‘Cheers,’ said Finn, slapping him on the back in a manly fashion. ‘Shall we have a look round first?’
We wandered around the little museum, reading the displays about the men and women who had worked there during the war. It made fascinating reading, especially when I found the displays about the bomb that had fallen.
Then we went into the reading room and discovered Finn’s friend had put out all the records we needed.
‘Ah-ha,’ said Finn looking blissfully happy at the idea of wading his way through old documents. ‘Here we go.’
His idea – and I had to admit it was a good one – was to simply read the names and information about the men who’d been injured in the bomb and try to whittle it down.
‘There were twelve men injured in the bomb who went to South London District Hospital,’ he said. ‘Some will be too old to be Elsie’s chap – we know roughly how old he is by some of the things he’s said in his notes to her.’
I nodded, taking the book out of the tote bag I’d brought it in and putting it on the table. ‘We can always check again if we have to, but I know he mentioned in one of his notes that he doesn’t remember the last war.’
‘Great,’ he said. ‘So let’s have a look. I think he’d have to be early to mid-twenties in 1940. If he was any older, I reckon he’d have some memories of the war. The end of it at least.’
We trawled through the list of casualties, discarding the men that were too old. That got rid of half of them, another wasPolish – apparently there had been a lot of Polish pilots at Biggin Hill – so we got rid of him too because we knew our man came from Lancashire.
With five left, Finn logged on to his laptop and called up the RAF records that he had a subscription for.
‘Now we have names,’ he said. ‘We can find their address when they enlisted and hopefully the address they returned to at the end of the war, too.’
‘We know Elsie’s fella was from Lytham St Anne’s because of the seagull story.’
‘Exactly.’
He checked the first couple of names and I watched him, hunched over his laptop typing away.
‘He’s not Eric …’ he said. ‘Nor George.’
I opened Elsie’s book, planning to flip to the page where she’d shared her notes to her mystery man. But I had it upside down so instead of opening the front cover, I opened it right at the back. I swivelled it round and started leafing through from the back instead, and stopped as I found a page that had been scribbled over. Urgh, had someone at Tall Trees done that?
The messages, pictures and poems in Elsie’s book were higgledy-piggledy over the pages. Some pages had just one letter on them. Others had a few squished in together. But they weren’t untidy – just making the best use of space, like when people signed a birthday card at work. This page, though, was more like the doodles I always did when I was on the phone, writing down random words from my conversation that made sense at the time but none at all when I looked at it five minutes later.
I tutted, gazing at the messy page. There was the alphabet written out from A to Z. And then around the letters were words scattered here and there in scribbled handwriting. That seemed, I thought to myself looking closer, not unlike Elsie’s writing.
‘What is this?’ I muttered. I read the scribbled words. “Friend,” one said. Another said: “Dying,” and another “it hurts.” I shivered,even though it was warm in the room where Finn and I were. This was so odd.
‘Look at this, Finn,’ I said. ‘Weird messages in what I think is Elsie’s handwriting.’
I showed the book to him and he pushed his glasses up on to his forehead so he could see better close up. ‘What is this?’ he said. ‘Are you sure Elsie wrote these?’
‘Not sure but I think it’s her writing.’ I squinted at the letters again. ‘Hmm, it’s hard to tell though. Everyone wrote so beautifully back then.’
I leafed through the pages until I found Elsie’s notes to her bloke, and flipped back and forth studying the writing carefully. ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Look at how she loops the ends of her Ss? It’s the same in both.’
‘I agree.’ Finn nodded. ‘But what does it mean?’
‘Oh God, look. She’s written “kill me”.’
We both looked at each other in surprise.
‘We don’t have a death certificate for Elsie, and Petra saw her in the Sixties, so we know that no matter what she says on these pages, she wasn’t dying.’ I frowned. ‘But maybe she thought she was?’
‘Could this be a game of some sort?’ Finn suggested. ‘Like a weird version of hangman?’
‘A very weird version of hangman.’
I flipped back and forth again, and Finn said: ‘Hang on.’
