A Brush with Death: A Penny Brannigan Mystery - By Elizabeth J. Duncan Page 0,35
the distraction, and by the time the women had eaten their sandwiches and tidied everything away, her journey was over as the train slowed down for the approach into Liverpool Lime Street station.
She got off the train, rode the escalator to the ground floor, and then continued on to the ticket inspection barrier. As she started to fumble in her bag for her ticket, the man guarding the barrier waved her through and she walked to the exit through the seating area and shops of the main concourse.
She paused for a moment to take in the vast iron-and-glass roof, and then, because the main entrance to the station had been closed as part of a massive renovation project, she emerged from a side exit into a day filled with deepening gloom and the heaviness in the air that comes before the relief of rain. Across the way stood the magnificent and recently refurbished St. George’s Hall and behind it, on William Brown Street, three great neoclassical buildings, including the Central Library. She worked her way around the side of the Hall, and with an admiring glance at St. John’s Garden, picked her way across the cobblestones to the main entrance of the library.
Built in the 1800s, with all the exuberance of the Victorians’ passion for grand, intimidating architecture in their public buildings, Liverpool’s Central Library is everything a British library should be. Its weathered brown façade, complete with imposing columns, prepares visitors to be impressed.
Penny entered the library and found it surprisingly bright and modern. A helpful attendant at the reception desk pointed her toward the lift, and promising herself more time for browsing on the next visit, she made her way to the fourth floor, where the microfiche copies of the Liverpool Echo, along with municipal records, are kept.
After a word with the reference librarian, she was shown the drawers where hundreds of neatly labeled white boxes were stored. Each box contained one month’s worth of the newspaper. The librarian pointed out a wooden block, about the same size as one of the white boxes.
“When you remove a box, please put the block in its place so you’ll know where to put it back,” she requested.
Penny pulled her notebook out of her bag and set it down beside a microfiche reader.
“I’ll be just over here if you need any help,” said the librarian, who returned to her desk near the entrance.
Having decided she was a start-at-the-beginning kind of person, Penny pulled the little box that read APRIL 1967 from the drawer and dutifully put the wooden block in its place.
She took the box over to the reader and sat down. She switched on the machine, then removed the spool from the box, threaded it through the magnifier, and wound it forward using the little crank.
She couldn’t resist a smile. This seems so low tech, she thought, but when the first page of the Liverpool Echo wound into view, she had to admit that low tech as it was, it apparently worked. And you had to admit that storing one month’s worth of newspapers in a box just a little bigger than a pack of cigarettes was a huge space saver. But as she turned the little crank that advanced the film forward page by page, she realized the huge drawback. She would have to examine every page looking for one name. Alys Jones. No search and find here. A computer could have pulled the stories she wanted in seconds.
She plowed on through 1967, returning the spool she had finished viewing to its place in the drawer and taking out the next month. Pressed for time because the library closed at four, she tried to resist the temptation to start reading the news stories, but occasionally one caught her eye. The release in June of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP was big news in the Beatles’ hometown. She soon found the advertisements more interesting than the stories. She loved the look of things priced in old money. A man’s fine white dress shirt for only five shillings! However much that was.
The years flashed before her. Celebrities died, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was elected prime minister of Canada, the Vietnam War ground on, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States, the microwave oven was invented, the Concorde made its first flight, and men landed on the moon.
And then, in November 1970, just as she was about to wind