He chuckled. ‘No, to offer my services. Exams and marking are over; I’ve got no students and no teaching until the autumn. I thought you might need a hand.’
‘With finding Elsie?’
‘Finding Elsie, painting the mural, passing round the book – whatever you need.’
‘Are you serious?’ I was delighted.
‘Absolutely.’ He frowned, his hair falling over the top of his glasses. ‘But I can’t draw. Please don’t ask me to do anything artistic.’
‘I could definitely use your help,’ I said. ‘But first I’ve got something to show you and I think you’re going to love it.’
I took him over to the corner of the room, where I’d left Elsie’s book on the table, and we both sat down.
‘There were a couple of pages stuck together and I managed to pull them apart.’ Finn looked alarmed and I shook my head. ‘Carefully,’ I reassured him. ‘And it turned out, they’d been stuck together deliberately. Because look what I found …’
I’d put a Post-it Note on the correct page so I found it easily and opened the book up in front of Finn.
‘What’s this?’
‘Love notes,’ I said in glee. ‘Love messages between Elsie and a mystery man. It’s the most gorgeous thing. She’s quite cautious at first, gets him to give her clues about who he is.’
‘Smart lady.’
‘I know – she’d be good on Tinder, wouldn’t she?’ I looked up and met Finn’s gaze just as I said “Tinder” and blushed. ‘Anyway, she clearly knows him. He’s a patient and she’s a nurse so they don’t use names – she’s still being wary.’
Finn had pushed his glasses up on to his head and was studying the tiny writing. ‘This is astonishing,’ he said, half to himself. ‘I can’t believe I missed this.’
I shrugged. ‘There’s a lot of other stuff in the book and you said yourself you’d not been through the whole thing. I just got lucky.’
‘Give me the gist,’ Finn said eagerly. ‘So Elsie knows who this chap is?’
‘It seems so, and they go on to share stories about themselves. And then here …’ I tapped the page at the right message. ‘Here is where Elsie scribbles a meeting place. It’s not nearly as neat as her other messages so I wondered if she was in a bit of a hurry when she wrote it.’
‘Did they meet up?’
‘I think so – because then the final message is him saying his arms feel empty without her in them. He says she’s his sunshine – like the song. And then the messages stop. I thought at first he was a soldier because he talks about going back to the war, but he also says he didn’t want to join the Army.’ I swallowed. ‘I wish we knew who he was. I’d love to know if he made it home safely.’
‘If he was a soldier, then we might be able to track him down,’ Finn said, his eyes lighting up. ‘Military records are brilliantly helpful.’
‘I wondered if he could have been in the air force,’ I said. ‘You said there were airmen at the hospital weren’t there?’
Finn pointed his finger at me. ‘There were,’ he said in delight. ‘There was an annexe here, which had a Red Cross ward.’
‘A Red Cross ward?’
‘A temporary building, like school huts. It was initially built for the injured airmen from the bomb at Biggin Hill but it was used throughout the whole war.’
‘When was the bomb?’
‘November 1940,’ he said.
I felt a little shiver of excitement run through me. ‘So it does fit. Maybe Elsie’s fella was one of the airmen?’
‘Maybe he was.’
‘Could you find out?’
‘Probably.’
