Читать книгу Who Do You Think You Are? - Claire Moss - Страница 9

‘Have you always been a librarian?’ I asked her.

Her eyes narrowed but she was smiling. The smile sent a warm rush through my stomach but the narrowed eyes scared me slightly.

‘Well,’ she said slowly, still smiling, ‘I wasn’t born a librarian, if that’s what you mean.’

I smiled too. ‘What, you mean you didn’t come out of the womb with a finger to your lips, telling the midwives to “ssshh”?’

She rolled her eyes and tried to look annoyed. ‘No. And I didn’t have a pair of half-moon glasses round my neck or my hair in a bun either.’

‘I must confess,’ I said, leaning on the desk, which, incidentally, meant I was leaning closer to her, ‘the dark-rimmed glasses are there so you’ve ticked that box but – ’ I shrugged, ‘ – your hair is disappointingly stylish.’ Was I flirting with the librarian? I never flirted with anyone. Or if I did, I didn’t realise I was doing it until it was too late.

She ran a hand over her cropped, dyed-red hair; her cheeks flushing slightly. I appeared to be the only person in the room other than her – possibly the only person in the building other than her – who was under forty and in possession of a full complement of teeth. If flirting was unusual in this kind of situation for me, it must be pretty much unheard of for her. She rallied pretty quickly though.

‘Oh yeah,’ she said, leaning back in her chair. ‘You only get your bun when you become chartered.’

I laughed. ‘You can get chartered? What like, “I’m a chartered librarian”? Like a chartered accountant?’

She pulled the kind of face girls at school used to pull when they’d hit you with a ruler but you were still the one who got bollocked by the teacher. ‘Yes, like a chartered accountant. Or like a chartered – I don’t know, a chartered something else that’s a proper profession. It is a proper profession, you know. Why, what do you do?’

‘What do you do that’s so clever?’ was obviously what she wanted to say, but at the last minute she seemed to pull back. Maybe she had suddenly become aware that we were two strangers conducting a conversation in Doncaster Local Studies Library and that the over-familiar piss-taking had already crossed the line into inappropriate. And, more to the point, that she was at work and that I was a customer.

‘I’m a journalist.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Right. Are you researching an article?’

‘Something like that.’ Time, it would seem, to talk shop. I opened my bag and pulled out the cuttings folder. ‘I’m thinking of doing a piece on this guy,’ I said, handing it to her. ‘He disappeared twenty years ago. Thought I might do a follow-up or something.’

She opened the file and spread the contents across her desk. ‘Peter Milton,’ she said slowly, reading from the headlines.

‘Pete,’ I corrected, before I could stop myself. ‘Or Peter. Whatever.’

She looked back down at the headline on one of the pieces of paper: SECOND YOUNG MINER REPORTED MISSING. ‘I think I remember this happening. During the strike?’

I nodded. Even a quarter of a century later, even for a younger generation who had been kids at the time, it was still just ‘the strike’. It was like how 1939-1945 was just ‘the war’ to our grandparents.

‘So – ’ She was still skim-reading the three cuttings I’d given her as she was speaking. ‘So, what exactly are you looking for?’

‘I – well, I don’t know really. What sort of stuff might you have? Obviously I’ve already done all the easy stuff myself – you know, Google, online news sites, that sort of thing. I just wondered if you’d have anything else on him?’

She narrowed her eyes at me again, but this time there was no smile. ‘Well, I could just go and get the Peter Milton file and we could have a look through it together.’

For a heart-stopping second I thought she was serious, that the Pete Milton file might really exist and that all the answers might be in it. ‘Are you sarcastic to all your customers?’ I asked her.

She raised her eyebrows and purposefully didn’t smile again. ‘Only the ones I like.’ The librarian was flirting with me now, I was sure of it.

‘I want to know,’ I continued, trying to remind myself why I had come here in the first place, ‘whether you might have any more information on him.’

‘Just him? Not this other lad who went missing as well?’ She pointed to the second paragraph of the article. ‘Lee Hague?’

‘No, I – erm…’ I failed to come up with a convincing reason why I might care more about Pete Milton than Lee Hague, so I let my voice trail off. ‘No, just Peter Milton.’

‘OK.’ She nodded. ‘OK then. So – you mean you want to know what happened to him after the disappearance? Do you know if he was ever found?’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. He was never – I mean, he hasn’t been found yet. What I want to know is, is there any more information on what he was doing before he disappeared? It’s too long ago for Google or any of the news sites to have stuff like that. And I was kind of hoping for – well, you know, something that everyone else might have missed.’ I gave an apologetic half-laugh.

She frowned and stuck out her bottom lip. She looked like the kind of woman who might have had her lip pierced at some point in her life, but it wasn’t pierced now. ‘The only stuff we’d really have is births, marriages, deaths, census records, that kind of thing. Probably wouldn’t tell you much new. Or,’ she gestured towards the ‘Staff Only’ door behind her, ‘we’ve got some old Coal Board files in the archive. I think there could be personnel records in among those, if you think they might be of any use? Most of it’s pretty boring though – anything really juicy would still be embargoed.’

‘Right,’ I said, trying to mask my enthusiasm. ‘And you’d have all the old newspapers and news databases, that kind of thing?’

‘Well, yeah, we have the locals on microfilm, the ones that haven’t been digitised.’ She pointed to the far end of the room where a middle-aged woman was hunched over a tall, grey machine that looked as though it should have been obsolete twenty years ago. ‘And obviously you can do a search on the online databases if I give you the passwords,’ she nodded towards a bank of computers by the window. ‘But don’t you have access to that kind of thing at your paper?’

My paper? ‘Oh, right, no, I’m – erm, I’m freelance these days.’

She looked at her watch. It was small and understated with a slim brown leather strap, looking out of place against her grown-up-punk clothes. ‘Well, how long have you got today? I’m not really supposed to, but if you like I could search some stuff out for you this afternoon and you can come back and look at it at your leisure.’ She smiled wryly. ‘It makes a nice change from dealing with all the family history nutters that normally come in here bothering me.’

‘Oh, OK.’ If only you knew.

‘So…’ She opened a big desk diary and looked at me expectantly. ‘Do you want to make an appointment to come back so I can be sure everything’s ready for you?’ When I hesitated for a second or two she leaned back in the chair and spread her hands. ‘Come on, don’t leave me hanging. When am I going to get to see you again?’

She was flirting with me. And for once I’d picked up on it in time.

‘Or,’ I said, in what I hoped was an alluringly languid manner, ‘you could meet me for a drink on Friday night and tell me what you’ve found. Then I can decide whether it’s worth coming back.’

Too far? I worried, but there was that killer smile again.

‘OK,’ she said, as though she were doing me a massive favour. ‘I finish here at seven. Why don’t you meet me outside and I’ll bring anything good I’ve found with me.’

‘OK,’ I echoed, failing to sound as cool as she had. ‘See you then.’

I headed towards the revolving doors that led out to the street.

‘Hey!’ She shouted after me. I turned round bracing myself to see if she’d really been winding me up. As if a woman like that wouldn’t have anything better to do on a Friday night. ‘My name’s Tash, Tash Chaplain, by the way!’

I raised a finger to my lips and mimed an exaggerated ‘sshhhh’ then turned to go. As I stepped onto the street, I allowed myself a little swagger in my step.