The Mum Detective Read online

  ‘The car?’

  ‘I was hiding behind the seats when you borrowed Lizzie’s car this morning. You see, it was meant to be a . . . a . . . joke,’ I continued rapidly. ‘I was going to jump up and surprise Lizzie, you see – but then you got in the car and I thought I’d wait a bit, and then . . . and then I decided not to because I knew you’d be angry.’

  Dad looked angry then all right, and started going on about how I was too old to be playing jokes like that. He said it was stupid and dangerous to hide in a car, not wearing a seat belt, and what if there’d been an accident?

  ‘I know, Dad,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m sorry. But are you going to take Mr Mitchell in for questioning now or what?’

  All of a sudden, Dad got this strange, dark look on his face. ‘Esmie, don’t you think you’ve done enough harm already, opening your mouth and blurting out all that rubbish to Jennifer?’

  ‘But it isn’t rubbish!’ I protested.

  ‘Isn’t it? Esmie, you’ve terrified her so much that she doesn’t even feel it’s safe to stay here.’

  ‘I know, but . . .’ My voice dried up. I couldn’t remember Dad ever looking at me as coldly as he was looking at me now.

  ‘Just go to your room where you can’t cause any more trouble. Go on!’

  I felt a lump in my throat and tears pricking my eyes. My legs felt wobbly. I stumbled up to my bedroom and burst into tears. It wasn’t fair! How could Dad say I was talking rubbish when, for all he knew, that skeleton could be Jennifer’s mum? And if it was, then that made Mr Mitchell a prime suspect, didn’t it? Dad was always saying that most murder victims were killed by someone they knew – and Mrs Mitchell had certainly known Mr Mitchell, hadn’t she? OK, so I had upset Jennifer with what I’d said, but I’d only been trying to keep her safe. It wasn’t my fault that she’d run away and taken my brother with her!

  Whenever I cry, my nose always starts running. I reached for a tissue from the box by my bed and my hand touched my mother’s photograph.

  ‘You don’t think I’m talking rubbish, do you, Mum?’ I murmured. I picked up the photograph and hugged it close to me. When I was younger, I’d really thought of that photo as being her and, if I’d had a problem, then seeing her face smiling reassuringly at me and imagining her voice telling me that everything was going to be OK had always been enough to make me feel better. But it wasn’t making me feel better now.

  The front door slammed and, when I looked out of my bedroom window, I saw Dad getting into Lizzie’s car. I guessed he had decided to go out and look for Matthew and Jennifer himself.

  I heard Lizzie coming upstairs so I quickly put down my mother’s photograph because, like I said before, I’m always very careful to give Lizzie the impression that I don’t give my real mother too much thought at all.

  ‘Esmie?’ Lizzie knocked on my door and came into my room. ‘Your dad’s just gone to speak to Mr Mitchell.’

  ‘What? On his own?’ Policemen weren’t meant to go and confront murderers on their own. Everyone knew that. They were meant to take back-up with them.

  ‘He’s just gone to tell him about Matthew and Jennifer. Then he’s going to Jake’s to see if they’ve gone there – or if Jake knows where they could be.’

  ‘Dad doesn’t believe me about Jennifer’s dad being dangerous, does he?’ I said, scowling.

  ‘Esmie, I think you should let your dad worry about that since he’s the one in charge of the investigation, not you,’ Lizzie said lightly. ‘Right now, I think we should be trying to come up with ideas about where Matthew and Jennifer might have gone.’ She paused. ‘Could they have gone looking for Jennifer’s mother, do you think?’

  ‘What? In the police mortuary?’ I knew that the police kept any dead bodies they found in the mortuary and I assumed they did the same with any suspicious skeletons.

  ‘Esmie . . .’ Lizzie looked at me like she thought I was deliberately being awkward.

  ‘Well, Dad thinks Jennifer believed me about her mum!’ I said, hearing my voice rising several notes higher than usual. ‘He thinks she believed what I said and that’s why she ran away! He thinks this is all my fault!’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t think that,’ Lizzie protested. ‘He’s just very worried. It made him lose his temper quicker than normal, that’s all.’

  ‘I mean it’s not like we don’t know Matty’s safe,’ I pointed out huffily. ‘He left a note to tell us he’s run away. So we know he’s not missing because he’s been kidnapped or anything.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not quite that simple, Esmie. It’s what might happen to him now that your dad’s worried about. Matty may seem quite grown up to you, but he’s still your dad’s child.’

  ‘Dad’s overprotective,’ I grunted. Matty is always saying that, and I reckon he’s right.

  ‘Well, I expect I’d be overprotective too, if I’d had to bring up two children on my own,’ Lizzie was saying. ‘It must be very hard not having another parent to share your worries with. And the job he does can’t help. He knows far more than most people about all the dangers that are out there.’

  ‘So you think he’s overprotective too!’ I burst out. ‘Good! As soon as he gets home, I’m going to tell him that!’

  Lizzie looked annoyed. ‘Maybe that’s not such a great idea, eh, Esmie?’ she said quite sharply. ‘Considering what’s happened today.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t fair of him to take it out on me, just because he’s worried,’ I protested. ‘I mean, I didn’t make Matthew run away, did I?’ I felt tears pricking my eyes again.

  ‘Esmie, I told you! Your dad doesn’t blame you!’ She sounded like she was losing patience with me now.

  ‘Yes he does.’ I glanced at my mother’s photo. ‘I bet he doesn’t even think she’d be proud of me any more.’ I picked up the photograph, not caring now that Lizzie was watching me. Something that Dad had always told me, right from when I was little, was that if my mother was still alive she’d be really proud of how I’d turned out.

  ‘Oh, Esmie . . . Of course your dad hasn’t changed his mind about that!’ Lizzie said. ‘There’s a lot for her to be proud of !’

  I nearly asked, Like what? But instead I heard myself asking in my most pathetic voice, ‘Would you still feel proud of me if you were her?’

  ‘Of course I would!’

  I nearly asked her then if she wished she was my mother, but I was too scared to, in case she didn’t give me the answer I wanted, because she wasn’t looking all that maternal right now. She was looking pretty harassed.

  Matthew didn’t call for the whole of that day, or the next, and by Monday morning Dad was looking really tired from hardly getting any sleep over the weekend. I reckoned Lizzie must have spoken to him about me because he came into my bedroom on Saturday night and told me that he certainly didn’t blame me for my brother running away. But he also mentioned again how wrong it had been to hide like that in the back of his car and listen in to his private phone call. And he said that he wished I would go straight to him in future, if I ever got any ideas in my head about any of the people we knew being murderers.

  The other thing he told me was that he’d spoken to Jennifer’s dad and satisfied himself that his story about Mrs Mitchell leaving when Jennifer was little was true. Besides, he added, they were fairly sure now about the identity of that skeleton. He wouldn’t tell me anything else, but he said that all would be revealed in due course and that I’d certainly got it wrong about the skeleton being Jennifer’s mother.

  I know I should have been relieved when he said that, and I was – because it was obviously much better for Jennifer if her father wasn’t a murderer – but I couldn’t help feeling a little bit disappointed at the same time. I guess Sherlock Holmes probably felt a bit discouraged too whenever he discovered that he’d got one of his cases completely wrong.

  On Monday at school, I told Holly everything that had happened. She said she’d known all along that the skeleton wasn’t Jennifer’s mother. Then she started
comparing Matthew to various cool characters who had run away in different films she’d seen, until I got really fed up with listening to her. My brother’s disappearing act just couldn’t be compared with Steve McQueen’s heroic attempt to escape from a German prisoner-of-war camp in The Great Escape, as far as I was concerned. Later, as we were sitting next to each other in French, she came up with the idea that Matthew and Jennifer had run away to Scotland to get married. She said she’d seen a TV programme about a teenage couple who’d done that. Apparently, you can get married in Scotland when you’re sixteen without your parents’ permission, whereas in England you can’t.

  I was still thinking about that when I got home that afternoon and, as soon as I walked in through our front door, I knew something had happened. Dad was home early and he was talking on the phone to somebody. It didn’t take me long to work out that the person he was talking to was Jennifer’s father.

  ‘Of course I’m not happy about it, but at least we know they’re OK,’ Dad was saying a bit impatiently.

  I rushed over, afraid that I already knew what it was that he was unhappy about. ‘Have Matty and Jennifer gone to Scotland to get married?’ I asked breathlessly.

  Dad stopped his conversation with Mr Mitchell in mid-sentence and stared at me. ‘Have they told you they want to get married?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. It was just something Holly saw on TV. But—’

  He held up his hand to stop me, then quickly lifted the phone back to his ear and spent several minutes calming down Mr Mitchell (who had overheard the word ‘married’ and was now freaking out big time).

  After he came off the phone, Dad told me that Matthew had left a message on our answering machine that afternoon. ‘He says they’re both fine, that they’ve got somewhere to stay . . . though he doesn’t say where . . . and that he’ll ring again in a few days . . . No doubt he’ll pick some other time when he knows I’ll be out . . .’ Dad had walked over to the window as he was talking, and now he was staring out of it as if he was searching for my brother. ‘I’m telling you, Esmie . . . When I get my hands on that boy . . .’

  The phone started ringing before he could finish and, as I was nearer, I got to it before Dad could. ‘Hello?’

  ‘May I speak to Esmerelda Harvey, please?’

  ‘This is Esmie,’ I replied, puzzled because nobody I knew called me Esmerelda. Dad was mouthing Matthew’s name at me and I shook my head to let him know that it wasn’t my brother.

  ‘This is Helen Forbes. You sent me a letter recently.’

  ‘Oh!’ What with everything else that had happened, I’d completely forgotten about writing to those two lady doctors to try and find Jennifer’s aunt. I couldn’t think what to say. ‘Are you . . . ? I mean, do you . . . ?’ I trailed off.

  ‘I think,’ the voice continued, pausing slightly, ‘that your friend, Jennifer, may be my niece.’

  Dad was still standing watching me, wondering who it was on the phone. I didn’t know what to do. Should I tell Dad who was calling? But I hadn’t told anyone else about my letter to Jennifer’s aunt – except Holly, of course. I hadn’t even told Jennifer or Matthew. If I told Dad then I knew he would take over immediately. He would probably phone Jennifer’s dad and tell him.

  ‘It’s a bit difficult for me to talk right now,’ I said into the mouthpiece. ‘Can I take your number and call you back? Or she will.’ I didn’t want to say Jennifer’s name while Dad was in the room.

  ‘Why didn’t Jennifer contact me herself if she wanted to find out about her mother?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Er . . . she . . . well . . . sh-she thought it was best if you phoned me to start with,’ I stammered.

  There was a pause. ‘Does her father know she’s contacted me?’

  I swallowed, remembering how Juliette had said that it wasn’t always necessary – or wise – to tell the truth about certain things. I knew that if I told the truth here, I could be making problems for Jennifer, since her aunt might be the type of adult who would want everything to be out in the open, with all the grown-ups agreeing, before she gave away any information about her sister. ‘She’s been waiting to see if you phoned back first,’ I mumbled.

  There was a pause at the other end. ‘Well, tell her that she must tell her father before she phones me. I mean that. I’ll give you my number.’

  ‘I’ll get a pen.’ Before I could start looking around for one, Dad produced his own pen and notepad from his jacket pocket. He was watching quite closely as I wrote down Jennifer’s aunt’s number, so I covered my writing with my other hand like I do when anyone’s trying to copy my work at school. As soon as I’d put down the phone, I ripped out the page with the number on and put it in my pocket, then I ripped out the three blank pages under that page and put them in my pocket too before I gave his notebook back to him. (In my detective book it says how it’s possible to read the indentations left on a notepad after writing on and removing the top sheet.)

  Dad watched the destruction of his notepad with a half-amused look on his face. Then he demanded to know who I’d been talking to.

  I had to think fast. ‘It was a girl at school phoning with a message for Holly.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she phone Holly directly?’

  ‘She doesn’t have Holly’s number. Holly doesn’t want her to have it,’ I added quickly. ‘They sort of fell out about something. I can’t really tell you any more.’

  Dad rolled his eyes as if he thought that me acting as a sort of personal secretary for Holly was really silly, but he didn’t say anything else. As soon as he’d gone back into the kitchen, I went upstairs to use the phone in his bedroom where I wouldn’t be overheard. I quickly rang Matty’s mobile number. All I got was the voicemail thing so I left a message on it. ‘Matty, this is Esmie. Tell Jennifer I’ve managed to contact her mum’s sister – her Aunt Helen. I wrote her a letter and she just phoned me and gave me her number for Jennifer to phone her back. I think she might know where Jennifer’s mum is. Oh . . . and listen . . . I made a mistake about that skeleton . . . Dad says there’s no way it could be Jennifer’s mother . . . I’m really sorry I said that . . .’ I heard Dad coming up the stairs so I quickly said goodbye and hung up.

  I was leaving Dad’s bedroom as he reached the landing. ‘What are you doing in there?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I flushed. ‘I was looking for my . . . my Mizz magazine. I thought maybe Lizzie had borrowed it.’ It was scary how good at lying I was getting these days.

  ‘Well, you can ask her later. She’s coming round to babysit at six o’clock while I go back to work for a couple of hours.’

  ‘Babysit?’ I scowled at him. Dad knows how I feel about him using that word.

  ‘Sorry . . . Childmind.’ He went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  I went into my bedroom to make a start on my homework. I had just opened my maths book – and closed it again because I hate maths – when the phone started ringing. Dad was coming out of the bathroom by then and I heard him go into his bedroom to answer it.

  I jumped up and went to join him.

  ‘Hello?’ he was saying. But whoever it was didn’t speak to him. ‘Probably a wrong number,’ Dad grunted as he put down the phone, but I could tell he also had another thought about who the caller might have been.

  I was certain I knew. I had only just left that message on Matty’s mobile. He had probably listened to it by now and was desperate to speak to me about it. He had probably been hoping that I would pick up the phone instead of Dad.

  I got on with my homework until Lizzie arrived just after six. I ran downstairs to greet her and noticed that Dad didn’t give her a kiss like he normally did when he opened the door to her. He just launched straight into telling her about the message Matty had left on our answering machine this afternoon.

  After Dad had spent the next half-hour talking to Lizzie about Matthew, he looked at his watch and said he really did have to go back to work for a couple of hours, even though he didn’t much f
eel like it. He told Lizzie the garage had said his car couldn’t be fixed until the new part they had ordered for it arrived. She said he could carry on using her car in the meantime as it was easy enough for her to catch the bus to work, and it was then that he gave her a kiss – a bit belatedly, I thought.

  After Dad had gone, Lizzie made me a snack for tea, which I told her I’d take upstairs to eat while I finished my homework. What I really wanted to do was sneak into Dad’s bedroom and use the phone in there to call Matthew again. I reckoned his mobile would still be switched off, but maybe if I left him a message letting him know that Dad was out, then he’d ring me back straight away.

  I sat down on Dad’s bed, lifted the receiver and was about to start dialling when I realized that Lizzie was on the line downstairs.

  ‘Thanks, Andrew,’ she was saying. ‘It’s just that I really need to see you. I don’t think I can wait until Saturday.’ She sounded stressed.

  I froze as a well-spoken male voice answered her. ‘How about tomorrow? I’m out at a meeting in the afternoon but I should be back by five. Can you get here OK?’

  ‘John’s still using my car but that’s no problem. I’ll leave work early and catch the bus.’

  ‘Great! See you then, Lizzie!’

  I felt sick after she’d hung up. Because how could she and this Andrew person just be friends if she needed to see him as badly as that?

  ‘Dad always called his girlfriend on his mobile when he was having his affair,’ Holly said when I phoned her up straight afterwards and repeated the conversation I had overheard to her. ‘It’s really stupid of Lizzie to use the landline, see, because your dad’ll see the call when he gets his phone bill.’ Holly was making it sound like the main point here was that her family were experts at having affairs whereas mine were rubbish at it.

  ‘But do you think Lizzie really is . . . y-you know . . .’ I stammered, not even able to bring myself to say the words.