The doors of the Central Library had been unlocked and open to the public for all of two minutes when McBride strode briskly through them and headed, once more, for the local studies section.
Elaine with the breasts was nowhere to be seen. In her place behind the counter was a male in a badly ironed shirt and tie that was too tight. His hair was greasy and needing cut and, although he appeared to be in his mid thirties, his pockmarked face still bore traces of acne. An unpleasant mix of body odour and cheap deodorant rose from him.
McBride was the only other person in the room but he might as well have been invisible while he waited for the assistant to acknowledge his presence by raising his head from the computer printout he was apparently studying. Nothing happened for at least twenty seconds. McBride shuffled his feet and cleared his throat. Still nothing. He was seriously contemplating making the slimeball’s tie even tighter when there was a flicker that his existence had been recognised.
An expressionless face with dead eyes looked up at him. Although the heating system in the library had still some work to do to warm the place, sweat glistened on the forehead of the man gazing sullenly at him. The badge on the crumpled shirt identified him as ‘Brad’. McBride found himself transfixed by the word and the inappropriateness of it. Christ sake – nobody was ever going to mistake him for Brad Pitt. He controlled an urge to laugh. ‘Brad’, as though reading his thoughts, stared defiantly back.
McBride knew things were not going to go well. He resolved to be polite … and for ten seconds he succeeded. ‘Can you help me find some back editions of The Courier, please? I need to go back eight years. Are they beside the more recent ones?’
‘Over there.’ The limp hair nodded vaguely in the direction of the other side of the room.
‘Where?’
‘There.’ Another inclination of the greasy head, this time barely discernible and towards no particular part of the premises.
McBride’s jaw tightened and he was aware that the fingers of his left hand were drumming on the countertop while his right fist was starting to clench. He marvelled at his own restraint. ‘I don’t know where you mean. Take me there, please. And, if you don’t, “Brad”, I’m going to write down your name and complain about you all the way to Number Ten Downing Street. I’m also going to squeeze you by the neck until your eyes bulge.’ McBride instantly regretted the remark. He knew instinctively that Brad would have learned the book on employees’ rights off by heart, particularly the chapter about being intimidated by customers. He waited for the outraged response. At the very least he would be asked to leave, more probably he would be threatened with the police.
Neither happened. The hunched figure of the surly assistant rose from his seat and walked slowly from behind the counter. If he had dropped his pace by a fraction, he would have ground to a halt. But he was moving and in the direction of a rank of bound files. He motioned McBride to follow. The journey across the room took an eternity but finally they arrived at a section covering a ten-year period.
‘The more recent ones are round the corner. You’ll have to get them down yourself.’ Then, as he sniffed and turned away, the man whose smell was now almost one hundred per cent body sweat, added over his shoulder, ‘No cutting anything out.’
‘Thanks, you’ve been extremely helpful.’
McBride had no idea if the sarcasm had been noted. Nothing seemed to penetrate Brad’s air of implacability and he shuffled off without giving any sign that he had even heard the remark. Moments later, he was back at his desk, crouched, once more, over the computer printouts.
After locating the files of six years earlier, McBride hastily turned the pages of the old newspapers until he found the one chronicling the death of Nicola Cassidy. He was not looking for additional information – he wanted less than was already contained in the cuttings dug out for him by Gwen. He hoped the report of the call-centre worker’s untimely death would be at least a sentence short of what had originally been there. He needed it to be telling him something, even if he could not understand what it was. He wanted a ‘message’ like the one left behind after the trial of Adam Gilzean.
He did not receive it. Every word detailing the murder of the twenty-five-year-old was as intact as the moment it had been printed. He repeated his search another two times to be certain but the file was as complete as the day it had been stored away. He doubted if anyone had even read it, far less approached it with a razor. McBride knew he should be glad but a rush of disappointment spread through him.
He replaced the file, aware that Brad had lifted his gaze from his printouts and was watching his every move from the other end of the room. He resisted the urge to fix him with a stare in return and instead pulled down the bound volume of newspapers for the year when Roberta Kerr had perished and left her two little girls motherless.
The only thing a close examination of the contents produced was a burst of sneezing from McBride, brought on by the release of an excessive number of dust particles that had triggered a near-forgotten allergy. Apart from the grime, the news reports of Roberta’s strangulation were pure and untouched.
McBride blew his nose – loudly, in the hope that it might irritate Brad. He moved from the main file area, round the corner to the section containing the more recent newspapers, and dragged the one he wanted from its place on the shelf. Feverishly, he pulled back the pages.
The story of Virginia Williams’ demise in douce St Andrews was instantly rewarding. A neat square hole under the headlines was obviously where a photograph of the Kiwi lawyer had once been positioned. In the last column of the report, five paragraphs from the end, there was a much smaller aperture where two sentences appeared to have been removed. McBride fought off an overwhelming desire to punch the air but permitted himself a soft, ‘Yessss.’
Like the other larger extraction, the missing words had been excised with infinite precision, by a sharp blade. He flicked the page over and whistled in admiration. There was no trace anywhere of a carry-through cut. Whoever had performed the surgery had also come equipped with some kind of protective pad to prevent damage to other parts of the file. ‘Impressive … and interesting!’ he exclaimed inwardly.
McBride was still marvelling at his discovery when a whining voice sounded from twenty feet away. ‘Are you nearly finished here?’ It was the slimeball walking towards him, a set of keys in his hand, his moist forehead glistening under the bright ceiling light. McBride snapped the file shut, anxious that he should not see where it had been opened.
The sweating librarian seemed suddenly uninterested in the activities of his visitor. He paid no attention to the file McBride had now lifted up into his arms.
‘I have to go out and I’m not allowed to leave anyone alone if no staff are on duty.’ He noted McBride’s questioning look and added, hurriedly, ‘We’re short of bodies – flu – so I’ll have to ask you to leave.’
‘Give me a couple of minutes more and I’ll be gone for good. OK?’
Brad hesitated. ‘OK, two minutes, no more.’ He rattled his keys officiously and walked reluctantly away. ‘Remember, two minutes – I’ll be waiting at the door,’ he called out as he disappeared back round the corner of the aisle.
McBride replaced the file on the table, reopened it at the cut pages and wrote swiftly in the pad he had pulled from a pocket, noting the precise spot where the extracted words had been.
Brad kept his promise and was standing with his arms folded at the door of the library, one foot gently tapping on the scuffed vinyl floor covering. His truculence remained to the end. He did not meet McBride’s eye as he ushered him through the entrance and nor did he acknowledge the short ‘Thanks’ McBride grudgingly uttered as he filed past.
It was only when he was in the street outside that it occurred to McBride that Brad had not followed him out. Instead, he had remained inside the file room, locking himself in after McBride had left. McBride shook his head at the unpleasant assistant’s odd behaviour but, somehow, it did not surprise him.
He did not waste time reflecting on it. All he wanted was to return to his car as fast as humanly possible to read Gwen’s copied article about the killing of Virginia Williams – the same one as the one in the library, only without the missing sentences.
He resisted the urge to run to the car park, knowing he would have looked like a shoplifter or someone with bladder problems, and contented himself with as fast a walk as seemed decent. Once inside his car, all control deserted him and he ripped at the packet of cuttings bearing Gwen’s distinctive handwriting like a child tearing opening a Christmas parcel. His eyes raced to identify the mystery absent passage. At first, he skimmed over them. They seemed so inconsequential that he believed he had mistaken their location. He rechecked his notebook only to discover there had been no error.
The words that had been so painstakingly removed were part of a statement given at a press conference by one of the murder team in answer to a reporter’s facetious question about the possible reasons for Ginny’s murder. The complete text of the affected sentences ran:
Your suggestion of a royal crime of passion is just one more on the list. Another much further away from reality is that Prince William is also a descendant of Jack the Ripper!
The parts removed were:
just one more on the list. Another much further away
McBride repeated them over and over.
‘Jesus!’ McBride exclaimed. He slammed his hand hard into the steering wheel, hitting he horn and sending a deafening blast round the echo chamber of the multi-storey. Conveniently, it blotted out the sound of McBride’s voice, which was roaring, ‘If you want to tell me something, just lift the phone! Bastard … bastard …’