Barry Maitland: Dark Mirror

‘Oh yes, Donald,’ Kathy said. ‘I’m interested.’

•

Kathy couldn’t find Pip at first in the offices of the British Library, hidden behind a mound of books, and when she finally dug her out, the DC blinked and looked disoriented, as if surfacing from a great depth.

‘Blimey, you been here long, boss?’

‘No, just arrived. How’s it going? Brock said you were doing a great job.’

‘Did he?’ She brightened a little. ‘Not sure if I am, but still.’

‘Show me.’

Pip took her through the books she’d checked so far, without discovering anything that looked significant.

Kathy said, ‘I’ve just learned that Tina spent last Wednesday evening in here, working on something, and I’m wondering what it was.’

‘Wednesday… here we are.’ Pip showed her the printout. ‘Just two requests.’

Kathy looked at the entries: the Haverlock diary and Sir Robert Harding’s second book about Bengal, After Midnight. ‘Have you looked at these?’

‘ After Midnight is here somewhere. Brock asked me about that. I haven’t seen the diary yet. Shall I ask them to get it?’

‘Yes, do that, and I’ll buy you a coffee while we’re waiting.’

When they returned from the cafe there was a note waiting on the desk: Request for Diary, author H. Haverlock, Add. 507861.86…. . NOT AVAILABLE.

They found a library assistant who said, ‘May be lost, or withdrawn for repairs.’

‘Or on loan to someone else?’ Kathy suggested.

The woman shook her head. ‘It’d say.’ She tapped at her computer for a moment. ‘No, it’s down as not yet returned by the last person who requested it.’

‘That would be Tina Flowers.’

Another shake of the head, her finger running across the screen. ‘She returned it last thing on Wednesday. The final request was the following day, the twelfth, at eight minutes past nine, as soon as we opened. By a Dr Anthony da Silva.’

Kathy thought. ‘Did he request anything else that day?’

Another search, then the woman showed them the entry on the screen: After Midnight: A Memoir of Bengal, 1947-71, author R. Harding, Add. 507861.103.

‘But we have that here,’ Kathy said. ‘Unless there’s more than one copy.’

‘No, that’s it. It was returned later that morning.’

‘So he asked for both the books that Tina had been investigating the previous evening, and now one of them is missing.’

‘How would he know what she’d requested?’ Pip asked. ‘Could he have accessed her records?’

‘No.’ More tapping. ‘But he was here that evening. See? He requested several books-about arsenic by the looks of it. Maybe he met her, saw what she was reading.’

‘It makes sense,’ Kathy said when they returned to Pip’s table. ‘He had finally traced the source of Marion’s revelations in her paper to the Cornell conference, and he knew that Tina had found it too.’

‘So he stole the book and murdered her. Kind of explains everything, doesn’t it?’ Pip said.

‘Looks like it.’ Kathy reached for the Harding memoir from the book pile, and opened it to a handwritten dedication on the inside cover: To my very dear friend Toby Havelock, a mischievous memoir, from one old India hand to another. Bob Harding. She flicked through the book. ‘And this, about the twentieth century, would have been of no interest to him.’

‘Brock found a reference to the Warrenders in there,’ Pip told her, and Kathy nodded.

‘Yes, he showed me a copy.’ She checked the index and read the passage again. ‘Marion must have found this while she was searching through that family collection, and noticed the reference.’ Kathy tried to imagine Marion’s method, skimming hundreds of books for obscure clues and trails, scanning their chapter headings, their indexes, for her key words. Arsenic, for instance. She looked it up in the index of Harding’s book, and there it was, page 213. She turned to the place, and found no such page. It had been very neatly sliced away, close to the binding. ‘Look at this,’ she said, showing Pip.

‘You think da Silva vandalised it before he returned it?’

‘Who knows? I’d better tell Brock what we’ve discovered.’

When she got through to him and described the sequence they had uncovered, he was grimly pleased.

‘Well done,’ he said. ‘I thought the answer must lie in those books somewhere. We’d better have him in.’

‘Yes.’

‘You sound unsure.’

‘No, I’m just wondering what was in that missing page of the Harding book. It may be nothing at all to do with da Silva of course, but I’m wondering. Suppose there was something there about using arsenic as a poison, some traditional Indian preparation perhaps that Harding described, which maybe Marion discovered and told her tutor about, and then da Silva used it on his two victims.’

‘I see, yes. Another link. All right, but there are other copies of that book, aren’t there? I seem to remember it appeared on the lists of both the National Archives and the London Library borrowings. I remember wondering why they needed to look at it in three different places.’

‘I’ll check.’

Kathy rang off, still uneasy. She hadn’t mentioned it to Brock, but what had really unsettled her was her session with the Warrenders. She was haunted by Emily’s sickly appearance, the unhealthy glitter in her eye and air of despair, and her mother’s comment that she thought she may have been poisoned too. And the terrible thought Not another one, please God, had been followed by an even more shocking one: Three young women, following obsessively in each other’s footsteps, like a suicide chain.

No, Kathy told herself, not that. Brock’s right, da Silva’s the one.

‘Come on,’ she told Pip. ‘Let’s take a drive. Where was the next place that Marion found this After Midnight book, after she discovered it in the archives here?’

Pip checked. ‘The National Archives.’

‘Okay, we’ll go there.’ twenty-nine

T he National Archives, housing nine hundred years of official records back to the Domesday Book, is housed in a modern building on a curve of the river near the botanical gardens at Kew. They found their way to a member of staff who listened to what they were after, intrigued by the request, and got to work on her computer.

‘Yes, it’s here.’

‘Do you have its borrowing record?’

‘I can get that.’ They waited a moment, then, ‘Not terribly popular, only two calls in the past year: T. Flowers within the past week, and before that M. Summers last August.’

‘No Anthony da Silva?’

‘’Fraid not. Do you want to have a look at it?’

‘Yes please.’

The woman returned after a while with the now familiar small green volume in her hand, and gave it to Kathy. This time the dedication in the flysheet read: To the Public Records Office, in appreciation of your generous assistance in the preparation of this little book. Robert Harding KCMG.

Kathy turned to page 213 and found it to be, as at the British Library, missing.

•

Kathy saw that the greenery in the square had thickened and darkened during the past week into more mature, summery foliage, although perversely the weather had turned cold again and grey. They mounted the front steps, went into the library and asked for Gael Rayner.

‘Any news?’ she said, voice hushed.

‘Not really, Gael. We’re trying to retrace Tina Flowers’ movements in the days before she died, last Thursday.’

‘Oh yes, we heard all about that, and of course your colleague came to collect the record of Marion’s borrowings.’ She nodded at Pip. ‘We just couldn’t believe it, Marion’s friend, taken in the same way. We’re all still in shock.’