by Nina Jon
She called Lucy’s mobile phone, but got the answer phone. “You gone home Lucy? Aren’t you feeling very well?” she said. “At least call me and let me know you’re okay.” She sent the same message by text and received a reply by return.
‘Had to go! Sorry. Things to do. C U!’
Jodie stared at the message. She’d never known her sister to do such a thing. It was completely out of character.
‘What’s happened? I’m here for you whatever you’ve done. But I can’t help you if you won’t tell me!’ she immediately texted back.
She didn’t get a reply and her calls went unanswered.
CHAPTER TWO
Mad March Hare
Jane Hetherington opened her bedroom curtains to see a hare sprinting across one of the fields adjoining the thatched cottage where she lived, and rabbits contentedly nibbling the newly emerged tips of the sugar beet crop. Farmer won’t be pleased, she thought. The scene reminded her that it was the first day of March, and she must turn the pages of the various calendars she had around the house.
I wonder what the month will bring, she thought, once she’d made her way downstairs to sit in her kitchen and drink her first coffee of the morning. She opened the back door to allow the spring sunshine to flood in. She could hear the birds chirping in the garden outside, but other than this, the house was silent. When her husband Hugh was still alive, and her daughter Adele, still lived at home, the house had always been full of noise. Back in those days, she’d yearned for moments such as this one, but now she had it, she’d have swapped it in a thrice for an argument with her daughter over a phone bill, or the sound of her husband complaining that his glasses weren’t where he’d left them and why couldn’t anybody ever leave his things alone?
She picked up her coffee cup and walked over to the open door. Although only the beginning of the month, tulips had joined the bluebells in bringing colour to the winter garden. She glanced over to her summerhouse. Its slatted egg-shell blue walls were caught in the sun. She sipped her coffee, staring away in the distance. The hare and the rabbits had gone, and in their place a large dog fox glanced right and left, searching for breakfast. Was he in the farmer’s pay, she wondered. She smiled to herself, closed her back door and took her coffee with her to her study.
Hopefully some new instructions would have arrived for her detective agency – the one she’d set up at sixty-three years of age – an age when many would be contemplating retirement. The agency had only been in existence for a couple of months, yet it had kept her busy enough, as was its purpose. To date she’d found missing people; revealed the person behind a string of poison-pen letters; unmasked a safe-breaker; caught a jewellery thief; established why lovers were distracted, and children unhappy at school. She’d even helped solve a murder. Nowadays this was all in a month’s work for her.
She turned her computer on to find an e-mail from a Dean
Moon, which immediately engrossed her.
‘I’m writing to you about my seventy-nine-year-old granddad,’ the e-mail began. ‘It all started around about a month ago, when my granddad showed my mum a letter he’d got from his bank about the money he’d run up on his credit card. He admitted he’d had other letters from them, but he’d thrown them out ’cos he only keeps his credit card for emergencies. He thought because he didn’t use it he could ignore the letters! He only showed mum the letter because the bank was threatening to send the bailiffs round to his flat. Mum spoke to the bank manager. He said the card had been used by someone who’d run up massive debts. Granddad said it wasn’t him. He hasn’t got anything to spend that much money on and there’s certainly nothing to show for it. He thinks someone must have been going into his flat and helping themselves to the card and putting it back. Even though we all told him not to, he keeps the card in a drawer in the lounge. It was still there when he looked. The staff all have keys – it might have been one of them, or some keys might have been left lying around by someone. Also, Granddad’s getting pretty absent-minded. He’s taken to leaving a key under a flowerpot in a neighbour’s garden! For all we know, he may even have gone out one day and left the front door unlocked. Turns out, the same thing’s happened to other people there. Granddad’s certain it must be someone where he lives, who was watching his comings and goings. That does seem the most likely – the cards were used and put back more than once – but it could have been a gang who’ve moved on. We called the police and they interviewed all the staff, but no one’s been charged. The police say their investigations are continuing, but I’m not sure they’re treating it as urgently as I think they should. I think they’re waiting to see if the thief strikes again before they expend valuable manpower on it. The complex’s on alert, so if the thief is still around, he or she has gone to ground for the moment.
The bank and credit card company have written-off Granddad’s debt, but they’ve cancelled his cards. I’ve never seen Granddad so angry. “Someone steals from me and I get the blame!” he said. That’s why I’m writing to you. I want you to find out if Granddad’s right, and it was someone he knows.
There’s more to this than I care to put in an e-mail. Mum’s taken Granddad away for a couple of weeks to cheer him up. Can we meet up when he gets back? Since Nan died a couple of years ago, Granddad’s lived in sheltered accommodation. Can we meet there?’
Not only did Jane believe she should help a vulnerable old man if she could, but the case sounded intriguing, particularly the words – There’s more to this than I care to put in an e-mail. She accepted the case immediately.
CHAPTER THREE
The Mouse in the Summerhouse
Jane decided to throw open her summerhouse door to let the spring air into it. She unlocked the door for the first time since October, and came face to face with a mouse busy scuttling across the floor. Both mouse and woman froze. Once she’d have jumped on a chair and called out to her husband, but since his death, she had to deal with situations such as this herself. In any event, sciatica made it impossible for her to lumber up on to a chair nowadays, let alone jump. She looked around the room and saw an empty plastic flowerpot discarded nearby. It was within reach. She picked it up and knelt down in front of the mouse.
“Come little friend,” she said in a whisper. “Let’s release you into the wild.”
When the mouse made no attempt to move, she tried to drop the flowerpot over it, but missed. The mouse immediately scuttled behind a heavy book case, which took up most of one wall. No amount of coaxing from Jane would budge him and the case was too heavy for her to move single-handedly. Of course she could leave the door open and wait for the mouse to leave, but she was looking for an excuse to pay her next door neighbour Charity, a visit, and now she had one.
Charity Parsons was a hairdresser in her early twenties. With both her parents dead, Charity was raising her school-boy brother, Jack, single-handedly. Charity had a boyfriend called Johnny Lambert. Johnny was good looking and charming and Jane had always got on very well with him. Nothing was too much trouble for him and he could be kind beyond compare. But where Jane was unable to defend Johnny was in his treatment of Charity and Jack. This was shabby. In her view, there was no other word for it. He’d left Charity more than once – the last time being a couple of months earlier, when he’d summarily announced that he’d bought himself a one-way ticket to the Falkland Islands, because he wanted to see ‘more of the world’. Jane put this fecklessness down to his dislocated childhood than to any wander lust, but it left Charity and Jack heartbroken. Charity had sworn she wouldn’t take him back again no matter what, and Jane thought the relationship finally over. But Johnny was back, wanting to reconcile and twenty-four hours after turning up unannounced at Charity’s door, his motorbike was still parked outside Charity’s cottage.
Jane pushed open the gate at the rear of Charity’s cottage garden, and walked up the garden path to her backdoor.
“Jane!” Charity said, when she found her neighbour on her back door step.
When Charity looked alarmed, Jane added, “…he’s about so long,” she motioned with her fingers, “and has a tail as long as he is. I’ve named him Aleckski because he’s the mouse who came in from the cold. I wondered if Johnny might help me remove him – dealing with wild animals is man’s work, after all.”
“Johnny’s not here. Jack’s school’s closed for teacher training, and Johnny’s taken him fishing. But come in, come in.”
No sooner had Jane stepped through the door, than Charity said, “Now before you say anything, I want to get one thing out of the way. I know what I said, but I love Johnny, and he must love me, otherwise he wouldn’t keep coming back. He told Jack he missed us when he was in the Falklands and that’s why he came back. He came back to be with us. He’s not as young as he used to be. He thinks it’s time he settled down, and it’s me he wants to settle down with. They were his very words.”
“Well I’m certainly glad to hear that. You know I want nothing more than to see you happily settled down, Charity,” Jane said.
“Let’s not get too carried away. We’ll just take it slowly for the time being. I don’t want him thinking he can just pick up where he left off, every time he wants to. We’ll see…” Charity said, suddenly preoccupied with her own thoughts. “He does get on so well with Jack, and he has other skills as well…” she added, with a backwards kick of her leg and a giggle, her usual gaiety having returned.
“Try and remember I’m a respectable widow woman, young lady,” Jane replied, as sternly as she could manage.
CHAPTER FOUR
Gone Fishing!
“Lucky we’re wearing waterproof boots,” Jack said, as he and
Johnny trudged across a water-laden field towards the river they’d selected for their fishing trip. It had rained heavily overnight, and the ground was quite damp underfoot.
As Jack spoke, he took a step forward and the ground beneath his right foot sank rapidly. He’d stepped into a puddle much deeper than he’d realised, and when he tried to pull his right foot out, he couldn’t – it was stuck. The water was rising alarmingly. It had almost reached the top of his wellington boots. “I’m stuck!” he yelled, almost overbalancing. He would have fallen head first into the water had Johnny not grabbed him by his collar.
Still holding onto Jack’s collar, Johnny took a hold of Jack’s wellington boot and pulled it out of the puddle. Jack took a couple of steps backwards to regain his balance. “Now that was lucky!” he said.
The two carried on. When they reached the river bank, they threw a tarpaulin over the only dry piece of ground they could find and set up their fishing equipment as best they could. Each unfolded stools. The cold box containing both bait and lunch was placed next to Johnny’s chair, and it was he who baited both his and Jack’s rod. Minutes later the two were sitting next to each other, surrounded by fishing paraphernalia, lines cast in the water, their rods resting on the rod perch planted between the two stools. Neither spoke.
After a while Johnny ruffled Jack’s hair and said, “You realise that you and me are effectively brothers-in-law.”
“Don’t do that,” Jack said, smoothing down his hair with his hands. “Do brothers-in-law give each other advice on girls?” Jack asked, a few moments later.
Johnny broke into a grin. No wonder Jack was suddenly so self-conscious of his appearance. His girlfriend’s little brother was in love. Bless, he thought. But then Jack was nearly fourteen, he remembered.
“What’s her name?” Johnny asked.
“Polly. She’s in my class. She’s very pretty and she makes me laugh,” he said, shyly.
“She the most popular girl in school?” Johnny asked.
“Not really, but I like her.”
“She the girl you texted me about?”
Jack nodded.
“She know you like her?”
Jack shook his head.
“Why don’t you tell her?”
“She might like someone else more,” Jack mumbled.
“Well that my friend is what we call life,” Johnny said, leaning back in his seat, pleased with his rapport with Jack, who he thought of as a mate. He was rather taken aback then by Jack’s response to this comment, which Jack clearly found glib.
“That it?” Jack said furiously. He stood up. “That your great advice is it? Ask her out and if she says no, tough. Get over it!”
“Jack, no mate, that’s not what I meant,” Johnny said. He hadn’t realised how much Jack liked this girl. He jumped to his feet, tripped over his stool and fell over. “I just meant, well…” he tried to say, still sprawled on the muddy ground.
“I should have known better than to turn to you for relationship advice,” Jack snapped, turning on his heels and walking away, splashing angrily through the puddles.
“Where are you going?” Johnny yelled after him. “We’re in the middle of nowhere!”
“I’m going for a slash,” Jack yelled back. “You going to still be here when I get back or will you have gone to South America again on a whim?”
Jack’s anger stunned Johnny, and his comments wounded him. They were a bit too close for comfort. He flinched. He stood up, brushed himself down and righted his stool. He sat down to kick the ground in shame. Jack was just a kid, and a kid who’d been through a hell of a lot. He’d lost his dad when still a youngster, and his mum not much later. Charity had effectively given up her girlhood to raise him. She’d shown the type of maturity that Johnny finally realised was lacking in himself. Charity had done a fantastic job bringing up Jack. The fact that she’d been prepared to do this said everything about her. It hadn’t been easy for either of them, and Johnny’s immaturity couldn’t have helped matters. This he now understood. It had taken a trip to South America to make him understand that what he saw as an irreverent, devil-may-care, take on life, was no more than self-obsession and selfishness, but realise it he finally did. The idea behind the fishing trip had been to tell
Jack this, but now Jack wasn’t speaking to him.
When Jack returned he ignored Johnny. He didn’t even make eye contact. He clattered into his seat and reeled his line in, angrily tossing the hook and line into the air behind him and flipping it back into the water. A stony silence descended.
“I was out of order mate,” Johnny said. “I didn’t take you seriously. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t take life seriously, that’s your problem, Johnny.”
“Point taken,” Johnny said. By way of a peace offering, Johnny offered him a sandwich. “Peanut butter and sausage. Your favourite.”
Jack snatched a sandwich from him and bit into it. He was still fuming as he finished off the last mouthful, almost swallowing it whole. Johnny poured a mug of steaming soup out for him. Jack scowled at him, but took it from Johnny and sipped it.
“Okay,” Johnny said. “My advice sucked. Let’s start again. Have you told her you like her?”
Jack shook his head. “I’ve already told you, I haven’t,” he said crossly.
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
Jack shook his head.
“Good. What does she like doing? Hobbies and stuff.”
“Same stuff I do.”
“So she likes football and girls then?” Johnny teased him.
“No,” Jack said, mellowing. “I meant music and stuff. She seems to spend a lot of time surrounded by other girls. Boy, girls can talk.”
“They sure can. And not just girls, so can adult women, mate, believe me.”
“What do they talk about?” Jack wanted to know.
“Boys mostly, so I’m led to believe. She a member of any clubs that you know of or the like?”
“She spends quite a lot of time in coffee places with her friends, or social networking, but I haven’t picked up the nerve to ask to be her friend yet.”
�
�Right,” Johnny said. “We know a couple of things about her. She likes coffee and company.”
“And she hasn’t got a boyfriend,” Jack reminded him.
“And she hasn’t got a boyfriend,” Johnny repeated. “Okay,” he said, putting his arm around Jack’s shoulder in a fatherly manner. “You need to approach her when she’s alone, at the lockers or something. Ask her if she wants to have a coffee with you.”
“What if she says no?”
“We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. I had to ask your sister out more than once before she said yes, remember. Ask her if she would like to have a coffee with you sometime. Now this is important. When she says yes, and I’m sure she will,” he added quickly, before Jack had a chance to say anything further. “When she says yes, or more likely – sure, why not! – which is the kind of things girls say so they don’t seem too keen, you need to have somewhere in mind. Where does she normally go?”
“The place on the high street, above the bookshop.”
“Right, well don’t take her there then, otherwise you’ll end up having a date with all her friends as well as her. Take her somewhere she doesn’t normally go. Doesn’t have to be in Failsham. Tell her you’ll either pick her up from her house or meet her there, whatever she’d prefer. Be early. When she turns up, tell her she looks really nice – whether she does or not. Pay for her coffee and remember to ask her about herself. Doesn’t matter if you already know, ask her anyway. Ask her what she likes to do, what she wants to do when she leaves school, who her favourite bands and TV shows are, etc. Even ask her if she likes cats, that kind of thing. Only talk about yourself if she asks and then be honest and modest. Girls hate show-offs. Does that help?” he said, his hand resting on Jack’s head.
“You’re okay, Johnny, even though you’re an ugly bugger. I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he said playfully punching him.