‘Certain people don’t like giving personal information,’ Gilbert said with the air of a detective who has walked the mean streets all his life. ‘Me, I have no problem telling anyone my name. It’s Paul Gilbert. What’s yours?’
She turned an extra shade of pink and said after a moment’s hesitation, ‘Tulip.’
‘Cool. How about a drink sometime soon, Tulip?’ It wasn’t the best pick-up line in the world and she didn’t rise to it at once.
‘Are you really a detective?’
‘Of course. That’s why I’m here.’
‘Honestly?’
‘Want to see my warrant card?’ He made it sound like seduction.
She smiled and shook her head. ‘I believe you.’
Detective work at Gilbert’s level was mostly plod, plod, but when a chance to make it work for you arrived you’d be a fool to back down. The date was fixed for Friday evening. By some miracle he also remembered to ask the boring question that would surely get him a grunt of approval from Peter Diamond. ‘Coming back to these forms, would you happen to recognise the initials of the librarian who issued the book in 1996? The letters look like M.S. and it’s the same person each time.’
She studied the form again. ‘I wish I could help, but I’ve not been here long.’
‘Maybe one of your colleagues would know.’
‘I can ask.’ Tulip got up and crossed the room and Gilbert watched her movement in perilously high heels and was even more delighted he’d fixed that date.
She spoke to one of her colleagues at a computer and soon returned. ‘M.S. is Mike Sealyham.’
‘You’re a star. Is he about?’
‘Not any more. He relocated to the records office late last year. He’s an archivist now.’
With reluctance Gilbert wrenched himself away. The library visit had confounded all his expectations. He’d made the date with Tulip and there might even be something worth investigating, as Diamond had predicted.
Feeling buoyant enough to act on his own initiative, he took the short walk from the Podium to the Guildhall, where he was directed to the search room. Mike Sealyham had to be the silver-haired man behind the enquiry desk.
‘You’ve come to the right bloke,’ he said, after Gilbert had explained his mission. ‘I’m the old-stager here, one of the few who can remember working in that lovely building at eighteen Queen Square. I think it was 1993 when we all moved to the Podium.’
‘This was later. I’m interested in 1996, when the book was last borrowed,’ Gilbert said. ‘That would have been in the Podium.’
‘Correct.’
‘Would you happen to remember who requested it?’
‘That’s asking a lot.’ Mike Sealyham shook his head. ‘Valuable items like that were stored in the strong room. I would have collected it from there and returned it. More than twenty years ago? I’m sorry to tell you I don’t have any memory of this.’
‘I’m thinking this guy may have been about seventy, good-looking, possibly with false teeth, charming, but not particularly well dressed. Gave his name as Mason, from Victoria Street.’
‘We saw a lot of retired men in the library.’
‘Missing a finger on his right hand.’
‘Him?’ Sealyham was suddenly as alert as a meerkat. ‘I do remember him.’
‘You do?’ Gilbert felt like giving him a hug.
‘He was a regular in the library. I don’t know where Victoria Street is, but he didn’t live there and I don’t suppose his name was Mason either.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘Because I used to see him most mornings on my way to work and he always came out of a house in Moon Street.’
‘Moon Street?’ Every police officer knew the notorious Moon Street estate, where drug busts were as regular as the postman.
‘A turn off James Street West. Not the most salubrious street in Bath. I lived round the corner from him, in Mars Court. Couldn’t afford any better on the salary I got.’
‘Did you challenge him about giving a false address?’
‘I suppose I should have done, but no. I sympathised. I wasn’t proud of living there myself. He seemed all right. Didn’t deface the books or anything.’
‘So you remember him pretty well?’
‘When you mentioned the missing finger, yes. We had brief conversations about his researches. Nice man. He was writing something on eighteenth-century Bath, if I remember.’
‘Beau Nash?’
‘Possibly. The Beau is unavoidable if you’re studying that period. Oh, and it’s coming back to me. He was knowledgeable about old furniture — Hepplewhite and so forth. Must have dealt in it at some time, I reckon.’
Paul Gilbert was on a roll. A man with a missing finger who supplied a false name and address and was into antique furniture. This was looking awfully like the conman who had ended up as the skeleton in the loft.
‘I don’t suppose you remember the number of the house.’
‘Where he lived? Offhand, I couldn’t tell you.’
‘Pity.’
‘But I can show it to you on Google Earth.’
‘Wicked.’
In seconds, Sealyham was using the website to zoom in on Britain, on Bath, on Moon Street and on a particular house in a two-storey terrace that turned out to be number 8.
What next for Paul Gilbert? The right thing was to call Peter Diamond, report on his findings and get further instructions. But when you’re really motoring, you don’t want to stop. Except that this wasn’t a motoring proposition. He was ten minutes’ walk away, maximum. He would definitely walk. Park your car anywhere in the Moon Street estate and you might not see it again.
The buildings had been thrown up in the 1960s, replacing Victorian slums with twentieth-century slums said to be maisonettes when the word had some cachet. It was social housing on the cheap — built with that nauseous lemon-coloured reconstituted Bath stone — and now it screamed out for demolition.
Thanks to Google Earth, Gilbert knew precisely which house Mr. Mason — or Mr. Harrod — had occupied. The present tenant in number 8 wasn’t likely to know who had lived there twenty years ago, but there is an unwritten law that in any estate there will be someone who has been around forever and is the collective memory. He found her at number 11, and she invited him in for tea. She’d been born in Moon Street, she said, and it had been going downhill ever since, but she still loved the place. Her name was Flossie and she was a bus-sized, jolly woman with a laugh so hearty you feared for her health.
The tea came up in Prince George mugs, with pictures of the royal baby against the Union flag.
Number 8, Flossie told him, was always changing hands — which wasn’t what Gilbert wanted to hear. ‘It’s a crack house now, as if you didn’t know’ — big laugh — ‘and before that it was a knocking shop for at least five years, but the girls were all right. They even hung a big flag from the bedroom window for the Diamond Jubilee. Didn’t stop them working, though’ — another peal of laughter — ‘and always open for business, it was.’
‘Going back a bit—’ Gilbert started to say, but he was interrupted.
‘Before them, we had an Indian family. They came the year Wills and Kate got hitched. I think they were Indian. Very quiet. Kept their children beautifully. Not like the little fiends next door to me, playing their so-called music at all hours.’
‘I’m interested in the people who were living there in 1996.’
‘1996. When was that? Princess Di was still alive, then. She went in 1997, poor lamb. I wept for a week.’
He’d cottoned on. Everything Flossie remembered was measured by royal events. He’d have to think of something. Had a royal baby been born in 1996? The royal family wasn’t his pet subject. He could have told you who finished top of the Premier League. No use here.