The Mum Detective Read online

  Dad looked stern. ‘But it’s his house, Matthew, and if he doesn’t want you in it, you should respect that!’ He glanced at the kitchen clock. ‘I think I’d better phone him before I go into work and try and straighten this out.’

  ‘NO!’ Matthew burst out.

  Dad ignored him and went through to the living room, where Lizzie was watching TV. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

  ‘It will be,’ Dad said, making for the phone.

  ‘Dad, you don’t know what he’s like! You’ll just make it worse if you phone him!’ Matthew protested.

  ‘We can’t leave things like this,’ Dad said firmly. ‘Now, what’s Jennifer’s number?’

  Matthew shook his head. ‘I don’t want you to phone him, Dad.’

  ‘What’s the number?’ Dad repeated, in the special voice he uses when he’s not going to ask nicely again.

  Matthew knew he had no choice but to give in.

  I held my breath as Dad phoned. Matty had gone pale. Lizzie pretended to be still watching TV with the sound turned down, but I could tell she wasn’t really.

  ‘Jennifer, is that you?’ Dad said into the phone. ‘This is Mr Harvey – Matthew’s dad. Can I speak to your father, please?’ There was a pause, then he asked, ‘Well, when are you expecting him back? . . . OK . . . Well, will you tell him I rang and that I’ll call him tomorrow?’ He came off the phone and looked at Matthew. ‘He’s out for the evening. But I will be phoning him back.’

  Dad looked at his watch, turned to Lizzie and pulled an apologetic face. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to go back into work, but I shouldn’t be more than an hour or so.’

  ‘You’ve got to work again?’ Lizzie sounded irritated and I hoped they weren’t going to have an argument about it. I reckoned Lizzie ought to understand about Dad’s work better than most people, because her father had been a policeman too.

  The two of them went out to the hall together and Matthew darted out of the room as well, which left me alone. Dad had left the letter from Mr Mitchell on the coffee table, so I took my magnifying glass out of my pocket and picked it up to examine it more closely. I decided that, if Jennifer’s father was a crime suspect, I wouldn’t need a handwriting expert to identify his writing because of the way he used those funny capital ‘a’s. He had printed his address in the top right-hand corner of the page and the 2 ACACIA AVENUE bit had four weird-looking ‘a’s in it. As I was scanning the rest of the letter, I noticed something else too. The word precious was spelled wrong. It was spelled prescious – with an extra ‘s’. Just like in the letter Jennifer had got from her mum.

  I had got out my detective book and was reading the section on examining written evidence when Lizzie came back into the room, looking harassed. She said Dad’s car wouldn’t start again so he had taken hers and she was going to phone Dad’s breakdown service to get them to come and have a look at his. She’d intended to go home since Dad was going to be working this evening, but now she couldn’t because she’d had to lend him her car. She looked down at the magnifying glass and the letter I was still holding and asked me what I was doing.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, quickly leaving the room and taking them with me. I headed upstairs, where I met Matthew on the landing. He was wearing his outdoor jacket.

  ‘Has Dad gone?’ he asked me.

  I nodded. ‘His car wouldn’t start again so he had to take Lizzie’s. Where are you going?’

  ‘None of your business. But don’t tell Lizzie I’ve gone out, OK? I’ll be back before Dad gets home. Is that the letter?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Cool.’ Before I could stop him, he had snatched it from me, dived into the bathroom and slammed the door.

  In my bedroom, I flopped down on my bed feeling fed up. I started to flick through the section in my new detective book entitled ‘Tracking Suspects’. It described how you could follow someone (like a murder suspect, for instance) without them knowing. And it suggested that if you wanted to practise, you could start out by tracking your friends. Or your sister or brother . . .

  I quickly read through all the tips about tailing somebody. One of the things the book suggested was that you wear soft footwear so that your footsteps wouldn’t be heard. I was still wearing my school shoes so I quickly changed out of them and put on my trainers as I heard the toilet flushing and the bathroom door being opened. In my book it said not to follow the person you were tracking too closely and to allow them thirty seconds to walk away before you started following them, so I waited until I heard Matthew going down the stairs, then started to count one-elephant, two-elephant, three-elephant, like that, up to thirty. Then I tiptoed downstairs myself. The television was turned up quite loudly in the living room and Matthew had obviously managed to open and close the front door without Lizzie hearing. Now I just had to do the same.

  I got outside safely and hurried down our driveway. I could see Matthew walking quickly down our road – he was almost at the corner now – and I started to follow him. I just hoped he didn’t stop because, according to the book, you weren’t meant to just stop walking yourself if your suspect stopped otherwise that would look very suspicious – you were meant to dive into a shop doorway or go and stand behind a tree instead. And there weren’t any shops or trees on our street.

  I followed Matthew to the end of our road, then round the corner, then down another road, and I wasn’t really surprised when he eventually turned into Jennifer’s street.

  I hid behind a lamp-post (which was the only thing near by that resembled a tree) as he rang her front doorbell, and when Jennifer answered the door, she noticed me standing there immediately – unfortunately I’m a lot wider than a lamp-post – and waved to me.

  My brother whirled round and nearly had a fit when he saw me.

  ‘Calm down!’ I told him, running over Jennifer’s front lawn to join them. ‘I only followed you to try out my detective skills and you’ve got to admit they’re pretty good. You didn’t know I was behind you at all, did you?’

  ‘Come inside, quickly,’ Jennifer said.

  ‘She’s not coming inside!’ Matthew barked.

  ‘If you make me go home, I’ll tell Lizzie where you are,’ I told him swiftly.

  He looked like he was about to throttle me, but fortunately Jennifer intervened. ‘Just let her come in, Matty. It’s OK.’ She led us hastily into the living room, where she pulled Matthew down beside her on the sofa and I was left with the lumpy-looking armchair. Jennifer seemed to know already about her dad writing to ours because straight away she asked, ‘What did he say in his letter, Matthew?’

  ‘Here.’ Matthew pulled the letter out of his pocket and showed it to her.

  She read it through quickly, then looked at him apologetically. ‘I’m sorry. Was that why your dad was phoning here?’

  ‘Yeah. He figures that speaking to your dad is going to sort it all out – like you and me are about five or something.’

  Jennifer sighed. ‘Dad thinks you’re encouraging me to try and find my mum. He’s acting really weirdly about it.’ She glanced down at the letter again, shaking her head. ‘Oh, this is so stupid!’ She tossed it on the floor.

  I quickly picked it up and put it in my jacket pocket. If Jennifer’s father did walk in suddenly, it would be bad enough him finding Matthew and me there, let alone also finding his private letter to our dad.

  ‘Don’t get upset, Jen. It’s not your fault.’ Matthew was putting his arm round her.

  ‘If the two of you want to have a snog, I can go and hang out in Jennifer’s room,’ I offered, pretty generously, I thought. ‘I can try on some of Jennifer’s make-up.’

  ‘Don’t you dare—’ Matthew began, but Jennifer interrupted him.

  ‘It’s OK. She can use it if she wants. It’s on my dressing table, Esmie.’

  ‘Thanks!’ I grinned, jumping up.

  ‘You don’t have to—’ I heard Matthew start to say as I left the room.

  ‘I told you, it’s OK. I don’t min
d her borrowing my stuff. I think she’s sweet.’

  I didn’t wait to hear Matthew’s answer to that.

  Up in Jennifer’s room I found her make-up bag straight away and started by trying on some purple lipstick. Then I reckoned I’d try on some mascara to make my eyelashes look longer. That’s when I noticed – in the mirror – Jennifer’s orange and pink bag lying on her bed. The bag was unzipped and I could see the folded-up letter she’d shown me the other day inside – the one her mum had sent her when she was little. I couldn’t stop myself taking it out of her bag to have another look. I had my magnifying glass in my pocket and this was another piece of written evidence I could examine. In fact, this was very nearly the real thing since it was a letter that had been written by a real missing person.

  I started to read it using the magnifying glass, and that’s when I noticed that the capital letter ‘a’s in the letter from Jennifer’s mum were written in exactly the same way as the ones in the letter from Jennifer’s dad. I pulled her dad’s letter out of my pocket and laid it down beside her mum’s, to conduct what my detective book called a side-by-side comparison. In both letters, the capital ‘a’s were all written like oversized small ‘a’s. And that was in addition to the word ‘precious’ being spelled wrong in Jennifer’s mum’s letter in the same way that it was spelled wrong in the letter from Jennifer’s dad. Both times the writer had put in an extra ‘s’.

  I stared at the two letters for several minutes, because what I was thinking now just didn’t make any sense.

  I went downstairs to show Jennifer and Matthew what I had discovered and walked in on them snogging on the sofa. How anyone can snog my brother is beyond me, but when I said that to Holly she didn’t agree with me. She said that Matthew has lips that are just the right thickness for snogging – unlike Jennifer’s, which are a little bit too thin.

  ‘Hey!’ I said loudly, which made them instantly jump about a mile apart from each other. ‘I want to show you something.’ I sat in between them on the sofa since there was now quite a big space there, holding the two letters I had been examining, one in each hand. ‘I’ve discovered something really weird,’ I told them. ‘Jennifer, I don’t think your mum really did send you that letter when you were a baby.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ve examined the handwriting in both these letters,’ I said, sounding spookily like Sherlock Holmes, even if I do say so myself. I gave them to Jennifer to look at – the one her mum was meant to have sent her years ago and the one her dad had only just sent to our house. ‘Look at the handwriting! It looks different because one’s written in block capitals and the other isn’t, but if you look more closely –’ I pointed out the identical capital letter ‘a’s and the identical misspellings of ‘precious’ – ‘they must have both been written by the same person. Which means that the letter you thought was from your mum can’t have been from her at all. It must have been written by your dad. Only why would your dad want you to think your mum had sent you a letter if she hadn’t?’

  Jennifer was staring at me as if I was talking in a foreign language. (I guess Sherlock Holmes got that a lot too.)

  ‘Read them,’ I persisted. I handed her the magnifying glass.

  Jennifer read both letters, staring at them closely, saying nothing. Matthew was leaning over her shoulder to look too. As he murmured that he saw what I meant, Jennifer suddenly jumped up from the sofa.

  ‘That’s rubbish! Of course this letter’s from my mum!’

  ‘Jennifer, the writing does look really similar—’ Matthew began.

  ‘Stop it!’ she snapped. ‘Stop interfering! You don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  Matthew looked surprised. ‘But you were the one who asked us to—’

  ‘I think you’d better go before my dad gets back. Here! Take this with you!’ She threw Dad’s letter in Matthew’s direction, keeping a tight hold on the one from her mother. ‘You’ve got an overactive imagination, Esmie, that’s your problem!’

  And she practically threw us out of her house.

  Matthew was really agitated on the way home, worrying about Jennifer. And I was worried too. Maybe I shouldn’t have just blurted it all out like that. Juliette used to say that it wasn’t always right to tell the truth if it was hurtful and if nobody had anything to gain by hearing it. But surely Jennifer did have something to gain by knowing the truth? Although I could see why she found it hurtful that her mum hadn’t written her that letter, because it was the only proof she had that her mum loved her.

  Matthew unlocked the front door as quietly as he could when we got back. It sounded like Lizzie was on the phone in the living room and we both stopped in the hall to listen. Was she on the phone to Dad, informing him that she had just discovered we were gone?

  She wasn’t, thank goodness. She was chatting to one of her friends. Matty headed upstairs straight away, but I paused to listen. And what I heard made me instantly forget about Jennifer and that forged letter from her mother.

  ‘Andrew thinks I should tell John,’ I heard Lizzie say. ‘But I’m not sure I’m up for that just yet . . . No, it can’t go on much longer, but John’s so stressed at work with this new case that I’m not sure now’s the right time to . . . Yes . . . Yes, I know . . . I know I’m not getting any younger . . .’

  Suddenly the doorbell rang, making me jump.

  I ran up the stairs as Lizzie came out into the hall and opened the front door – it was Dad’s breakdown service. I went into my bedroom, feeling dazed. What had Lizzie meant just now? What couldn’t go on much longer? Was she having an affair with this Andrew person after all, and waiting for Dad to be less stressed at work before she told him?

  I looked at the photograph of my mother that sits by my bed. When I was younger I used to talk to her all the time about stuff and imagine that I could hear her replying to me. But since Lizzie had been around, I’d stopped doing that because I was afraid Lizzie would hear me and think that since I still spoke to my real mum, I didn’t need her as well. ‘Mum, what shall I do?’ I asked now. ‘What if Lizzie’s being unfaithful to Dad? What if she leaves us?’

  But, as usual, my mother’s picture didn’t reply, which is why I really did need Lizzie too.

  In no time at all I had thought up a cunning plan (as Sherlock Holmes might say) to find out the truth. I was going to hide in Lizzie’s car on Saturday morning and follow her when she went to meet Andrew. I had seen an American TV film recently where the private detective hid in the boot of his suspect’s car after shooting bullet holes in it first to make sure he could breathe. Well, there was no way I was climbing into Lizzie’s boot, but I reckoned I could easily lie down flat behind the front seats and follow her that way.

  Lizzie stayed over at our house on Friday night, so on Saturday morning her car was parked in our driveway beside Dad’s. At half-past nine, Lizzie was upstairs getting dressed, Dad was in the kitchen swigging down a quick cup of coffee before he set off for work, and Matthew was still in bed. I took Lizzie’s car keys off the hall table, slipped outside and unlocked her car door, then quickly returned the keys before dodging back outside again. I climbed into the back of her car, locked the door again from the inside, and lay down flat on the floor behind the front seats, pulling the travel rug over me. With any luck, when Lizzie got in the car she wouldn’t bother looking in the back.

  I lay there for five minutes, starting to get uncomfortable. I heard Dad come outside and try to start his car. His breakdown service had done a temporary fixing job when they’d come out to it the other day, but they’d told Dad he needed to take it to a garage to get it sorted properly. Dad hadn’t got round to doing that yet and now it sounded like the engine had conked out again. The next thing I knew, Lizzie and Dad were both in the driveway and Lizzie was offering to get the bus into town so that Dad could take her car to work this morning. Before I could get out, Dad was getting in and sliding back the driver’s seat, because he’s got longer legs than Li
zzie, which meant I had to roll over on to my side really quickly so as not to get crushed.

  I lay there fuming as Dad drove off because I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to follow Lizzie now – and that I was going to have to be really careful not to be caught by Dad since he’s always going on about how important it is not to muck around in cars and to always wear your seat belt.

  We had driven all the way to Dad’s work and had just pulled up in the car park when his mobile started ringing. ‘Hello?’ I heard him say. ‘Where are you?’ He listened for a bit, then asked, ‘Did they find anything else at the allotments?’

  I instantly pricked up my ears. Dad was talking about his latest murder case – the one he’d flatly refused to give us any details about when we’d asked.

  ‘What about forensics?’ he was saying. ‘Well, we knew that much . . . What? OK, so we know it’s an adult female skeleton . . . What? . . . A healed fracture to the right arm . . . OK . . . So how are we doing with the dental and hospital records? . . . OK . . . Sure . . . What about missing persons? . . . Right . . . OK . . . Well, keep me posted.’

  He put his phone away and got out of the car.

  My heart was beating really fast as I waited for him to walk away. The skeleton that had been found in Jennifer’s dad’s allotments belonged to an adult female who had once broken her arm. Well, I knew of a missing person who had once broken her arm, didn’t I? And whose husband did a lot of digging on those allotments . . .

  ‘I suppose it might not have been murder. It could just have been manslaughter,’ I pointed out to Holly when I told her everything on the phone as soon as I got back home. I knew from asking Dad ages ago that murder was premeditated whereas manslaughter wasn’t. If you committed manslaughter it meant you’d killed somebody on the spur of the moment, rather than actually planned to do it. ‘Jennifer’s dad’s got a really bad temper,’ I continued. ‘What if he was having a row with Jennifer’s mum and he completely lost it? What if he pushed her and she fell and hit her head and died? And then he didn’t want anyone to find out what he’d done so he buried her in the allotments.’