Not worth anything? Showed what Carla knew. The truth was that when you read a book that had previously been owned and read by Angela Sutherland, you became part of a conversation. And since, tragically, there were never to be any more actual conversations with Angela, that, to Irene, was valuable. That was invaluable.
If it weren’t for the nagging worry of the whereabouts of Laura, Irene might have been quite contented, basking like a lizard in the morning sunlight, sorting through the books, watching the office workers and the mums with their children hurrying past in the lane outside.
Irene’s little two-up, two-down house sat on one side of Hayward’s Place, a narrow lane in the heart of the city. Not much more than a footpath cutting through between two larger roads, Hayward’s Place was flanked on one side by five small identical houses （Irene’s was number two）， and on the other by the site of the Red Bull Theatre （which may or may not have burned down in the Great Fire of London and which had now been developed into an uninspiring office space）。 It offered a convenient shortcut and was, on weekdays at least, busy day and night.
Where was Laura? They had said Tuesday, hadn’t they? She usually came on a Tuesday, because on Tuesdays she had a later start at the launderette. Was today a Tuesday? Irene thought that it was, but she was starting to doubt herself. She pulled herself up out of her chair, gingerly—she’d not long ago twisted an ankle, which was one of the reasons she needed help with the shopping in the first place—and with effort circumvented the little piles of books on the floor, the read and unread, the favored and the destined-for-the-Oxfam-shop. She pottered across her living room, furnished simply with her chair and a small sofa, a dresser on which sat an unfashionably small and rarely watched television set, and a bookcase atop which perched her radio. She turned the radio on.
At ten o’clock, the newsreader confirmed that it was indeed a Tuesday—Tuesday the thirteenth of March, to be precise. The newsreader went on to say that Prime Minister Theresa May had given the Russian premier until midnight to explain how a former spy was poisoned in Salisbury; he said that a Labor MP had denied slapping a female constituent on the buttocks; he said that a young woman was being questioned in connection with the murder of Daniel Sutherland, the twenty-three-year-old man found dead on a narrowboat on the Regent’s Canal on Sunday. The newsreader went on to say a number of other things too, but Irene couldn’t hear him over the sound of blood rushing in her ears.
She was imagining things. She must be. Daniel Sutherland? It couldn’t be. Her hands trembling, Irene turned the radio off and then back on again, but the newsreader had moved on now; he was talking about something else, about the weather, about a cold front moving in.
Perhaps it was a different Daniel Sutherland? How many Daniel Sutherlands were there? She hadn’t bought the newspaper that morning, she hardly ever did anymore, so she couldn’t check that. She’d heard it was possible to find anything on a mobile phone these days, but she wasn’t entirely sure she knew how, and in any case, she couldn’t quite remember where she’d seen the phone last. Upstairs somewhere, probably. Battery dead as a dodo, probably.
No, she’d just have to do things the old-fashioned way; she’d have to go around to the newsagent to get the paper. She needed milk and bread, in any case, if Laura wasn’t coming. In the hallway, she shrugged on her coat and picked up her bag and house key, noticing just as she was about to open the front door, just in time, that she was still wearing her slippers. She went back into the living room to change her shoes.
She was forgetful, that was all. Funny, though, how nervous she felt when she left the house these days—she used to be out and about all the time, shopping, going to the library, volunteering at the Red Cross shop on the high street, but you fell out of the habit quickly, after a period of being housebound. She needed to watch that. She didn’t want to end up being one of those old people, too frightened to walk out their old front door.
She was, she had to admit, happy to avoid the supermarket—so full of the impatient, unthinking, distracted young. Not that she didn’t like young people. She didn’t want to become one of those sorts of elderly either—the bitter sort, closed-off and self-satisfied in their beige senior citizen sandals ordered from the back pages of the Sunday supplements. Irene wore blue-and-orange New Balance trainers with a Velcro strap. They were a Christmas present from Angela. Irene had nothing against the young; she’d even been young herself once. Only young people made assumptions, didn’t they? Some young people. They assumed you were deaf, blind, weak. Some of these things might be true （and some not—Irene had the hearing of a bat; she often wished, in fact, given the paper-thin walls of her house, that her hearing wasn’t so acute）。 Nevertheless, it was the assumption that rankled.