The Mum Detective Read online

  ‘Isn’t it really expensive?’ I asked, thinking that these people must be private detectives, and the only private detectives I had ever seen were ones on TV programmes who always charged their clients loads of money per day – plus expenses.

  ‘It depends how easy the person is to trace, but they do it through database information and stuff. Anyway, I’ve got some money in a savings account and I can use that. Look. This is the one I think looks the best. It says they trace missing relatives as well as bad debtors.’

  ‘Bad debtors?’

  ‘People who owe you money and don’t want to be found.’

  Matthew and I read the site’s home page. It sounded straightforward enough. You just had to give them all the names the missing person might be using, their last known address, their approximate age and anything else you knew that might be helpful in locating them, like what they might be doing as a job.

  ‘My mother’s name is Catherine Joanne Mitchell, or Catherine Joanne Forbes if she’s using her maiden name,’ Jennifer said. ‘This house is her last known address – 2 Acacia Avenue – and she’d be forty-one by now.’ She paused. ‘But I have to give them my contact details and email address and I think I might have to pretend that I’m over eighteen. I was wondering if you could do that from your computer, Matthew. That way they won’t be sending me back any messages that Dad might see.’

  ‘Sure.’ Matthew picked out a pen from the pot on the desk, scribbled on his plastercast to check it worked, then asked for a piece of paper so that he could write down the website address. ‘Do you know what she might be working as or anything like that?’ he asked.

  Jennifer shook her head. ‘She was studying English at college before she dropped out – that’s all I know.’

  ‘Maybe she went back to college—’ I started to say, but just then we heard the front door open.

  Jennifer gasped. ‘Dad’s not meant to be back yet.’

  She went out on to the landing while Matthew and I stayed in the spare room, holding our breath. ‘I thought you were going to your allotment after work, Dad,’ Jennifer called down the stairs to him.

  ‘The police have cordoned it off. Probably kids down there taking drugs or something.’ He sounded annoyed. ‘Whose coat is this in the hall?’

  I gulped. I had left my jacket over the end of the banister. Matthew had dumped his on the sofa in the living room.

  ‘Have you got a visitor?’ We could hear Mr Mitchell’s footsteps coming up the stairs now.

  I suddenly realized the computer screen was still showing the missing-persons site. ‘Quick,’ I hissed, pointing at it. ‘We’ve got to switch it off.’

  While Matthew struggled to close down the computer in time, Jennifer was trying to stall her father. ‘It’s Esmie’s coat,’ I heard her say.

  ‘Esmie?’

  ‘Matthew’s little sister.’

  Mr Mitchell was outside on the landing now and, before he could come into the room, I rushed out to join Jennifer. My heart was beating really fast, but her dad hadn’t said anything about her not being allowed to see me again, had he? Mr Mitchell stared at me. He was a big man – taller and broader even than my dad – and he had thick dark-grey eyebrows and grey hair. He didn’t look very friendly.

  I quickly shut the spare-room door behind me and that was a mistake. If I’d had a bit more experience as a detective I would have known that when you don’t want to draw attention to something, the best thing to do is to act like you don’t have anything to hide. But I shut the door like I did have something to hide and Mr Mitchell cottoned on immediately and pushed past me to open it. He caught Matthew just as he was trying to fit himself inside the wardrobe. My brother had knocked one of Mr Mitchell’s suits off its hanger in the process and was trampling it underfoot as he attempted to close the wardrobe door with his good hand.

  ‘WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?’ Mr Mitchell roared at him.

  I don’t know how Matthew felt but I nearly wet myself.

  Matthew scrambled out of the wardrobe, nearly tripping as his feet got tangled up in Jennifer’s dad’s trousers. His face had turned the same colour as a very ripe tomato. I hadn’t seen him look so embarrassed since the time he forgot to lock the bathroom door and Holly walked in on him just after he’d got out of the shower. (He was standing stark naked with his back to her, looking in the bathroom mirror and trying to squeeze a spot on his chin. It was soon after that that Holly started going on about him having a bum like Brad Pitt’s.)

  Mr Mitchell was turning to face Jennifer now. ‘I thought I told you I didn’t want you seeing this boy again!’

  ‘I know, but I wanted to see him, Dad. I asked him to come round. I—’

  He didn’t wait for her to finish. He whirled back to face my brother again. ‘YOU! OUT! OR I’LL GIVE YOU MORE THAN A BROKEN ARM TO WORRY ABOUT!’

  That really scared me. I ran down the stairs, grabbed my own coat and fetched Matty’s from the living room. Matty came thudding down the stairs after me with Jennifer’s father close behind. Matty and I both dived out the front door and didn’t stop running until we were out of Acacia Avenue and back on the main road.

  ‘Not even Dad shouts as loudly as that, does he?’ I said, panting to get my breath back.

  ‘Not at you, maybe,’ Matthew replied. ‘He can turn up the volume pretty high when he’s laying into me.’

  I frowned. I still didn’t reckon our dad was anywhere near as scary as Jennifer’s. I mean, Matthew and I both knew that Dad would only ever go so far when he was angry with us. But we didn’t know that about Jennifer’s father, did we?

  We got home to find a long, angry message on our answerphone from Mr Mitchell, telling Dad that he didn’t want Matthew going anywhere near Jennifer from now on. Matthew instantly wiped it off the machine.

  ‘Dad’ll be cross if he finds out you’ve done that,’ I told him.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ll take the risk. This way he might not find out anything. Oh, damn.’ Matthew was looking at his watch.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Lizzie said she’d drop in a chemistry book she reckons is really cool. She was going to bring it round today on her way back from work. I hope we haven’t missed her.’

  ‘Does Lizzie know about chemistry then?’ I asked. This was news to me. It hadn’t occurred to me that our potential stepmother might come with additional bonus features.

  ‘Of course! She’s a pharmacist, isn’t she? She works in a chemist’s.’

  Matthew needn’t have worried because it was half an hour later when Lizzie arrived with the chemistry book under her arm. I invited her into the kitchen and told her I was going to put the kettle on because I’d made some more flapjacks and I wanted her to taste one. Before she could protest that she hadn’t been meaning to stay, I was laying out two teaplates and two teacups on the kitchen table and getting out the teapot.

  ‘Are you having tea too, Esmie?’ she asked. ‘I thought you didn’t like it.’

  ‘I don’t, but I’m trying to acquire the taste. Holly says it’s easy to acquire the taste for things if you persevere long enough. She’s done it with coffee, black-cherry yogurt, olives – but only the green ones – and vegetable pakora.’

  Lizzie laughed. ‘Well, this is very nice. Thank you.’

  I put the flapjacks out on a plate in the middle of the table and folded two pieces of kitchen roll in half to make napkins. Then I made the tea and offered her a flapjack, which she bit into straight away and pronounced delicious.

  ‘So is your friend Andrew an old friend from college or university or something?’ I asked, picking up a flapjack myself.

  She looked surprised. ‘No, not from university. I met him . . . later than that.’

  ‘How long is it since you last saw him?’ I continued. (After further discussion with Holly at school, I had decided to carry out some further interrogation – or supplementary interrogation I reckon you might call it if you were a detective.)

 
‘I don’t know, Esmie. A while.’

  I decided I’d better come straight out with my main question before she lost patience with me. ‘Is he an old boyfriend?’

  ‘No!’

  And just then I thought of another really important question – one that hadn’t been suggested by Holly. ‘Did he locate you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, if you’d lost touch, how did he find you again? Was it through the Internet or something? Like on Friends Reunited for instance?’

  She frowned. She had stopped eating her flapjack. ‘Esmie, why all the questions?’

  I had suddenly switched to thinking about Jennifer’s mum and how, even though we didn’t have any clues to help us find her, we did have a clue that might help us find her sister. Her sister was a doctor – and Lizzie was a pharmacist, which meant she knew more about doctors than I did, because they were always writing out prescriptions and sending them to her. ‘Lizzie, if there was a person you wanted to find who was a doctor, how would you do it?’

  She looked at me sharply. ‘What makes you think Andrew is a doctor?’

  ‘Huh?’ I was confused for a moment. Then I remembered that she hadn’t realized I’d switched subjects. ‘Oh – I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about—’ I broke off abruptly. I couldn’t tell her about Jennifer’s mum without breaking confidentiality, which is something a good detective should never do. ‘How would you do it, that’s all?’

  Lizzie was looking at me warily. ‘If you want to locate a medical doctor, you can look up their name in the medical register.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a list of all doctors in the UK, with contact addresses for them.’

  ‘Where would you find the medical register?’ I was starting to feel excited.

  ‘It’s on the Internet now, I think, and they have it in book form in the reference section of the library. But, Esmie—’

  ‘I’ve got to go now,’ I interrupted, deciding I’d better get out of the kitchen before she started firing awkward questions at me. ‘I’ve just remembered I’ve got homework to do.’ And I grabbed another flapjack and rushed out of the room.

  At school the next day, there was a rumour going about that a dead body had been found on the local allotments, and everyone who knew that my dad was a detective was asking me about it. When I confessed to Holly that this was the first I’d heard of it because Dad hadn’t mentioned it to me yet, she was very unimpressed.

  ‘What’s the point in having a dad who’s a detective if you can’t get any inside information on murders?’ she asked.

  ‘Dad never tells us about his work,’ I told her. ‘You know what he’s like.’

  ‘Yeah, but I reckon you could do more snooping around than you do. I mean, he must bring paperwork and stuff home with him sometimes, doesn’t he? Can’t you sneak a look at that?’

  ‘I’ve never seen him with any paperwork. I think he keeps everything in his office.’

  ‘Well, can’t you find out something about this? Can’t you at least find out if the body’s a man or a woman?’

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  Holly sighed, like she reckoned I was a lost cause. ‘Well, don’t tell this lot you don’t know anything. Just pretend you know all about it but you’re not allowed to say anything because of confidentiality reasons.’

  After that, when people started asking me stuff, Holly nearly always gave them an answer before I could. Before the day was over there was one rumour going about the school that three bodies had been found, and another that the murder weapon was a spade that belonged to somebody on the allotments. And both rumours had been started by Holly.

  After school I asked Holly to come to the library with me (I didn’t want Dad to know that I was looking in the medical register and I was afraid he would find out if I used the Internet at home). I had already told Holly that Jennifer was trying to locate her mum without her dad knowing, and sworn her to secrecy about it. On the way to the library, I told her about Jennifer’s aunt being a doctor and what Lizzie had told me about finding doctors.

  ‘I think it’s really interesting that you’re so keen on finding Jennifer’s mother,’ Holly said. ‘I reckon it’s because you haven’t got a mother that you’re doing it.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Mum told me about this lecture she went to the other day about how some people are sort of psychologically programmed to seek out the missing relationships in their lives. And with you, that’s a mum, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not searching for my mum! I’m searching for Jennifer’s!’ I protested.

  ‘Yeah, but I bet you wouldn’t be so excited about finding Jennifer’s mum if you weren’t sort of programmed to search for mothers in general.’

  ‘Shut up, Holly! You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Holly’s psychobabble – as Dad calls it – really winds me up sometimes. Dad says it’s not Holly’s fault and that she gets it from her mum, but then he would say that, since Holly’s mum has always – especially since she started doing her counselling course – been able to wind him up.

  ‘I do know what I’m talking about,’ Holly replied firmly. ‘And listen . . . you know how you want to be a detective when you grow up? Well, I reckon, because of the way you’re psychologically programmed, you’d make a really good mum detective – one who specializes in finding missing mothers. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you’re crazy.’

  Holly shook her head. ‘I’m just unusually perceptive for a twelve-year-old. That’s what Mum says.’

  I nearly answered that my dad thought she was unusually precocious for a twelve-year-old, but I decided to keep quiet because we had just arrived at the library and I wanted Holly to help me look for the book. I felt a lot more confident doing this with her than I would have doing it on my own.

  ‘Lizzie said it would be in the reference section,’ I told her. Inside the library I started to look up and down the shelves, not really knowing what I was looking for. It was Holly who marched straight up to the desk and asked a librarian. (Holly and her mum always go straight up to assistants in shops and places and ask to be directed to the thing they want. When Juliette was here, she used to do that too, but only because she said English shops were too disorganized for her to be able to find anything by herself.)

  ‘What did you say that book was called again, Esmie?’ Holly shouted to me, which was embarrassing because you’re meant to keep quiet in libraries and that made everyone look at us.

  ‘The medical register,’ I said, keeping my voice to a whisper as I came over to join her. ‘It’s a book that lists all the doctors in the UK.’

  The librarian pointed to a section headed Y for Yearbooks. I’d never have thought of looking there. I’m like Dad in that I always like to find things by myself and I always spend ages looking for stuff before I’ll give in and ask anybody. I dreaded to think how long it would have taken me to find this book under Y for Yearbooks, rather than M for Medical.

  Holly and I pulled out the four volumes of the medical register that were there. They looked like big dictionaries. We started to flick through them and found that, inside, the doctors were all listed in alphabetical order. There were quite a few doctors who had Forbes as a surname. I skimmed through them until I came to those whose first names began with H. There were three Helens. One was a Helen Anne who had qualified in 1988. I did a quick calculation in my head. Jennifer had told me her mother would be forty-one years old now, which meant that Helen – if she was, say, two or three years younger – had to be in her late thirties. In 1988 she would therefore have been in her early twenties, which sounded about right for graduating from university. Helen Anne Forbes had an address in London, which I quickly copied out.

  The next Helen Forbes had no middle name and had qualified in 1991. I supposed that could be her as well. Her contact address was a surgery in Birmingham, so I wrote that down too.

  The last Helen Forbes had qual
ified in 1955, which meant she was far too old to be the one we were looking for.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Holly asked as we left the building together.

  ‘I’m going to write to both of them, giving my address, and explaining that Jennifer is trying to get in touch with her mum.’

  ‘Why don’t you get Jennifer to write the letters? She can still use your address if she doesn’t want any replies to get sent to her house.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell Jennifer yet,’ I answered firmly. ‘That way, if I don’t get any replies, she won’t have her hopes raised for nothing, will she?’ There was also another reason why I didn’t want to tell Jennifer. I was afraid that, if I told her, she would tell my brother and then they would want to do everything else by themselves. And the thing was, this had been my idea – my lead – and I wanted to see it through to the end.

  Holly and I walked back slowly towards the part of town where we lived, not talking much. I was thinking about what I should write in the letters. When we were almost at the place where we had to go our separate ways, Holly suddenly asked, ‘Has Lizzie told your dad about Andrew yet?’

  I looked at her in surprise. I thought she’d forgotten about that. ‘Yes, I told you. He’s just a friend. Women can have male friends, you know.’

  ‘That’s what my dad said to my mum at first, when one of Mum’s friends first saw him in a restaurant with Tara.’ Holly’s voice cracked as she said Tara’s name and I thought – not for the first time – that underneath all the flippant comments, Holly was a lot less cool about her parents’ breakup than she was always making out.

  But I knew from experience that Holly would snap my head off if I suggested that, so I just said, ‘Yeah . . . well . . . this is different.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It just is.’

  There was an awkward silence between us for a few minutes. I was afraid Holly wasn’t going to let the subject drop, but when she spoke again it was about something different. ‘When are you getting your kitten? You haven’t talked about it in ages.’