collector's item . . . shall we say £5?"
Elizabeth's worst suspicions were pleasurably encouraged.
Fortuné hunters were out of date, and in any case the details of her official inheritance—let alone the rest of it all—couldn't possibly be common knowledge. But he was up to something, that was certain.
"The price is £1.50, Mr Mitchell. I couldn't possibly accept more." She took his £5 note.
"Mint condition?" He raised the book between them. "The going price in Blackwell's at Oxford for this is £9.95, you know."
So he had done his homework, but if he was trying to pick her up that was to be expected.
"It's still £1.50." That "Blackwell's at Oxford" was a nice touch, well-calculated to arouse her happiest memories, if that was what was intended. Yet, once identified for what it was, it armoured her against him. "Do you mind taking your change mostly in silver?"
"I don't want any change." Her intransigence was beginning to unsettle him. "Keep it for the church tower."
She began to count out the 10p pieces from her cash-box.
"You can give them all to the Vicar's wife, then—she's sitting just down the end there, and she'll give you raffle tickets in exchange. You might win a bottle of whisky or an LP. And even if you don't win anything, she'll give you a pamphlet on the history of the church for free . . . seeing as you're dummy3
interested in history, Mr Mitchell."
That, and £3.50 in 10p pieces, ought to damp down his ambitions, whatever they were. And besides, there was a customer waiting further up the table.
She pushed the piles of coins towards him. "Excuse me . . ."
But when she had completed the sale of One Hundred Great Lives and Civilisation on Trial, at 40p the pair, he was still there with his coins untouched, looking just a little forlorn.
"Yes, Mr Mitchell?" Elizabeth's conscience tweaked her slightly. It was after all a church sale, and she had not given him the benefit of any doubt whatsoever, in all Christian charity.
He spread his hands. "Miss Loftus, I confess ... I was also hoping to buy a little of your time."
So at least they had come to the crunch on her terms, thought Elizabeth smugly. "My time?"
"Just that. At least, to start with ... I want to put a proposition to you."
Elizabeth's hackles rose. She looked up the table for more customers, but there were none, so she could hardly set any price on her time, which patently had no value here and now.
"A proposition?" She could hear the harshness in her voice which was normally reserved for scholarship girls who allowed their precocious sex lives to intrude into the work which had to be done, and who then attempted to fob her off with transparent excuses. "What proposition?"
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At least he had picked up the danger signaclass="underline" she could see that by the set of the jaw. "It's about your father, Miss Loftus.
It relates to him."
As it invariably did, the direct mention of her father froze Elizabeth, activating her public face to assume its sorrowing-daughter expression.
"I was very sorry to learn of his death."
There was no earthly reason why he should be very sorry, if he was a stranger. And if he wasn't a stranger—it occurred to Elizabeth that it was quite possible, if this young man was an academic of some sort, that he might have met Father somewhere, sometime. But then, if he had, it seemed to be unlikely that Father would have endeared himself sufficiently to make him "very sorry". So, either way, it was merely a conventional insincerity preparing the way for the proposition.
"I read the obituary in The Times."
Everyone had done that—
. . . after a long illness bravely borne . . . although badly wounded, refused medical attention. . . continued to direct the engagement. . . successful conclusion of a brilliantly-handled operation . . .
Well, The Times always did its duty by VCs, and, with the original citation to go on, the panegyrist's work had been largely done for him in advance, for all that it mattered now, which was no more than any other seawrack from those dummy3
sunken E-boats of his.
But everyone had read it anyway, even Mr Paul Mitchell.
"That's why I'm here, really . . . Perhaps . . . perhaps I'm rather rushing in—so soon after . . . But I'm hoping that you won't think so."
What Elizabeth was thinking was that her silence was getting to him. And that, if it had merely been a matter of small talk about her irreplaceable loss, would have been fine with her.
But with his proposition as yet unproposed it called for a bit of encouragement.
She indicated the stacks of 10p pieces. "You've purchased some of my time, Mr Mitchell—remember?"
He gave her a curious look, almost as though she had given him an inkling of the true face behind the mask.
"Yes, of course . . . Well, the obituary stated that at the time of his death he was engaged in writing a history of HMS
Vengeful, the destroyer he commanded in the Channel fight in '42. Is that what he was doing?"
The question was delivered with a slight frown, indicating doubt if not actual disbelief. And that was interesting because of all the facts recorded in the obituary, other than the long illness bravely borne, this was the one The Times had got wrong. And—not doubt, but certainty—Mr Paul Mitchell knew as much. But how?
"Why d'you want to know, Mr Mitchell? Does it matter what he was writing?"
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He shook his head vaguely. "I seem to remember . . . about two or three years ago ... he wrote a letter to The Times trying to get in touch with anyone who served on the previous HMS
Vengeful—the one which fought at Jutland in 1916, or any next-of-kin with letters and suchlike . . . And he also explained then that he was writing a book about all the ships of that name which had ever served with the navy—am I right?"
"Yes, Mr Mitchell." She had typed the letter herself, as always, from that scrawl which only she could read. And there was no point in denying it because there was nothing vague about his memory, it was exactly right.
"So The Times was wrong?"
Elizabeth nodded. But she had asked why and he had answered how, she realised.
"All the Vengefuls." He nodded back. "And there were twelve of them, I believe? Or nearly thirteen, but the Admiralty changed its mind about the last one, and finally called it something else— Shannon, it is now ... so that doesn't qualify.
And your father commanded the penultimate Vengeful, then."
Elizabeth nodded again. "You're very well informed, Mr Mitchell."
"Not really. I just read the newspapers, that's all."
"Then you have a good memory."
He grinned at her. "Especially for letters in The Times.
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Because that wasn't the only one your father wrote, was it!"
The grin started to broaden, then disappeared instantly as he remembered also that such levity was inappropriate to the occasion. "I'm sorry . . ."
"There's no need to be." It didn't suit Elizabeth for him to become inhibited by her bereavement, not now that she understood exactly how he had become so knowledgeable.
"You mean the Vengeful-Shannon correspondence, I take it?"
He nodded cautiously, still doubtful about her reaction to the memory of that long, acrimonious and ultimately hilarious battle of the letter-writers in the columns of The Times.
"You found it amusing?" Elizabeth fabricated the ghost of a smile to take the sting out of her question. She could well believe that outsiders might have considered it so, that passionate and useless controversy about the naming of a warship which the letters editor had headlined variously, tongue-in-cheek, as "The last fight of the Vengeful" and "A hard-fought engagement".