Most of the ground floor was occupied by a shrimper’s cart with its nets extended and a full-sized figure of a shrimper in oilskins staring through sightless glass eyes at a point where the sea and his catch under it would have scurried. There was a Victorian fire appliance and a vintage motorcycle. There was a faithfully reproduced High Victorian parlour. It was all very picturesque and interesting. But there were no books. Suzanne was not encouraged. And there were no staff, either. She could hear a transistor radio very faintly somewhere. But there seemed to be no one about.
She climbed the stairs. The first-floor display comprised two large rooms. One of them was pretty much dedicated to the Mexico disaster and its aftermath. The other was full of stuffed wildlife from the Fylde Coast. The taxidermist had done an excellent job. The animals were as lifelike as any dead beast was ever going to be. But Suzanne was starting to feel that Alice Daunt had surely misdirected her to this haphazard assemblage of local relics and curios. She wanted books. Or she wanted microfiche or an easily accessed computer database. She wanted facts and revelations, not dust and elderly pictures.
She followed the tinny sound of the radio. It was playing ‘When Love Breaks Down’. Suzanne thought that she had never disliked a song more. But she listened carefully, trying to track its source. It was coming from down below her, from the ground floor. She descended the stairs. The music barely increased in volume. It was being listened to surreptitiously, in a sly near-silence. Gaining the ground floor, she looked around. There was something in the gloom to the right of the Victorian parlour. It was darkness on darkness, an added dimension, the suggestion of a shadow or opening. She walked towards it. The song grew louder without gaining body. It was shrill, exactly the sort of sound reproduced by a pocket radio from the 1960s or 1970s. Suzanne thought that no pleasure could be gained from listening to this starved melody. With a song you liked, it would be even worse.
It was a sort of cupboard without a door. Her eyes adjusted and she saw a figure sitting there. He looked up at her and jumped. He was wearing a liveried sweater, uniform trousers. He was the museum staff. And if he wasn’t on his break, he was skiving. He switched off the radio.
‘Can I help you?’ He stood, finger-combing his hair, clearly caught out and embarrassed.
‘I’m researching a Southport resident called Jayne Boyte.’ Suzanne took out her BBC accreditation and showed it to the man.
‘People generally make an appointment. I mean, they email us or telephone ahead, unless they’re just casual visitors.’
‘I’m not a casual visitor, as you can see. But I’m not from Southport, obviously. I wasn’t previously aware of the existence of this museum, of this resource.’
The man had recovered from her ambush. He seemed to like the flattery implicit in his place of work being termed a resource by someone with a laminated pass. Work avoidance, Suzanne thought, looking down at the radio where it sat on his bench. It was silver and rectangular and held together in one corner by adhesive tape.
‘Essentially, we have two separate archives,’ the man said. ‘The photographic archive is catalogued both by date and by subject matter. The written archive is not catalogued at all. We did have an archivist scheduled to put it all in some kind of order about three and a half years ago. But budget cuts put paid to that.’
Suzanne nodded. It was a familiar complaint.
‘You’re more than welcome to have a look. It’s all on shelves, roughly alphabetically listed by author, in a room in our basement.’ He began to search for a key from a bunch attached to a key ring on his belt. ‘You have to come with me around to the back of the building to gain access to it. It’s through a door at the rear and down a set of steps. Do you have a mobile phone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then put my number in it. I will have to lock the door behind you. It’s nothing personal, but we have to do it as a security measure. It’s one of our rules.’
‘Fine,’ Suzanne said.
He shuffled past her and began to lead the way. ‘I hope you don’t have any allergies.’
‘What?’
‘Specifically, I hope you’re not allergic to dust.’
Suzanne expected mildew. She expected splotched pages and books with gummy spines. But there was a dehumidifier purring away in the corner when the museum worker switched on the overhead lights in the subterranean room. Everything looked dry and comparatively clean and well ordered. The shelves were neatly stacked. The lights cast a brilliant flare of white brightness. They revealed her guide’s glasses as bifocals and gave his eyes an avaricious gleam. She realised that the remark about dust had been his little joke.
‘Good luck.’
‘Thank you.’
‘We close at five. Appreciate it if you could summon me to come and get you by a quarter to, at the latest.’
Suzanne looked at her watch. It was just approaching one. She had not eaten breakfast, but this was one day when lunch could wait. The walk along Roe Lane to Churchtown had been just the thing, she realised now, for her hangover. All trace of it was gone. She felt alert and fresh. And she was excited at the nature of the archive that clearly resided here, well maintained but scarcely ever used. There might be secrets here, committed to paper by Jane Boyte before her rebel instinct was destroyed. As she heard the key turning to lock the basement door, Suzanne had Jane pictured in her mind on the sand in the sunshine, wearing her flying leathers, feline and gorgeous with her bobbed hair raven black and her smile full of life and mischief between the brothers Giroud.
She found what she was looking for within fifteen minutes. The Dáil delegation press picture had led her to expect something typed rather than handwritten. And it was typed, double-spaced across eighty pages which had then been professionally bound. The binding was blue canvas-backed board and it had faded with the years from what Suzanne had imagined was cobalt to something much paler. There was nothing on the cover to tell you what you were reading. But on the volume’s slim spine were printed the words: Jane Elizabeth Boyte. My Deposition. August 12, 1927.
There was a desk in the corner of the museum basement. Suzanne went over to it and pulled up its chair and sat. She had no protective gloves with her to shield the pages of the deposition from damaging secretions. But she had the strong instinct that she was the first person in eighty years to open what she held between her hands. And she thought that it would survive the experience. She opened the volume and flicked through the leaves with her thumb. They were thicker than flimsy, thicker than foolscap. They were somewhere between foolscap and cartridge paper and would have been stiff in the roller of Jane’s Royal or Remington machine. The letters forming the words were even in their depth of ink and the impression left by the individual keys on the page. Jane Boyte had been an expert typist, fast and confident and clean. There were no mistakes at all. Her deposition was, Suzanne could see from the dates at the top of each entry, strictly speaking, a diary. At least, it was a chronological account. It ran from May 10 to August 8. And it concerned itself only with the days and weeks and months in between those two dates during the single year of 1927.
Jane’s entire deposition had been written during Harry Spalding’s Southport summer.