by Lena Jones
‘An aubergine.’
He bursts out laughing. ‘Well, you’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, Agatha Oddlow?’
Not knowing how to respond, I change the subject. ‘Any joy at the butcher’s?’
He shakes his head. ‘They didn’t even know her.’
‘Maybe she’s a vegetarian,’ I suggest.
‘Or doesn’t cook her meals from scratch.’
‘No. She gets a box of fruit and vegetables delivered each week, so that can’t be right.’ Then I remember what Elizabeth MacDonald said as well. ‘Anyway – I know she’s not a veggie. She’d bought shellfish to make paella on Friday night.’
‘So she gets a weekly delivery from the local greengrocer’s?’
I nod.
‘Had she cancelled this week’s delivery?’
‘Nope. And all the greengrocer knows is that Sheila wasn’t in when they tried to drop her box off. That was on Friday at around six thirty. So it looks like she didn’t make it home.’
‘Or else someone came to her flat and she left with them.’
‘I guess that’s possible …’ I concede. ‘It’s a very small window of time, though, seeing as she left work at around five thirty and wasn’t in for her delivery at six thirty.’
‘Shall we visit the rest of the shops in the row?’ he suggests. ‘They might know something.’
‘Sure. I’ll take the off licence, and you can take the grocer’s on the corner.’
We meet a couple of minutes later. ‘Anything?’ he asks.
‘She bought a bottle of wine on Friday night,’ I say. ‘The man in the shop reckons it was around ten past six. She didn’t seem particularly frazzled or frightened.’
‘The corner shop didn’t see her – or they don’t remember seeing her, anyway.’
‘So it’s down to whether she made it home with the wine and the paella ingredients.’ I rummage in my backpack and draw out my lock-picking kit. ‘Come on, let’s visit the flat.’
We ring all the doorbells on Sheila’s building, until someone buzzes us in through the shared front door.
‘Number three’s on the ground floor,’ says Arthur, pointing down the entry hall.
I stop in front of the pigeonholes for the post and rummage through Sheila’s mail. There’s what looks like an electricity bill, plus various flyers for local businesses.
‘Nothing interesting,’ I say.
We walk over to her door, where we pull on latex gloves, so we won’t contaminate any evidence. There’s only one lock – a Yale-style latch that should be easy to pick. It’s one of the first types Mum trained me in. Within seconds, there’s a satisfying click and we’re inside.
‘That was impressive,’ says Arthur, closing the door behind us.
‘Thanks. My mum taught me. It’s actually pretty easy.’ I pause, thinking about Mum and the uncertainty around how she died. ‘She just made it seem like a fun game – we were always playing detectives. Now, though, I keep wondering if she was making sure I had some useful skills, in case her work ever got me into danger and I needed to escape.’
‘Wow – that’s a lot to think about.’
‘Yeah, a bit too much. Anyway, I guess we’d better get on with the case.’
I switch on the light. We’re in Sheila’s living room. It’s a welcoming space, with a blue sofa, matching armchairs and colourful cushions, and a kitchen area along one side. There’s a view through French windows of a leafy, green garden. ‘Bay trees, laurel and box,’ I murmur, approving her choice of evergreens for year-round interest.
‘What?’
‘Sorry! Old habit, learnt from Dad. Just noticing what shrubs she has in her garden. No use whatsoever to the investigation.’
‘Unless she’s found a secret passageway to a magical kingdom underneath a bay tree,’ he says gravely.
‘At this point, I don’t think we should rule anything out,’ I say, in an equally mock-serious tone.
We both laugh, stopping abruptly when we remember we’re dealing with someone’s disappearance.
‘What if she’s in danger?’ I ask quietly.
‘I’m sure she’s fine,’ he says. But he doesn’t meet my eye. Then he says in frustration, ‘There must be a clue somewhere. People don’t just vanish into thin air.’
‘Agreed. We’ll search this flat until we find a lead of some kind.’
‘OK – you take the bedroom and I’ll start in here,’ he says.
‘I’d like to see inside the fridge first,’ I say.
‘Come on, then.’ We walk over to her silver larder-style refrigerator, and he opens the door.
‘There’s a bottle of wine in here,’ he says, pointing.
‘Yeah, but it’s not the one she bought. This is white, and she bought red.’
‘No sign of the paella ingredients, either.’
The contents of the fridge are fairly sparse. There’s some wilting lettuce in a drawer at the bottom, half a lemon, a block of yellowing Cheddar cheese and a bottle of salad cream.
‘So she didn’t make it home,’ I say.
‘No, doesn’t look like it,’ he agrees. ‘Shall we move on?’
I nod and head into the short hallway, where I find two doors. I choose the end one and find I’ve selected correctly: there’s a neatly made bed, plus an antique painted wardrobe in carved wood and a matching chest of drawers and dressing table. This room also looks out on to the garden.
I sit on the bed and gaze around the room for anything that looks off.
Poirot joins me. He rubs the top of the chest of drawers with a white-gloved hand and says approvingly, ‘She is very clean and tidy, our Ms Sheila Smith.’ Poirot is a big believer in order and cleanliness.
‘She is,’ I agree. And yet … Oh!
I jump up. Everything in the room is immaculate, with careful paintwork on the walls and doorframe. There’s only one thing that doesn’t match. The wardrobe door consists of four panels. And the panel at the top right is missing a bit of paint!
I pull up the chair from Sheila’s dressing table and climb on to it. When I push on the panel, hoping it might swing open, nothing happens. But on closer examination, I realise the paint would only chip at the edge like that if someone had used a tool to prise it open. After jumping down, I scour the room for a likely object. And then I see it on the windowsill – a metal ruler, hidden in a vase of dried hydrangeas. Grabbing the tool, I clamber back on to the chair and jemmy the panel open. The whole rectangle of wood clatters to the floor, and I hear Arthur call out to me, checking I’m OK.
‘I’m fine!’ I call back. I’m staring at the spot where the rectangle of wood fell out. Removing the single panel has exposed a narrow hiding place – a hollow in the door …
But it’s empty.
I feel a stab of disappointment. I’d been so sure this discovery was going to offer a clue to Sheila’s whereabouts! I jump down and grab the wooden panel to put it back. And then I feel something beneath my fingers – an uneven section in the wood. I’m shaking as I turn it over and remove the little plug of wood from the back. There’s a folded envelope inside! I sit down on the chair and open it, drawing out a much-folded piece of paper.
‘Hey! Come here!’ I call to Arthur.
When he runs in, I hold up the sheet of paper. ‘Look at this – Sheila had hidden it ridiculously well. I think she must have been really scared for her safety.’
Arthur stares. ‘What does it say?’
I read it aloud:
‘Then there’s a signature,’ I say, ‘“The Silver Serpent”, and a symbol of a snake drawn in silver ink … It’s quite pretty, actually – really delicate and detailed.’
‘Let’s see,’ says Arthur.
I hold it up again and he studies it. ‘It’s not like any snake I’ve ever seen,’ he says disparagingly. ‘I mean – the markings are a bit like an adder, but the head’s hooded, like a cobra …’
I laugh. ‘I think that’s the idea – it isn’t meant to be repres
entational! It can be all snakes, rather than just one specific one. Anyway, what do you think it means? Who could this Silver Serpent be?’
‘Someone who didn’t much like Sheila “sticking her nose in”, apparently.’
‘It sounds quite childish to me,’ I say.
‘Does it?’
‘Well, how many adults do you know who tell people not to stick their noses into things?’
‘You’ve not met my mum, have you …?’
We both laugh. ‘This feels important, though, don’t you think?’ I say. ‘I mean, just the fact that she’s gone to so much trouble to conceal it, look—’ I show him the wooden panel and the plug of wood.
‘Very imaginative,’ he says. ‘A hiding place within a hiding place.’
‘We’d better get on,’ I say. ‘We can try to work out who this note is from later – and what Sheila was poking her nose into.’
He heads back to the main room and I inspect the note one more time. It’s written on high-quality thick paper – and there’s a watermark that I don’t recognise, but the Guild lab can probably help with that. I sniff the sheet, but any scent it might once have carried has long faded. I put the note carefully into a plastic evidence bag and stow it in my backpack. Then I give the bedroom a detailed search – looking inside drawers and examining the contents of the wardrobe itself. But I just have this gut feeling that I’ve already found the only thing in the room worth discovering.
Arthur finishes in the big open-plan living room at the same time as I’m done in the bedroom, and we convene in the tiny bathroom.
‘I’ve got something too,’ he says.
‘What?’
He draws out a clear evidence bag containing a memory stick.
My eyes widen. ‘Where did you get that?’ I ask.
‘It was hidden inside a vase in the living room.’
‘What do you think’s on it?’ I ask.
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Hopefully, it’s something less cryptic than the note!’
‘Shall we examine it now, on her computer?’ he suggests.
‘Let’s get this room searched first.’
He removes the bath panels while I sift through the bathroom cupboard.
‘Anything?’ he asks. His head is inside the cavity beneath the bath and his voice is echoey.
‘Nope. How about you?’
‘Nothing.’ He wiggles out and stands up. His hair is full of cobwebs, which he removes with a grimace. ‘Fancy checking out the memory stick now?’
‘Definitely.’
We walk through to the living room, where Sheila’s laptop is lying on her desk. Arthur sits in her chair and presses the button and it starts up quickly.
‘Drat! She’s set up a password,’ he says.
‘What shall we do now? Do you think anyone at the Guild could get into it?’
But he’s already typing, his fingers tapping too quickly to follow. Codes fill the screen. I watch in awe as the screen, after first turning black, changes to colour – and her desktop appears.
‘That was a-maz-ing!’ I say. ‘I didn’t know you could hack!’
He grins and bows. ‘Just a little extra service I provide, ma’am.’
‘Well, I’m very impressed.’
I turn my attention to Sheila’s laptop. Her background image is an artwork I don’t recognise. It’s a large grid of text, all made up of typewriter lettering. At first glance, it looks like the entire piece is formed of the same character, typed over and over again. But when I look more closely, I see there are lots of different hieroglyphic forms as well.
As Arthur goes to put in the memory stick, I say, ‘Wait a moment – what do you make of that? Is it just a piece of contemporary artwork?’
‘It looks like a piece by Anni Albers,’ he says. ‘She liked to turn everyday things – like repeated typewritten characters – into works of art.’
I lean over his shoulder and take a picture of the typed grid with my phone. While he loads the memory stick, I home in on the symbols on my mobile. ‘There are lots of different characters here,’ I say. ‘And some of them have been crossed out for some reason. Others have a red background.’
‘Maybe Sheila made her own version of an Albers’s piece for fun. Anyway, we can look at that later. The memory stick is in. Shall we see what’s on it?’
We both watch the screen expectantly. When the laptop has whirred for a while but nothing has happened, Arthur opens the ‘This PC’ folder and double-clicks on the ‘removable flash drive’ icon. Again, nothing.
‘How is that possible …?’ I ask Arthur, feeling disappointment creeping in. ‘I really thought we were finally on to something.’
‘Me too.’ He leans back in his chair and stretches out his long legs. ‘Why would she bother to hide a memory stick that had nothing on it?’
‘I have no idea … Try double-clicking the icon again,’ I suggest.
Just after starting to move the cursor, he stops. ‘Look!’
A word is appearing on the screen … It starts off faintly, like a watermark, then slowly solidifies into clear capital letters. We both stare at it.
STOP
‘Stop? Stop what?’ I murmur. But another word is forming, and now another – and soon a whole message has appeared in the same way, shifting from an unreadable haze into a legible image, like adjusting the focus on a camera.
STOP INVESTIGATING.
AO and AF: WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
YOU ARE POWERLESS AGAINST US.
IF YOU WANT TO KEEP YOUR FAMILIES SAFE,
HEED THIS WARNING.
‘“AO and AF”?’ I say. ‘How do they know our initials?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ says Arthur.
‘So just because they know who we are, they think we’ll be intimidated enough to stop our investigation?’ I look at Arthur and see he’s turned pale. ‘Are you scared?’ I ask him, keeping my tone neutral so that he won’t feel judged.
‘It’s hard not to be. I’ve never been threatened before.’
‘Haven’t you?’ I say breezily. ‘I’m always being warned off. It’s usually a sign I’m getting close.’
He smiles, but it’s weak compared with his usual warm grin. ‘A bit too close for comfort, perhaps?’
I shake my head. ‘You can’t let them get to you. They’re bullies – and you have to ignore them and carry on, or they’ve won.’
‘Great advice, in theory – not so easy to follow in practice.’
I gesture to the laptop, to point out that they’re only words – and then I stop, because the warning has vanished.
‘Where did it go?’ I say, startled.
He frowns at the screen. ‘A self-deleting message!’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘Well, I guess they figured we can’t go running to the police with a blank memory stick …’
‘Unless the message starts up each time someone puts it in?’ I eject it and reinsert it and we wait, but nothing happens. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t take a photo,’ I say, feeling embarrassed.
‘Never mind. There goes that bit of evidence,’ says Arthur.
‘We’ll get it checked at the Guild lab anyway,’ I say, ‘just in case there’s something about the origin of the memory stick or any fingerprints …’ I sigh with frustration. ‘There must be something more proactive we can do!’
‘Stop the investigation?’ suggests Arthur.
‘You’re not serious?’
He pulls a face. ‘Of course not – I’m just a bit shaken.’
I put my hand on his sleeve. ‘It’ll be fine.’
He moves to shut down the computer, and I say, ‘Let’s look through Sheila’s emails while we’re here.’
‘Good idea,’ he says, clicking on her email folder. But Sheila turns out to be as efficient in her tech housekeeping as she is in her office and home – there are only fifty messages. It doesn’t take long to sift through them and discover they’re all to do with work meet
ings and gallery arrangements. Her contacts list is longer, though, and we both note down the names.
‘There may be something useful in these contacts,’ Arthur says. ‘I reckon when we get home, we should each see what we can turn up on them.’
‘Yes, let’s do that. We could cross-reference them with any contacts on her mobile. Do you have a list?’
He shakes his head. ‘No one’s found her phone. She must have it with her.’
‘Has anyone rung it?’
‘I did, lots of times. It always went straight to voicemail. And the Guild tried to trace it but failed. Their tech can normally track any phone, even when it’s off, but it looks like hers was an ancient model.’
‘Not much to go on there then. Let’s just see what she’s been working on.’ I click on the ‘Documents’ folder and reveal a set of files, all clearly relating to art exhibitions – ‘Van Gogh’, ‘Impressionists’, ‘Pop Art’, ‘Cubists’, ‘Bloomsbury Set’ …
‘Nothing unusual there,’ I say. ‘We might as well head over to HQ and report to the professor.’
He sighs and shuts down the computer. ‘Sure. Do you need to let your dad know you’re going to be late?’
‘I can text him on the way.’
As we walk back to the Tube station, Arthur asks me, ‘What are you saying in your text to your dad?’
‘Just that I’m running late.’
‘And when you get home?’
I sigh. ‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.’
Arthur looks at me. ‘What if he forbids you from continuing with the investigation?’
‘Then I guess I’ll be back to sneaking out of my bedroom window and down the oak tree.’
He raises an eyebrow. ‘Nobody warned me I’d been partnered with such a rule-breaker.’
I laugh. ‘I promise I only break the rules in pursuit of justice.’
I’m pleased to see he’s smiling as we pass through the barriers at Westbourne Park station.
Guild HQ is strangely deserted when we arrive back at half past four. I spot Sofia, dashing along a corridor, and run after her.
‘Hey, Sofia! Where is everyone?’ I ask her.