Chapter 8

I was back doing my revising when the shopping expedition returned. “We’re home,” called Mum, giving me time to hide the evidence. “Anything happen while we were out?”

“Shona called round for Elize,” I called back. “She only stayed as long as it took to drink the coffee I made her.”

A few minutes later there was a gentle knock on my door and Elize burst in.

“You made coffee for Shona? You dog!”

“It was either that or slam the door in her face. You could have warned me.”

“I honestly didn’t expect her to go through with it, considering how she feels about you.”

“What can I say. Peace has broken out. She will go back to ignoring me, and the universe is set to rights.”

“Are you going to help her?”

“I’ll try. Did she tell you what she wanted?”

“Something about a lost relative. She didn’t go into detail.”

“Shona is going to find out as much information as she can. If nothing else, it will give me a fighting chance of finding the relative on the internet. Are you happy to courier it over?”

“I am now that peace has broken out.”

The following Monday evening, Elize knocked gently on my bedroom door then waltzed in as if she owned the place, without waiting for an invitation. She waved an envelope at me. “A delivery from Shona,” she said. “I hope you know what to do with it.”

“I hope I didn’t give her false hope,” I admitted.

“The envelope’s sealed so it’s obviously confidential. Here,” she said, handing it to me. “Do your thing.” Then she left as abruptly as she had entered.

I opened the envelope as carefully as I could and examined the contents. There was a copy of the sister’s birth certificate, so I had both the date of her birth and her full birth name. There was a sheet of paper on which the grandmother had listed facts about her sister from when they were growing up. And Shona had even managed to obtain an old black and white photograph of the sister, with a note saying Grandma wanted it back. With a marked resemblance to Shona, the sister was very good-looking and I could imagine why she would be popular with men.

I considered locking my bedroom door to ensure nobody could enter uninvited, but since the parents had forbidden it I decided to take the risk that I wouldn’t be disturbed. In any case, the only person likely to enter without an invitation was Elize, and there had been a certain finality about the way she had left after delivering the envelope.

I prepared the artefact by threading a length of cotton through the hook on its head. Then I got out my world atlas and opened it at a map of the whole world, Mercator’s Projection. I wasn’t worried about the distortions, knowing even the continent would be a good start. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the sister’s name, age, and the old photograph. I felt the artefact pull down until it touched the map. I opened my eyes and saw it was pointing to England.

I repeated the process with a map of England. The pointer landed on Leeds.

I printed off a district map of Leeds from the internet, then a street map of the district indicated, then a map detailed enough to give property numbers. After the pointer landed on a specific property, I had an address for Shona’s grandma’s sister.

An internet search identified the residents at that property. A single person lived there with the same first name as Shona’s grandma’s sister but with a different last name. Despite being a tearaway, she must have got married.

I wrote the name and address on a piece of paper and put it in Shona’s envelope with everything she had sent me, then I resealed the envelope with sticky tape. I tidied away all my research and put the artefact back in its holder. Then I knocked on Elize’s door. It would have served her right if I’d just burst in on her as she always did with me, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.