So many stories, Cordon thought, fact or fiction, began with someone looking for someone else. Searching. He closed the book and carried it with him to the desk, the man with the carrier bags just leaving.
‘Two-fifty?’ Cordon queried.
‘If that’s what it says.’
‘Most of the others are less.’
‘That’s ’cause most of the others aren’t so good.’ Something sparkled, some fragment of gold, inside Carlin’s mouth when he smiled.
Cordon passed across a five-pound note and kept his hand out for the change.
‘Your daughter,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Your daughter.’
‘Who says I have a daughter?’
‘Rose. Letitia.’
Coins spilled through Carlin’s fingers. ‘You’re what? Police?’
‘More a friend.’
‘Of Letitia’s?’
Cordon nodded. ‘Down to you, that. The name. Or so she said.’
‘Suited her. Back then especially.’
‘Joy and happiness.’
‘That’s what it means.’ He shook his head. ‘Never liked Rose. Her mum’s choice, not mine.’
He broke off long enough to sell one of the Goths a book on Ancient and Medieval Necromancy.
‘You heard about her mother?’ Cordon asked. ‘About Maxine?’
Carlin nodded.
‘The reason she was in London,’ Cordon said, ‘as far as I can make out, she was looking for Letitia.’
‘Meant to come here, wasn’t she? Right after New Year. Called to say she was getting on the train. Last I heard of her. Till a couple of days back. Got a postcard. Here — I’ve got it somewhere.’ He started to rummage through one of the desk drawers. ‘Lake District somewhere. Here you are. Keswick.’
Cordon looked at a picture of artificially coloured lakes and mountains; spidery writing, kisses, a name.
‘Working in a hotel, that’s what she says.’
‘Why there?’
‘Why not? Law to herself, Letitia. Don’t seek to reason.’
‘You’re not worried then?’
‘No. I mean, I was, a bit anyway. But now I’ve heard …’ He gestured with his hands. ‘With her, that’s the way it is. Since she was knee high to a grasshopper it’s been the same. Mind of her own. Wouldn’t bend. Break, maybe, but not bend. And since she got of an age, no stopping her. Here today, gone tomorrow.’ A hasty smile. ‘Mostly the latter.’
He looked at the book in Cordon’s hand.
‘You want a bag for that or …’
‘No, thanks, you’re fine.’
‘Down for the day, is it?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Letitia phones — not as that’s likely — but if she does, who shall I say it was asking?’
Cordon fished out one of his cards and placed it on the desk.
‘Police, then. I was right.’
Cordon shrugged.
‘Police and a long way from home.’
Maybe too long, Cordon thought.
‘Enjoy the book,’ Carlin said.
‘Do my best.’
Charlie Feathers was still doing his thing as Cordon walked to the door, just hitting the closing chorus of ‘We’re Getting Closer to Being Apart’.
21
In the short space of time Cordon had been in the bookshop, the weather had changed: a cold wind buffeting along the narrow street, the first thrusts of rain. There was a pub a short way down on the opposite side, an exterior of blackened wood and brick. Cordon bought a pint of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord and took it across to a corner table, prepared to wait it out, the bookshop entrance just visible through a smear of glass. Two sups and he cracked open his book, the search for the sister, the missing girl. He was at chapter six, ‘Eureka’ — a journey downriver, shooting the rapids — when Carlin emerged and carried the boxes of sale books back inside; then, duffle bag on his shoulder, drab green waterproof still unzipped, he padlocked the door and turned away towards the interior of the town. Cordon swallowed the last mouthful of his lingering pint, used a beer mat to mark his place, and, book in hand, set out after him.
As the street broadened into a T-junction, he quickened his pace, crossing into a narrow ginnel between housebacks, then climbing a tall flight of stone steps that changed direction midway, following the line of the cliff.
Below, he could see the patchwork of boats stretched out across the stones below, the beach where he had sat earlier, staring at the sea. The rain less insistent now, little more than mist.
Gulls wheeling above his head, riding the wind — for a moment he could have been back in Newlyn — he continued to climb until the top of the steps was reached and the land levelled out, a crown of bushes ahead and a well-worn track posted to Hastings Country Park and the Saxon Shore Way. For a moment he thought Carlin had slipped from sight, but there he was, hood up, following a grass path away to the left; less hurried now, slowed perhaps by the climb, the realisation he was nearly home.
The path dropped down towards the rear gardens of some thirties houses, conservatories stuck to their backsides like carbuncles; a narrow ginnel leading out on to a quiet street, a crescent, the fading toll of an ice- cream van the only clear sound.
Cordon waited to see where Carlin was headed; watched as, at the gate to number seventeen, he fumbled out his keys. Dark curtains were partly drawn across the windows of the downstairs bay. In the garden, a gnome, three foot high, wore a black beret at a rakish angle on its head, dark glasses covering half its face, a Ban the Bomb symbol painted in psychedelic colours on its chest. A few desultory snowdrops gathered in a cluster beside the gravelled path.
Cordon waited until the front door had opened and closed.
The gate squeaked a little at his touch.
No bell, he knocked.
Carlin opened up with a flourish, prepared to repel some unwanted vendor of overpriced homeware or charity beggar lobbying on behalf of a home for blind donkeys.
The sight of Cordon knocked him back, but not for long.
‘Decided to catch a later train?’
‘Something like that.’
‘It’s not about the book? Changed your mind? Because if it is, we open again tomorrow at ten. Fifty per cent of the cover price if you return it within six days. Twenty-five thereafter.’
‘It’s not the book.’
Carlin nodded, gave a little tug at his wisp of beard. ‘She’s not here, you know.’
‘So you say.’
Carlin held his gaze, then stepped back inside, leaving the door wide open. Cordon followed him, clicking it closed at his back.
There were posters from various rock concerts framed on the walls; photographs of singers and musicians
