Property of a Lady(26)
‘Pity,’ said Michael. ‘Did you phone Nell? Would it be all right for me to call?’
‘She says you’re very welcome. My advice, though, is if you do, don’t stay too long. She’s all right for short spells, but that’s about all.’
‘I will call,’ said Michael. ‘But I’ll bear your advice in mind. In the meantime, Inspector, does Marston Lacy have a newspaper? Ah, good. Can you give me directions? And d’you know if it keeps archives?’
The newspaper offices turned out to be part of a large group, with a chain of papers covering two counties, which Michael thought augured well for an archive department.
The head office was on the other side of the county. He followed Inspector Brent’s directions carefully, realizing he was heading due west, and that he was close to, if not actually crossing, the border into Wales. Village names started to begin with two LLs and end with rhy or og, and most of the signs were in Welsh without the English translation. He rather liked this; he liked the feeling that this was where England crossed over into Wales and where the lyrical Welsh language still lived.
The newspaper said it did indeed have almost all the back issues for the Marston Lacy and Bryn Marston Advertiser, as far back as 1915.
‘We started as a news-sheet to inform people about the Great War,’ said the receptionist. ‘There’s no problem whatever about access to back issues. We get a lot of people wanting to trace odds and ends of local history. And it’s what newspapers are for, isn’t it? To inform people. What years were you interested in?’
‘The nineteen sixties, please.’
As he sat down at the microfiche screen, he thought this was where and how history was stored nowadays. It no longer preserved itself in carefully folded tissue paper, with lavender or camphor or magic charms scattered in the creases, nor was it set down in crabbed writing on curling brown paper, or stored in leather-bound books or pipe rolls or tax chronicles. The modern age packed its history away on microchips and SIM cards and within the electronic and Ethernet mysteries deep inside computers. Michael considered this, and he wondered what would happen to the present age’s history if the language of computers were to be lost. Would this present civilization become lost for all time, or would the people of the far future be able to decipher the fragments that survived, in the way Egyptologists deciphered tomb writings?
The sixties, as experienced in this part of the British Isles, looked to be a slightly gentler version of what was going on elsewhere. This quiet part of England-going-on-Wales did not seem to have succumbed to flower power or free love, although people in the photographs wore miniskirts and boots, and the girls had long, straight hair and Cleopatra-style eye make-up. The men sported Beatles’ hairstyles and narrow trousers.
At first he thought he was not going to find what he wanted – that the brief disappearance of a seven-year-old girl would have been too slight an incident to warrant a newspaper report. And then, quite suddenly, it was there. Three columns of a news story, with a photo of a small girl with long hair and a slightly turned-up nose that gave her an impish, rather attractive, look.
MISSING GIRL FOUND SAFE AND WELL IN CHURCHYARD
Local girl Evie Blythe was last night found alive and well in St Paul’s Churchyard, after being missing from her home for almost forty-eight hours. Local residents helped look for her after she failed to return home from school on Tuesday after a sports’ afternoon – searching all night and most of the following day.
At first it was feared Evie, 7, had been abducted, and fears grew for her safety. However, she was found by searchers near an old grave in the disused part of the churchyard, apparently suffering a temporary loss of memory.
Older inhabitants of Marston Lacy recalled a similar case before the war, when a small girl vanished for several days and was later found in the same churchyard, apparently with no notion of how she got there. But police have quashed speculation that there could be some form of copycat crime at work.
Superintendent Halden told our reporter that not only were the two cases a good thirty years apart, but in neither case did there appear to be any sinister motive. ‘We can only conclude that Evie was overcome by tiredness after the school sports’ event,’ he said. ‘And that she succumbed to a bout of temporary amnesia. We’re delighted to have found her safe and well.’
It is known that short-term amnesia can sometimes strike at random, more often after some form of trauma. It is unusual in so young a child, but not entirely unknown.
Evie told our reporter that she can’t remember how she came to be in the churchyard. ‘It’s a fusty old place,’ she said. ‘I’m not going there again.’
St Paul’s Church, thought Michael, leaning back from the screen and turning his head from side to side to ease the tension that had built up in his neck and shoulders. She was found in the churchyard near an old grave. So was another girl thirty years before that. He hesitated about searching for the earlier story, but it was more important to locate St Paul’s Church and get out there as soon as possible.
He went out to request a printout of the article and, while he waited for it, asked the helpful receptionist if there was a local phone book he could consult.
There was one church dedicated to St Paul in the phone book. It was listed as St Paul the Apostle, and it was on the edge of Marston Lacy. Michael got back into the car, turned it round, and headed back.