The Mum Detective Read online

  As soon as I got home from school on Thursday afternoon, I raced upstairs to the little boxroom Dad calls our study to see if there was an email reply from Juliette waiting for me. Our computer is quite slow compared to the ones at school – Matthew is always moaning about how uncool it is but Dad won’t buy another. He says the time it takes our computer to get going is teaching us how to be patient, which is no bad thing, and that the trouble with everybody nowadays is that they expect everything to be done for them instantly.

  I was staring at the computer screen, wishing it would hurry up a bit, when Lizzie put her head round the door. She was the only one in the house with me because Dad was still at work, and Matthew was round at his mate Jake’s. ‘What are you doing, Esmie?’

  ‘Checking our emails.’

  ‘I thought your dad didn’t like you going online on your own.’

  ‘Emails are OK.’ I looked at her as if I thought she was a bit daft, which is always a good way of knocking her off the scent if she’s about to correctly sniff out that I’m doing something Dad wouldn’t normally let me do. ‘Look. It says we’ve got six new ones. One of them must be from Juliette.’ I clicked on the Inbox.

  There were five junk ones and one for my brother.

  I closed down the mailbox window, feeling cross. It was the first time Juliette had taken this long to answer me. Was she starting to forget about me now? She had said when she left that she’d never forget me.

  ‘Esmie, are you OK?’ Lizzie asked.

  ‘Yes. It’s just that Juliette hasn’t bothered answering me yet.’

  ‘When did you write to her?’

  ‘Saturday.’

  ‘Well, that’s not very long ago. I’m sure she’ll write soon.’ She spoke really gently and I thought how Juliette had never spoken gently. She had always spoken quite loudly and bossily. She had said she was only being bossy because she cared about me.

  ‘Lizzie, are you and Dad OK?’ I asked. ‘You’re not going to split up or anything, are you?’ It just popped out. One second I was thinking how much I liked Lizzie, and the next I was thinking how much I had liked Juliette and how that hadn’t stopped her from leaving me.

  Lizzie was looking uncomfortable. ‘Esmie, I don’t think you should be asking me questions like that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because that’s my business. Mine and your dad’s. Listen . . . I came upstairs to ask if you fancied baking some flapjacks with me. I’ve checked in the cupboard and we’ve got all the ingredients.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ I immediately cheered up. (Holly says she thinks it’s amazing the way I can cheer up really quickly if I get distracted by something nice, whereas she always feels much more committed to her bad moods.) ‘Holly made some cakes with her mum at the weekend,’ I added, jumping up. ‘But the icing didn’t set.’

  Lizzie reacted as if I’d said something surprising.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ She smiled at me. ‘Come on. Let’s go and get started.’

  We went downstairs and I put on my special apron. A few months ago Lizzie had given me a yellow cotton apron with a red flower embroidered on the pocket, which she’d made at school. She had kept it all these years because she liked it so much and I thought it was really nice of her to give it to me as a present.

  ‘I think we should do more baking together,’ I said as I watched her get out a packet of porridge oats and a tin of golden syrup. Nobody ever baked in our house – not even Juliette. She’d always told me that the French didn’t rate cakes as highly as the English did because they preferred proper food.

  ‘Well, let’s see how these turn out first, shall we?’ Lizzie answered.

  ‘Just because you’re not a good cook, that doesn’t mean you won’t be good at baking,’ I reassured her. ‘So don’t worry.’

  Lizzie laughed. ‘Thanks.’

  I got on with measuring out the ingredients. ‘Last time I baked fairy cakes at Holly’s, Matthew ate nearly all of them when I brought them home,’ I said after I’d weighed out all the oats and tipped them into our largest mixing bowl. ‘So he’s not having any of these.’ Matthew is a real pig when it comes to eating all the biscuits and cakes and anything nice we have in the house. ‘I bet he never stuffs his face in front of Jennifer the way he stuffs it in front of me,’ I added bitterly.

  Lizzie chuckled and carried on looking in our fridge for the butter. ‘Are Matthew and Jennifer still an item then?’

  ‘Oh, well . . . not really, but . . .’ Matthew had made me promise not to tell anyone that he was still seeing Jennifer. In fact, Jennifer was coming round to our house this coming Saturday morning when Dad and Lizzie were out at work.

  ‘Does Jennifer still want to find her mum?’ I’d asked my brother when he’d told me that yesterday. ‘Because I reckon if she does, she should start by examining that letter her mum sent her as a baby, for clues.’

  But instead of taking me seriously, Matthew had asked me mockingly if I fancied myself as Sherlock Holmes, or what? (And that was another reason why I didn’t reckon he deserved even one of my flapjacks.)

  I made sure I was in on Saturday morning when Jennifer came round. Matthew had tried to get me out of the house by suggesting I went round to Holly’s, but I’d told him that I’d already invited Holly round to ours.

  ‘Well, just keep out of our way, OK?’ he instructed me when we were in the kitchen eating breakfast before either of our guests arrived.

  ‘Don’t worry. We’re not going to interrupt you snogging, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’

  ‘Shut it, Esmie.’

  ‘Shut what?’ I asked, opening my mouth and showing him my tonsils.

  ‘Just shut it,’ he grunted again more fiercely.

  I gave him a sugary-sweet smile and informed him that he’d said, Shut it, to me eleven times yesterday. ‘Juliette says girls have better language skills than boys and I reckon she’s right.’

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘Oh yeah? Well, if she’s got such great language skills, it’s a shame she can’t be bothered to write to you any more, isn’t it?’ He’d heard me moaning to Dad last night that Juliette still hadn’t answered my email.

  ‘Shut up, Matthew!’ I snarled at him.

  ‘Shut what up?’ And he opened his mouth really wide then, only it was more disgusting to look at than mine because it was stuffed full of soggy toast.

  We weren’t speaking to each other by the time Jennifer arrived.

  ‘Hi, Esmie, how are you?’ she asked, smiling at me as I opened the front door. She was wearing jeans and a short black coat and she was swinging a pink and orange leather bag.

  ‘I’m fine. How are you? Is your dad still mad at you?’

  ‘He will be if he finds out I’ve come here. He’s down at his allotment at the moment, so he doesn’t know.’

  Matthew came thudding noisily down the stairs at that point. I was sure he’d got even louder since he’d got that plaster on his arm. Maybe it made him heavier or something. I knew he would only start yelling at me if I didn’t leave them together for a bit, so I went upstairs while they went into the living room. Holly should have been here by now and I wondered if she’d slept in. I was just thinking about phoning her when I heard Matthew and Jennifer coming upstairs too. At first I thought they had gone into my brother’s bedroom, then I heard them talking in the study.

  Matthew’s bedroom is strictly out of bounds to me – on Dad’s orders – but the study isn’t, so I went and pushed open the door. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Trying to find something on the Internet,’ Jennifer answered before Matty could tell me to go away.

  I squeezed into the space behind Jennifer so I could look across her shoulder at the screen. ‘What?’

  ‘The Friends Reunited site,’ Jennifer answered.

  ‘Do you think your mum might be on it?’

  Jennifer looked a bit surprised.

  ‘Esmie’s really nosy. You can’t do anything
without her finding out about it,’ Matthew told her, by way of explanation. ‘Esmie, just clear off ! There isn’t enough space in here for three of us.’

  Reluctantly, I left them to it and went to make a start on tidying my bedroom, which Dad had made me promise to do before he got back from work. He had been in a bad mood this morning and whenever Dad’s in a bad mood, he always wants Matthew and me to tidy our rooms. I had just started to sort through the stuff on my bedroom floor when the phone rang. I went to answer it in Dad’s bedroom, thinking it would be Holly, but it wasn’t. It was Matthew’s best friend, Jake. I yelled out for my brother to come to the phone and went back to my own room.

  I hadn’t been in my room again for more than a couple of minutes when I glanced up to see Jennifer standing in my doorway. ‘This is really nice,’ she said, looking round. ‘I really like your pink wallpaper.’

  ‘So do I, but my friend Holly says it’s too littlegirly. She says if I had a mum, my room would be more sophisticated because mums have better taste than dads. Apart from her dad because he’s a fashion designer.’

  Jennifer came and sat on my bed. ‘Well, I think it’s lovely. My room’s always been plain cream because Dad doesn’t like strong colours. But I think they make the place look a lot cheerier.’ I watched her pick up my old Barbie doll from the window ledge. (I never play with her any more, but I’ll never get rid of her because she once belonged to my mother.) Jennifer started to try and untangle Barbie’s hair, which is a bit frizzy because she’s so old. I told her about my gran giving me my mum’s Barbie, and Jennifer said that the only thing she still had of her mum’s was a half-knitted baby cardigan with the knitting needles still attached.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Dad says she was knitting this cardigan for me but she never finished it because she tripped down our front steps and broke her arm when she was pregnant.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a . . . a shame . . .’ I mumbled, suddenly feeling awkward because we were talking about Jennifer’s mother who had abandoned her.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you saw the cardigan,’ Jennifer joked. ‘It’s lime green.’ She pulled a face.

  I smiled. ‘I guess it must be difficult to knit when you’ve got your arm in plaster.’

  ‘Yup! In fact, Matthew was complaining about that only the other day!’

  I giggled and the conversation got easier after that. Jennifer said that she had some photographs of her mum, but that she wasn’t allowed to put them up in the house. She also said how much she liked the photograph on our mantlepiece of my mother (when she was eight months pregnant with me) and Matthew.

  ‘Your mum looks really huge in that picture!’ she said, smiling.

  I nodded. ‘Dad says I was quite a big baby. That’s not why she died though,’ I added quickly. ‘I came out fine. It was afterwards that things went wrong. They couldn’t stop her bleeding or something.’ I don’t normally talk to people I don’t know very well about how my mother died, but I guess I felt like I could trust Jennifer because she had confided in me about her mother.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jennifer said.

  ‘It’s OK.’ I never know what to say when people say they’re sorry about my mum. I mean, of course it’s not OK that she’s dead, but then it’s not their fault, is it? ‘So did you find your mum on the Internet?’ I asked her quickly.

  She shook her head. ‘She hasn’t registered on the Friends Reunited site. I checked her maiden name as well as her married name.’

  ‘Doesn’t she have any relatives who might know where she is?’

  ‘She had a sister called Helen, but Dad says they’d lost touch by the time he and my mum got married.’

  ‘How come?’ I found the idea of sisters losing touch with each other very strange indeed. I mean, I can’t ever imagine losing touch with Matthew, no matter how much of a pain he continues to be when we’re both grown up.

  ‘I only know what I managed to get Dad to tell me when I asked him ages ago. He said my mum and her younger sister were brought up by their grandmother because their mother left when they were little and their dad couldn’t cope with looking after them on his own so he left them too. When they grew up, Mum’s sister went to university to study to be a doctor and their grandmother was really proud of her, but my mum dropped out of college and their gran didn’t approve of that at all and there was a big argument. Soon after, their grandmother died and my mum refused to go to her funeral and my mum and Helen didn’t speak after that.’

  ‘That’s terrible!’ I gasped.

  Jennifer just nodded as if she didn’t feel anything much about it at all. I thought it was really odd the way she had told the story – as if she was telling me about some people who had nothing to do with her. But then I suppose she hadn’t actually known any of them, had she? Not even her own mother.

  I thought about how I’d never known my mother either. But the difference was that I’ve always thought of my mum as still being with me, sort of looking down on me. Sometimes I even talk to her when I’m in bed at night. So you see, she’s always been a part of my life even though she’s dead. And I’ve always known exactly where she is.

  ‘Do you think it’s true that your dad really doesn’t have any contact details for your mum’s sister?’ I asked Jennifer now. The first step in being a good detective, I reckon, is never to assume that people are telling you the truth. They hardly ever are in any of those detective programmes you see on TV, and Dad says they often aren’t in real life either, although it might not be because they’ve murdered anybody.

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘Maybe he only said that because he doesn’t want you to find her. I think you should check to see if there are any old address books in your house. There might be an address for your aunt in one of them.’

  ‘Dad’s only got one address book and I’ve already looked through that,’ Jennifer said. ‘Thanks for trying to help though, Esmie.’

  ‘Thanks for being nosy, you mean,’ my brother said, coming to join us.

  I turned on him angrily. ‘At least I’ve got some ideas about how to find Jennifer’s mum!’ I snapped. ‘Unlike you!’

  ‘Actually, Matthew had an idea too,’ Jennifer put in quickly. ‘My mother wrote me a letter when I was a baby, see, and Matthew reckoned we should look at that more closely for clues!’

  ‘Oh, did he?’ I glared at my brother.

  ‘Yes,’ Jennifer continued. ‘So I brought it with me to show him, and we had a look at it just now. There’s no address on it, of course. I’d have checked that out long ago if there was. So—’

  ‘Maybe there’s a postmark on the envelope,’ I interrupted excitedly. ‘Then at least you’d know where she posted it.’

  ‘There isn’t an envelope. Dad only kept the letter.’

  ‘Oh . . . well . . . can I see it?’ I asked.

  ‘Hark at Miss Marple,’ Matty said drily. ‘One look at that letter and she’ll crack the case straight away!’

  ‘Maybe I will—’ I began, but Jennifer interrupted me then.

  ‘This isn’t a joke, Matthew,’ she said sharply, getting up abruptly and walking out of my room.

  Matthew rushed after her. I know I should have let them have their privacy and all that, but I couldn’t stop myself following them. Jennifer had gone back into the study. Matthew went in too and put his arm round her shoulders, saying that he knew it wasn’t a joke.

  ‘All we want to do is help you, Jennifer,’ I called out from the landing, ‘because we know what it’s like not to have a mum!’

  Matthew started to yell at me to go away, but Jennifer stopped him.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she sniffed. ‘I’m sorry. Esmie’s right. You are helping. Here . . .’ She picked up her pink and orange bag, unzipped it, and pulled out a folded piece of cream writing paper, which she handed to me. It looked like it was quite old. ‘You can see her letter if you want, Esmie.’

  I opened it up carefully. It was written in printed capital let
ters, the way my grandmother in Bournemouth used to write to me when I was little so that I didn’t have to decipher her funny joined-up handwriting.

  DEaR JENNIFER, it said, I aM WRITING THIS LETTER FOR YOU TO REaD WHEN YOU aRE OLDER SO THaT YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I LOVED YOU aND HOW PRESCIOUS YOU WILL aLWaYS BE TO ME. She had spelled the word ‘precious’ wrong – with an extra ‘s’ in front of the ‘c’. I noticed because I always used to do that too and my English teacher was always crossing it out with her red pen. I used to have trouble with ‘vicious’ and ‘gracious’ as well.

  I didn’t point out the spelling mistake to Jennifer. I just carried on reading. PLEaSE REMEMBER I WILL aLWaYS LOVE YOU, it ended.

  The doorbell rang then and my brother hissed, ‘Don’t go blabbing all this to Holly!’

  ‘Of course not!’ I snapped, feeling annoyed at having to leave them – and the letter – before I’d completed my assessment.

  I had only just opened the front door when the phone started ringing, so I dashed into the living room to pick it up while Holly took off her coat.

  It was Dad, wanting me to look up the number of the chemist shop where Lizzie worked. He said she wasn’t answering her mobile and he needed to know if she wanted to go with him to a fortieth birthday party that he’d just remembered he’d been invited to tonight.

  ‘OK, Dad. I’ll go and look for the number and ring you back,’ I said. I came off the phone and raised my eyebrows at Holly, who had already sat down on our sofa. ‘I don’t know why Lizzie bothers having a mobile. She always has it switched off.’ I couldn’t think where the phone number for Lizzie’s shop was at first, then I remembered that she’d written it on a piece of paper and stuck it on the fridge door. I went and got it and phoned Dad back straight away, but his phone went straight to voicemail.

  ‘Why didn’t you just leave him a message?’ Holly asked when I put down the phone without leaving one.