Page 39 of All Our Missing Pieces

Wherever they were before must have been pretty bad, Beatrice thought.

‘So he must know the area backwards,’ she said.

‘Like you won’t believe. He can chatter on for hours about old Mr Miggins whose wife ran off with the window cleaner and the Hassans’ daughter who’s a professor at Cambridge now and the two babies that were swapped at birth in the… Sorry.’

Beatrice looked at him, confused, then laughed. ‘Don’t be. I wasn’t swapped at birth – I was just adopted.’

‘Okay. I was worried I’d dropped a clanger there.’ He smiled. ‘But whether he’ll know anything about this Doyle family I don’t know. Not just that it was a long time ago – from what you said it sounds like they didn’t really stick around here.’

‘No, but if he could even remember that they were here at all, it’d help. I feel like the house I’m living in might just be the one my birth mother’s family owned, but equally it might not. And if it’s not, then maybe I could find the right house and maybe there’d be someone there who’d know something.’

‘Well, I guess we’re about to find out.’

She followed Neil up a few steps to the entrance of the building and watched as he pressed buttons on the metal panel by the door, his fingers moving swiftly and surely.

The intercom crackled and he said, ‘It’s me, Gramps. Me and Beatrice.’

There was another crackle and a buzz, and Neil pushed open the door.

‘Let’s hope the lift is working,’ he said. ‘It goes on the blink sometimes and then poor Gramps is stuck up there on the seventeenth floor until they get it fixed again. His legs aren’t what they were and they’ve never been all that.’

‘What if it goes on the blink when he’s out?’ Beatrice asked.

Neil laughed. ‘Good question. Then he has to call the cavalry – that’s me – and I take him to Mum and Dad’s.’

But it turned out that the lift was working, and it bore them up to the seventeenth floor without incident. They emerged on to a concrete walkway bordered with metal railings, beyond which the ground looked very far away. Beatrice followed Neil along a row of doors, some a uniform dark red, others painted blue or yellow or stripped back to wood and varnished.

‘Here we are.’ He stopped and knocked on one of the red doors. ‘He’d have come and waited for us, but Mum nags him to keep the door closed and use the peephole.’

‘Because of burglars?’

‘Because of Jehovah’s Witnesses. He gets them in and argues with them and the poor buggers have to practically declare a hostage situation to get away.’

Whether the peephole was used or not, Beatrice couldn’t tell, but the door opened almost immediately. In front of her stood an old man – at least, he was almost standing, bent nearly double over a walking frame. He was tiny, shrunken with age, his hands mottled and bony on the metal bars, the wrists protruding from his clean white shirt thin as a bird’s legs. His hair was a shock of white, and his eyes when he peered up behind thick glasses were bright blue.

‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ he said, reaching out a hand to Neil as if he wanted to embrace him.

Neil leaned over the walking frame and hugged his grandfather. ‘Good to see you, Gramps. This is Beatrice, who I was telling you about. My grandfather, Jack Isaacs.’

‘Lovely to meet you, Mr Isaacs.’ Beatrice gingerly took the fragile hand in hers. ‘Thank you for inviting me over.’

‘It’s always good to see a new face. Especially a lady friend of Neil’s – and come all this way to visit me.’

Beatrice glanced at Neil, her eyebrows raised. She lived less than a mile away. And surely he hadn’t said…? Neil responded with a rueful grin and a shrug that could have meant anything.

‘I’m living in London for now,’ she explained. ‘But I’m from Philadelphia originally – hence the accent, I guess.’

It was too late to correct him on the girlfriend front – Mr Isaacs was leading the way into the flat, moving confidently but painfully slowly, the wheels of his walking frame bumping over the linoleum floor and the dark Oriental rugs that covered most of it. Beatrice followed him down the hallway and into a living room.

It was like stepping into a time capsule. The sofas and armchairs had worn cushions on wooden frames, the fabric clean and the wood lovingly polished. The walls were papered in a floral print up to the picture rail and stripes above it, the colours long since blurred by the sunlight that flooded in through the window occupying an entire wall. Heavy mahogany bookcases were stacked with worn paperbacks and thick, cloth-bound non-fiction volumes, interspersed with framed photographs, also faded to ghostliness.

‘Take a seat, my dear.’ Mr Isaacs gestured towards the sofa. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

‘Let me do it, Gramps,’ Neil urged. ‘You sit down and chat to Beatrice.’

Neil turned and left, and Beatrice found herself stepping towards the old man, gently taking his arm and helping him down into an armchair. She perched herself on the sofa at right angles to it, squinting against the light from the window.

‘So you’re a student of local history,’ Mr Isaacs began.