Free Why Don’t You Come for Me by Diane Janes

words.’
    ‘It’s perfectly healthy for boys his age to have a few things like that lying around,’ Marcus continued, ‘and I don’t want you to start making him feel uncomfortable about it. In fact, that’s exactly the sort of reason why you ought to knock before you go into his room.’
    ‘I saw him with a knife,’ Jo began, but Marcus held up his hand, the gesture subduing her into silence as effectively as if he wielded a physical force.
    ‘Sean has given me his word that there isn’t a knife. Use your common sense, Jo. There’s no earthly reason why he would be likely to have one. We don’t live in the sort of area where a kid might think he needed to acquire a knife for self-defence. How good a look did you get at this so-called knife?’
    ‘I just saw it for a second. As soon as I opened the door, he shoved it into the cupboard. I honestly thought it was a knife.’
    ‘Thought?’
    ‘I saw it.’
    ‘A minute ago you only thought.’
    ‘I’m going to make the dinner,’ Jo said. ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere. By the way,’ she added as an afterthought, ‘it’ll be spag bol rather than lasagne, because Sean’s just eaten the last of the cheese.’ She caught sight of Marcus’s expression as he turned into the sitting room, and wished she had not mentioned the cheese. It just sounded like another petty jab in her stepson’s direction.

CHAPTER FIVE

    Jo’s first real opportunity to search Sean’s bedroom did not come for more than a week. First she was away for four nights leading In the Footsteps of Wordsworth, and when she got back, either Sean or Marcus always seemed to be in the house. Only when Marcus left to take care of Border Raids and Battles, and Sean had gone to school, did she have the house to herself.
    She was still annoyed with Marcus about the Cornwall trip, but in the interests of avoiding further accusations that she was being self-centred, she had decided to bide her time. Once she had shown Marcus that he had been wrong about the knife, she would be in a far stronger position to raise the issue of who should go down to inspect the hotel in Fowey. Her plan was to locate and confiscate the knife, keeping it somewhere safe from Sean until she could lay the evidence of its existence before Marcus on his return. She assumed that it would be back in the cupboard by now, so it was merely a question of finding the key.
    She was not surprised when a thorough search in and among the shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe drew a blank. Never mind – she had all day if that was what it took. For the next ninety minutes she undertook a fingertip search of which any undercover agent might have been proud, taking great care to replace everything exactly where she found it. Trouser pockets, CD cases, the furthest corners of shelves, under the mattress, inside the pillow slips and duvet cover, she probed every possible place, gathering dust from along the top of the doorframe, even feeling along the hems of the curtains, but as she worked her way round the room, it was with the ever-increasing conviction that Sean must have taken the most obvious precaution of all. He had taken the key with him.
    When she had tried every possible hidey-hole, she knelt in front of the cupboard and investigated it more closely. It appeared to be homemade, perhaps the result of some long-forgotten woodwork class. At some stage in its history a coat of gloss paint had been applied, which had faded to the shade of cream left too long in the fridge. There was a narrow gap between the door and body of the cupboard and Jo found that by pushing repeatedly against the door she could make it rattle. If only the hinges had been on the outside, she could have unscrewed them. Damn it, he was not going to beat her! She marched out to the garage, returning with a torch and a large screwdriver. When she shone the beam of the torch up and down the crack, she could make out the dark rectangle of the lock – one small metal