Free Diamond Star Girl by Judy May Page B

him.
    Miss Higgins came back with a note from him in return that simply said,
    Get in here!
    I had to assume either the bump on the head had turned him simple or he really wanted to talk to me in a hurry. I knocked nervously on the bedroom door and went in to find him sitting up in bed wearing the kind of traditional blue-striped PJs that I would have expected, a large bandage around his head and his glasses sitting gingerly on his face. He was smiling at me.
    ‘Did you actually make a plan to ruin my life or is all this sort of accidental?’ he said.
    ‘Half and half,’ I shrugged miserably.
    He insisted I share his lunch, and because Miss Higgins had provided enough food to explode even a guy’s stomach, I thought it would help him if I ate part of the pasta mountain on the tray in front of him. Luckily I’d been too ‘off’ to eat breakfast so I was very helpful indeed.
    ‘Lemony, I need you to do something for me.’
    ‘Go away and stay away?’
    ‘Quite the opposite, I need you to return to the cottage and look around, then report back. The crew and actors and extras will all be here again tomorrow and we might not get another chance. Bring Pauland Ro with you to be safe.’
    I agreed, grateful to be able to do something helpful other than stuff my face with linguini. I’m now sitting in the large sitting room writing this, waiting for Paul to finish whatever he’s up to so we can come up with a strategy together, and encouraging Ro not to call Bob, but to face her movie-world withdrawal head-on. Have to go fetch crisps to give her something to do other than stare at her silent walkie talkie.
LATER
    We did it! I honestly thought we were wasting our time, but it was there! We ran straight from the cottage up to Stephen’s room and he confirmed that the drawing we found was of the necklace. OK, so we didn’t find the necklace itself, but it proves we are one step closer. With Ro on board we took a far more practical approach than just wading in with nothing but huge hope and a nervousness around shelves, instead we removed everything from the cottage and stacked it neatly outside, under a plastic sheet in case it rained before we put the stuff back.
    We’ve all seen too many detective shows and were wearing such serious and knowing faces that anyonewatching us would think Stephen had lost an arm in there and we’d been sent to fetch it. The empty cottage seemed properly empty as we didn’t find anything treasure-shaped at all, no matter how much tugging of hooks and tapping of walls we did. We were just about to move the stuff back in and admit defeat when I thought that, if we were guessing with any kind of half-functioning minds, the necklace would have been buried beneath the ground. It would have been under the boulder so it would’ve had to have been below the floor not around the walls, window sills or fireplace.
    Ro jumped all over this idea and wanted to call Bob to see what the chances were of lucking into some heavy floor-breaking machinery. In the end the demolition squad wasn’t needed, as Paul noticed that not all the flagstones making up the floor were the same. One was slightly more battered looking, which made us think that maybe it might have had a more exciting life than the other flagstones. Sure enough, with the famous shelf for leverage we managed to lift it and underneath we found a roll of tough fabric with the sketch inside.
    Well, at that stage we only knew it was a roll of fabric as I insisted we wait until getting to Stephen’sroom before looking inside, after all it wasn’t his fault he was doing the wounded soldier bit while we all got to rove about like untamed detectives. Ro and Paul have started saying, ‘It was the shelf ’s fault. Bad shelf!’ every time they see me looking guilty and angst-ridden over the whole thing.
    He’d been napping when we bounded in, but it would have taken a hard-of-hearing narwhal to sleep through our frenzy. Once Stephen had compared the