The Key to Finding Jack

by Ewa Jozefkowicz

  The

  Key to

  Finding

  Jack

  Also by Ewa Jozefkowicz

  The Mystery of the Colour Thief

  Girl 38: Finding a Friend

  The

  Key to

  Finding

  Jack

  Ewa Jozefkowicz

  AN IMPRINT OF HEAD OF ZEUS

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK by Zephyr, an imprint of Head of Zeus, in 2020

  Text copyright © Ewa Jozefkowicz, 2020

  The moral right of Ewa Jozefkowicz to be identified as the author and Katy Riddell to be identified as the artist of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781789543568

  ISBN (E): 9781789543506

  Cover illustration by Katy Riddell

  Author photo by Ruta Zukaite

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  Contents

  Also by Ewa Jozefkowicz

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Acknowledgements

  Coming in Spring 2021

  The Cooking Club Detectives

  Out now in Paperback

  The Mystery of the Colour Thief

  Girl 38: Finding a Friend

  About the Author

  About Zephyr

  One

  ‘So listen to this one. You have a treasure chest that you want to send me in the post. Each of us has our own padlock with a key, but you don’t have the key to my padlock and I don’t have the key to yours. How can you send me the treasure chest and make sure nobody else can open it?’

  We were sitting on Jack’s bed, staring out through the skylight. I was supposed to be in my own room fast asleep, but I’d sneaked up the stairs as I did so often.

  Being six years older than me, Jack stayed up until whatever time he wanted, and he was hardly ever asleep when I crept in.

  That night I could already hear the familiar engine roar. I knew without checking the clock that it was the 10.15 p.m. flight to New York. Right on cue, the flashing dot appeared in the black square of Jack’s skylight. I liked to imagine all the people sitting in the plane waiting to reach their destination. I even made up stories about them. The old lady going to visit her businessman son, who’d recently started working in Manhattan. A newly married couple off on their honeymoon – drinking champagne and kissing. And, in the row in front of them, a family with loads of kids coming home after spending a few weeks in London over the summer holidays. The stewardesses were a bit annoyed because the kids kept getting out of their seats and running up and down the aisle, colliding with the food and drinks trolleys.

  I tried to focus my mind on Jack’s riddle.

  ‘Easy. I would send you the key in a separate envelope. Only you and I would know what it’s for,’ I declared triumphantly.

  ‘Nah. Come on, Flick, you can do better than that. It could easily be intercepted.’

  I racked my brain.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Crack the padlock open with a hammer?’ I asked, although I knew it was the wrong answer.

  ‘You have to be subtler than that. If it’s possible to force it open, anyone could. Think harder, sergeant.’

  We had a joke from when we were little that Jack was a detective doing lots of undercover work, and I was his main contact in the police force. He’d explained that this role was much more important than being his assistant (which I always wanted to be), because it meant heading up the detective operations in the field. ‘The difference is that all your work is legal. Some of what I do is undercover and shady. Together we make a great team though.’

  The roles were perfect, because I loved to follow rules and Jack hated them. One of his absolute favourite things was to make people laugh. He often got away with his practical jokes, and when he didn’t, he got detentions. Quite a lot of them. That made Dad really cross, especially now, as Jack was supposed to be concentrating on his work and getting into uni. Then Mum would be cross because Dad was cross, and normally Mum was on Jack’s side. Dad said she was over-protective of him. But Jack was also cleverer than anyone I knew and could solve the hardest puzzles and mysteries in seconds.

  ‘Remember that working out a riddle might take a few steps. Let me start you off. You have your own padlock with a key. You send me the chest with your locked padlock attached. I receive it, but instead of trying to open the chest, I add my padlock to it, also locked. Then I send it back to you. Is it beginning to make sense? You’d be receiving the same chest but this time with two padlocks.’

  ‘Of course! I unlock my padlock and send the chest back to you with only your padlock attached, and you can unlock it and get the treasure!’

  He held up his hand for a high five. Jack was like that – helping me towards the answer but making me feel I’d got there myself.

  He passed me his box of chocolate frogs and I sucked on one happily, even though I’d brushed my teeth. At first the mix of minty toothpaste and chocolate was disgusting, but I knew that after about thirty seconds my mouth would be filled with caramelly wonder.

  Each time I cracked one of Jack’s puzzles I immediately felt sleepy and he had to pinch me to send me back to my own room. But that night I was determined to stay awake for as long as possible, because it would be the last time in ages we’d be able to have this kind of conversation face to face. In the corner of his room, by the window, my brother’s rucksack was already packed, and his passport and plane tickets were lying on the bedside table.

  Jack would be gone for a whole ten months. He wouldn’t be with us when we went to the fireworks for my birthday in November. He wouldn’t bring me huge sticks of marshmallows like he did every year and tell me the names of all the weird and wonderful flashes in the sky. I could never tell which were real and which he’d made up on the spot.

  He’d also miss Christmas. Grandma Sylvie would come round, as she did every year, and complain about her aches and pains, and without Jack, there would be nobody to distract her by suggesting a card game, or giving us all some really complicated puzzles to solve.

  I tried not to think about it too much, because it made a painful ball, which I couldn’t swallow, form in my throat.

  So as I sat there, looking up at the skylight, I tried to think about everything other than Jack leaving, which was easier said than done. I told myself that I would remember this evening as ‘The Night of the Treasure Chest’ because otherwise it would have to be ‘The Night Before Jack Left’.

  I kept replaying the short birthday greetings film that Jack had
sent me from Brazil. It was strange seeing him there on the beach, when Mum and I were in the middle of our Christmas shopping. We went to Uncle Michael’s for New Year’s Eve dinner and when I lit my sparkler, I made a couple of important resolutions. The first was that I would finally complete at least one of the stories that were swarming in my head, inspired by Jack’s riddles. The second was that I would persuade Dad to pay for us all to visit Jack.

  On the wall calendar that he’d made for me, I kept counting down the days that he’d been away and fortunately, time was passing quite quickly. The new term started and we were set an exciting writing project in English. Otherwise, life carried on as normal. There were no signs that everything was about to change. Even the flashing lights of the 10.15 p.m. to New York still sped reliably past Jack’s skylight night after night. But then, halfway through January, the boy who used to lie watching them was somewhere on the other side of the world, caught in what the lipsticked newsreader on TV said was ‘one of the worst natural disasters in living history’.

  Two

  It was a Thursday afternoon in the middle of English class. We’d been reading Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking, and Mrs Emmett had set us the best possible assignment – to write our own detective story. My discussions with Jack had given me so many great ideas. I’d even jotted some down in a special book of ‘riddle tales’ which I kept under my bed. I promised myself that one day I would type them up on Mum’s laptop – I just hadn’t found the time to do it yet. Now, after only half an hour, I’d managed to fill more than three pages.

  Keira was sitting next to me, twisting one of her braids round and round her finger and biting her tongue in concentration. I glanced at her exercise book and saw that she’d written a short paragraph which had more words crossed out than left in.

  ‘Oi, stop copying,’ she whispered, winking at me. Keira and I had been friends since nursery and we were good at completely different things. I love English, history and geography – anything that involves a story, while Keira is great at maths and science, and likes things that have a definite answer. Being friends means we can help each other with stuff the other person isn’t so good at.

  ‘I can’t think of a story to save my life,’ she whispered to me now. ‘D’you think anyone will notice if I adapt one of the episodes of Crime Fighters that I watched with Mum the other week? It’s on a weird channel. Probably not that many people would have seen it.’

  ‘Go for it,’ I told her.

  ‘Everyone busy with their work?’ said Mrs Emmett, raising her eyebrow at us. ‘I see that some of you have lost your concentration. Before we finish for the day, it might be helpful to hear your opening paragraphs. I want to feel that dramatic tension and the slow revealing of clues that Arthur Conan Doyle is so good at. Does anyone want to volunteer?’

  Her question was met with silence.

  ‘All right, I will,’ said a low voice with an American accent from the back of the class.

  ‘Thank you, Duncan. Come to the front.’

  ‘Do I have to? I can read sitting down.’

  ‘You’ll be able to project your voice better facing the class.’

  Duncan seemed to take ages getting to the whiteboard. His best friends and sidekicks, Max and Elliot, slapped him on the back for good luck.

  As always, everything about him looked immaculate. His shoes were clean, his trousers barely had a crease, and his shirt was tucked in. Even though I couldn’t see his exercise book from here, I sensed that he probably had super-neat handwriting.

  ‘His dad’s a famous author. He’s won some important awards,’ Keira had told me when Duncan had joined our year. ‘Mum’s read all of his books. And Duncan’s brother is amazing at tennis. He’s only in sixth form and he’s already won a couple of junior tournaments.’

  Duncan certainly acted as though he had his own part to play in his family’s fame. He walked through the school corridors with his head held high, like a celebrity on the red carpet, and he barely spoke to anyone except his two best friends. It was as if the rest of us weren’t worth his attention.

  Today, he didn’t even raise his eyes to look at the class. Instead, he cleared his throat and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. There was a long silence during which he seemed to be thinking.

  ‘This one is called “The Cabin”,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s about… a dead man in a cabin. You’ll see.’

  He read confidently, and did his characters in different voices, but it was obvious that his story hadn’t been well thought through. A body was discovered in a cabin in the middle of a snowy forest. A detective was called to the scene and found that there were no windows and the only door was locked from the inside. When he forced his way in, he saw a man with a stab wound in his neck and a bucket of bloody water beside him, but nothing else.

  I could tell straight away what had happened. It was a variation of a riddle that Jack had told me years ago. The man had been stabbed with an icicle. I rolled my eyes at how obvious the answer was.

  Duncan must have spotted me as he finished reading because I could see a pink glow in his freckled cheeks. His eyes narrowed slightly. I knew that look.

  ‘Thank you, Duncan. A promising start. There’s certainly some impressive characterisation. I think you could work on building the suspense. We have time for a couple more. Any other volunteers?’

  I avoided Mrs Emmett’s gaze, but I should have known that this was the wrong tactic. Jack used to have her for English and he’d warned me that she always picked on the people who least wanted to be chosen.

  ‘Felicity? Do you want to come and share the opening of your story with us?’

  I nodded, even though I hated reading my work aloud. I could feel Duncan’s gaze on my back as I walked to the front of the class, and I made a point of looking straight at him before I started reading. As always, he refused to catch my eye.

  ‘It’s because he likes you,’ Keira insisted. ‘I mean, really likes you. I’ve seen him looking at you when he thinks you won’t notice. Why else would he do that?’

  But I didn’t agree with her. Duncan was just strange and it was probably his way of trying to make me feel uncomfortable.

  I still remembered the moment we’d met on the first day of term last year.

  ‘So your name’s Flick?’ he’d asked, when we were walking down a corridor between lessons.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s peculiar, isn’t it?’ he asked and I couldn’t tell whether he was making fun of me or if he was really curious about it.

  ‘It’s short for Felicity,’ I explained, although I’m sure he knew that.

  ‘I’m Duncan. I’ve recently moved over from Florida,’ he said in his American accent, which only added to the impression that he was genuinely famous. ‘And where are you from?’

  ‘I’m local,’ I told him, ‘I grew up here and I went to Ellerton Primary.’ I instantly felt like the least interesting person in the world. That was the thing about Duncan – even if he said very little, he managed to get under your skin.

  Today I tried to ignore him and cleared my throat awkwardly.

  Lady Abigail Jackson hated Christmas shopping. Every year she thought about sending one of her maids instead. What she wouldn’t give to avoid the tedious crowds, the gridlock of horses in the streets and the freezing cold. But she always ended up going herself, much to her household’s dismay. It was partly because she had no idea what to buy and also because she didn’t trust anybody else to do the job well.

  The children, of course, insisted on going with her. They wanted to see the huge Christmas tree outside St Paul’s Cathedral and to visit the new chocolate shop that had opened on Cheapside. Margot had worn her new red beret for the day and Henry flew out of the house with no coat, so his sister had to chase down the road after him.

  There were even more people in the streets than she’d expected. It took them an age to cross Blackfriars Bridge, as the children kept stopping to ad
mire the view of the Thames on this crisp December morning.

  ‘Mother, there’s a carol service at St Bride’s,’ said Margot, pulling her sleeve. ‘Can we go and see, just for a minute?’

  Lady Abigail agreed. After all, Margot didn’t often get a chance to enjoy herself.

  Ever since Lady Abigail’s husband had died four years earlier, she’d put her efforts into making sure her children were well set up for life, and that Margot in particular knew how to take care of herself. She had struggled after his death, but she’d learned how to manage the servants and the estate, how to do the accounts and take charge of her children’s education. In addition to Margot’s regular lessons with her private tutor, she received guidance on how to be ‘a proper young lady’.

  When they reached the church, Lady Abigail grabbed Henry’s arm to stop him from making a run for it. Luckily the little rascal seemed overwhelmed by the crowds pouring down the narrow lanes to St Bride’s and was sticking close to her. But when she turned back to look at the choir, she realised that she couldn’t see her daughter.

  ‘Margot!’ she screamed. ‘Margot!’ The crowd around her shifted, alarmed by the volume of her voice. ‘Have you seen my daughter? She was wearing a red beret.’ The women around her shook their heads, the men parted to let her pass. The sound of the choristers stopped. She was aware of people joining the search. They shouted questions. ‘How old is she? What colour hair? How tall?’ She answered them quickly, her eyes scanning the church.

  Then, above the heads of the crowd, she saw a red beret being passed to her. When her fingers closed upon it, she felt a sudden pricking sensation. Attached to a pin was a piece of card showing a tiny picture of a bell.

  ‘It was lying by the front steps,’ said an elderly lady.

  Lady Abigail stayed at the church long after the crowds had left, and spent hours walking the streets of London shouting her daughter’s name. But Margot was nowhere to be found.