dealing, whereby the top card is retained on the pack by the thumb while the second card is invisibly slipped out under it in the process of the deal. Then there are the ‘stackers’, who can arrange the cards in a useful order while shuffling. There are the ‘paper players’, who use marked cards, and there are ‘hand muckers’, who cleverly conceal cards in their palms and switch them for other less useful cards during play.

  Most amateur cheats keep things simple, using less complicated methods such as ‘shorting the pot’ (quietly putting in less money for their bet than they say) or peeking at other players’ cards. The benefit of the simple approach is deniability.

  A fine example of suspected cheating of the sophisticated sort came one chilly December day in 2011 at a roadside café near Newcastle, where a group of lorry drivers had finished their egg and chips and were playing a game of poker.

  The game had been going some time and the pot was huge. The card players were all experienced, and very good at what they were doing. There was no chat and the focus was on the game. Cards were held close to chests and mugs of tea were going cold. Glances passed back and forth, but the stony poker faces gave nothing away.

  Several players clearly thought they had good hands, and betting was serious. A great wad of money had built up in the centre of the table. Then came the moment. The dealer laid down, in dramatic fashion, one card at a time, a perfect royal flush in Spades: Ten, Jack, Queen, King and Ace, the strongest possible poker hand, and an unlikely one.

  For a moment a hush fell upon the group. The dealer’s face showed no emotion. Outside, the engines of arriving vehicles appeared to fall silent. Then one of the men, large and broad-shouldered, stood up, knocking his metal chair onto the tile floor. ‘You’re a cheat!’ he announced determinedly, aiming a stout forefinger at the dealer. ‘And I can prove it.’ The dealer didn’t speak but instead, in front of a whole table of witnesses, silently drew a long knife and stabbed the man through the chest, killing him on the spot.

  The café owner locked himself into his room and immediately called the police, who arrived quickly. As a trickle of blood continued to run from the table into the spreading red pool on the floor they interviewed all the lorry drivers and also the café owner. All the men agreed on the dealer’s guilt and even the dealer admitted the stabbing, though not the cheating.

  But, after hours of questioning, a confession, and clear evidence that the dealer was guilty of the murder of an innocent card player, not a single man was arrested – not even for illegal gambling – and every one of them was allowed to walk free and drive his lorry home.

  The problem

  Why, when the police had the dealer’s confession and the agreement of everyone around the table on the dealer’s guilt, did the police let every single man off scot-free?

  Tap here for the solution.

  The magic bucket

  The mystery

  Stuart O’Brien is a successful businessman, with silvering hair, a flash car and an imposingly ugly mansion in the Surrey countryside.

  Stuart left school without taking any exams but used his persuasive skills to land himself a job in the sales team of Polyplastika, a plastics manufacturer. The company turns out drainpipes, washing-up bowls, industrial pallets and buckets by the thousand.

  Stuart was always a fantastic salesman and rose through the company ranks very fast. His friends call him ‘Irish Stu’, and say that he hasn’t so much kissed the Blarney Stone as stuck his tongue down its throat. By the time he was twenty Stu was heading the firm’s sales team and was beginning to earn serious money.

  Stu is now strengthening the firm’s toehold in China, he’s on the company board and is being tipped as the firm’s next CEO. He plays golf to a handicap of four, buys the most expensive foreign colognes and has just treated himself to a pair of enormous Tudor garage doors. Life is good.

  Stu is married to Laverne, a tall blonde with an expensive taste in handbags and holidays. She has a mouth full of uncannily white teeth, which flash like urinals in a cave.

  Apart from looking good on Stu’s arm at company dos and trips to the Far East, Laverne is a great party-giver. At their annual summer barbecue, held at the O’Briens’ vast Surrey home, Laverne circulates in the garden in unlikely heels, topping people up by the pool, putting little umbrellas in their glasses, and doling out to each of them at least eleven seconds of her white-urinal smile. And it’s at the barbie that Stu always does his party piece.

  Someone hands him one of the company’s famous plastic buckets – he prefers to use a red one. He then hands back the lid, which he doesn’t need, and fills the bucket to the very brim with warmish water. He now asks for silence while he slowly turns the bucket upside down. It remains full. Not a drop spills out. He doesn’t swing it round his head, add anything to it, or put anything on the top – it’s an open bucket full of nothing but water. To prove the point, he puts his hand into the upside-down bucket and brings it out wet, shaking and flicking a few drops at his friends.

  After a couple of seconds, or longer if people ask, he turns the bucket right-way up again. It contains just as much water as it did at the start. He hands it to Laverne, who can barely hold it because it’s still full to the brim.

  Stu’s audience are so astonished by his performance that many laugh in sheer disbelief, an
d, if they didn’t know it before, realise that Irish Stu is one of the best showmen going.

  Finally, with the help of someone else, because it’s heavy, Laverne empties the water out of the bucket onto Stu’s head, producing a round of applause and shouts of glee. Stu then dries himself off and goes in to change.

  If people want, they can examine the bucket at any time (Stu has been known to sell a couple during this procedure).

  The problem

  How on earth can Irish Stu turn a full, lidless bucket of water upside-down in his back garden without the water pouring out?

  Tap here for the solution.

  The impossible brothers

  The mystery

  Bob and Jim are brothers. Bob was born in Hastane Maternity Hospital, near Drumroos in Scotland, at 8.15 a.m. on April Fools’ Day 1976. Jim was born in the same place, just seven minutes later.

  Their mum remembers the day not only because of the happy occasion of their births but because of the Jovian–Plutonian gravitational effect that astronomer Patrick Moore reported would happen that day.

  Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, with a mass of about two and a half times that of all the other planets glued together. Pluto on the other hand is so small that in 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

  Moore told listeners to BBC radio that as Pluto passed behind Jupiter at 9.47 that morning, a powerful combination of the two planets’ gravitation would decrease the gravity on Earth. People were told that if they jumped in the air at exactly the right time they would stay up longer than normal and briefly feel as if they were floating.

  Shortly after the appointed time hundreds of listeners telephoned the BBC to report that they had indeed felt the effect. One woman said that she and some friends had been ‘wafted’ from their chairs and ‘orbited gently around the room’. Not that you can orbit around a room when you’re inside it, but never mind. (These people actually vote.)

  Of course, the whole thing was an April Fools’ hoax by the mischievous Patrick Moore. Although Jupiter is very massive, it is also a very long long way away. At its closest to Earth the planet has a gravitational pull only about the same as that of a Renault Twizy on an old man standing a couple of feet away. The gravitational attraction of Pluto is even less. It’s about the same as a marble 100 yards away from you. Which means that even the combined gravity of the two distant planets is far too small to cause a person to become lighter or float while jumping. It’s a good job that gravity is such a weak force, or the gravitational pull of Bob and Jim’s obstetrician would have caused the tide to go out in their mum’s cup of tea.

  The problem

  Jim and Bob were born at the same place in the same hour of the same day of the same month of the same year, and to the same mother. Yet they are not twins. How can this be?

  Tap here for the solution.

  Arms and the child

  The mystery

  Jenny Brown and Margaret Green are lifelong friends. They grew up together, they went to the same school together, and they graduated from teacher-training college together. Both of them applied for a teaching post at their local village primary and they were appointed at the same time, in the same September of the same year.

  Jenny and Margaret now teach in that school, in adjacent classrooms. The school is a charming Victorian building with a steep tiled roof, and roses round the door. It smells, as many schools do, of shepherd’s pie and pine disinfectant. It has about 120 children each year and at the end of their four years most of them feed into the large secondary school in the town.

  Jenny and Margaret’s school is a happy place, with a good head, good staff, generous playgrounds, a large sports field and plenty of trees. Not so long ago a local supermarket offered a great deal of money to buy the bottom end of the cricket pitch, but the headmistress, Miss Jean Piaget, had other ideas. The parents carried her in triumph on the day the supermarket abandoned its scheme (they carried her metaphorically, that is).

  One day the two young teachers were sipping tea in the staffroom and discussing mathematics. They decided to teach their pupils that maths is not just for passing exams but is a useful and fascinating subject in the real world. They devised a lesson plan in which the children in their classes would measure the length of every child’s arms and deal with the numbers in different ways, to arrive at the three different sorts of average: the mean (got by adding up all the different lengths of the children’s arms and dividing this figure by the number of children in the class), the median (arrived at by listing in order the different lengths of the children’s arms and finding which arm length falls in the middle of the list) and the mode (found by seeing which arm length occurs most often).

  On Monday morning Jenny and Margaret called their respective registers. There were 28 children present in each class, with no absences.

  They then explained the task to their classes and allowed them to decide who would be in charge of the tape measure, who would take down all the measurements and who would check the figures before handing in the final calculations. The children got to work, and by lunchtime the numbers were all written down.

  In the staffroom Jenny and Margaret compared lists and checked the maths. Miss Tijdelijk, a temporary supply teacher, was passing through with a sandwich and asked Margaret and Jenny what they were doing. They showed her the numbers and to her utter astonishment she discovered that, although everything had been done in exactly the same way in both classrooms, and although all the measurements were correct and all the mathematics properly done, the average (mean) arm length of the children in Jenny’s class was three inches greater than the mean arm length of the children in Margaret’s class.

  The problem

  The children in both classes are all physically normal, and nobody in either class has extraordinarily short or long arms. The arithmetic is correct and, in fact, accurately reflects the actual arm lengths of the children.

  How is it that the children in Jenny’s class appear to have significantly longer arms than the children in Margaret’s class?

  Tap here for the solution.

  The window cleaner in the sky

  The mystery

  Tall buildings are nothing new. Blocks of high-rise flats were all the rage in Ancient Rome, where they rose to a height of ten or more storeys. Some Roman emperors took against them, though, getting their togas in a right tangle trying to set a height limit on the pesky things, but without much luck. If an emperor can’t get something like that done it makes you wonder about your own planning department down at the town hall.

  It wasn’t just Rome, either. Twelfth-century Bologna had many high-rise apartment blocks too, something like 180 of them. It looked like an ancient New York. The tallest of these buildings – which hasn’t fallen down over the centuries – is the Asinelli Tower, one of the so-called Duo Torri (Two Towers) that together resemble the old World Trade Center. The Asinelli Tower is 319 feet high, and I can imagine the 12th-century Bolognese sitting down to eat their spaghetti at sunset, grumpily looking out over the red roofs of the city and writing endless letters to the council to complain about being overlooked.

  But neither the Roman nor the Bolognese towers were really skyscrapers. This term was first used in the late 19th century to describe steel-frame buildings of ten storeys or more. Nowadays it can refer to any very tall multi-storey building, most often one covered in big windows.

  The oldest iron-frame building in the world, and the grandfather of the skyscraper, is the Maltings in Shrewsbury, which went up in 1797. However, as with the Roman tower blocks, there were complaints. And it was the same in 19th-century London, when a British empress took a leaf out of the Roman emperors’ book.

  Queen Victoria, Empress of India, had a really good moan about tall buildings going up near Buckingham Palace, and to mollify the monarch height limits were introduced, which continued to be enforced until the 1950s. Prince Charles carries on the good fight today in an effort to prevent the buil
ding of ugly high-rise buildings in London, and pushing to have The Gherkin thatched. I’ve noticed that, rather like the Romans, he’s not having much luck.

  Many office employees today work in skyscrapers, and one of the benefits is the fun of watching the guys who clean the windows from special cradles trying to cope with the high winds, and being stared at.

  It was in 2012 that Horace Morris, an experienced 60-year-old window cleaner who was working on a window on the 40th floor of the 94-storey Alto Tower, near London Bridge, had a spot of trouble. Horace was smoking a cigarette and whistling along to the radio. He had cleaned the windows many times before and was not really paying proper attention to what he was doing.

  As he was reaching across to get to a particularly dirty patch in a tricky corner, Horace slipped off his support and fell.

  The problem

  Horace was not wearing any kind of safety harness or other device, just his workwear. His clothes were not padded, he had no safety hat – or any hat – and there was nothing to slow his fall. Yet when he hit the ground Horace merely shook his head, rubbed his sore hands together, and stood up. He had broken no bones, and had only a slight scratch to his palm, a sore knuckle, a bent thumb and two very achy knees. How come?

  Tap here for the solution.

  The troublesome signpost

  The mystery

  Everybody who is old enough to remember the event recalls where he or she was when President Kennedy was shot, or when the World Trade Center was attacked. For those who witnessed its aftermath, the Great Storm of 1987 is another of those memorable events.

  During the night of 15 October violent hurricane-force winds tore roofs off houses in London, demolished the seven oaks in Sevenoaks, and blew beach huts half a mile across the sea road in Hove. Roads and railways blocked by downed trees kept commuters at home, and fallen electricity lines left many without power. London, East Anglia and the Home Counties were particularly badly hit, being buffeted by winds the like of which will probably not be felt again for another 200 years. Gorleston in Norfolk chalked up a gust of 122 mph.