Eye Spy by Tessa Buckley

Baskervilles was after him.
    After a while I knocked on Donna’s door. She didn’t reply. I pushed the door open and went in. She was lying on her bed, sobbing – great shuddering sobs that seemed to fill the room. I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen her cry like that. I felt helpless. I didn’t know what to say to comfort her, so I just sat next to her and held her hand tight until at last the tears subsided. Eventually she sat up, wiping her wet face on the pillow case.
    â€œWhat was all that about?” she asked, and her voice trembled as she spoke. I shook my head. “Dunno. Perhaps he’s just paranoid that they’ll try and pinch his ideas. You know how secretive he is about everything.”
    â€œHe’s mad. Does he think Holtech will send a spy around here to steal his precious robot?” Another tear rolled down her cheek and she brushed it impatiently away with her sleeve.
    I had a sudden vision of a man in a balaclava creeping round the house, peering into cupboards and pulling out drawers. That reminded me how I’d been meaning to look for more information about our mother. Maybe I could use that as a way of distracting Donna and taking her mind off what had just happened. “Look,” I said. “I’m as fed up as you are with Dad’s secrecy. But there’s one thing he has no right to keep from us and that’s the truth about our mother. It’s as if both he and Nan are trying to pretend she never existed. Don’t you think that’s odd?”
    Donna shrugged. “What does it matter?”
    â€œDon’t you
want
to find out about her?”
    â€œNot really. She’s dead, and nothing we do can bring her back. What’s going on now is more important than what happened all those years ago.”
    â€œBut don’t you see? It’s what happened in the past that’s made Dad the way he is now.
That’s
why we have to find out! It might explain why everyone is so secretive about Annie.”
    She thought about it for a minute, then shrugged. “I s’pose you’re right.”
    â€œYou bet I am! And now, while both Nan and Dad are out, is the perfect time to see what we can find out about Annie. Come on, Donna, we’ll never have a better chance to solve the mystery!”
    And so we set about searching the house. It was difficult to know where to start. Our house is like a rabbit warren of small rooms, all at different levels where bits have been added on over the years. Nan told us it was once the gatekeeper’s lodge to a manor house, but the manor house was pulled down years ago to make way for the new estate and Lea Green School. The house is full of all the stuff from Nan’s life with Granddad, as well as all our belongings. We’d set ourselves a huge task.
    In the end we decided to start by looking in all the cupboards. Granddad was a DIY fanatic, and there are loads of them built into nooks and crannies, in recesses and under the stairs. When I opened the door of the biggest cupboard, all sorts of things came tumbling out: old jigsaw puzzles, chipped flower vases, and unfinished pieces of knitting. We began to sort through the pile.
    An hour later, we’d been through all the downstairs cupboards without finding anything remotely interesting. I still wasn’t sure what we were looking for. Photos or letters, perhaps? A marriage certificate would be good; that would give our mother’s surname before she married.
    â€œWhat about that desk in the sitting room where Nan keeps all her papers?” Donna suggested. I felt a bit sneaky and underhand, looking through Nan’s private papers, but we had a right to this information. After all, people who are adopted can apply for details of their birth mother once they reach eighteen. Annie was
our
birth mother, so really we were just doing the same thing, only a few years earlier.
    Nan may not have turned out cupboards very