Half Moon Investigations - Eoin Colfer [12]
‘There are several clues. First, he blames his father, which is classic transference. Then he refers to the Battle of the Somme, which took place in the First World War, not the Second. Something Stevie would know if he had actually completed his assignment. Also, specific references such as the essay title are commonly woven into false stories to make them sound real. In fact, they provide the detective with more ways to trip up the subject.’
‘This is all pretty circumstantial.’
I took a pot of graphite filings from my desk. ‘I’m not finished yet,’ I said. ‘Stevie offers to take you to Le Bistro, which is gross overcompensation. That has guilt written all over it. The letter smells faintly of perfume, Happy by Clinique, which is not one of yours and leads me to believe he has been holding hands with another girl. Finally, I feel indentations in the page. I suspect that our Stevie made more than one attempt to write this note. Perhaps he was even going to tell the truth before he lost his nerve.’
I laid the page flat on my desk, shaking graphite filings over its surface. After a slow count of ten, I tipped the filings into the waste-paper bin. Not all the filings ran off, some caught in the indents.
‘This is what was written on the page before this one in the pad. Only two lines are legible. I think you will find that the handwriting is the same.’
Hazel took the sheet, reading the faint black writing aloud: ‘Dear Hazel, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I have met some…’ My sister ripped the note into shreds, tossing it into the air like confetti.
‘He’s met someone else, has he?’ she said, pulling a mobile phone out of her pocket. ‘Someone who wears Happy. It should take me about five minutes to find out who.’ She handed me a Mars bar. ‘Thanks, little brother. For that I won’t tease you for an entire day.’
‘I’d prefer actual money,’ I said.
‘I can’t pay you,’ said Hazel, skipping across the corridor to her own room. ‘It would be exploitation of child labour.’
The door closed behind her.
Mam sighed. ‘We won’t see her for days. Hazel will get at least a one-act play out of this.’
I knelt to gather the shreds of paper. ‘Do you see how complicated things become when people get involved in relationships, Mam? My business is just taking off and I want to concentrate on that, so I think I’ll give the relationships a miss for a few years, if you don’t mind. April Devereux is a client, that’s all.’
‘OK,’ said Mam. ‘But wear something with colour. Think ahead. You never know.’
How do you know if you’re a detective? What sets us apart from everyday people? My theory is that most people like to dwell on the brighter side of life. They want to concentrate on the rug and not on the dirt swept underneath. Not detectives. We want to pull back the rug and put the dirt in a forensics bag. Then we want to run over the floorboards with a sticky roller just in case some of the dirt got away. We are social scientists. We like to take people apart to see what makes them tick. You don’t have to be particularly smart to be a detective, you just have to want to do it.
April lived on Rhododendron Road. A name which must have started out as a joke and stuck. It took twenty-five minutes to walk along Lock’s historic wooden pathway and across the town bridge, and with every step I thought about my shield.
April’s house was a large manor-style building complete with manicured lawns and tree-lined avenue. The drive was covered with raked white gravel and flower beds swirled along both sides, drawing the visitor towards the front porch.
I crunched down the drive, only to be told by the gardener that April was next door at her cousin’s but had left a note for me. The note was on scented pink paper with a unicorn watermark. ‘April Devereux’ was printed in dark pink flowing script across the top.
Dear Half Moon, it read.
Follow the yellow trick road.
A (April)
It was not very encouraging, I decided, if your employer thought you were too thick to figure out that A stood for April. Especially at the bottom of a