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

‘It’s fine if you’re not, you know. It’s the most awful thing. I keep telling myself that they’re doing everything they can to find him.’

‘Yeah, everyone says that.’

‘It doesn’t help, eh?’ Mum asked, rolling her eyes. It was the same expression that she used when Dad said something silly or when we found Auntie Chrissy’s Instagram photos of her dog wearing a waistcoat. Only this time it was about Jack, and it made the tiny drummer start in my head again.

‘Have there… have there been any updates?’

‘Nothing. The police said that we’ll be the first to know if they hear anything.’

She stared nervously at the two phones laid out on the coffee table. I noticed that she’d started picking the skin on her fingers. There were red tracks down the side of two fingernails on her right hand. The sight of them made me want to get her plasters, but I knew she’d be embarrassed by me noticing.

‘Mum… Who’s Sol?’

‘Who?’

‘Sol Falcon.’

‘Do you mean Simon’s dad?’ I could see her lower lip begin to tremble. Simon was Jack’s friend from school, who was supposed to be joining him in Peru. He hadn’t saved enough money to do the whole trip with Jack, but he’d been due to fly out this coming weekend. He’d rung yesterday to say how worried he was and to ask if we’d let him know when we had news.

‘Oh, yes.’ I’d completely forgotten that Falcon was Simon’s surname.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘No reason. I saw it written down somewhere,’ I said, hoping that Mum wouldn’t be suspicious. I don’t know why I didn’t tell her but something told me this was a puzzle I needed to work out on my own.

She didn’t ask any more questions. Instead, she patted my hand.

‘I’m going to have a shower now, pet,’ she said quietly. She lifted herself carefully from the sofa and was gone before I could ask any more questions.

Simon… It took me a moment to register that I’d scored double points on Jack’s puzzle already. I’d managed to find not one, but two people with the initials S.F. Simon was such an obvious answer to the riddle. He was one of Jack’s newer friends – they’d only begun hanging out in their last year of school and they played tennis at the local club. After their A-level results came through, they started properly planning their gap year. Simon had already been to Brazil, so he didn’t mind missing the first part of the trip. I remembered them looking at a huge map of South America on our living-room floor and excitedly drawing their route with a red pen. I wondered if he was still stacking shelves at Sutty’s shop, where he and Jack had worked together through the summer.

I rang Keira to tell her what I’d learned.

‘Why would he give the key to somebody who was going on the same trip as him? That’s the puzzling part. But you should go and speak to him anyway,’ she said. ‘Find out if he still works at Sutty’s and if he does, ask to have a chat when he’s on his break. Let me know what happens.’

She was right. I would go and speak to him tomorrow.

‘The sooner, the better,’ said Jack’s voice in my head.

When I lay in bed that night, sleep didn’t come. Instead, I thought of questions to ask Simon, or any other S.F. I could track down. I knew from the advice Jack had given me over the years that the main thing was to be discreet. I couldn’t launch into asking whether they knew anything about the key.

After what felt like hours of brainstorming in the dark, I came up with these questions:

• Could you tell me three things about Jack that I might not know?

• Have you ever solved one of his puzzles?

• Do you know anything about a special item that he owned?

I couldn’t reel them off as if I were conducting an interview. They would have to be cunningly slotted into casual conversation, which was easier said than done.

If I thought their answers were good enough, I would subtly introduce the subject of the key.

Finally, around 3 a.m. I fell asleep. I dreamed of Lady Abigail, walking along the dark lanes of Victorian London, calling ‘Margot! Margot!’ Her name echoed among the stone walls, returning fruitlessly to her mother’s ears. But in those last moments before the sound dissolved into the night, it seemed to merge with Jack’s name and the two danced together on a gust of wind.

Five

The first time Jack took me to Sutty’s shop was a week after it had opened. He collected me from school and we took a detour on the way home, because he said he was craving chocolate. I suspected something straight away, because he hates sweet things, apart from that particular brand of American chocolate frog which Dad once brought back from a law conference in Boston, and which Jack had been buying from Sutty’s ever since.

From the outside, Sutty’s looked like an ordinary grocery shop, but inside, we found that it was anything but.

For starters, Sutty greeted each of his customers as though they were a long-lost friend. When he’d first opened his shop, he insisted on giving everyone a handshake, until some customers became a bit freaked out by his affection. He would settle for an excited wave from behind the till.

The second unusual thing was that every nook and cranny was rammed with stuff. Sutty’s had shelves that towered to the ceiling, overflowing with all of the normal things you would find in a corner shop – milk, washing-up liquid, biscuits… and so much more. Indian silk fabrics spilled from woven baskets; there were dog beds with leopard print lining; fishing rods hung from the ceiling, along with headphones, strings of fairy lights and even feather boas, all forming an upside-down maze for taller shoppers. I loved it the moment I stepped through the