LITMIR.BIZ

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it a lot lately. And not by accident, either. She would have to get herself another set of keys cut or life would be even more difficult for her than it was at present. She grieved deeply for her daughter, but she had hung on to rationality. It didn’t look as though Fred had.

      Fred Kinver walked briskly to his small allotment hard by the former Brazen Head Dock, now changing into a hotel and leisure centre. His allotment might be swallowed up by their tennis courts but at the moment Fred and about a dozen others were still in possession.

      Here Fred had the wooden hut that he called his ‘office’. He did keep a few papers, old bills and diaries here. Otherwise he used it for a smoke, a quiet drink, and talk with a few old friends. It was locked, or appeared to be so, but the padlock had long since been broken and hung there for show. All Fred’s friends knew you could get in if you wanted.

      When Fred went there, as he did often, no one noticed him because he was a familiar figure. He had looked the same for years, grey-haired, spectacled, of medium height, and on the thin side. Winter or summer he wore the same old tweed jacket and raincoat. By the same token, he did not notice much about others. Jim Marsh, riding past on his father’s milk-float, saw Fred going across to his allotment. His father had told him to keep away from Fred because of family reasons, which prohibition he obeyed without meaning to keep for ever. He didn’t like Fred.

      Now Fred went into his ‘office’ and sat down for work. He was keeping a kind of diary. Perhaps not a diary, more an account of a life.

      After he had filled in a few paragraphs, he rose and hid it in a corner of the hut, under a box of lettuce seedlings that he would probably now never plant out. They were already yellow and sorry-looking. Casualties of the war he was fighting.

      Then he went on to what he called his next appointment. At the Library.

      The new Spinnergate District Library in Puddle Lane was a long, low building put together from the dark red brick so popular locally. It replaced an Edwardian building of stern construction which had resisted bombs in two world wars and very nearly defeated the 1980’s demolition team.

      The old building had been a comfortable home for books, mice and men. The new one, although light and warm, seemed less welcoming somehow, and mysteriously appeared to have fewer books. The librarians explained this by saying that there were just as many books, but they just looked fewer on the new shelving. Hardly anyone believed them and Fred, a regular attender and borrower since his unemployment set in like a long illness from which he would never recover, was able to name several of his favourite books that had definitely disappeared. The Giant Book of Mysteries, for one. Also The Boy’s Book of Sea Stories, an old favourite which had gone from the ‘Books for Younger Readers’ shelves.

      He made for the reference library, which was quiet and well stocked with files of newspapers going back over the last decade. The Spinnergate Library was a library of reference for South Docklands. It was much used by the Sixth Form College down the road and occasionally by students from the University. The room was never empty, but there was a live and let live feeling about the place: you kept quiet and did not interfere with the other readers.

      This was just as well since they had been seen doing rather odd things. Eating was not allowed in the library, but there was no doubt that old Mr Rough had been noticed chewing a piece of cold toast. A late breakfast, he had maintained. Mrs Armitage knitted a dark blue sock which never seemed to get finished; she must unravel it in the night like one of those strange Nordic goddesses, and would ask to measure it against your foot if you would be so kind, which was harmless enough but not what the Library was meant for. Two female students had been seen holding hands in one corner and one of them, weeping, had run out before anything could be said to them.

      Fred Kinver went into the stacks behind the main library where the files of newspapers, both local and national, were kept in great bound volumes.

      He was systematically going through them collecting material on John Coffin. Personal details of the man’s life (not many of those, he had not been free with information about himself to the Press), photographs, and anything that came to hand about the cases he had worked on. Over the years Coffin had had a fair amount of publicity, so Fred had a harvest. When the new Force was created and John Coffin appointed he had figured in several major articles in The Times and the Independent.

      As soon as he came across anything that interested him, Fred took out a tiny knife and quietly cut it out. No one saw. He did a bit every day, never too much, but taking his mite of paper daily, like a rodent.

      He smiled as he did so.

      When he got home the day’s haul would be pasted neatly in a big scrapbook, which he planned to take round to his ‘office’ as soon as it was up to date. He was reluctant to do this, as he would rather have had it to hand, but in the end, if left in the house, his wife would find it. She found everything.

      ‘Valuable archive information,’ he muttered as he stowed away today’s bag, and then went off to choose a new book to take out.

      ‘You’re doing a lot of reading lately, Mr Kinver,’ said the cheeky girl at the desk as she fed his tickets into her machine.

      He did not answer.

      Stiff-necked old thing, thought the girl. ‘No manners,’ she complained to her colleague.

      ‘Don’t think he heard you.’

      ‘What’s more, I think he always takes the same book out.’

      ‘Oh, he’s one of those, is he?’

      They had several like that.

      On his way home Fred loaded up with all the daily papers that Mimsie Marker had left on her stall by the Tube station. She let him have them cheaply in a bundle. She was sorry for him.

      ‘It’s not good for you to keep reading everything about Anna, but I can see why you feel you must,’ she said.

      ‘Do you?’ In a way she probably did, but not entirely. ‘I’m collecting information.’ He didn’t mind talking to her: she was old Spinnergate village, not like the red-faced little girl in the Library, an alien if ever he saw one.

      ‘The police are better at that, Fred.’

      ‘Are they?’ He leaned forward and looked her in the eye. The one eye that really looked at you, the other wandered. ‘But do they draw the right conclusions?’

      He was angry, but it seemed more than that, Mimsie thought. ‘So what are all the newspapers for?’ She didn’t know about what he did in the Library, but from the way she spoke she might almost have guessed it.

      ‘Background material.’

      There wasn’t much of that, she thought, but he was obsessed.

      ‘Fourteen days, that’s three hundred and thirty-six hours, and I don’t know how many minutes since Anna was killed, and they still haven’t got the man.’

      ‘It’s early days.’

      ‘And it’s staring them in the face,’ said Fred Kinver. ‘I’ll set things right.’

      Mimsie said: ‘Fred, we’ve been chums a long time, haven’t we? You can trust me. You’re not up to something, are you?’

      But he didn’t trust anyone then, not Mimsie, not his wife, not John Coffin, no one except himself could set things right. For it was not just information he was collecting, he was somehow fuelling himself up for what he meant to do.

      A naturally timid and peaceful man, more fitted for making biscuits than taking action, he needed strength.

      ‘It’s quite clear who killed her,’ he said. ‘Why don’t they listen to what Anna said. I listen all the time.’

      He strode off.

      ‘You’ve left your change,’ Mimsie called after him, but he did not hear.

      She could see he was not taking the road home to Elder Street. He was turning left. Wherever

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