Page 35 of All Our Missing Pieces

An arrow to the right of the screen took her to the opening spread of the paper, and she zoomed in again, distracted by an advertisement for chocolate bars and a headline about minimum payments for boxers.

It was all so alien it might as well have been printed in another language – or another world. And, she realised quickly, the task was hopeless. There were hundreds of issues of the newspaper for every year, each running to more than forty pages. Even if she only flicked through them, even if she restricted herself to the years around the Second World War, it would take her days and days to go through them all.

She didn’t have days and days. She had forty-five minutes each afternoon, and then only if she persuaded the children that ‘Rap and Rhyme’ was something they wanted to do every day – a long shot at best. Already, it had been half an hour since she’d left them.

Her chances of finding what she was hoping to find were about as good as they were of winning the lottery. And that was assuming she actually knew what she was looking for, which she didn’t really – not beyond confirming whether the house she was living in was actually the same house that had been owned by the Doyle family from Clonmara.

She navigated out of the newspaper archive and logged out of her newly created account, knowing there was no need to remember the password because she would never use it again.

‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ the librarian asked, smiling, as Beatrice passed the reception desk again.

She shook her head. ‘Not this time. But thank you for your help.’

When she returned to the children’s section – the small tables and chairs and brightly coloured books reassuringly normal – Slate and Parker were the only kids left; Beatrice felt a stab of guilt as she hurried over. Neil was squatting down, talking to them, the cheerful grin still on his face.

‘Here’s your mum now,’ he said.

‘I’m not their mum – just the nanny. Sorry I was late collecting them. I got distracted by the newspaper archive upstairs. I was looking for articles about Spitalfields before the Second World War.’

Neil stood up. He was very tall, all lanky legs and arms, with a shaved head and a neatly trimmed goatee beard. Beatrice guessed he was a couple of years older than her and wondered fleetingly why a young guy like him would choose to spend a summer afternoon wrangling a bunch of kids in a library.

‘You’re into local history, then?’ he asked. ‘You’d love my grandpa. He grew up around there. Well, the whole family on my dad’s side did, but he’s the oldest one still around. He worked as a cobbler, back when those old houses were leather workshops.’

‘He did?’ Beatrice hesitated. She could think of nothing she’d enjoy doing less than listening to the meanderings of some senile old man. ‘Actually, it’s not so much local history, although that’s part of it.’

‘Oh?’ Neil smiled. ‘I’m intrigued. Tell me more.’

Beatrice glanced down at Slate and Parker and saw that they were still happily ensconced on their plastic chairs, their heads together as they paged through a Curious George picture book. If only she had the ability to make the two of them sit quietly and focus that Neil appeared to possess.

She looked back at him. There was no reason for her to entrust him with the details of her personal life – details she’d kept hidden from the people she lived with and saw every day. But at the same time – he was a stranger. She didn’t ever have to bring the kids back here, ever see him again.

She lowered her voice and said, ‘The thing is… I’m adopted. I was born in Ireland although I grew up in the States. My dad was working out there at the time. And now I’m trying to find out more about what happened.’

‘To trace your birth parents?’ he asked gently.

‘That’s… well, my mother, mostly.’

Her father had always felt like a shadowy figure, sidelined by her compulsion to find the woman who’d given birth to her.

‘Why East London, though?’ Neil asked.

Hastily, seeing that the children had finished the book and were beginning to bicker about what to look at next, Beatrice explained about her time in Clonmara, which had yielded only the fragment of information about a big house in Spitalfields.

‘Wow,’ Neil said. ‘Sounds like you’ve got some detective work ahead of you. But hold on. There’s something I remember reading recently – we get newspapers from all over the world here, every day. They all get laid out on a table upstairs. The ones in Bengali and Urdu are the most popular, and I can’t read those but I love geeking out over the others.’

‘Go on,’ Beatrice urged impatiently.

‘They all get recycled at the end of the week,’ Neil continued, ‘but centrally, they’re digitised. I should be able to find the article, if you’ve got five minutes.’

‘Yes, please.’

He hurried off, and Beatrice crouched down with the children, trying to get them engaged in another book and reassuring them that they could go to the playground on the way home, now that the rain had eased.

‘Here you go.’ Neil returned, proudly bearing an A4 printout.

Beatrice almost snatched it from his hand. It was a good-quality scan, but the columns of newsprint were slightly askew on the page. At the top, she saw the running head of the Irish Times and a date from a couple of weeks earlier.

But the headline told her all she needed to know: National Adoption Contact Preference Register to Open.