Paul had written the exhibition label before he found the diary. He had left a space for the instrument’s maker, but none for doubt.
His aunt Celia read it standing up. All the chairs in the house had been sold except the piano stool, which was packed beneath two lamps in a removal crate.
“Arthur Hewitt,” she read. “Codebreaker, musician, quiet hero.”
“You don’t like quiet?”
“I don’t know about hero.”
“He worked at Bletchley Park.”
“I know where he worked. I posted his letters.”
She put the label on the kitchen counter and went back to the list of things she wanted to keep for her new flat. Outside, a buyer was trying to fit the dining table through the gate without taking its legs off. Celia watched him for a moment, then opened the window and told him where Arthur had kept the screwdriver.
The violin was still upstairs. The local museum wanted to borrow it for the war exhibition; the instrument dealer wanted to collect it on Friday. Celia had arranged a week’s loan before the sale. Paul thought that remarkably little time for a quiet hero.
He had been twenty-six when his grandfather died. Now, in the summer of 1998, he was thirty-one and still thinking of things he should have asked him.
Arthur had taught him to hold a bow. He had also taught him that the orange segments went in a separate saucer, because their juice spoiled the biscuits. Most of Paul’s memories were like that. The museum invitation had offered a way to enlarge them.
He found the diary in a shoe box beneath the spare-room bed. The cover was plain brown. Inside, the entries continued through the spring of 1945 and on into August, when Arthur was still going to work and waiting to hear when his employment would end.
Paul started at the last written page. It had two lines of numbers, a drawing of a violin’s waist, and one ordinary sentence: I cannot put this down plainly.
The first line read: 33 34 44 / 32 24 33 15.
The second read: 15 31 43 24 15 / 33 34 42 44 23.
He took the book downstairs.
Celia was adding the curtains to her keep list. She had moved into the house to look after Arthur during his final illness. Since then she had worked fewer shifts at the surgery, cleared his rooms, and paid the bills while Paul visited on Sundays with flowers that required finding a vase.
“Look,” he said.
“I am looking.”
“At the numbers.”
She leaned closer. “He used to write us treasure hunts.”
“Before the war?”
“After. Don’t look so disappointed.”
Arthur’s childhood alphabet game was drawn inside the front cover. Five rows: ABCDE, FGHIK, LMNOP, QRSTU, VWXYZ. Below them he had written Row first, place second. I does for J.
Paul copied the square. Thirty-three meant the third letter of the third row: N. Thirty-four was O. Forty-four was T.
“Not,” he said.
Celia stopped writing.
He worked along the second group. M, I, N, E.
NOT MINE.
The next line took longer because he kept checking the first one. ELSIE NORTH.
“Do you know her?” he asked.
“No.”
“Could be a contact.”
“For what?”
He turned back through the diary. There were ordinary entries about rain and letters. A man had borrowed a razor and failed to return it. There was a pencilled reminder to buy his sister a birthday present. Paul had hoped for a clandestine meeting; he found an argument about the cost of getting a violin bridge replaced.
The entry was dated October 1942. E says it was already cracked. It wasn’t. She has a receipt for the repair to the lower rib, which she says proves that I am remembering the wrong damage.
At the next mention of E, Arthur had written only Asked again.
Paul brought the violin down in its case. Celia spread an old towel on the counter. He laid it belly-up and bent over the lower side. A narrow repaired split crossed the rib beneath the right-hand corner. It had always been there. As a boy he had thought every violin came with one.
“It could have been a loan,” he said.
Celia touched the edge of the case. “Then we’ve had it rather a long time.”
They searched the shoe box together. Celia wanted the dealer’s appraisal; Paul wanted a letter that would make the coded words mean something else. Under a bundle of Christmas cards they found a small paper envelope containing two photographs and a repair receipt. Beside it was the 1945 employment letter from Bletchley addressed to Arthur that Paul had copied for the exhibition.
One photograph showed Arthur in a garden with a violin. The other showed a young woman on a low stage, the instrument held against her neck. On the back, in a different hand, was written Elsie, 1938.
The receipt bore the name E. North. It described a split in the lower rib near the corner, with a little sketch of its position. Paul placed it beside the violin. The line on the paper and the line in the wood agreed.
“That connects them,” Celia said. “It doesn’t tell us what happened.”
He went upstairs to read the diary from the beginning.
There were no more numbers. Arthur had hidden the name at the end, but not the act. Paul found it halfway through an entry he had initially skipped because it began with a complaint about wet socks.
I took the violin from E’s room while she was out. I wanted it for the evening and did not want another refusal. When she asked me the next day I said I had not been in her room. I had time to correct this. I have had time every day since.
The pencil mark at the end was hard enough to have torn the paper.
Paul sat on the bare bedroom floor. Downstairs the table buyer was laughing. He had found the screwdriver and, apparently, the usefulness of taking advice.
He read the entry again. The theft had not happened in a ruined city or during an escape. There was no reason to attach it to Arthur’s secret work.
When Paul came down, Celia was on the telephone to the dealer.
“No, the case is included,” she said. She listened, then said, “I will ring you back.”
Paul handed her the open diary.
She read it without sitting. Then she put it down and took the curtains off the list.
“The curtains haven’t done anything,” he said.
“The people buying the house want them. I was going to keep them. If the violin doesn’t go, I’ll sell them.”
He had not known there was an offer on the house. She showed him the figures. The price of the violin filled a gap between the removal bill, the deposit on her flat and the final expenses of Arthur’s care.
“We don’t know if this Elsie had children,” he said. “Or if she’s alive.”
“We don’t know whether that receipt belongs to this instrument. We think it does. We ought to find out. But you don’t get to say ‘ought’ and go back to your nice Sunday evenings.”
He looked at the label on the counter. His own name was printed underneath Arthur’s: Lent by the Hewitt family. Research by Paul Hewitt.
“What does it cost to put the sale off?”
She called the dealer back and asked. He had booked transport with another collection in their town. Cancelling the violin’s place on it would cost eighty pounds. He would hold his offer for a fortnight, but he wanted a written account of the ownership question before doing anything else.
Paul fetched his cheque book. He wrote the eighty pounds to Celia, and another two hundred as a loan towards her moving costs. That used most of the money he had saved for a week away. He wrote the loan amount on her list himself.
“I can give the instrument a fortnight,” she said. “It won’t fit in my new flat. You’ll take it after that, whether you’ve found anyone or not.”
He agreed. They left the case open while he made notes, copying the woman’s name exactly. The museum curator might know how to begin tracing her; asking was Paul’s job. He would give the curator copies of the diary entry, receipt and photograph, rather than his preferred version of them.
At four he called the museum. The curator was still in. Paul told her he needed to withdraw the violin from the loan and correct the label. When she asked why, he almost said there was a complication with the estate.
He read Arthur’s sentence instead.
The curator asked him to bring the papers on Monday. She did not promise to find Elsie, or an heir, or an answer that would allow the sale.
Celia put the photographs in a fresh envelope. Paul rewrote the exhibition label. He kept Arthur’s name and the documented wartime employment. He removed musician and quiet hero. At the bottom he wrote that the instrument previously proposed for display was being withheld while its ownership was investigated.
“Will they use that?” Celia asked.
“I’ll ask them to.”
She closed the violin case. The two catches made different clicks. Arthur had always shut the left one first, pressing with his thumb, and Paul put out his hand before remembering that Celia had already done it.
He took the case from her.
“Don’t leave it in your car,” she said.
“I won’t.”
He put it beside his coat, where he would have to step around it before going home. Then he helped her take down the curtains.
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