Three days before Emily and O’Brien’s visit to Bootle, Billie Vane stepped out of the rear entrance of All Star Lanes in Manchester, determined to shake off any bad guys on his tail. The trivial nature of those two words struck home as he remembered where he was—on the streets of Manchester where he spent his childhood. In the mid-seventies, the film and TV characters of James Bond, John Steed and Emma Peel had set a trend that inspired imagination. Together they had influenced the games he played with his mates. One they called Catch the Spy involved dodging in and out of shop doorways in Stretford, sometimes with plastic guns in their hands. God! What would people say now? Billie shuddered at the thought, still struggling to accept how his present situation had become so serious. These people really were after him, and he must do everything he could to lose them.
He walked quickly, keen to distance himself from Deansgate. It was an area he was once familiar with, having worked in the city in the nineties, but so much had changed. He remembered the rough grid of the city centre streets, turning south and then east. The further away the better. Conscious that reflections in shop windows had already proved helpful, he repeated the exercise, sometimes stopping and crossing the road to provoke anyone following into mimicking his actions. But there was nothing he could spot this time. His thoughts took another direction.
There had been enough visual reminders. Everywhere he looked there were people walking along holding one-sided personal conversations with phones held to their ears, or pausing at random spots on the pavement to engage in one- or two-digit typing.
My phone! What have I done? It had been a spur of the moment thing. My phone is suddenly a threat so I have to ditch it. Really? Am I sure about this? His nerves felt like they’d been plugged into the National Grid, so Billie stopped at the corner of Great Portland Street and forced himself to take deep breaths. S-l-o-w-l-y. That felt better. It was just a phone. A mechanical box. I can live without it. Or at least… He still needed a replacement with no personal stuff and a new number. I’m in the middle of a city, with shops full of the things. No big deal then?
Thirty minutes later, leaving a small shop near Piccadilly Gardens, Billie’s mood brightened over his secondhand purchase. It was a Samsung similar to his own, but an older model, and he felt familiar with accessing the settings. As he blended into the crowds on Cross Street, he considered his next priority: somewhere that provided both refuge and a power socket. Returning to the Hilton was not an option, so should he just look for a cheap hotel? If this had been Glasgow, he knew exactly where he would go: the Mitchell.
Manchester was his place of birth. He had lived with an aunt after losing his parents in a car crash at the age of five. She had brought him up as her own, so this city held special memories in his heart. The aunt had died twenty years ago, and Billie’s closest living relative was a cousin in Cornwall. His aspirations had been fed by a world of books and the infinite knowledge within their pages. Libraries fostered his imagination, providing inspiration and healing for the stresses of puberty and beyond. The place where he felt most comfortable became his working environment, initially at the Central Library until his marriage to a dancer from Glasgow led to a transfer there in 1996. While matrimony lasted barely two years, the Mitchell became more of a home to Billie than his poky house in the East End. He’d even slept there on one memorable occasion. A later relationship with a girl from Edinburgh (Tina’s mum) still didn’t tempt him to move, and he had rarely been back south of the border. Now the intervening years felt easy to push aside, parting like dusty net curtains at the thought of what lay ahead: a place where he could think… and plug in his phone. Recognisable streets surrounding Manchester’s Central Library led him instinctively to St Peter’s Square.
Picking his way carefully over the tram tracks and through drifting crowds around a Metrolink Station, Billie was curious to see a new entrance in glass and steel had been constructed, linking the library to the Town Hall extension. With a slight grimace of distaste, he made his way inside, reaching out for the comfort of familiarity.
But it was a different world.
He stared in awe at the transformation. The cream-plastered corridors and Formica-trimmed shelving under dusty fluorescent strip lights were no more. In their place someone had opened up the interior and turned it into a car showroom—without the cars. He wandered into the heart of the ground floor space, taking in the concealed lighting and the circular centrepiece. He assumed this had replaced the spiral staircase he remembered using to reach the Reading Room on the upper floor. Looking up through a glass ceiling, Billie could just glimpse the huge dome that crowned the old building. Surely that part of history had been left intact? He looked for the stairs.
Leaving the spectacular modern finish of the new-look hallways behind, it was a relief to find the Great Hall looking much as he remembered. A great deal of effort had been made for a sympathetic restoration of original features, with long reading tables radiating out from the centre. An ornate clock resplendent in gold leaf stood proudly atop four green marble pillars, encouraging the eye skyward. He stood a little way back from the old counter where he had spent so many hours in previous years. How often had he run down the steps behind to retrieve a list of items from the floors below?
Sitting at the end of one of the tables he looked up at the religious text etched around the edge, just beneath the dome. As he turned his head and body to take in the whole scene, a jolt of recognition sent blood rushing to his head, and he blushed at his lack of perception.
Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom, and with all thy getting get understanding. Exalt her and she shall promote thee; she shall bring thee to honour when thou dost embrace her, she shall give of thine head an ornament of grace, a crown of glory she shall deliver to thee. Proverbs 4:7
Profound advice for any reader, but it was the letters and numbers at the tail end of the inscription that made a connection: Four to Seven. Or Four Two Seven. It seemed such a thin disguise, and he should have seen through it before now. That Old Testament book was often abbreviated to four letters: PROV. Billie reached into his inside pocket for the paper on which Emma had written her cryptic message. Those same letters leapt out at him: 401Dox@PROV427. Spoken out loud, those last three digits could read like a maths ratio, replacing the 2 with a colon. She knew about his years working in this very location, and had even told him, the day they first met, that she was giving a talk at Manchester’s Central Library. She probably sat in the Reading Room while researching The Tragic Sister, read the inscription herself, and knew it was something with which he would be familiar. Clever. So clever that her coded clue had completely escaped him.
With the door to one half of the message prised open, the other became visible. Initially, he assumed 401Dox to be a reference to the docks from which ship 401 (Titanic) had sailed—meaning its original birthplace of Belfast, or even its port of registration at Liverpool. That might have been a pointer to where Emma had gone into hiding, but if so, it made no sense for her to be here in Central Library, a repository for books—and documents. She had always referred to the ‘Titanic Document’, from which he’d been allowed to see a small extract. ‘Come to Manchester and I’ll let you see the rest of it,’ had been almost the last thing she said to him. The enigma on the paper he was holding suggested Emma had hidden it at the library.