13 #2
Dragging the box to the open entrance of the hatch, he lay flat on his stomach and shifted the box awkwardly over the hole, lowering his arms down as far as they’d go before dropping the box.
It hit the landing with a cloud of dust, but luckily didn’t break apart.
Coughing and cursing in the suddenly dry and dusty air, he dropped back down on to the landing himself, and then knelt beside the box, opening it up.
There were some clothes and stuff on the top, and a scrapbook or two, which he carefully set aside.
That might interest the writer woman who’d called him.
There were some pewter coffee pots that might have some scrap value, and these he also put aside.
The rest of the box was full of crap, but at the very bottom were stacked some leather-bound tomes which, when he opened them up, showed yellowing pages.
Which meant they must be old. They were full of handwritten stuff, and one tome looked like some sort of set of accounts – again handwritten in fading blue ink, listing columns of numbers with letters at the top.
L/S/D. That made him guffaw for a bit, imagining his old nan high on psychedelics.
But somewhere in the murky and distant past, he was sure his mum had said something about ‘old’ money – pounds, shillings and pence, and how, for some reason, they had been known by these letters.
Feeling optimistic that he might now have something to bargain with when he called this Moore woman back later, he opened the rucksack and shoved everything inside that he thought might contain paydirt.
He’d take it back to his place and look through it more carefully tonight.
Fingers crossed, he’d find something the woman on the telephone had mentioned and sell it for whatever he could get.
And the scrapbook was bound to have photos and stuff – and who knew, there might even be something in there about that pop groupie the writer had been banging on about.
He couldn’t for the life of him figure out why people bothered to read books when there was the internet, but if there was money in it, he was bloody well going to get his share.
The pewter he’d drop off at some junk shop on the way back. With any luck, it would cover the cost of a few takeaways.
Lyssa, now free of Bibbie, who was stuffing his face with left-over salmon, still felt unable to cope with the chore of transcribing the Jonas Bannister recordings, so hit the internet instead.
She’d already started on trying to track down what had happened to Luke Raines after the Lucky Cuckoos had disbanded, and found he’d gone on to manage several bands in the 1970s – some that had had more success than others.
But come the 1980s he must have felt he was too far out of the loop to stay in the music business, and he’d retired to the south coast, in a small landlocked town in Dorset.
There she’d found an obituary for him in the local paper.
Which led her to the useful information that he’d been survived by his ‘beloved niece, Caroline, who still lived in the family home’.
Unfortunately, Monica’s vague recollection that Caroline was orphaned young and had been raised by Luke had proved to be only too true, and when she’d begun a search for all of Luke’s siblings, she’d found that those of his youngest sister had been lost in a records fire in their hometown.
Which meant she still had no idea of Caroline’s surname – for if she was indeed the child of Luke’s sister, then the sister would have married and taken on her husband’s name.
Which meant she’d have to do things the hard – and long – way.
Several ancestry search engines helped her to eventually come up with a few possibilities and she noted them down. The first two possible Carolines ended – literally – in a dead end, when she searched the registry of death databases. But three were still in the land of the living.
The first one had a Facebook page, but a quick scan convinced Lyssa that she was not the Caroline she wanted.
Although she wasn’t expecting Luke Raines’ niece to still be posting much about her dead uncle or her connection to the Lucky Cuckoos, she was sure that there’d be something – but after an hour of trawling back in her timeline, there was nothing.
The second Caroline had emigrated to the US when Luke Raines would still have been alive and, since the one she wanted had still been living with her uncle at the time of his death, could not be the right person.
The third Caroline had no social media profile at all – which was perhaps not so surprising.
Not everyone was a silver surfer. She was the one who’d married a farmer from the same area of Dorset as the one her uncle had retired to, so she looked to be the most promising.
But a hunt through the land registry showed that the farm had been sold for a huge amount of money in 2002 to a property developer, and there the trail ended.
But not one to be defeated, Lyssa made a list of farming society websites and began to trawl. Farmers, she knew, had a high suicide rate, and consequently there were a lot of clubs and help sites set up to help them stay in contact with their contemporaries.
Drafting a message for anyone with any information about a Mrs Caroline Dixon-Hayes to contact her, she posted on all of them and finally turned off the laptop.
It was now dark, but after the rollercoaster of a day she’d had, she had no appetite, so dismissed the idea of making dinner. Instead, she reached for her earbuds and downloaded a random mix of 1960s classics.
And fell asleep on the sofa before the last one had played.