Author's Note: Things that may cause confusion in this chapter: Pigwidgeon wears a cute little aviator's helmet and goggles in LEGO Harry Potter and he can't fly, he just hops along flapping his wings. (he's also about waist high, but I prefer him being teeny and fluffy); Loki always has the Casket of Ancient Winters in LEGO Marvel, so he always has it in this story as well.

Tuesday

Loki woke up early on Tuesday morning to the horrible feeling of a ray of sunlight shining directly on his eyelids and a strange tapping noise at his bedroom window. He pulled the covers over his head, trying to evade both the sunlight and the noise. Probably some human contraption his neighbours were using, he thought. Like the lawnmower they had last year. They were very confused when they found that encased in a block of ice in the back garden, especially as they had been using it not ten minutes before.

But there was no escaping this awful tapping noise. Now it had been joined by a kind of muffled rustling – and was that a hoot?

Moaning, Loki sat up, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. He heaved himself out of bed and groped his way to the window, accidentally standing on Rubowski's stomach along the way. "Sorry," he muttered, "not a morning person."

At the window, he squinted through the gap in the curtains. He couldn't see anything, so he steeled himself for sun damage and threw the curtains wide. There was still nothing there. Leaning closer and squashing his nose against the glass, he looked around –

and was suddenly confronted by an alarmingly close-up view of an owl's face. Before Loki could move, the owl pecked the glass again (he felt the reverberations in his nose) and dropped out of sight. It was fluttering up and down, pecking the glass whenever it was high enough. This must have been the source of the strange rustling-and-tapping noise.

Loki, seriously annoyed that he had got up this early because of a pathetic little owl, yanked open the window, steeled himself for the excessive amount of ultra-violet radiation outside, stuck out his arm, dragged the owl inside and pulled the window and the curtains shut, making sure that there was not the slightest crack between them this time. He made a mental note to put blackout blinds on his Amazon wish list. He'd send Odin a link next November. The god was loaded.

He rounded on the puffball of feathers he had allowed inside his home. It was the tiniest, fluffiest and least aerodynamic owl he had ever seen. But that wasn't the strangest thing about it. It appeared to be wearing a minuscule leather helmet and goggles on its head.

Loki could not believe this. He was suspicious. But he didn't even know what to be suspicious of. Why would anyone try to infiltrate his home with an owl dressed up as an aviator? It was all too outrageous.

Staring at the owl, trying to figure this out, it occurred to him that it looked very familiar. He was sure he'd seen this thing before... somewhere... on Earth?

Recognition came when the owl hooted, flapped up to a height of about two feet, and crashed back down to earth. Of course! This was Rubowski's bird! He'd seen it a couple of times when he'd paid a visit to his apartment to pick up some more ... unusual ... merchandise. Rubowski said he had taken a shine to the creature's happy-looking face and eccentric dress sense. Loki couldn't understand why anyone would want a bird that couldn't actually fly. Give him a white raven any day.

The bird – Rubowski had called it Pigwidgeon – hooted serenely, gazing up at Loki. Loki gazed back at it, trying to figure out why it was here. Was it a spy? Had the murderer sent it? How could something that tiny be a spy anyway?

Frustrated, he grabbed the piece of fluff, which twittered indignantly. It was so small that he could grasp it in one hand. Holding it between two fingers by the scruff of its neck, he peered between its feathers, examined under its wings and prised off the helmet to check for possible bugs. Finding none, he relinquished it and flopped onto his bed, mystified.

Pigwidgeon fluttered down to the floor, landing on Rubowski's forehead. He stared for a second, then seemed to recognize his previous owner. He began hooting shrilly and pecking at his hair. After some time, his pecking slowed. He uttered a confused-sounding hoot and turned to look at Loki accusingly.

Loki didn't notice. He was deep in thought. Pigwidgeon launched himself at him and started trying to eat his nose. "Hey!" Loki complained, "I didn't do anything, OK? That dead body just happens to be in my bedroom! Look at me – don't I just look like the god of innocence?"

Apparently the owl didn't agree. It kept pecking painfully at his nose.

"Augh!" Instinctively, Loki reached for the Casket of Ancient Winters (he slept with it under his pillow, naturally – whenever it got too hot he could generate a nice ice cube to keep him cool) and blasted Pigwidgeon. Immediately, the owl stopped moving and fell to the floor with a tiny clink.

Loki didn't want ice melting all over his lovely carpet, so he put the small block in the fridge's ice box. Finally, he could get on with what he actually wanted to do today – figure out who had murdered Rubowski, and why.

Returning to his bedroom, he flicked on the lamp (hoping to shed some light on the matter, his brain helpfully supplied). Rubowski's body was where he had left it, although his head was now surrounded by a dusting of ginger hair and he had suddenly developed a widow's peak.

Loki set himself to the task of finding out as much as possible from the body. He rifled through Rubowski's pockets, finding a few dice, his phone, his wallet and a glossy purple leaflet.

The dice were ordinary-looking. Loki shook them, poked at them and threw them inside. He soon figured out the password to Rubowski's phone. Hmm. Six missed calls from Tom Skinner, who Loki happened to know was Rubowski's boss. Had Rubowski gone missing in action?

The wallet was also empty of anything incriminating. Credit cards, debit cards, library cards, loyalty cards for various supermarkets, pharmacies and other shops, several driving licences and international ID cards, some cash...

Finally Loki turned to the purple leaflet. It bore the slogan U-NO-POO, emblazoned on the deep purple in bold yellow capitals.

U-NO-POO? U-NO-POO? What?

Loki stroked the paper, which was thick, smooth and expensive. He turned it over, to find another proclamation on the other side. This one read EVER AGAIN. It had been harshly scraped into the back of the leaflet with a fading ballpoint pen.

U-NO-POO … EVER AGAIN. Loki could gather nothing from this, except that Rubowski had possibly had toilet problems. Which was probably not something that he, as a distant acquaintance, would have known.

There was nothing else in Rubowski's pockets, so Loki started looking instead for the cause of death. Peeling off Rubowski's pants, he was confronted with a horrible sight. Well, what would have been a horrible sight to a human. Loki didn't really flinch away from physical horror – not when it suited him, anyway.

Rubowski's rear end had been mangled beyond recognition. It no longer looked human. It didn't resemble anything any more, really, but if Loki was pushed, he'd say it looked most like a badly burnt marshmallow made of human flesh, skewered on a stick. The stick was still there, actually. Loki extracted it slowly, trying not to look at the lumps of meat and dung dropping on to his precious carpet.

He continued scanning the body, but could see no other signs of harm. It looked as though a red-hot poker had been shoved so far up Rubowski's bum that it had punctured a vital organ and he had bled to death internally. Loki snorted softly. An ignoble death, even for a human.

It was difficult to tell whether Rubowski's murder had been orchestrated by the Mafia or whether it had been at the hands of someone else. Death was rarely a coincidence in the human underworld. Loki was familiar enough with it to know that murders generally occurred when a member of a gang became a liability. He also knew that the ringleaders were usually smart enough to take care of the liability themselves before anyone else could exploit it. The boss, Skinner, could easily be the culprit and the eight missed calls an attempt to track Rubowski down.

However, when the Mafia killed, they did so furtively. They didn't do it in this loud, flashy way, with such an unusual and personalized method. They certainly dumped the body somewhere a bit less obvious than the middle of a New York highway.

Then, these inconsistencies could be red herrings, designed to entice the police away from professional killers like Skinner and towards an insane individual with a vendetta against Rubowski.

As of yet, Loki didn't know. But if he called Skinner and played the conversation just right, he might pick up a few more ideas.