it.’
‘God yeah. We’d have loved that. You can never have too much storage.’
So there was no basement. Good to know. Staring at the floor alerted him to one more hiding place that needed to be ruled out. Quietly, so that Caleb, who he now imagined to be listening with a glass at the wall, would not hear, Luke rolled back the carpets and prised up the central floorboards to shine a torch beneath them. His beam revealed nothing but sixty years of dust and dirt.
Right. Enough now. Michael Duffy had been truthful when he had said they had cleaned his grandmother’s house from top to bottom. Perhaps though the evidence, or the clue, had been removed. Perhaps there had been some ostensibly innocent possession of Kathleen’s – say, a red coat – hidden in the back of that old wardrobe. Perhaps even now Michael Duffy and his family were sifting through a lifetime’s possessions, unwittingly sending something vital to the charity shop, or bundling it away into the back of a wardrobe.
Imagination was for novelists. It was dangerous if you used it to plug the gaps that should be filled with facts. He had to back it up with something, before he let it possess him.
Chapter 16
Brighton Pavilion was a magnificent, onion-domed palace with minarets and ogee windows. It would have looked more in place in Jaipur or Rajasthan than it did in its actual location, between the staid facade of the Theatre Royal and the Old Steine with its university buildings and the buses that thundered along every ten seconds. But there it was, set in English parkland, thin paths winding between long borders where determined butterflies and bees squeezed the last of the year’s nectar from greying lavender bushes and buddleia whose purple plumes had already faded to brown. The gardens were full of self-consciously attractive young people eating lunch. The air smelled of cut grass, ground coffee, hummus and falafel. A dense clump of shrubs with a pair of scuffed boots protruding from its base puffed out a thin string of marijuana smoke.
The Brighton History Centre was in a room at the top of the Museum and Art Gallery. Luke walked unseeing through local history exhibitions and fine art. He told himself that he wasn’t going behind Charlene’s back as such, that nothing he was doing would get her in trouble, and that in fact, he was simply trying to research the case so that he could do what she had suggested, lay it to rest, even if all he had to do was to satisfy himself that there was no story to tell. He was hardly risking her job by coming here, unless Grand had full-time spies lying in wait in the town archives on the off-chance that one day someone would come and research his past. He was just exploring. That was all.
The room had clean modern pine desks and swivel chairs. Shelves stretched up to a ceiling ornate with white plasterwork and three huge domes inlaid with a dark green gloss and silver swirls. It was empty apart from Luke and two librarians, a smiling, slightly pop-eyed woman about his mum’s age and a man with a wispy beard. A research service advertised itself on a poster – competitively priced to undertake all your local history study needs – but Luke was too confident in his own skills to be tempted.
Luke knew that the oldest of the newspaper archives were not yet available online, but he had at least expected them to have been digitised onto a CD ROM. He was surprised, and a little intimidated, to learn that everything was on microfilm, something he had read about but never come across, even when studying for his Master’s. From filing cabinets he gathered little reels of film from the sixties, the daily local newspaper and a couple of long-defunct weeklies. The unblinking female librarian showed him how to place the roll of film under the glass slide, then use the knobs to zoom, pull back, move forward and rewind. As the first facsimile of a 1968 front page, complete with grainy photographs and advertisements,
‘God yeah. We’d have loved that. You can never have too much storage.’
So there was no basement. Good to know. Staring at the floor alerted him to one more hiding place that needed to be ruled out. Quietly, so that Caleb, who he now imagined to be listening with a glass at the wall, would not hear, Luke rolled back the carpets and prised up the central floorboards to shine a torch beneath them. His beam revealed nothing but sixty years of dust and dirt.
Right. Enough now. Michael Duffy had been truthful when he had said they had cleaned his grandmother’s house from top to bottom. Perhaps though the evidence, or the clue, had been removed. Perhaps there had been some ostensibly innocent possession of Kathleen’s – say, a red coat – hidden in the back of that old wardrobe. Perhaps even now Michael Duffy and his family were sifting through a lifetime’s possessions, unwittingly sending something vital to the charity shop, or bundling it away into the back of a wardrobe.
Imagination was for novelists. It was dangerous if you used it to plug the gaps that should be filled with facts. He had to back it up with something, before he let it possess him.
Chapter 16
Brighton Pavilion was a magnificent, onion-domed palace with minarets and ogee windows. It would have looked more in place in Jaipur or Rajasthan than it did in its actual location, between the staid facade of the Theatre Royal and the Old Steine with its university buildings and the buses that thundered along every ten seconds. But there it was, set in English parkland, thin paths winding between long borders where determined butterflies and bees squeezed the last of the year’s nectar from greying lavender bushes and buddleia whose purple plumes had already faded to brown. The gardens were full of self-consciously attractive young people eating lunch. The air smelled of cut grass, ground coffee, hummus and falafel. A dense clump of shrubs with a pair of scuffed boots protruding from its base puffed out a thin string of marijuana smoke.
The Brighton History Centre was in a room at the top of the Museum and Art Gallery. Luke walked unseeing through local history exhibitions and fine art. He told himself that he wasn’t going behind Charlene’s back as such, that nothing he was doing would get her in trouble, and that in fact, he was simply trying to research the case so that he could do what she had suggested, lay it to rest, even if all he had to do was to satisfy himself that there was no story to tell. He was hardly risking her job by coming here, unless Grand had full-time spies lying in wait in the town archives on the off-chance that one day someone would come and research his past. He was just exploring. That was all.
The room had clean modern pine desks and swivel chairs. Shelves stretched up to a ceiling ornate with white plasterwork and three huge domes inlaid with a dark green gloss and silver swirls. It was empty apart from Luke and two librarians, a smiling, slightly pop-eyed woman about his mum’s age and a man with a wispy beard. A research service advertised itself on a poster – competitively priced to undertake all your local history study needs – but Luke was too confident in his own skills to be tempted.
Luke knew that the oldest of the newspaper archives were not yet available online, but he had at least expected them to have been digitised onto a CD ROM. He was surprised, and a little intimidated, to learn that everything was on microfilm, something he had read about but never come across, even when studying for his Master’s. From filing cabinets he gathered little reels of film from the sixties, the daily local newspaper and a couple of long-defunct weeklies. The unblinking female librarian showed him how to place the roll of film under the glass slide, then use the knobs to zoom, pull back, move forward and rewind. As the first facsimile of a 1968 front page, complete with grainy photographs and advertisements,
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