when she had clambered into the van and set the central locking did she register that she had the box files. She threw them on to the passenger seat and started the engine, flooring the accelerator and careering out of the street and down St Peter’s Square.
If Stella had checked the rear-view mirror when she turned out of Terry’s road she would have seen a figure under the cherry trees walking in the direction of the river where, thirty years before, Katherine Rokesmith had been found murdered. An hour later, when she was out of the shower, dressed and leaving for the office, Stella discovered she had left Terry’s keys in his house.
9
September 1985
Justin moved as swiftly as he dared in the deathly quiet library, slipped into the furthest aisle between the bookshelves and raced to the end where there was the door to the basement. Simon followed him into the library seconds later and, flanked by oak cabinets and creaky carousels of catalogue cards, scanned the wood-panelled room.
Simon was not as careful as his prey and allowed the door to slam behind him. The librarian, a placid woman with blurred, creamy features that had earned her the sobriquet of ‘the Oyster’ from the boys, paused from wiping a book with votive diligence to frown from her podium, signalling silence with her linen pad.
Justin tripped over a stool on casters, which spun along the aisle. He grimaced, sure he had given away his position, but Simon had wrongly anticipated him and was checking the Reading Corner by the inglenook fireplace which, with a semi-circle of high-backed leather winged armchairs, was an obvious hiding place.
When Margaret Lockett died in 1939, aged eighty-one, she left Marchant Manor to her trust to found and administrate a boarding school for the children of families connected with her father’s passion: the railway. Sir Stephen Lockett had died fifty years before his daughter, an early supplier of toilet systems; he had increased his fortune through shrewd investment in Britain’s developing rail network and his obsession with the likes of sanitary engineers J. G. Jennings and Thomas Twyford extended to structural pioneers such as Gustave Eiffel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Bouch. This apparently innocuous interest was to prove fatal.
On the night of 28 December 1879, Sir Stephen boarded a train to cross the Firth of Forth by the new Tay Bridge: a lattice-grid construction, then the longest bridge in the world. Queen Victoria had made the inaugural journey six months before. He did not let the storm already buffeting his carriage dampen his spirits and treated with boyish excitement the flickering gas lamps and loose window catch that let rain spatter on to his pocket book and soak his coat. Even when the train lurched upwards, pressing him into his seat, he did not panic. Only when he heard a crack that his understanding of sewer construction told him was the sound of inflexible cast-iron fracturing did Sir Stephen appreciate the gravity of his situation. Tall pilings crumbled, girders buckled and in moments the bridge collapsed like one of Stephen Lockett’s wooden models, although this time he could not revise calculations and start again. The train plunged into the river A rush of water engulfing him, he thought of a toilet flushing but the thought had no time to develop. Over seventy passengers drowned; Lockett’s body was one of those never recovered, nourishing school lore that his waterlogged ghost roamed the night-time corridors of Marchant Manor. On stormy days he shook casements and caused power cuts. Boys claimed to have caught a whiff of his cigar in the library that had been his smoking room.
Six years after the Tay Bridge disaster Thomas Twyford invented the Unites, a one-piece, free-standing toilet set on a pedestal base and Margaret Lockett doubled the turnover of her father’s business living as a recluse amongst his railway relics with only his marble bust for company.
Sir Stephen
If Stella had checked the rear-view mirror when she turned out of Terry’s road she would have seen a figure under the cherry trees walking in the direction of the river where, thirty years before, Katherine Rokesmith had been found murdered. An hour later, when she was out of the shower, dressed and leaving for the office, Stella discovered she had left Terry’s keys in his house.
9
September 1985
Justin moved as swiftly as he dared in the deathly quiet library, slipped into the furthest aisle between the bookshelves and raced to the end where there was the door to the basement. Simon followed him into the library seconds later and, flanked by oak cabinets and creaky carousels of catalogue cards, scanned the wood-panelled room.
Simon was not as careful as his prey and allowed the door to slam behind him. The librarian, a placid woman with blurred, creamy features that had earned her the sobriquet of ‘the Oyster’ from the boys, paused from wiping a book with votive diligence to frown from her podium, signalling silence with her linen pad.
Justin tripped over a stool on casters, which spun along the aisle. He grimaced, sure he had given away his position, but Simon had wrongly anticipated him and was checking the Reading Corner by the inglenook fireplace which, with a semi-circle of high-backed leather winged armchairs, was an obvious hiding place.
When Margaret Lockett died in 1939, aged eighty-one, she left Marchant Manor to her trust to found and administrate a boarding school for the children of families connected with her father’s passion: the railway. Sir Stephen Lockett had died fifty years before his daughter, an early supplier of toilet systems; he had increased his fortune through shrewd investment in Britain’s developing rail network and his obsession with the likes of sanitary engineers J. G. Jennings and Thomas Twyford extended to structural pioneers such as Gustave Eiffel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Thomas Bouch. This apparently innocuous interest was to prove fatal.
On the night of 28 December 1879, Sir Stephen boarded a train to cross the Firth of Forth by the new Tay Bridge: a lattice-grid construction, then the longest bridge in the world. Queen Victoria had made the inaugural journey six months before. He did not let the storm already buffeting his carriage dampen his spirits and treated with boyish excitement the flickering gas lamps and loose window catch that let rain spatter on to his pocket book and soak his coat. Even when the train lurched upwards, pressing him into his seat, he did not panic. Only when he heard a crack that his understanding of sewer construction told him was the sound of inflexible cast-iron fracturing did Sir Stephen appreciate the gravity of his situation. Tall pilings crumbled, girders buckled and in moments the bridge collapsed like one of Stephen Lockett’s wooden models, although this time he could not revise calculations and start again. The train plunged into the river A rush of water engulfing him, he thought of a toilet flushing but the thought had no time to develop. Over seventy passengers drowned; Lockett’s body was one of those never recovered, nourishing school lore that his waterlogged ghost roamed the night-time corridors of Marchant Manor. On stormy days he shook casements and caused power cuts. Boys claimed to have caught a whiff of his cigar in the library that had been his smoking room.
Six years after the Tay Bridge disaster Thomas Twyford invented the Unites, a one-piece, free-standing toilet set on a pedestal base and Margaret Lockett doubled the turnover of her father’s business living as a recluse amongst his railway relics with only his marble bust for company.
Sir Stephen
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