Three Things About Elsie(65)

I raised my eyebrows at Jack. ‘Bit old-fashioned, isn’t it?’ I whispered, because it seemed wrong to intrude on the quiet. It felt like a library, but the words were crochets and quavers, and the stories had all jumped ship and written themselves into songs.

We looked up at a wall of photographs, and the past gazed back at us. Black-and-white ballrooms. A hundred foxtrots, captured forever within a lens. Stages crowded with musicians, hardwood floors crowded with dancers. There were band leaders, their batons poised into a smile, and singers leaning their songs into chrome microphones.

‘Memorabilia,’ I said. ‘There are packets of them as well.’ I pointed to boxes under the counter, where hundreds of photographs wrapped in cellophane waited to be reclaimed.

‘Perhaps we’re in there somewhere,’ said Elsie.

‘I doubt there will be any of us. We weren’t fancy enough, I don’t think. Despite Gwen’s best efforts.’

Jack walked closer to the photographs. ‘Al Bowlly again,’ he said, and pointed to the top row. ‘He gets everywhere, doesn’t he?’

‘Clacton-on-Sea, 1939.’

The voice appeared from the back of the shop. I gave a little start. When we turned, there was a man standing in the shadows, watching us closely from behind a tuba.

‘Britain’s first pop star. That’s what they called him.’ The man walked into the light. Short. Round. A pencil moustache so thin, it made me wonder why he’d bothered in the first place. ‘Quite the heart-throb in his day.’

‘I remember when he died,’ Elsie said. ‘We were all quite beside ourselves.’

‘The war claimed far too many, far too soon.’ The man clasped his hands together in a little prayer. ‘Although made even more tragic, given the circumstances.’

Jack turned on his walking stick. ‘What happened?’

And so the shopkeeper told us. How Al Bowlly had been reading in bed when the air-raid siren had sounded, and he’d chosen to stay with his book, rather than go to the shelter.

‘They found him after the all-clear,’ he said. ‘Head injury from the blast. Barely a mark on him.’

‘It makes you want to go back, doesn’t it?’ I said. ‘Tell him to get to the shelter. Tell him there will be a lifetime of books, if he just changes his mind.’

We all stared at the photograph.

‘Small decisions,’ Jack said. ‘It’s always the small decisions that change a life.’

The man coughed and unclasped his hands. ‘Was it Al Bowlly you were particularly interested in?’

I looked around the shop. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘No. To be honest, I’m not even sure.’

The man pursed his lips, and the moustache did a little shimmy across his top lip. ‘Not sure?’ he said.

Jack stepped forward. ‘We’re trying to trace someone. Someone called Gabriel Price. We think he might have a connection with this shop. Or Al Bowlly. Or perhaps he might have no connection at all, and we’re barking up the wrong tree.’

The man smiled and his moustache straightened itself out again. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Gabriel Price. Not the wrong tree at all. In fact, very much the right tree, if you’ll allow me.’





HANDY SIMON


The park gates were clearly Barry’s pièce de résistance. He began telling the story of a severed hand, waving his cane around and putting on different voices, but by this time the wind had got up and Simon found himself wishing he was back at the hotel with a crème de menthe and a bit of central heating. He wasn’t the only one, by the look of it. The group was beginning to fray at the edges. A couple of people had stayed behind to look in the window of a shoe shop, and someone else had wandered over the road and was staring at a bus timetable.

‘Can we all stay together?’ Miss Ambrose shouted down the street, but her words were swallowed up by a pub door. She turned to Simon. ‘Do you think we ought to have a head count?’

Simon took a deep breath and pulled the clipboard from his rucksack. He had hoped, in the absence of Miss Bissell, to have a few hours free from counting heads, but he should have known that the influence of Miss Bissell was always far weightier than Miss Bissell herself. Sometimes, it felt easier when she was actually there.

When he was done Miss Ambrose took the clipboard from him and scanned the names. ‘Trust Florence to be involved in the mystery.’

‘They’ve probably just been waylaid by a public lavatory,’ said Simon. ‘Or a charity-shop window. They’re probably further down the pavement.’

Miss Ambrose stepped into the road to look.

‘Watch out!’ Gabriel Price pulled her from the path of a moped, and back to the safety of the kerb. ‘You want to be careful, Miss Ambrose. That could have been a nasty accident.’

‘Mr Price.’ She looked up and tried to steal back her breath. ‘I was just checking. We appear to have lost Florence and her friends.’

Gabriel Price picked up Miss Ambrose’s bag, which had dropped into the gutter, and he handed it back to her. ‘I do believe,’ he said, ‘you’ll find them in the music shop.’

‘I didn’t know Miss Claybourne was musical,’ said Simon.

Gabriel Price smiled. ‘I really couldn’t comment on that,’ he said.