Page 1 of The Start of the Story
1
AUGUST 1958
The elderly lady sighed as she pulled herself out of the taxi. ‘Just you wait here for me, Dennis,’ she said to the driver, tugging a bedraggled bunch of flowers out after her. ‘Don’t you go leaving me.’
Dennis, looking only slightly less bedraggled than the flowers, and infinitely less fragrant, sniffed. ‘Well, hurry up, then, Doris. Nobody likes hanging about out on these moors. You never know what’s coming for you.’
The road stretched long and grey, draped over the moors like a tired python. Doris looked up and down it, at the lack of anything bar some sad heather still waving its purple in the breeze and a couple of yellow gorse bushes doing their best to enliven the landscape. ‘There’s nothing coming for you, Dennis Slaithwaite,’ she said, very definitely. ‘Nothing except your ma with a rolled-up copy ofNews of the World. Now, you be quiet and wait here. I’ll be nobbut a minute.’
Brandishing her bouquet as though it were a cudgel with which to keep anything untoward at bay, Doris picked her careful way out across the moorland, following a path that only existed now somewhere in the depths of memory. Cloudsfollowed her, tracking her progress as a little heap of shadow, until she stopped and looked down.
‘There you are,’ she said gently. ‘Well, my loves, I’ve come to say goodbye. Off to live with my sister, for my sins. Or hers. I’m not quite sure which one of us is going to suffer most, but there you go. Anyway. I’m heading off to Nantwich.’
Stiffly, as though the weight of her seventy-odd years had congregated in her joints, she bent and laid the flowers on the stone that lay in the heather at her feet.
‘I’m the last that remembers you,’ she said quietly. ‘The others have all gone now. Apart from that Elsie, but she’s halfway round the twist, she’d not know you from Pat Boone any more. So it’s only me.’
The stone remained unimpressed and continued in its flat, mossy horizontality. The bells of heather flowers dangled around it, past their best now and fading rapidly into withered brown fists. Doris regarded them with sympathy. What was it that Mr Churchill had said, back in those dark days of the war? ‘When you’re going through hell, keep on going?’ Something like that, anyway.
‘Keep on going, my lovelies,’ she said quietly, more to herself than to the stone. ‘I hope you find happiness, wherever you are. If nobody remembers you now, at least you’ll know that we knew you once.’
She reviewed that last statement. It didn’t sound very pithy, for last words in such a momentous situation, but she was tired and Dennis had started beeping the taxi horn at her, and she’d still got to finish packing up her things and put butter on the cat’s paws. She really couldn’t think of anything else to say. So, with a small shrug and a settling of her shoulders, Doris turned and began trudging her painful way back towards the road.
Over on the stone, a breeze moved the flowers and revealed a card. It was printed in pastel colours, with pictures of Tinkerbellfrom the Peter Pan film. On it, in a somewhat shaky hand but with impeccable calligraphy, were the words ‘For the little people’.
Now
‘There’s a man to see you, Rowan.’
Chess barged her way into my office again, despite all my best efforts to train her to at least knock gently first. Well, I sayoffice, it was a back room in the local library. Chess was my assistant. Well, I sayassistant, she was the secretarial equivalent of a back room in the local library. Small, dark and hopelessly inadequate for the task in hand.
‘Um? Did you get details?’
‘Tall. Man. Irish, or something, he’s got an accent anyway.’ Chess stared over my shoulder at the laptop screen. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Typing up the notes from the last few days’ interviews. These have to be transcribed straight away, before I forget. And I actually meant details like – why does he want to see me?’
‘Dunno.’ Chess further illustrated her unsuitability by perching herself on the corner of my desk. ‘Doesn’t it drive you mad? All these people telling you fairy stories?’
‘No. It’s my job. Can you go and find out what the man wants, Chess, please?’
But it was too late. The door was already opening and a scruffy dark head emerged into the gap. ‘Hello? Anyone in?’
Chess raised her eyebrows at me. As she’d got her hair tied back into a ponytail so tight that their starting position wassomewhere towards the top of her forehead, the raising took some effort.
‘That’s the man,’ she hissed at me.
‘I gathered,’ I replied, dryly.
‘And you’d be…’ the man flapped the door so that he could stare at my nameplate ‘…Dr Rowan Thorpe?’
I just blinked. Who, my entire posture said, would be sitting in an office with someone else’s nameplate on the door? It clearly said it with some force, because the man cleared his throat.
‘Er,’ he said. ‘I was expecting a bloke, y’know.’
‘Well, you got me.’ I sounded waspish. But then, I generally sounded like that these days; only one step away from a yellow and black jumper and sitting in an irritated fashion on a fruit bowl. ‘And who are you?’
He ignored my question, sliding himself through the gap between the door and the frame in one smooth ‘nobody ever tells me to go away’ move. He was wearing black from head to foot, and a grin that was nine tenths easy charm and one tenth determination. ‘So, you’re the folklorist?’
