Three Things About Elsie(53)

‘I’d give that a miss, if I were you,’ Jack said. ‘We don’t want to rile him.’

Of course Jack and Elsie agreed with each other. They always agreed with each other. But riling Ronnie Butler was just what I wanted. He’d spent the last sixty years riling me, creeping into my mind uninvited, casting a shadow of himself over everything I had – or hadn’t – done with my life. Since the night Beryl died, there hadn’t been a day when he hadn’t wandered into my thoughts. Those were the days when the past felt so nearby, it was as though I could have taken a step and walked through it all over again. So when Jack returned to the cupboard, and Elsie decided to lift up a rug, I slipped the sheet music underneath one of the beige cushions and I left it there. It was my sheet music, and it was up to me what I did with it.

‘I really don’t think there’s anything in here.’ Jack stood in the middle of the sitting room and looked around. ‘How about we try the bedroom?’

The bland quiet of the sitting room had leaked into the rest of the flat, and the bedroom looked more like the kind of place you’d sleep somewhere off the M6. Snooping around someone else’s sideboard had felt strange, but looking around the room they slept in felt even stranger, and we all stood in the doorway, waiting.

‘Come on. Let’s get it over with,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll check the wardrobes and you look under the bed.’

Elsie took one side and I took the other, and when I knelt down and lifted the eiderdown, I saw her peering back at me from the other side.

‘Can you see anything?’ I lifted the material a little further.

‘Only your face,’ she said.

‘Nothing in here,’ Jack said from inside the wardrobe. ‘He hasn’t got many clothes.’

‘Have you checked all the pockets?’ I said. ‘People always find things in pockets on the television.’

‘Of course.’ Jack appeared from behind the wardrobe door and disappeared again.

The bedside drawer only contained a Vicks Sinex Nasal Spray and an old paperback.

‘Eighty-odd years and nothing to show for himself,’ said Jack. ‘It’s a bit of a rum do, isn’t it?’

We checked the kitchen, although there was nothing in there apart from Miss Bissell’s standard collection of saucepans and crockery. Even the fridge was bare.

‘Not even a pint of milk,’ I said. ‘Or half an upside-down orange.’

I pulled open one of the little plastic drawers and Elsie looked inside. It was unoccupied. ‘Even with a meal on a wheel,’ she said, ‘you’d think he’d have something in here.’

‘A jar of pickled onions,’ I said. ‘Or an opened tin of spaghetti hoops.’

‘It’s disappointing,’ said Jack. ‘After all that effort.’

Elsie sighed. ‘Are you hungry, Florence?’

‘A little bit,’ I said.

‘Had to be done, though.’ Jack straightened his cap. ‘It needed the once-over.’

‘So what now?’ I said. ‘We’ve rummaged in every corner of his life, and there’s nothing.’

‘We need to regroup.’ Jack nodded at himself as we passed a mirror. ‘We must be missing something.’

We’d reached the hallway (which wasn’t a hallway at all, but a square foot of beige carpet between the kitchen and the front door), when Elsie grabbed my arm.

‘His shoes. We didn’t check his shoes.’

I couldn’t understand what she meant at first.

‘Don’t you remember? Ronnie always used to hide things in his shoes. Matches, money, anything he didn’t want someone else to get their hands on.’

‘Of course.’ Jack was reaching for the front door, but my words made him stop and turn. ‘We need to look in his shoes.’

I went back into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe door. A pair of brown lace-ups looked back at me from a quiet darkness. They seemed harmless enough. The toes were a little tarnished and there was a brush of mud on the heels. I reached inside each one and felt around. Nothing; just the smooth, dark feel of leather. Perhaps we’d got it wrong. Perhaps Ronnie had grown out of silly habits, and he no longer hid things in there. As I lifted my hand out of the second one, though, the tips of my fingers felt something strange. The sole seemed to be raised, in the corner. It was just a bump, barely noticeable, but when I lifted it, there was a piece of lined paper, folded many more times than it needed to be, with a smudge of blue ink on the edges.

‘Bingo.’ I said it so loudly, Jack and Elsie stuck their heads around the door.

‘Come on then, let’s get it opened.’ Jack put his face very close to the paper, and he squinted.

‘Give me a chance,’ I said. It was difficult to unfold; the creases were tight and unhelpful, as though it had waited to be opened for a very long time. Eventually, I smoothed it out and placed it on the bedspread.

‘It looks like a telephone number,’ I said.

‘Or a code?’ Elsie said.

‘I think it’s a telephone number as well. It has the right number of digits,’ Jack pointed at the piece of paper.

‘Let’s ring it!’ I clapped my hands and Elsie blinked along with each clap.

‘Let’s just bide our time,’ Jack said. ‘Copy it down and put the paper back where we found it.’