Chapter 11

Back home, I headed straight to my room. I really wanted to use the artefact immediately to see whether the information Cathy had given me would be sufficient, but I knew Elize would be unable to resist coming into my room to question me.

Sure enough, there was a gentle knock at the door then Elize waltzed straight in.

“Well?” she asked, almost bouncing with excitement. “Did Cathy tell you anything useful? Have you identified the rapists?”

“I’ll let you into a little secret Elize. Actually, it’s quite a big secret so I’m trusting you not to tell anyone. I must not be observed while I’m doing my thing or it won’t work.”

“Oh.”

“Cathy did give me some information that might be useful. I’m currently mulling over the best way of using it, with a view to making an attempt tomorrow. So when you see me disappear into my room, whatever you do, do not interrupt me.”

“Why don’t you lock your door?”

“Our parents forbade it.”

“That was ages ago. I’m sure they’d respect your right to privacy now you’re older.”

“I’d rather not risk it. And speaking of the parents, why does Mum think Justine is my girlfriend?”

“I don’t know. She hasn’t caught the two of you in bed together, has she?”

“Not that I know of. Surely she would have said something.”

“Well you seem to be doing a very good job of ignoring Justine when the parents are around, so I haven’t a clue.”

The parents called us down to dinner soon after.

“I don’t want much,” I admitted. “I had a very large, very late lunch.”

“Oh?” said Mum. “And would that have been with your girlfriend?”

“No, it was with Shona.”

“You went out for a meal with Shona?”

I could feel the ground giving way beneath my feet. “Mu-u-um,” I protested. “It wasn’t like that. Shona and I don’t even like each other very much.”

“So you went out for a meal with a girl you don’t like?”

“Mum, stop teasing him,” said Elize. “He was doing a favour for me.”

“My little boy is becoming a man at last,” Mum replied. “It’s only natural I’d want to know who his friends are, particularly girlfriends.”

“I prefer Justine,” I admitted, throwing her a bone to deflect the conversation. “But she’s two years older, way out of my league, and off to university in the Autumn.”

“Justine’s a nice girl,” said Mum, nodding as though agreeing she was out of my league.

Fortunately my gambit worked and the conversation shifted to less embarrassing topics.

After dinner, I helped Elize to clear up the debris, then retired to my room to do more studying until bedtime.

At breakfast the next morning, Elize said that she was meeting up with the other girls I town. They were all caught up with their studying so they were going to hang out and relax. She expected she’d be out all day but she’d be home in time for dinner.

I shooed Elize away from the clearing up. “Thanks,” I said. “I hope you have fun today. You deserve it.”

“You said you needed privacy, so we’re killing two birds with one stone. Good luck today, and thanks for trying to help Cathy.”

“You’re welcome.”

I went back to my room and prepped the artefact.

Cathy said she was in the van for several hours. I didn’t know how reliable that might be, because to a frightened twelve year old girl with a hood over her head, the time could easily have been magnified in her mind. However, the van was moving all the time and she hadn’t mentioned any rocking motion so I guessed the rapists had stayed on mainland Great Britain. I started with a map of the British Isles.

I memorised everything Cathy had said about the men’s descriptions then shut my eyes and dangled the artefact over the map. There was no downward pull. Then I repeated the process with her description of the van. Another failure. Then I tried Cathy’s description of the house. There were a lot of details, and when tried to hold them all at the forefront of my memory, I couldn’t concentrate properly. Unsurprisingly I got no response from the artefact. I then tried to find the house by concentrating on one piece of detail at a time. Still nothing, even though I’d had hopes the chip on the bathtub or the wallpaper print defect might yield something.

I had failed. Unless I could somehow prompt more information from Cathy, I wouldn’t be able to identify the rapists for her. In despair, I went down to the kitchen and thermohydrated a tea bag to take a break. While I was there, I pondered the situation. I’d never had a major failure before and the girls would be disappointed. Cathy particularly would be devastated, but I felt more worried about letting Elize down.

Could the perps have redecorated? From Cathy’s description, they didn’t seem very house proud, but if they had redecorated the exercise was doomed anyway. Perhaps there were other houses with the same print defect in the yellow wallpaper. If so, that wouldn’t be a unique characteristic. What if I were to concentrate on the house details two at a time? Even if other houses had the same wallpaper, combining it with another feature might be enough for uniqueness. I guessed it might take me the rest of the morning to work through all the combinations of pairs. If that failed, I could try combinations of three features but that would take me all afternoon and more.

Back in my room, I drew up a checklist of pairs of house details and set to work testing them. Pair after pair yielded nothing, then when I was testing the combination of the bathtub chip and the wallpaper print defect, there was a downward pull from the artefact. I felt like screaming the house down with joy and relief!