Reluctantly Home(48)

‘We do indeed,’ he said with a smile that suggested that not many people asked him for such items and it would be a librarian’s pleasure to dig them out for her. ‘Do you know which year you’re interested in?’

‘1983, please,’ she replied quickly. ‘From August to December.’

‘I imagine that’s before you were born,’ the librarian commented, and then immediately looked a little awkward, as if this were too personal a statement to have made, but Pip smiled broadly back at him and nodded.

‘Just give me one moment and I’ll locate them for you,’ he said, and disappeared towards the stairs.

Pip entertained herself by flicking through the tourist information leaflets that were sitting in a rack on the table. There were so many interesting-looking things to do nearby. It was funny, when you lived in a place, how few of them you ever thought about visiting. She checked herself. She didn’t live here. She was just passing through. She would be back in London before she knew it.

‘It’s Philippa, isn’t it?’ a voice said at her back. ‘Philippa Appleby. Please tell me that I’m right or I’m going to feel awfully foolish.’

Pip knew the voice at once. ‘Mr Lancaster!’ she said, spinning round to look at him.

The librarian had seemed ancient to her when she had been a girl, although she supposed he hadn’t been much over forty. He looked unchanged now except that his thick dark hair was grey. Even his glasses were the same: unflattering gold frames in a retro shape.

‘Well I never,’ he said, holding out a hand for her to shake. ‘How very lovely to see you. And you must call me Keith. You’re not a schoolgirl any more, you know.’

Pip thought there was more chance of hell freezing over than of her addressing Mr Lancaster by his first name, but she grinned at him.

‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘Are you still working here? I did wonder when I came in, but I thought that . . .’

‘I’d be far too decrepit to still be holding down a job?’ he finished for her.

‘No! Of course not,’ protested Pip, although that was precisely what she had thought. She felt her cheeks betray her.

‘I’m very well, thank you, my dear. And I just work part-time these days. Things are done differently but I try to keep up. Don’t want to be accused of being an old fuddy-duddy.’

He smiled, and Pip saw that his teeth were almost the same beige as his jumper. Then his expression changed, and he put a hand out to touch her gently on her arm.

‘And I was so sorry to hear of your trouble,’ he said.

It was all Pip could do not to roll her eyes. Was there anybody in this whole town who didn’t know about ‘her trouble’? The evidence suggested not, but they all meant well, and their wishes were kindly given.

‘Thank you,’ she replied.

She was saved from having to say anything else by the arrival of the first man carrying a cardboard storage box with ‘Southwold Gazette – 1983’ written on its side in black marker pen.

‘Here you are,’ he said as he approached.

‘Now then, Ian, this young lady has been coming to this library since she was knee-high to a grasshopper. I could barely keep up with her. She was always in here, changing her books and ordering things in from Ipswich. But it didn’t go to waste, because she went on to be a barrister in London. That’s right, isn’t it, Philippa?’ He looked to her for confirmation, looking almost as proud as if he had fathered her himself.

‘That’s right,’ said Pip as she reached for the box of microfiches, anxious not to get into a discussion about her more recent history. ‘Are the readers still in the back room?’ she asked, cocking her head in that direction.

‘Oh yes,’ laughed Mr Lancaster. ‘We don’t like change for change’s sake around here.’

Pip saw him eyeing the box curiously, but she wanted to talk about what she was looking for even less than she wanted to discuss the accident.

‘Thanks for your help,’ she said dismissively. ‘And lovely to see you again, Mr Lancaster.’

She could feel his eyes boring into the back of her head as she walked away.

In the back room, she picked the machine in the corner that faced outwards so that she could see people approaching, and set the box down on the desk. Then she sat down, flicked the light on and took the first tape out. The label read June 1983. That was too early. She put it back, skipped past July and pulled August out. Then she fitted it into the machine and began to scroll through the pages.

According to the diary, Scarlet must have died on Wednesday the seventeenth, or at least that was the first day when Evelyn hadn’t written anything. It didn’t take long to locate the story. As Pip had assumed, it was front-page news.

Child dies in drowning tragedy

A local family is in mourning after a devastating accident last Wednesday. Three-year-old Scarlet Mountcastle wandered away from her family home and was found drowned in a shallow pond in a neighbouring garden a short time afterwards. The child’s mother, Evelyn Mountcastle, an actress, was born and bred in the town. Miss Mountcastle, who lives with her sister Joan in the family home, is said to be too distraught to speak to our reporters but we understand that she has been helping the police with their enquiries into the death of the child. Miss Mountcastle appeared in minor roles in several television series in the 1970s before settling back in the town with her daughter. A neighbour told our reporter, ‘Scarlet was a delightful child, always smiling. She was never on her own and her mother totally doted on her. It’s hard to see how this could have happened.’ When asking about Scarlet’s father, our reporter was told that ‘there was no sign of him on the scene. The Mountcastles always kept themselves to themselves.’ A private service for family only will be held at St Edmund’s.