Читать книгу The Pilot Who Wore a Dress: And Other Dastardly Lateral Thinking Mysteries - Tom Cutler, Tom Cutler - Страница 20

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, and, 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.