The Mum Detective Read online

  ‘If it’s something important Dad likes me to make sure I speak to him in person. He’s always forgetting to pick up his messages.’ I tried his number again but it was still going through to voicemail.

  ‘Try him again later,’ Holly said.

  ‘I’ll forget if I leave it,’ I said. ‘I know, I’ll phone Lizzie at the shop and then she can phone him back.’

  Holly went off to make herself a drink in the kitchen.

  ‘That’s weird,’ I told her when she came back.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I just phoned the shop and Lizzie’s not there. The woman who answered says she never works there on Saturdays.’

  ‘I thought you said she worked there every Saturday morning now.’

  ‘She does, but the person I just spoke to said Lizzie hasn’t ever worked there on a Saturday. But I don’t understand because she goes there every Saturday!’

  Holly and I stared at each other. If Lizzie wasn’t going to work, then where was she going? And where was she now?

  ‘Let’s try her mobile,’ Holly suggested. ‘She might have it switched on by now.’

  I picked up the phone again and dialled Lizzie’s mobile number, and we immediately heard a muffled ringing tone.

  ‘She’s left it here!’ Holly started to lift cushions off the sofa until she found Lizzie’s phone under one of them.

  I hung up and the mobile stopped ringing. I went over and took it from Holly. I could see there was at least one message on it as well as the missed call from us. I stared at Lizzie’s phone. You must never ever listen to someone else’s private voice messages. I know that. It was just that now Lizzie wasn’t where she was supposed to be, I felt like I absolutely had to find out where she really was. Even if that meant doing something I knew was wrong. Before I could change my mind, I pressed the button that lets you hear the messages. It asked me to key in a pin number before it would let me listen to them, but that wasn’t a problem since Lizzie uses the same four-digit pin number for everything and I know what it is. I listened to the message at the other end, expecting it to be from Dad. It wasn’t. It was from a man whose voice I’d never heard before. The message had been left this morning at just before ten o’clock, which was the time Lizzie had told us she had to be at work today.

  ‘Hello, Lizzie,’ the voice said. ‘This is Andrew. I’m afraid I’ve had to take my dog to the vet as a bit of an emergency. I’m on my way back to the house now and I should get there in about ten minutes. See you then!’ He had a very smooth, quite posh-sounding, English accent.

  I handed the phone to Holly, who listened to the message too. ‘He sounds a bit like Hugh Grant,’ she said. (Hugh Grant is Holly’s second favourite actor after Brad Pitt. Holly likes older men, in case you hadn’t noticed.)

  I was frowning. ‘I’ve never heard her talk about anyone called Andrew. I wonder who he is.’

  Holly gave me a knowing look, and I instantly knew who she thought he was.

  ‘Don’t be daft!’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘Lizzie can’t be . . . you know . . .’

  ‘My dad was,’ Holly said. ‘He was seeing that stupid Tara for six months before Mum found out.’

  ‘But Lizzie wouldn’t do that!’

  ‘You did say that your dad and Lizzie haven’t been getting on that well lately,’ Holly continued. ‘All I’m thinking is—’

  ‘Well, don’t think it!’ I snapped angrily. And I stomped out of the room.

  I knew there had to be a simple explanation. I couldn’t believe Lizzie was having an affair like Holly had suggested. Holly’s dad had two affairs at different times while he was married to her mum so I could understand that being the first explanation she would think of. But Lizzie wasn’t like Holly’s dad. Lizzie was . . . well . . . Lizzie.

  I couldn’t think why she would need to keep her meeting with this Andrew person a secret, and I couldn’t think why she’d told us she was going to work at the chemist on Saturdays if she wasn’t. But I trusted Lizzie enough to believe there was a perfectly innocent explanation for both of those things.

  That is, I trusted her until the telephone conversation I had with Juliette a couple of hours later. Holly had had to go home for lunch by that time and Jennifer had gone too because she wanted to get home before her dad got back from his allotment. I was just thinking about sending Juliette another email, even though she still hadn’t replied to mine, when this horrible thought popped into my head. What if Juliette had had an accident and that was the reason she hadn’t replied? The more I thought about it, the more I reckoned that Juliette could quite easily have had a car accident. Just before she’d gone home to France she’d said she was going to have to keep reminding herself to drive on the right side of the road again because she’d got so accustomed to driving on the wrong side in England.

  ‘You mean the left side, Juliette,’ I had said, but Juliette had informed me that the left side was the wrong side as far as she was concerned. She’d added that she was looking forward to driving on the correct side again in France, but that she was going to have to be careful not to have an accident while she was getting used to it.

  Now that I was imagining Juliette driving the wrong way round a French roundabout and crashing, I knew I had to speak to her immediately, no matter what Dad said about the phone bill.

  I rang her number and her mother answered. ‘llo? ’

  ‘Bonjour. C’est Esmie,’ I said in my best French. ‘Je désire parler avec Juliette, s’il vous plaît.’

  Juliette’s mother, who speaks very good English but still always likes it when I talk to her in French, asked me how I was. Then she went to fetch Juliette.

  ‘Juliette!’ I was so excited to hear her voice again that I immediately forgot that I’d been imagining her lying in a hospital bed a few minutes earlier. She told me she’d just got back after being away for a week with some friends. We chatted for a bit and she asked after Matthew and Dad and Lizzie, then I told her what had happened today. When Juliette lived with us, I told her everything and it was hard to get out of the habit.

  Juliette sounded cross. ‘Really, this is too much, you listening to this message on Lizzie’s phone. You should not be doing this! This sort of behaviour can only lead to trouble.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled sheepishly. ‘But Juliette, listen . . . Holly says Lizzie’s probably having an affair. But she can’t be, can she? I’m just going to ask Lizzie who Andrew is as soon as she gets in.’

  ‘Be careful, Esmie.’ Juliette sounded worried.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. I had expected her to agree with me that Holly was just being silly.

  Juliette was silent on the other end of the line but I knew she was still there.

  ‘You don’t think she’s having an affair, do you?’ I asked sharply.

  ‘I did not say that.’

  ‘Well, if she’s not, then it doesn’t matter if I ask her who Andrew is, does it?’

  ‘That depends. It may be that she has been keeping him secret for some other reason.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Like perhaps . . . perhaps . . .’ It sounded to me like she was struggling to come up with any alternative explanation.

  Before Juliette had time to say anything else, the front door slammed and I heard Lizzie in the hallway. ‘HELLO-O! Is anybody in?’

  ‘It’s Lizzie,’ I said. ‘I’m going to go and ask her right now if she’s having an affair!’

  ‘Esmie—’

  ‘I’ll speak to you soon, Juliette. Check your emails cos I’ve sent you two.’ And I put down the phone.

  Matthew had already made his own lunch and taken it up to his bedroom, where he was listening to music, so I had Lizzie all to myself as we made sandwiches together in the kitchen. She asked me what I’d been doing this morning and I know I should have asked her then what she had been doing – and checked out whether she was going to lie to me – but, when it came to it, I couldn’t bring myself to trick her like that. So instead
I blurted out straight away, ‘We rang you at the shop this morning and you weren’t there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lizzie had her face turned away from me because she was filling up the kettle. That was poor detecting tactics on my part. You should always ask your suspects questions when they’re looking at you. That way you can tell from their faces whether they’re lying or not, unless they’re really good liars, in which case you might need to use a lie detector to help you – except that Dad says they don’t have any of those in British police stations.

  ‘We had to ring you because Dad wanted to ask you something and you weren’t answering your mobile.’ Now that I was telling her this, I remembered that I hadn’t phoned Dad back yet and that he hadn’t phoned me back either. ‘So I phoned the shop and a lady answered and said you weren’t there.’ I decided not to say the bit about Andrew yet. I reckoned it would be better if she told me about him first.

  ‘Who answered?’

  ‘Someone called Mary.’

  ‘And what did she say to you?’ Lizzie still wasn’t looking at me.

  ‘That you didn’t work there on a Saturday. But I don’t understand because you’ve been going there every Saturday for the past month.’

  ‘Mary must have made a mistake,’ Lizzie said, turning to face me now.

  ‘But why would she do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she got me muddled up with someone else.’

  ‘So you were there all the time then?’

  She nodded. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But what about Andrew?’ I blurted it out before I could stop myself. ‘You left your mobile here and I . . . I . . .’ I flushed, but there was no going back now. ‘I listened to his message.’

  Lizzie looked flustered. ‘I knew I’d left my phone here but . . . What did he say?’

  ‘He said he was going to be late home because he’d had to take his dog to the vet but that he’d meet you there in ten minutes.’

  ‘Let me hear it.’

  I went and got her phone and watched her face very carefully as she listened. All sorts of scary thoughts were starting to whizz round my head, like what if Holly was right after all? What if Lizzie was having an affair?

  ‘Andrew must have made a mistake,’ Lizzie said after she had finished listening. ‘I’d better ring him.’ I thought her voice sounded a bit shaky, but I might have been imagining it. Dad says that feeling suspicious can make you imagine things about people sometimes, which is why it’s very important for a detective to always keep an open mind.

  ‘But who is Andrew?’

  ‘Oh, he’s . . . he’s just an old friend I’ve arranged to meet next Saturday morning. He must have got the dates muddled up and thought I was going to see him today. I’d better ring him straight away.’ She started to walk out of the kitchen with her phone and I followed her.

  ‘But you work on Saturday mornings,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Well, next Saturday I’ve . . . I’ve got the morning off.’ She turned round and spoke to me quite sharply then. ‘Esmie, stay here and finish your lunch!’ She carried on upstairs and I heard her go into Dad’s bedroom and shut the door.

  I guessed she was annoyed with me for listening to her private phone messages. But at least her explanation for everything had been reasonable. Sort of. She had a friend called Andrew. Well, that was fair enough, wasn’t it?

  Lizzie stayed upstairs for ages. I got bored waiting for her in the kitchen and went through to the living room to watch TV. The phone started ringing soon after that and I waited for someone else in the house to pick it up but nobody did.

  ‘Hello?’ I answered. (I used to say our telephone number when I answered the phone, but I don’t ever since Holly pointed out that it might be some weirdo on the other end who’s only phoning to say rude words or do heavy breathing. She read somewhere that people like that just punch in telephone numbers randomly until they get one that works, which means they don’t actually know what number they’ve called, which means it’s really stupid to reel it off to them because then they can make a note of it and call again.)

  ‘Esmie? Is Lizzie there?’ It wasn’t a weirdo. It was Dad.

  ‘She just got back. Dad, I tried to phone you but I got your voicemail, and then I tried to phone Lizzie at the shop but—’

  ‘I know. I’ve been on the phone all morning. Something’s come up at work and I’m going to be caught up for the rest of the day. I’ve decided to give this party a miss. I should be home later this evening but there isn’t much food in the house. I wanted to ask Lizzie if she could pop out and get something.’

  ‘I’ll go and get her,’ I said. I went upstairs and realized why Lizzie hadn’t answered the phone herself. The bathroom door was shut and when I called out to her, she called back that she was washing her hair. ‘Dad’s on the phone,’ I shouted through the door. ‘He says he’s not going to be home until late and he wants you to get some shopping.’

  ‘OK,’ she called back. ‘I’ve got my mobile in here with me. Tell him to hang up and I’ll ring him back.’

  I went downstairs again and told Dad what Lizzie had said. ‘What is it that’s come up at work, Dad?’ I asked. ‘Has there been a murder or something?’ I’ve become a lot more interested in Dad’s work since I’ve started thinking that I might like to be a detective too when I grow up, but Dad still won’t tell me much about it. Instead of answering me he asked if I’d tidied my room yet, and when I said that I was still working on it, he told me I’d better get back to it. Then he said, ‘See you tonight, sweetheart,’ and hung up.

  When I went upstairs, I could hear Lizzie talking to him on her mobile in the bathroom, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I wondered if she was telling Dad about her friend Andrew leaving a message on her phone and me listening to it. I hoped she wasn’t, because if Dad found out I’d done that, I was going to be in trouble. Dad is always saying I’ve got to learn that I can’t just go around invading other people’s privacy whenever I feel like it. (When I recently pointed out that detectives do that all the time, he said, ‘Not without a search warrant, they don’t,’ and carried on giving me a huge row because he’d just caught me nosing around looking for love letters in Matthew’s bedroom.)

  Still, at least if Lizzie was telling Dad about Andrew, it proved that he definitely couldn’t be her secret boyfriend. I thought about how – unlike Holly and Juliette, who had let their imaginations run away with them – I had kept an open mind and looked for a sensible solution to the mystery. And I thought how that proved I would make a totally brilliant detective!

  On Monday, Matthew was meant to be looking after me until Dad got home, but at five o’clock Jennifer rang him and asked him to go round there. Her dad had phoned her to say that he was going straight to his allotment after work to do some weeding, which meant they’d have her place to themselves.

  ‘I’m not supposed to leave Esmie,’ I heard my brother say. ‘Can’t you come here instead?’

  She said something and he said, ‘Right, well OK, but I won’t be able to stay that long.’ As he put down the phone, he picked up a pencil that was lying by the messages pad and poked it down his plaster to scratch at the skin.

  ‘Dad said it would just get even more itchy if you kept doing that,’ I warned him.

  ‘Yeah, well it’s not Dad’s arm, is it?’ Matthew grunted. ‘Listen, Ez, you don’t mind staying here on your own for an hour while I go round to Jennifer’s, do you? She can’t come here because she’s got to make dinner for when her dad gets back.’

  ‘You’re not allowed to leave me in the house on my own,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, but that’s just Dad being overprotective. We don’t have to tell him.’

  ‘I want to come with you.’

  ‘But, Esmie—’

  ‘If you go without me, I’m telling Dad,’ I said, which I knew would end the argument. I didn’t really have any objections to being left in the house on my own but I was keen to see Jennif
er too, and I was especially keen to find out how her search for her mother was progressing.

  Matthew knew he had no option but to take me with him, though he hardly spoke to me for the whole walk round to Jennifer’s house. I guess he thought it was really uncool, having his little sister tagging along with him.

  Jennifer looked surprised to see me when she opened her front door – though not horrified, which I guess Matthew would have looked if the situation had been reversed.

  ‘I had to bring her,’ Matty said quickly. ‘She wouldn’t stay—’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Jennifer interrupted him, smiling. ‘I think it’s really sweet the way you look after Esmie.’

  ‘Sweet?’ My brother looked perplexed. That’s because he hasn’t got a clue how the female mind works, which he would have if he read one of Holly’s mum’s magazines. A few weeks ago in Cosmopolitan there was a survey where they showed lots of women all these pictures of different men, and some of the men were holding babies and some weren’t. Eight out of ten women found the men with the babies more attractive. Cosmo said it was because women like it when men show their caring sides. I guess that probably extends to big brothers showing their caring sides too.

  I could tell Matthew was going to ruin everything by saying something horrible to me any second, so I quickly intervened. ‘Matty never leaves me in the house on my own, do you, Matty?’ Don’t ask me why I was helping him. Maybe it was because I had taken a liking to Jennifer and I wanted her to keep on being his girlfriend. Or maybe reading that Men Are from Mars book at Holly’s had kick-started me into automatically trying to save everyone’s relationships.

  Fortunately, Matthew seemed to realize at that point that he was on to a good thing and, instead of answering me back, he just smiled nonchalantly as if it took him no effort at all to be the most caring big brother in the whole world.

  Jennifer led us upstairs to the spare bedroom, where they kept their computer. It was already switched on. ‘I’ve been checking out some more Internet sites. I wanted to show you one of them. Look.’ She typed ‘missing persons’ into the Google search and came up with several agencies that claimed they could locate missing people for you for a fee.