Owen changed every lock in the house before nine o'clock the next morning and refused to let me pay him for it.
"Call it a neighbourly gesture," he said, dropping the old keys into my palm. "Two valleys is neighbourly, round here. Anyone else got a key to this place?"
"Mr. Pruett. And apparently half the dead of Ashcombe."
He didn't laugh. He looked at me the way he'd looked at the wall, carefully, testing for damp. "You want me to stay a bit?"
"I want to go to the library," I said. "Brindle Market. Will your van make it?"
"My van has made it to Aberdeen and back," he said, offended. "Get in."
The van smelled of solder and oranges. There was a dog blanket on the passenger seat but no dog, and when I asked about it, Owen said the dog had been his father's, and had died the same winter as his father, and he hadn't got round to moving the blanket. He said it to the windscreen, in a flat voice, and then turned the radio up.
I liked him better for it. I didn't say so.
The library at Brindle Market had once been a corn exchange, and the newspapers lived in a back room behind a door marked STAFF ONLY, under one flickering strip light. The archivist was a broad, unhurried woman of about sixty in a purple cardigan, with a pencil through her bun and a name badge that said JOAN KERRIDGE.
She looked at me when I said the name Calloway. She looked a fraction too long.
"The Ashcombe and District Courier," she said. "Weekly. We have it on film from 1902 to 1994, when it folded. What year?"
"1968. October."
She found the reel without checking the index, which I noticed, and threaded it for me herself. Owen sat on a plastic chair by the radiator and pretended to read a leaflet about bin collections.
I'd done this a hundred times for work. It still made me queasy, the grey pages sliding past like water under ice. Fete results. Cattle prices. A wedding at St. Michael's, the bride in ivory. The harvest supper.
The issue for the thirty-first of October. Page one, the storm: two barns unroofed, the river over the Marlow road, a tree through the vestry window. Page two, the parish council. Pages three to five, advertisements.
Page six, at the bottom, eleven lines between a notice for a jumble sale and a lost dog.
LOCAL GIRL MISSING AFTER STORM. Miss Sylvie Calloway, 17, of Hollow Lane, Ashcombe, has not been seen since the evening of Saturday 26th October, when she was observed walking toward her home during the height of the gale. Her mother, Mrs. Evelyn Calloway, believes she may have gone to stay with relatives. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Reverend A. Penrose at the vicarage.
Underneath, in small capitals: M. HOLLIS.
"Owen," I said.
He came and read it over my shoulder. I felt him go still.
"The woman with the blue door," I said. "She wrote it. At seventeen. Her best friend vanishes in a storm and she writes eleven lines and puts it next to the jumble sale."
"Maybe they made her keep it short."
"Who would make her?"
He didn't have an answer. I wound on through November. December. The new year. I was looking for the follow-up, any follow-up. A search party. A sighting. Divers in the river. There was nothing. The Courier had reported a missing girl once, and then the whole valley had gone back to cattle prices.
"Mrs. Kerridge," I said. "If a girl went missing in 1968 and was never found, would there have been an inquest?"
"Eventually. After seven years, the family can apply to have her declared dead." Joan Kerridge didn't look up from her desk. "I already checked, Miss Calloway. There was no inquest. No death was ever registered. Sylvie Rose Calloway is not dead, as far as the state is concerned. She just isn't anywhere." She turned a page she wasn't reading. "After that first winter, Evelyn never said her name again. Not in the shop, not in church. People took the hint. A child brought up in that house would never once have heard it."
I thought of my mother in the kitchen in Leeds, saying Just me into her tea, and for the first time I believed she had meant it.
"You already checked?"
She put down her pencil.
"One more thing," I said, before I lost my nerve. "My grandmother's accounts have a payment to a Mrs. Orr, on the fourteenth of April 1969. Two guineas. I think she was a midwife. My mother was born that day, at home."
Joan Kerridge's face did something complicated.
"Mrs. Orr was my mother," she said. "She delivered half of Ashcombe." She studied me. "Your mother was born on the fourteenth of April 1969? At Hollow Lane?"
"Yes."
"My mother kept a book," she said slowly. "Every birth she ever attended. I gave it to the county record office when she died." She stopped. "I'd want to look at it again before I said anything else."
Then she got up, walked to the door of the reading room, and turned the key in the lock.
Owen half rose from his chair. Joan held up a hand.
"I'm not going to murder you," she said. "I just don't want Gary from the front desk hearing this, because Gary's mother lives in Ashcombe." She came back and sat down opposite me, close, her knees almost touching mine. "Do you know how many people have asked for that reel in the twenty-two years I've worked here?"
"No."
"Two." She reached under her desk and brought out a ledger of her own, an ordinary blue request book, and turned it round so I could read it. "You. And a woman who came in on the third of this month."
The third of this month was the day after my grandmother died.
The handwriting was looping and old-fashioned and leaned hard to the right. Name of reader. Reel requested: Courier, Oct to Dec 1968.
The name was S. R. Calloway.