"It says here that a shopper who lost her car among the 13,000 parking spaces at Bluewater found it after staff showed her a security video of herself driving in."

"Is she named?" I said, grabbing the page in disbelief.

"No, he grinned. "But it sounds like her, doesn't it?"

Readers of last week's column will recall that my mother is on her way to earning a billion loyalty points for her frequent visits to the new retail Utopia near their home. And, although I considered my husband's jibe a little cutting, I also had to admit it was a fair comment.

In fact, I could see no harm in relating it to my mum when she phoned up mid morning.

Iwas expecting to hear her laugh like drain and call my husband a cheeky monkey. Instead, she stunned me by saying: "But I did lose the car there last week."

Apparently on her sixth trip to Bluewater in less than three weeks she'd gone into John Lewis for curtains and when she returned to where she believed she'd parked, her Skoda wasn't there.

"I didn't think it could have been stolen as it's not the sort thieves go for," she said. I've heard that only 30 Skodas were taken in the whole of the country last year." I'm not sure if she finds this statistic flattering but it's one she is fond of repeating.

"Anyway, I went to the security office and the staff offered to find it on their surveillance cameras," she continued.

Here, however, the stories diverge. Rather than scan the screen, a concierge accompanied my mum to the parking area and pointed out another section which she had overlooked earlier. There was her vehicle, safe as Skodas.

"We were so pleased, we hugged each other," added my mum, who has a gift for giving her stories emotional or dramatic endings.

So, was the newspaper article about her or not? It's possible that another woman was aided to her lost car via a video, or perhaps the publicity people on Bluewater decided to embellish my mum's experience and then tip off a news desk.

FIRED with confidence over his powers of deduction, my husband became convinced that my journalist dad, who has an understanding of tabloid values, was the one who'd sold the story.

"I bet you a fiver he did it," he said. "Then I can win back the £5 you got from me when I lost the bet that Homebase would be open on Easter Sunday."

Although not such a dead cert as the previous challenge, I accepted it and rang my dad at work the next day to check.

"I would have sold it," he sighed. "But I didn't know. Your mum's at Bluewater so much these days that she doesn't dare tell me about her shopping trips any more."

My mum, however, swears she did tell my dad, while my husband now suspects a cover-up to prevent him getting his winnings.

The case continues.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.