The Keeper of Songs by Fiona Mountain

Author:Fiona Mountain [Mountain, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fiona Mountain

* * *

Robbie slouched against the chair, scratched the back of his head. ‘So, when your dad asked you to find Molly, he was asking you to do what reporters, music fans and investigative journalists, have been trying to do for decades and have all singlehandedly failed.’

‘Yeah, thanks, Dad!’ I exhaled. ‘So now what?’

We were still whispering, so as not to disturb the other library users.

‘He believed you’d find a way,’ Robbie said. ‘He must have known you’d enjoy a challenge.’

‘Wild goose chase, more like.’ I bit my bottom lip. ‘I wonder if he might be…’

‘The unidentified man?’

Further down the long table, a silver-haired man in a tweedy jacket turned to scowl at us.

I dropped my voice lower still, leant in even closer to Robbie. ‘In which case, he had an affair with her, cheated on my mum?’

‘That would explain a helluva lot.’

‘It would.’

Patterns. They were everywhere. I was fascinated by the Fibonacci sequence in nature, the way it dictated the arrangement of leaves on a branch, flower petals, spirals in a shell. Much traditional ironwork was based on repeat elements and I used it all the time when I was at the forge, designing gates and fire screens. Molly disappeared in 1968 and ten years later, the exact same thing happened to Sukey. Two women in my father’s past, who’d both gone missing. Here was one of those patterns that caused TV detectives to reopen old cases, hunt down a killer who’d escaped justice. My dad was no killer. But…

‘D’you think your dad was the type to have an affair?’ Robbie asked.

I couldn’t make that fit either. ‘I don’t. I really don’t. But then what do we really know about our parents and who they were before we existed?’

‘I know. Hard to imagine they even had a life before we came along.’

‘Hmm. True.’ I smiled at him. ‘I’m really glad you’re here.’

‘Me too.’

We were silent for a moment. I fell to wondering if my dad had known, when he left me with this quest, that the only person I could turn to for help, was the person who was right here beside me now? He was canny like that.

‘Hey look at this. Robbie was occupied by something else on the screen.

He’d clicked on the third index listing for Molly Marrison and it had pulled up another newspaper cutting. The article was dated 25th October 1967. The title: Derbyshire Girls Arrested in Abortion Rights Rally.

There was a brief mention of Molly in the second paragraph, simply stating that she was a Derbyshire singer, who’d built up a following the local pubs and clubs.

But it wasn’t her who’d been was arrested.

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