When Sam finally discovered the house where his mother lived and died, he thought it would be the end of his search. He little realised that events would soon plunge him into the search for his mother's murderer. Even less did he realise he would have to stand in for her in the re-enactment.

The complete story has been serialised into five parts which will be published at approximately daily intervals.

PART ONE - SUNDAY

Sam was nervous as he rang the doorbell - it had taken him several years to reach this point in his search, and he had a sudden doubt it might all turn into yet another red herring.

The house was called The Vicarage, one of those huge houses built at a time when vicars would have ten children and a few dependent relatives. Nowadays, one vicar probably covered half a dozen churches, and lived in a small house which allowed the church to sell off all the other, much larger ones at considerable profit.

No one answered the door and, with the sound of an organ emanating from the church across the green, Sam wondered whether he had maybe pre-judged the church's desire for profit, and the incumbent vicar was doing what all vicars do on a Sunday - taking a service. He looked across the green to read the church board displaying the times of service; the Sunday afternoon service had started half an hour ago.

Sam shrugged and went to sit on a bench facing the green. He'd waited this long; another half hour or so wasn't going to hurt. Besides, it wasn't as though he had anywhere else to go, except back to an empty flat on a dreary October, Sunday afternoon. The last bus left the village at 6.10, so he had plenty of time before that.

After the service ended, it didn't take long for the vicar to shake the hands of all those leaving - half a dozen people from a church which, Sam guessed, would comfortably seat two hundred. But after completing his duties, the vicar hurried out of the churchyard, got into a car and drove off. So, Sam thought, he had been right all along about the Vicarage.

An elderly woman was heading his way from the church. Still quite sprightly, he guessed she'd be about seventy. In the twenty-five-year old newspaper photograph he'd found on the web, the mother's age was given as forty-five, which would make this lady about the right age. She glanced at him as she approached, and then gave him a closer, more detailed look which made him feel uncomfortable.

Sam sighed. Most people in these twee little villages were highly suspicious of men on their own lurking around their properties. He didn't want to get off on the wrong foot so he stood up and smiled at her, and called across.

"Mrs Lockhart?" he asked. "You don't know me, but I believe that some time ago my mother worked for you. Her name was..."

"Sally Brown!" she declared, her face breaking into a delighted smile. "I recognised you straightaway. You're just like her."

"Really? I... I never knew her. I was adopted, you see, after she died and..."

"Come inside the house," she said, leading the way to the front door. "I knew that someday you would find us. Please call me Emily."

"Sam Crawford," he said, holding out his hand for her to shake.

"Where's your sister?" Emily asked. "Presumably you're still in touch with her."

He pulled a face. "I'm sorry. Samantha, my twin sister, is someone else I never got to know. She died of meningitis when we were six months old."

***

"When I was eighteen, I was allowed to know my real Mother's name," he said, as he followed her into the house. "But they only told me her dates of birth and death, not where she'd been living. With Brown being such a common name, it's taken me years to get this far. Then the Charminster Echo put its back copies on the internet and I found the item about her accident."

"She was such a lovely woman," Emily said. "She'd been working for us for about two years when it occurred."

They had stopped in the Hall, a grand affair large enough to act as a place where the vicar could offer sherry after the Sunday service to selected members of his congregation. They both stared at the Great Staircase which ran up the right-hand side.

"That's where it happened," Emily said. "That's where your mother fell and died."

He walked over to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. They didn't look dangerous. He turned back to face Emily. "Tell me what she was like."

Emily's face lit up. "Lovely. She was absolutely lovely. But come through to the kitchen and I'll make some tea and I can tell you all about her.

***

At one time, the kitchen must have been state of the art - now, like the rest of the house, it looked shoddy and desperately in need of refurbishment.

"We had this kitchen replaced the year before Sally came to us," Emily said, noticing his glance around as she put the kettle on. "Richard, my husband, was vicar in the parish and we lived here at a low rent. Then his father died and his inheritance enabled him to buy the house from the church, giving us somewhere to live after Richard retired - if he'd only lived that long. We had it refurbished throughout, and still had plenty left over for the little luxuries in life. 'Why don't we get a cook/housekeeper?' Richard said. Before Sally came to work for us, we had a couple of other girls in quick succession. They were both quite useless."

Her face lit up again as she thought of Sam's mother. "When Sally came, it was just like Mary Poppins arriving. We had three grown up sons and a daughter-in-law living here and it was a chaotic mess. Then Sally turned up and suddenly everything was in order. To me, she was the daughter I'd always wanted, and to her, we were the family she'd never had - she was an orphan, too, just like you, although she never spoke about it."

She looked again at his face. "You really are quite like her," she said, "although a bit slimmer. To be honest, she was plain, and very overweight, which I saw as an advantage. With all the testosterone in this house, I didn't want anyone living here who was too attractive. We'd had trouble with both the pretty girls who came before her. At that time, Matthew was taking his accountancy finals and engaged to one of those strange girls who wanted to remain a virgin until their wedding night. Mark had given up college in order to hurriedly marry his pregnant girlfriend, and they were living here whilst they waited for their new house to be finished. Meanwhile, Luke was doing his GCSEs, and the last thing he needed - or at least, we thought he needed - was a distraction from his studies.

"It was ironic that we partly chose Sally for her appearance, and yet when she arrived, she proved to be far smarter than either of the other two, who always slouched around in sloppy tee shirts and jeans. After a few days, she said she'd found some servants' uniforms in the attic - I didn't know anything about them and they looked as though they'd been there since the 1950s. She suggested that in a vicarage, a proper servant uniform would be more appropriate and I thought it would be a nice touch.

"As they say, she scrubbed up well. Smart black dress and white frilly apron; her shining face, always smiling, and she even wore one of those white smock caps when she was dispensing sherry or tea to the masses. It certainly impressed the bishop, and it was whilst she was here that Richard took over several of the other parishes as congregations dwindled."

"So was there still a problem with testosterone?" he queried.

"I didn't think so at the time," Emily replied, "but in retrospect, I suspected it was simply that she was more discrete than the others."

He was intrigued. "Oh?"

"When she became pregnant, she told us the father was someone she met in London when she went up there on her Mondays off, but wouldn't give us his name. Fifty years ago, a maid would have been thrown onto the streets if she became pregnant, but in the 1980s, of course, it was perfectly respectable to have a baby without a named father. I've already told you she had become like a daughter to me and I enjoyed helping her through pregnancy, and was absolutely enchanted with you two babies. When Social Services took you away, I was heartbroken."

"So she told you," he said, trying to summarise the meaning behind her words, "that my father was someone she met in London, but you thought that perhaps..."

She shook her head. "Maybe we'll talk about it later. I think we might find some photographs of her and you two babies in the attic. Would you like to see them?"

***

The attic was huge, running the entire length of the house, and absolutely full of decades of discarded junk, much of it under dust sheets. It was easy to see why servant uniforms from the 1950s had remained there unnoticed. Emily led the way to the end, and pointed to a trunk in the angle of the roof.

"I think you'll need to pull it out in order to open it. I packed all of Sally's effects in the trunk, expecting Social Services to take them, but when they realised there was nothing of real value, they simply weren't interested."

He pulled the trunk forward so that he could open the lid without it hitting the sloping roof, and then hesitated before reverently opening it. There were several items lying on the top of the clothes: an order of service for his mother's funeral; a scrapbook; as well as several miscellaneous envelopes such as one marked 'Birth and Death Certificates', some from the Inland Revenue, and letters addressed to Emily from Social Services, presumably about how he was being cared for and his eventual adoption.

"We made up the scrapbook for the funeral," Emily said. "It contained all the photographs and other details we could find about her. Why don't we take it downstairs, then you can read it properly."

For some stupid reason, he had tears in his eyes as he picked up the order of service and the scrapbook. She led the way back downstairs and he followed.

***

He spent an emotional couple of hours looking through everything, acquainting himself with the mother and twin sister he never knew. There were several, rather blurred close-up photographs of his mother with Samantha and him, but there were only three where he could see his mother properly. They'd been cut from the local newspaper of functions held by the vicar - a small, weedy looking man - with Sally serving tea and biscuits or sherry. One of them showed her smiling as she shared a joke with the bishop, and this part of the photograph had been enlarged and used in the newspaper when it reported her death - the photograph he'd seen two weeks ago in the newspaper archives.

There was no doubt she had a striking face - certainly not a face to call pretty - and he supposed it did have some resemblance to his own, though he hadn't noticed it before. He had to smile that Emily had chosen her because she thought her plump - he'd have called her curvy, or even voluptuous, with large breasts, hips and bum, and a reasonably trim waist that, he suspected, was due more to a foundation garment than to her natural lines. If the men in the house had not lusted after her, then they were probably not interested in women.

Emily fed him cups of tea, and filled in the answers to all his questions. All except the question he didn't ask - about his father.

Finally, he got back round to it. "Emily, earlier on you suggested that my father might have been closer to home than London. Please, please could you elaborate on the comment you made about my father's identity?"

Emily paused and then said, "The reason I have so much difficulty with this is that it goes well beyond your father's identity. It's actually about Sally's death."

He shook his head. "Her death? What about it? According to the newspaper article, she tripped and fell from top to bottom of the stairs at a family function, in front of you, your family and the bishop. She was pronounced dead when the doctor arrived ten minutes later."

"Come upstairs again."

She led the way back up the Great Staircase until she was a few steps below the landing. She turned to face him and looked down the stairs. "It was my forty-fifth birthday party. We were all in the Hall, below, drinking sherry as a prelude to dinner. Sally had come upstairs to make certain you two were asleep in the bedroom. It was as she was hurrying back downstairs to serve dinner that she appeared to trip and fall. We all rushed to her and crowded around her body at the bottom of the stairs. She was unconscious, but we didn't know whether she was dead or alive. Richard went to call for an ambulance and the local doctor. Meanwhile, I came running upstairs to bring you both down, thinking she might regain consciousness and would want to see you."

She turned to face up the landing. "I was in such a panic, I didn't notice anything at the time, but in bed that night, I re-lived the whole event in a kind of slow motion replay. I recalled that, as I reached the top of the stairs, there were two little round hooks screwed into the newel posts on either side of the stairs. I got out of bed to investigate. The hooks had disappeared and there were small indents where they'd been screwed in, and the hole later filled. You can't see the marks now, after all this time, but they were just there..." She pointed low down on the newel posts on either side of the stairs. "...and there."

She sensed his incomprehension, and she sighed. "I know it's straight out of Agatha Christie, and I sound like Miss Marple, but it is a very effective way of tripping someone at the top of a flight of stairs. You feed a length of fishing line through the hooks and push the line down out of sight into the stair carpet. You feed the free ends some distance away - in this case down the wall to the Hall below, where you can innocently stand, sherry in hand, waiting for your victim to appear. When the victim is about to cross the line, you pull on the free ends to raise it tight, a few inches above the stair. The victim trips over it and falls down the stairs. In the chaos surrounding the fall, you pull the length of fishing line clear of the hooks and hide it. Later on, you surreptitiously remove the hooks from the stairs and fill the small holes in the newel posts." She finished with a grimace as though to say, "Make what you will of that."

"If that night you remembered seeing the hooks and worked all that out, why didn't you contact the police next morning?"

She climbed the four stairs to the landing before answering, and he was left looking up at her like Romeo staring at Juliet.

"Because apart from the bishop, it could only have been one of my three sons, my daughter-in-law or Matthew's fiancée - now his wife. In fact even the bishop can be ruled out because he was talking to Richard and me."

"So you suspected my mother was murdered?" he gasped, "leaving me an orphan, and you concealed it to save your sons?"

"Your mother was dead; whatever I did wouldn't bring her back, and yes, I protected my sons from a charge of murder. I have no excuse."

"But why would any of them murder her?"

She grimaced. "I told you that, when you were born, I was absolutely enchanted with you both. Once - just once - I said a silly thing in my baby talk, and I murmured to you, 'It's your granny.' I could see Sally's face reflected in the window, and she showed a shocked recognition. Sally never realised I'd seen her face, but I believed then that you two were my grandchildren."

The silence lengthened between them. The evening was beginning to draw in, and they were standing in semi darkness.

"It still doesn't explain why the father should murder his child's mother."

"Because I pushed it, that's why," she said. "Because I was stupid."

She looked down at him as she said, "We recruited Sally because she wasn't a good looker in the hope that our sons wouldn't want to get involved with her. But that certainly didn't mean it was all right to make her pregnant and not take responsibility. I privately challenged all three and they each denied it, so I was forced to take more extreme measures.

"I persuaded Richard to change his will in favour of Sally. After all, since all three of our sons had good careers ahead of them, it seemed only right to leave the house to the mother of our new granddaughter, who was a single mother with nowhere to live. Under the will, after Richard's death, I would live here for life and then it would pass to Sally.

"Whoever killed her realised that with no known father, you and your sister would be taken away and we would have no further contact with you. Richard would have no alternative but to change his will back to our sons."

Sam looked around. "It's a nice house," he said, "but you're still here twenty-five years later. It was a bit of a long term killing."

"Richard was tremendously strong spiritually, but his body was weak. He'd had a number of serious illnesses, and he died the following year. So there was quite a short timeframe in which Richard could have changed his will back again.

"But can't you see?" she added, "By getting Richard to change his will, I'm as responsible for the death of your mother as much as the person who set the trap."

"No," he said. "That's not how responsibility works. In retrospect, you may have done something that was less than wise, but that doesn't make you a killer." He thought some more and added, "Of course, nowadays, it's quite easy with DNA testing to determine whether one of your sons is my father, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he is also the murderer - it could have been anyone who lost out under the new will, including their wives."

"DNA testing is only easy if you get a sample from them. Remember, they're all in their forties now, comfortably off, with teenage children. I'm certain that neither Matthew nor Mark would be willing to give you a DNA sample, since it would prove they were being unfaithful - I suspect even Luke would not want that kind of disruption into his well-ordered life. I think there'd have to be a certain amount of subterfuge."

She thought some more and added, "There'd have to be even more subterfuge to determine the killer."

"You didn't want to do that twenty-five years ago. Do you want to do it now?"

She paused and then said, "Your feelings about your children do change as you get older. I had supposed that when the grandchildren were growing up I'd see a lot of them, but I rarely see them or their parents. They're always too busy to come and see me. Of course, they'll all be coming here for my birthday next Saturday. That might be a good opportunity for you to meet them."

Then she shook her head. "The problem is that until we have proven your paternity, it will be difficult to justify your presence at what is essentially a family occasion, unless..."

"Unless?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Oh, nothing. Just a silly idea I had."

***

"Emily, I need to leave now to catch my bus," he said, sometime later.

"Do you have to get back home, tonight?" she asked him.

He shook his head. "There's nothing to make me go home, but obviously I hadn't planned to stay overnight. I haven't told you this, but I've been out of work for a while and I'm getting no interviews or even much prospect for a new job. Continuing the search for my heritage was a way of taking my mind away from it."

"You could stay in your mother's old room, if you don't mind slumming it," she said. "Or there's no shortage of larger bedrooms you can use."

But he plumped for his mother's bedroom. It wasn't big, but he was closer to his mother than he'd been since those first few weeks of his life. Emily got him fresh bed linen and he made up the bed as she watched.

"You're much better at doing that than my husband or my sons ever were," she said.

He smiled at her. "Your husband and sons had it easy. When you live on your own, you get used to doing everything for yourself. I'm also not a half bad cook."

"Why don't you go up to the attic?" she suggested, "and bring down Sally's chest. You could go through the rest of the contents this evening after dinner. I always retire early, so it will give you a chance to get to know your mother a little more."

***

She suggested that he cook the meal - it wasn't difficult, as she had plenty of food in the fridge and he made one of his speciality omelettes. She opened a bottle of wine and had one glass for herself, and he had a few glasses. They chatted easily together, about nothing in particular, and then Emily went off to her bedroom and he stayed behind to clear the table and fill the dishwasher.

Then, he too went to his bedroom, opened the chest and started to pull out his mother's things. She had several black, uniform dresses, and a few other dresses, skirts and blouses which he hung in the wardrobe. Her shoes he put into the base of it, and her underwear went in the drawers. And that was it - the entire possessions of his mother put into a wardrobe and a few drawers. It made him feel very sad.

He wasn't certain how long he stared at the open wardrobe before there was a knock on his door, and Emily entered, wearing a long dressing-gown.

"Don't be sad," she said, seeing his face. "She gave birth to two lovely children, and you're here to remember her spirit. It's all any of us can hope for."

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

"I was thinking," she said, "that it would be good to bring your mother to life again."

"What?"

"I want to recreate my birthday party in 1986, and re-enact the events surrounding your mother's death. That's the way they solve Agatha Christie murders, and it's a reason to give to my family to explain why you are here at a family event."

"But why should your family agree to it, and who'll play the part of my mother?"

"Why, you will of course!"

***

It was a crazy idea. She thought he could simply put on his mother's dress and he'd look just like her.

"But I've seen the photographs," he said. "She had boobs, for heaven's sake, and hair, and... a big bum." No one could deny that. His mother had an incredibly large bum.

"There are ways around those kinds of things," she said. "But no one could deny that you have your mother's face..."

"Complete with a beard and Adam's apple," he said.

"OK," she said, "let's not worry about the practicalities just now, as most of them can probably be overcome. Let's just look at the idea itself. They will all stay overnight for my birthday next Saturday, and in recent years, it's been quite tiring to look after them. So, I'll tell my family that Sally's daughter, Samantha, has looked me up and I've suggested she do her mother's old job for the next week and help me prepare for the party. The family might privately whinge about it, but there's not much they can really complain about. That gets you into the house, in the ideal position to go cleaning their rooms and extracting a few hairs from a hair brush. Right?"

"I can see the idea," he said, "but I could do that job as a man. Nowadays, you don't have to be female to work as a cook/housekeeper."

"Call me old-fashioned," she said, "but I really believe a cook/housekeeper should be a woman, and I just would not feel comfortable with a man doing it."

"But I'm a man and you want me to do it."

"For the next week, you will be a woman, and that's how I would feel about it. Besides, if we're re-enacting your mother's death, you have to take the part of Sally."

He shrugged acceptance.

"I shall explain that Samantha has asked to find out how the accident happened and I've agreed to re-enact the scene on my birthday - just as it was on the night she died. Again, they might whinge, but there's nothing they can really complain about. Right?"

"Unless they twig that Samantha is a man." He stated the obvious.

"Sam, remember, we're both doing this for your mother. Why don't we give it a go and see if we can disguise you as a woman. If we can't, then clearly it won't work. But if we can, what then? I understand your reticence about wearing women's clothes, but surely, if it exposes your mother's killer then it will be worth it, won't it?"

He hesitated. "Will it, Emily? Remember, this is most likely one of your sons. Do you want to expose him?"

It was Emily's turn to hesitate. "Well, let's do a deal. If you're prepared to give it a go, then we both have to accept the consequences, right?"

He nodded and they shook hands on it.

After she had left the room, he took his mother's uniform dress out of the wardrobe and held it against himself. It was a hypnotic idea, but then he caught sight of himself in the mirror and came to his senses. Oh well, it would all be quickly resolved in the morning.

---

Author's Note: I have turned off comments for this serial, as I don't want readers to second guess who has done what to whom, and give the game away to everyone else. Make your own deductions, but in the normal who-dunnit tradition, please keep them to yourself.