by Nina Jon
She sent Charity a text message. ‘Do you have any more information about Johnny’s father, which might help me narrow down the search?’ Charity replied: ‘Only that his father was born in Hemsley, and worked as a docker there, before moving up here and marrying J’s ma.’
This was something to go on at least. Jane glanced at her watch. Good heavens. It was much later than she’d thought. She’d suspend her search for the day and resume it in the morning.
She turned her computer off, drew her curtains and closed the study door behind her.
CHAPTER SIX
Mousetrap!
I
The next morning, Jane visited her summerhouse to ensure the mouse really had left it. A quick glance inside told her the answer, and she was soon in the small front room of her neighbour’s house.
“To ensure the mouse really had gone, I left half a digestive biscuit on the summerhouse floor last night,” she explained, “and this morning all that was left were some crumbs and a pile of mouse droppings. I can’t just leave it – it’ll breed, if it hasn’t already. I’ll be overrun.”
“You did close the window, didn’t you?” Johnny asked her. “They home you know.”
“Of course. I checked they were closed, before I locked the door.”
“I always check the windows last thing,” Charity said. “Sometimes I have to get up in the night to double-check they’re closed. When Johnny wasn’t here I spent more time padding around the house checking the window locks were on, than I did asleep.”
Johnny ignored her. He picked up a copy of British Mammals from the book shelf.
“First know your enemy,” he said, flicking through the book. “Could it have been a pine martin?” he joked, studying the relevant page.
“Not unless we’re in Scotland,” Jane replied.
“No chance that it was actually a rat?”
“None, unless it’s a pygmy rat.”
“Is this your foe?” Johnny asked, holding out a page for her to study. She put her glasses on. The animal depicted was a tiny rodent with a short golden body, round ears and short legs, described as a harvest mouse. Its underbelly was white and its eyes bead-like and black. The entry went on to state that its numbers had declined sharply and that such rodents were no longer as common as they once were, and were now limited to isolated parts of the country.
“That’s him!” Jane said.
“A single litter can contain up to ten youngsters,” Johnny read out. “Let’s hope he doesn’t get himself a girlfriend.”
“Or isn’t already pregnant,” Jane said, with a shudder.
“I can go and buy a mouse trap right now, if you want, or some poison.”
“That’s cruel!” squealed Charity, adding quickly, “although I entirely understand, if you choose to go down that route, Jane.”
“Charity’s right. It’s too cruel,” Jane said. “I know it’s irrational, but I’ve looked into his or her little face. I almost feel I know him. The book says they’re declining in numbers. There must be a more humane way to deal with this than kill him.”
“I will cogitate, my dear,” Johnny said
II
Jane left her neighbours investigating humane mouse removal, and returned home to continue her search for Johnny’s father. She typed UK Docks into her search engine. This brought up numerous entries, including a detailed description about how to dock a dog’s tail (which she chose not to read), and another on how to kill dock weeds and stop them from returning (which she printed off to put with her gardening books). She was unconcerned with the history of naval dockyards, the travelogue of a cargo container, nor with spacecrafts docking, nor the Olympic Mentor coming into dock. None of these would progress her search. She opened a webpage said to list every trading dock in Britain past and present. From it she accessed a page dedicated to the Newcastle Docks, and studied the names and photographs of its staff. All were far too young to be Johnny’s father.
From there, Jane visited the websites of each of the docks in the UK. Even though Johnny’s father would now be sixty, and was unlikely to still be employed in any of them, she thought it worth a chance. However, after hours in front of her computer, she was no further forward in her search. She searched Dockworkers. This produced images of dock workers across the world, information about various charities and a link to the blog of a dock worker, dedicated to the memory of his great grandfather, also a dock worker. Whilst many of the entries were fascinating, none of them helped her. There was nothing in any of these pages which drew her closer to Johnny’s father. She searched under ‘Stevedore’ and learned nothing more than how to tie a stevedore knot. She even typed ‘Longshoremen’ but again drew a blank.
She was quite relieved to be interrupted by someone ringing her front door. She answered the door to a local resident called Hayley Payne. Hayley was in her early twenties, and had until recently, worked in a local supermarket until she was abruptly fired. There’d been rumours of money missing from a till, but nothing official. No charges were brought, and the young woman herself would tell all who listened that she was the victim of persecution, a smear campaign. Jane wondered what Hayley could want from her. Nothing positive, she suspected. “Hello. It’s Hayley isn’t it?” she asked.
“You’re a private detective now, aren’t you?” Hayley replied. Although a question, the words were spoken in such a direct manner that they came across almost as an accusation.
“An amateur private detective, yes.”
“Yeah, well that’s why I’m here. A proper one would be too expensive, wouldn’t they?” Hayley replied.
Whilst Jane would rather not have been having this conversation, she was too polite to brush the girl aside. “How can I help you?” she asked.
“I want you to get some dirt on my cousin,” Hayley said, pulling out a photograph of her cousin, which she held out to Jane. “Miss Goody two shoes. The family’s golden girl. Miss can’t put a foot wrong. Miss ‘I’m engaged to the wonderful Adam, and we’re going to go into business together. Isn’t my life wonderful?’”
Jane looked at the photograph of Hayley’s cousin: Jess Payne. A very pretty girl, Jane had always thought. She hadn’t heard she was engaged. She must send a card, she thought, almost oblivious to Hayley’s tirade, which was continuing unabated: “Lucky Adam, that’s what I say. Lucky Adam! Lucky Adam!” she repeated, in a contemptuous and sneering tone.
Jane stared at the girl. How young she was to be so consumed by such petty jealousies. “What do you want me to do, Hayley?” she asked.
“Find something that will split them up. Something I can use to wipe that smug look off her face!”
Jane doubted if there were any skeletons worth knowing about in Jess Payne’s cupboard, besides which, she had no intention of becoming involved in anything so underhand, and frankly, so silly.
“I’m terribly sorry, my dear, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to take your case on,” she said briskly. “I’m really rather busy at the moment. But thank you for thinking about me.”
Hayley glared at her, and opened her mouth to reply, but wasn’t given the opportunity. Jane firmly shut the door on her, hoping that would be the end of things, but wondering if it would.
She returned to her study and resumed her search by typing Dockworkers again. Jane’s own grandfather had been a docker until his early death had plunged his widow and children into penury. She opened and read an entry about life on the docks from that era. It was fascinating. She could have spent hours reading it, but although it managed to be both poignant and funny in places, reading it was distracting her from her search, which was going nowhere fast.
She studied the postcard of Johnny’s father again. Something told her it held a clue as to his whereabouts, but she couldn’t think what.
Someone was knocking at her back door. She went to answer it, hoping she wasn’t going to find Hayley Payne there.
She didn’t. Instead she found Johnny and Jack. Jack was holding
a tray over which a cloth was covering up a very strangely shaped object. Even more bizarrely, Johnny was holding the children’s box game Mousetrap, on top of which was a wastepaper bin. Jane invited them in, feeling it best she let them speak first. Johnny placed the game on the table, the bin beside it, and next to that Jack’s tray.
“I couldn’t find a shop selling humane traps in Failsham, so I dug out an old game of Mousetrap! Instead,” he explained.
“I’m not sure that was designed to trap real mice, Johnny,” Jane pointed out, rather obviously, she thought once she’d said it.
“Oh ye of little faith,” he replied. “I should tell you that my able assistant and I have been able to create a number of traps from this humble game, each more than capable of catching a real mouse. My able assistant will now produce our first trap.
We’ll start with the toy box, boy,” he instructed. Jack produced a bright yellow plastic box, which was about the size of three match boxes stacked on top of each other, and secured together by elastic bands, with a hinged door which opened at the top. Johnny took over.
“We figured two plastic mice must be about the size of one real one,” Johnny said, picking up a couple of the game’s tiny plastic rodent contestants to show her. The mice, both bi-peds, wore hard hats and boxing gloves. “Please note the front door is hinged, so if I do this” … he flicked the door and let it go… “you will see how it snaps straight back into place.”
He flicked the door open a number of times, and each time it immediately snapped shut again. Jane opened her mouth to speak, only to be silenced by Johnny.
“One minute please. If we set it at an angle…” He set the door at a forty-five degree angle “… mousey can get in for his dinner, but he can’t get out again. Watch and see – I mean watch and admire!”
He pushed two plastic mice into the toy box in quick succession. When the second mouse hit the back of the box, the door snapped closed.
“See!” Jack said gleefully.
“If that was a real mouse, he couldn’t get out again unless he was bright enough to work out that if he climbs up the door, he can push it open from the top, which is unlikely in something with a brain the size of a pea, but just in case he is a rodent genius, we have two more, yes I said two more traps,” Johnny roared in a mock evil laugh.
Jane said nothing.
The first of the other traps was produced. Jane picked it up and looked at it. It was a tiny plastic toilet sat atop a plastic cistern, with another high-walled rectangular box below, around which Johnny had thickly wrapped duct tape. A hole in the toilet basin, wide enough for a ball bearing, was the contraption’s only entrance and exit. “It’s a small hole but a mouse can make himself smaller. They can make themselves small enough to climb in and out of keyholes,” he explained.
Jane had heard this, although in all her years of country living she had never yet come across a mouse squeezing itself through a keyhole and thought it unlikely she ever would.
“I’ve named it the Inescapable Box. We’ll put grain at the bottom to tempt him in. Once in, he’ll never be able to climb back out again – it’s too slippery.”
“Are you sure this box is really inescapable?”
“Not entirely.”
“Show her the piece de resistance,” Jack said, adding, “He’s been working on this all afternoon.”
“Allow me to show you the piece de resistance, Jane,” Johnny said, removing the cloth covering the object on the tray. This revealed a quite extraordinary looking piece of apparatus. Jane stared at it. She recognised it immediately as the game’s most famous component – its mousetrap – albeit in an improvised form. Its tiny blue plastic wheel, inside its yellow frame, attached by an axle to its plastic yellow plank, was still there, as was the lever, and the pole where the cage would normally be balanced, although this was missing. As an added extra, a series of cotton threads ran from the wheel, around the pole and from there to the pole’s circular base.
Johnny picked up the wastepaper bin and carefully positioned it upside down over the pole, so that part of its rim was on the table, and part held aloft by the lever. “Something the size of a miniature washing basket isn’t going to trap a mouse, is it?” Johnny said, referring to the game’s original part.
“And this is?” Jane questioned. Even with this twist, she still had absolutely no idea how this was going to work.
Johnny ignored her. “You will have noticed thread,” he said, gently touching one of the threads. “Mouse smells the bait, and pushes his way through the threads. But watch what happens when he does.” He pressed the thread, and as he did, it tightened along its length. This caused the plank to lower, the wheel to turn and the lever to rise, which in turn released the bin to fall over the plastic mouse grazing below, and the rest of the game to collapse spectacularly. Despite this, the bin remained in place, trapping the mouse.
“Mousetrap!” both Johnny and Jack yelled simultaneously, high-fiving each other.
Jane didn’t know what to say. “We’ll set it up in the summerhouse for you. I am quietly confident the pesky little critter will be in our hands by morning,” Johnny said, rubbing his hands together and giving another mock laugh.
Jane couldn’t see for the life of her how any of this was going to work, but it had given her enormous entertainment, and more importantly had bought Johnny and Jack closer together.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Case of the Sister Behaving Strangely
Leaving the boys setting the trap, Jane returned to her study. Another e-mail had arrived in her absence.
‘It was my husband’s idea to get in touch,’ the e-mail from Lucy Erpingham’s sister Jodie Narbade, began. After describing the evening of Lucy’s sudden departure from her house, which Jane read with fascination, Jodie continued. ‘I’m certain she was about to tell me something but what I just don’t know. We’ve hardly spoken since. We used to be such a close family, in and out of each other’s houses, but we’ve hardly seen her for months. There’s always some excuse why she can’t see us. We used to speak on the phone every day, but she hasn’t called me since then. She doesn’t return calls, she pretends she’s not in when we call round, when we know she is. She even pretended not to see our mum in the street the other day. You can imagine how upset Mum was.
‘I’ve even turned up at her office to ask her what was going on, but she just turns it into a joke, telling me nothing is wrong, I’m overreacting, she’s just been busy, she’ll be in touch soon. Then nothing. If that wasn’t weird enough, she’s spending money like water. I know, because people are telling me. She’s always liked the good things in life, what eighteen-year-old girl doesn’t? But it’s like she’s gone crazy – buying everything she sees. She’s been seen all over town in expensive clothes shops, in nightclubs and restaurants. I know for a fact she’s bought a new sports car and had her teeth whitened and I’m told she’s had a boob job. She only works in local government. She hasn’t got the money for it. She hasn’t got a rich boyfriend, as far as she’s letting on. My husband thinks she’s either got herself a married sugar daddy or gone on the game, and that’s why she’s avoiding us. I hope to God she hasn’t. She was certainly being a bit secretive about this new man at work.
Things can’t carry on like this. It’s driving both me and Mum nuts, not knowing what’s happening. I want you to follow her and find out what’s going on.’
Jane understood, and even shared Jodie’s concern for eighteen-year-old Lucy. She stared out of the window, unsure whether to accept or not. She already had two cases to keep her busy – although one wasn’t going to start for a fortnight. Who knew – she might stumble across something in the course of her investigations which would help her with her search for Johnny’s father. It had happened before. It might happen again. Also it sounded interesting. She accepted the case.
‘When did all the spending start?’ she asked.
‘Don’t know exactly. It may have started months ago, for all I know.�
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‘Were you arguing about anything, when you were interrupted by your neighbour? It’s important I know everything.’
‘No. Not at all. We were having a sisterly gossip, like I said. It’s like she was suddenly invaded by body snatchers or something. She used to be a homely, family-centered girl. My husband thinks she was about to make some big confession about something – all that needing somebody to confide in business – but by the time I’d got back she’d lost her nerve and done a runner, and now she’s too scared to spill the beans. I’m sure it’s something to do with this bloke at work she was talking about. Maybe he’s stopping her from seeing us?’
‘Maybe you could send me a photograph, and any other details I’m likely to need, such as her address, workplace, mobile telephone number and daily routine?’ Jane asked.
‘Will do. Anything you don’t get from me you’ll find on line. She must be on every social networking site going and she is not that good at setting her security settings. Please find out what’s going on. I can’t sleep at night over this. I can’t help unless I know what’s going on.’
The e-mail ended with plaintiff words: ‘She’s only 18!’
Jane spent the next few hours reading up on her subject. The photographs which Lucy Erpingham had posted of herself on-line, showed a young, short, plump, smiling woman with fair hair and a large cleavage, proudly exposed in every photograph. Lucy listed her interests as: ‘spending time with me mates’ ‘having a laugh’ ‘spending money’ ‘shopping’ ‘eatin’’ & drinkin’’ ‘acting on impulse’. She listed her favourite foods as salted potato crisps, green Thai chicken curry and chocolate ice-cream. She liked wine and coffee, but not water. Jane hadn’t heard of any of Lucy’s favourite bands or her favourite TV shows. Under things she hated, Lucy had written: ‘getting up b4 eleven’ ‘dandruff’ ‘being on my own’ ‘not being able to buy everything I want!!’