‘You made it back. I didn’t know if you would,’ she said to Adrian. That was when she noticed his preoccupied, slightly deflated look.
‘I spoke to my contact. I thought they’d have a lead but they said what everyone else around here knows; Wagstaff was a playboy all through the sixties and seventies, always had a beautiful woman on his arm, but that doesn’t confirm anything about him knowing Jonathan’s mum or having a relationship with her in the eighties.’
Mirren could see he really had a bee in his bonnet. ‘You’ve been chasing it up all afternoon? Didn’t you have family to see?’
‘Oh I saw them,’ he said distractedly. ‘I’m not giving up yet. I know where we can find concrete information about Olivia and Wagstaff. Are you free now? Want to come?’
Mirren thought about the evening she’d had planned, having been too proud to accept Kelsey’s invitation to eat takeaway food at the bedsit with her and Jonathan – irrelevant now they’d made a dash for Scotland. There wasIt’s A Wonderful Lifeprimed to watch on her laptop and a big, tartan tin of shortbread – Mirren’s favourite – her mum had sent post restante to the local post office. Mirren and Kelsey had been surprised to learn the postie didn’t deliver to riverside moorings and had hastily set up the barge’s mailbox. The shortbread had been Mirren’s first and only mail since moving-in day.
‘I’ve got nothing planned,’ she told him.
‘Great. Are you hungry? You should probably eat first.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ she lied, too impatient to find out where they were going.
‘Not even for these?’ He produced a box of beautifully beribboned chocolates from behind his back, the fancy kind from the little chocolatier in the arcade.
‘OK, maybe I’m a little peckish.’Why am I grinning so much? And what’s with that rush of adrenaline?She scanned his face, wondering if he was feeling it too and trying to fight the excitement bubbling up within her, but it was too late because he was smiling at her and wishing her a happy Christmas under the streetlights and every pound of her flesh wanted to betray her vow and kiss him.
‘Merry Christmas,’ she said, forcing herself to be sensible. ‘Here, I have something for you too.’ From her pocket she produced the John Wagstaff autobiography, which he took with a wry laugh.
‘Our mark?’
‘That’s right… and there’s this as well.’ Her other hand grasped a bottle of champagne from the bar fridge. It had cost her week’s tips but it was Christmas Eve after all and she’d wanted to give him something nice.Because that’s what friends do. Platonic, chummy friends who don’t fancy each other.
‘Come on, we can pop that cork where we’re going,’ he said, taking the bottle and jamming his free hand into his long coat, his black cashmere scarf flapping in the cold breeze. ‘Follow me.’
There were no signs of life at theExaminerofficers as they crept up the dark, creaking staircase past Adrian’s office, neat and tidy with his Christmas cards displayed on the wall.
‘Is this breaking and entering?’ Mirren hissed quietly.
‘Why are you whispering?’ Adrian whispered back, breaking into a laugh and flicking the lights on as they climbed up to the top floor. ‘It’s not breaking in if you work here and you have a key.’
‘Fair enough. So what are we looking for?’
Adrian led the way into the room next to Mr Ferdinand’s dark office. The whole building was silent and surprisingly warm. The heating system worked even if the Editor in Chief didn’t. Mirren couldn’t control her feelings of defeat as she glanced around the shabby, haphazard offices on the upper floors, comparing them to the sleek and modernBroadsheetbuilding. If she couldn’t even get a writing job here, she really had hit rock bottom.
The lights flared on revealing what looked like a cross between a store room and a library, but the cabinets that lined the walls held little white boxes instead of books and there, taking up a quarter of the room and up against the far wall, stood a great grey machine with a chair in front of it.
Adrian walked over to it. ‘So this is the…’
‘Microfilm reader,’ Mirren cut in. ‘For looking through old newspapers archived onto reels. I know exactly what it is and how to use it. I did my journalism degree in the days before newspaper archives were digitised, remember?’ She was already crouching by the plug and switching it on at the mains, leaving Adrian raking a hand through his hair, smiling at her enthusiasm. ‘Where did you study?’ she asked as the machine whirred into life and the bulb behind its screen glowed dimly. Mirren had used these contraptions, once the height of data storage technology, time and again searching old newspaper archives and she loved its clunking simplicity.
‘I didn’t study anywhere,’ Adrian replied. ‘I joined the staff here as the Saturday tea and photocopying boy when I was fifteen, then I moved up to being a junior reporter straight out of school with my A-levels in English, Art and Fashion.’ He looked a little sheepish at the admission. ‘Nothing like a fancy journalism degree for me, I’m afraid.’ His look suggested he expected Mirren to be disappointed somehow, but it didn’t dim her view of him in the slightest.
‘I knew you were a bit of a fashionista,’ she grinned, trying not to run her eyes over his smart outfit – or more specifically, she was avoiding thinking about how his clothes spoke of the perfectly defined model-like frame beneath.Dammit, if he wasn’t smiling shyly now with a hint of red in the apples of his cheeks beneath those specs. She snapped her eyes back to the screen. ‘Umm, so Mr Ferdinand was your mentor, then?’
‘He taught me everything he knows about the industry, shame half of it was fifty years out of date.’ Adrian looked around at the dusty clutter of the archive room. ‘We’re losing advertising revenue every year. I’m not supposed to know this, but our parent company, Eagle Media, are sniffing around again. I’d be surprised if we were still open next Christmas.’
‘What would you do then?’
He shrugged. ‘All I ever wanted to do was work at this paper. Well, I used to want that, and I was proud of it too. Back when we were famous for our theatre coverage. That was fifteen years ago now, can you believe it? I still review every play that comes to town; sometimes I interview the directors or actors, but I get the feeling nobody reads my columns anymore. We’re the paper you pick up if you’ve got kittens to sell… or you’re looking to line your budgie cage.’ There it was again, that dark, brooding look she’d seen him fight so many times now. ‘Maybe the big bosses will move me to theHoneybourne Gazetteeror theAlcester Buglerwhen this place closes.’
He was looking up now at the ornate yellowing cornicing and the stained glass and leading on the skylights. There was still the shell of a fine building to admire and, if you looked past the mess, it hinted at the glamour of a lost age of reporting. The sheen over Adrian’s eyes told Mirren he was picturing it now, back when he was a teenager at the end of theExaminer’s long heyday, before the rot set in.
‘Anyway,’ he forced out a big sigh. ‘What year are we looking for?’
‘Oh! Of course!’ Mirren awoke from the hazy pleasure of watching him. ‘Jonathan’s thirty-two, so he was born in…’
