The Key to Finding Jack by Ewa Jozefkowicz (best classic books to read TXT) 📕

‘Get Mom to buy you your own stuff! And stop pretending to be me! You’re a poor imitation.’

Duncan’s shoulders twitched at these words and I actually felt sorry for him. But when he glanced in our direction to work out how much we’d heard, our faces must have betrayed us. The colour rose in his cheeks as he pushed past us.

‘He’s an idiot,’ I heard him mutter. ‘He thinks he’s so great.’

‘You could say that about Duncan,’ I sniggered to Keira as we walked to class. But I began to understand where all of his snooty behaviour came from and felt a tiny bit guilty about being so snappy with him. He desperately wanted to be as good as his brother and his dad, I could see that now, and yet he hadn’t found something that he really excelled at.

I’d noticed how awkward Duncan was in our sports lessons. He probably figured that he couldn’t follow in his brother’s footsteps and become a tennis star. Instead, he’d put all of his energy into writing, but maybe it was more difficult for him than he’d thought. Trying to live up to expectations made people behave in different ways – Jack avoided our dad, while Duncan clearly did everything to get the attention of his.

The first two lessons of the day were maths and I couldn’t concentrate at all. I kept sneaking my phone out of my pocket to double-check that I hadn’t missed any calls. Jack’s face, which I’d changed to my screensaver, stared back at me, unblinking.

‘But,’ I kept telling myself, ‘it’s only 5 a.m. there…’ Then ‘only 6 a.m.’ and ‘only 7 a.m.’. As the hours mercilessly ticked away, I felt less and less sure of myself.

Sixteen

After break we had English again. Mrs Emmett pulled me aside at the beginning of the lesson and asked whether I would read my latest extract to the class. ‘Only if you want to, Flick.’

I’d already refused once, so I nodded reluctantly. It was the worst possible timing. What if I got the phone call right in the middle of reading?

‘We only have two more lessons in which to finish off our crime thrillers,’ Mrs Emmett said, banging the palm of her hand on the desk to signal quiet, ‘so hopefully you should be getting to the heart of your story by now. I’ll make sure that I leave ten minutes at the end of the lesson to hear some of your creations. Meanwhile, you have forty minutes to get on with your writing. I also have an important announcement to make, so don’t let me forget.’

I managed to collect my thoughts enough to focus on the story. It was a welcome relief from constantly worrying about Jack.

When Mrs Emmett called me to the front, I slid my phone to Keira under the desk and made her promise that she’d signal to me if it rang.

Behind us, Duncan scrambled around with his books and pencil case, accidentally dropping things onto the floor which he then had to noisily pick up. I wondered if he was deliberately trying to sabotage my reading. Any regret I’d felt at snapping at him vanished in an instant.

‘Duncan, when you’ve sorted yourself out, perhaps you would like to volunteer?’ said Mrs Emmett coldly.

‘Maybe later,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m not really ready.’

‘I’ve called this story “The Case of the Beret and the Bell”,’ I told everyone. ‘This is the part after Abigail has found out from her old friends what Margot has been doing to help them.’ As I started reading, I felt strangely self-conscious, as if I was revealing a secret part of myself to the class.

‘Who is Margot?’ The question swirled around and around in Lady Abigail’s mind as she went about her day. It had replaced her previous question, ‘Where is Margot?’ because it seemed more important.

The bobbies had been no use – they were too busy catching pickpockets and vagrants to worry about a young lady going missing. Lady Abigail felt so desperate that she had decided to begin her own investigation. But the more she found out, the more she realised she didn’t know her daughter at all.

Over the past week, since visiting Louisa, she had uncovered many surprising things about Margot and written them all down as a list at the back of her pocketbook:

• Helping the Bells when they were struggling

• Visiting and caring for an elderly neighbour who was very sick

• Helping the maids with the Christmas preparations so that they could leave early to see their own families

• Handing out money to the poor begging outside St Paul’s Cathedral

• Secretly giving reading lessons to Sally, one of the cook’s daughters, who wanted to go to school but had to work alongside her mother.

To Lady Abigail it seemed that wherever she turned, somebody knew Margot and remembered something wonderful that she had done. She felt terrible that she hadn’t known any of these things about her own daughter. She would still have tried to stop Margot from doing them though. After all, helping the maids with their work was not a task becoming for a young lady.

And yet, despite Margot’s goodness, somebody had set out to snatch her from her family. The thought of her daughter lying in a cold, dark cellar somewhere and in this freezing weather, made Lady Abigail feel sick. Recent stories in The Illustrated London News told of a child-snatcher who had been nicknamed ‘The Bearded Fiend’. It was believed that he had stolen eight children so far and was using them to start a ring of thieves in the west of the city.

The Bearded Fiend seemed to operate in the Chelsea area, which was far from the Jacksons’ home, but she feared that he could have extended his reach.

Lady Abigail found that she could no longer eat. She couldn’t sleep. She suffered from waking nightmares so severe that they left her in a cold sweat.

One day when Henry was having his eggs in the