faces, wreathed in enjoyment over a game with an Alsatian dog. Faces that had stepped outside life, had seen life’s stage scenery from the back, and knew what a fraud it was.
‘Three of them,’ said Hermione. ‘And three skeletons in the boat . . . it’s a big coincidence.’
‘I doubt it,’ I said, with a dry throat. ‘They don’t look like victims to me. They look more like the ones who did it. And sat back and laughed. They looked as if drowning baby monkeys would be very amusing, as far as they were concerned.’
We stared at the enlargement for another long time, and I for one was feeling worse and worse.
Finally, Hermione said, ‘We can’t sit here all day,’ and rolled up the enlargement and put it back in its tube. ‘We need to know more.’
‘How?’ My voice came out in a sort of wail.
‘If somebody this rich vanished, it’d be in the papers. At the time. What we need is the local Wheatstone papers for 1913 . . . Wheatstone Public Library’s what we need next.’
She started the car, and drove off, fast.
Wheatstone Public Library, in the afternoon, was a good place to lay ghosts. Unlike the rest of gothic Wheatstone, almost in defiance of gothic Wheatstone, it was a simple classical building in red brick and sandstone, like a well-mannered barn.
And the reference library was the least ghostly of all. Durable wall-to-wall carpeting, a neat beech reception-desk where middle-aged ladies requested books on the history of canals around London, the development of the English apple tree, or a reasoned catalogue of the products of the Bow potteries in the eighteenth century. A fat good-natured bespectacled man took eager schoolchildren with spiral-backed notebooks through the development of the London sewage system, or the imports of tanned hides through the East India docks. Not so much educating them as telling them what to write in their projects. The air was loud with demands for rubbers, spare biros, and the tinkle of dropped drawing-board clips.
And along one wall, the row of microfilm machines, which we had to queue for, so great was the demand of housewives doing their family history.
We got machines in the end, and were now busy suffering. The chairs were half-broken rejects from the rest of the library, the machines were so well-used that the spools of microfilm often came out of their clips. The turning-handles ran backwards if you let go of them, and often came off in your hand altogether, if you whirled them too vigorously. And there is something infinitely backache-creating in using a microfilm. Inside, things rattled; the print on the smoky golden screen kept going blurred; it was satisfactory neither to sit back wearing my reading-spectacles, nor to lean forward without them.
I was working through the copies of the long defunct weekly newspaper called the Wheatstone Guardian, while Hermione next door waded through the desert of the equally defunct Wheatstone Advertiser.
Big impressive newspapers, which did not confine themselves to the local news. They thought nothing of spending two columns on the doings of Lloyd George (with regard to the welfare of the citizens of Wheatstone). There were fascinating insights into the middle-aged Winston Churchill, ladies’ fashions for the coming season, a cholera scare in the East End and Dr Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, recommended by all Army doctors to cure everything from enteric fever to whooping cough, by the look of it.
The only comfort was the touch of Hermione’s knee on mine, as she sighed and whizzed through three more pages of foreign news and hat-adverts. It was hot and I kept dozing off. I was just turning the handle now, knowing that if anyone found anything, it would be her.
But her sudden hiss of breath made me come leaping awake, with a thudding heart.
‘Got him,’ she said. I looked across, and saw, small and dim as a postage stamp on her screen, the same pudgy face, the same smirk of a hidden joke. The small headline said:
MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF
WHEATSTONE FAMILY
The print was too small and blurred for me to read more. So I just listened as she muttered to herself, and scribbled stuff into her notebook.
‘Aged forty-two at the time of his disappearance. Well-known member of the Neptune Yacht Club. Was in business as an importer . . . oh, an address. Abbeywalk, Belvoir Road, Wheatstone.’
The room whirled around me. I remembered Abbeywalk: the queerness of the place; the heap of abandoned suitcases in the outhouse. But in particular I remembered the