The Pilot Who Wore a Dress: And Other Dastardly Lateral Thinking Mysteries

Children these days seem to have little trouble remembering twenty computer passwords, yet they still cannot remember the kings and queens of England. Why should they, when they can look them up on their iPhone?

Older people often have trouble remembering where they live and their own names, let alone recalling their PIN number, mobile number, telephone banking security questions and all that stuff.

I don’t know who is responsible for the following joke about computers – I wish I did – but it kind of sums up the situation.

COMPUTER: Please enter your new password.

USER: cabbage

COMPUTER: Sorry, the password must be more than 8 characters.

USER: boiled cabbage

COMPUTER: Sorry, the password must contain 1 numerical character.

USER: 1 boiled cabbage

COMPUTER: Sorry, the password cannot have blank spaces.

USER: 50fuckingboiledcabbages

COMPUTER: Sorry, the password must contain at least one upper-case character.

USER: 50FUCKINGboiledcabbages

COMPUTER: Sorry, the password cannot use more than one upper-case character consecutively.

USER: 50FuckingBoiledCabbagesShovedUpYourArseIfYouDon’tGiveMeAccessNow!

COMPUTER: Sorry, the password cannot contain punctuation.

USER: ReallyPissedOff50FuckingBoiledCabbagesShovedUpYourArseIfYouDontGiveMeAccessNow

COMPUTER: Sorry, that password is already in use.

Anyway, the point is to tell you about a man named Bill, who could never remember how to spell his password. He was alert, sane, and happy with computers, but spelling had always been a bit tricky for him. It wasn’t just unusual words like ‘acquit’ and ‘minuscule’ that gave him trouble, it was ordinary words with double letters, like ‘misspell’ – somewhat ironically.

The most annoying of the lot was his password, which he never could spell correctly, so that he spent many wasted hours trying to log on to his computer.

The problem

How did Bill spell his password?

Tap here for the solution. (#litres_trial_promo)

Terry’s girlfriends (#ucefa55a4-8356-5892-adbe-849a11948a6d)

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. (#litres_trial_promo)

The lorry driver slaying (#ucefa55a4-8356-5892-adbe-849a11948a6d)

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. (#litres_trial_promo)

The magic bucket (#ucefa55a4-8356-5892-adbe-849a11948a6d)

The mystery

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