Free Winter of Discontent by Jeanne M. Dams Page A

not.”
    “It’s an awfully old-fashioned kind of nickname, anyway,” I said thoughtfully. “The sort of thing one might find in a Dorothy Sayers novel, or even P. G. Wodehouse. Ever so frightfully public-school, what?”
    Alan grimaced at my imitation of an upper-class British accent.
    “And Bill wasn’t that sort at all,” I pursued, “and he was just a child in the thirties. On the other hand, what would Bill have been doing with someone else’s letter, down there in the catacombs?”
    “Search me. That, of course, is what Derek is trying to find out. One of the things. Do you want to hear the rest of my news?”
    “I haven’t had time to deal with this bit yet, but go ahead.”
    “Well, you remember I said the museum looked as though the intruders were looking for something?”
    “Intruders? There was more than one?”
    “Plural for convenience. We don’t know yet how many there might have been. At any rate, Derek and his people have been searching through the mess, trying to work out what ought to be there and isn’t. And so far, two things seem to be missing. One is Bill’s diary. Sorry, ‘engagement calendar’ to you Yanks. They can’t find it anywhere.”
    “But that could be really important! If we knew who Bill had seen on that last morning—”
    “Exactly. That’s why Derek put particular emphasis on finding it. Now it’s still possible they may find it. Walter might have taken it home with him, or it could be in that rabbit warren of an office upstairs. They’ll keep looking.”
    “It’s certainly suggestive, though. That it’s missing, I mean.”
    “It is. And the other thing that’s missing—care to hazard a guess?”
    I thought hard, and then looked at Alan with dawning comprehension. “The atlas?”
    “Got it in one. The atlas. That carefully marked atlas with all the place names—the same place names that are in the letter. Now what do you make of that?”

NINE
     
     
     
    WELL, I COULDN’T MAKE ANYTHING OF IT AT ALL. So ALAN AND I sat over our coffee, brewing another pot, until we had ingested enough caffeine to keep a grizzly bear awake all winter. We got ourselves thoroughly wired, but we didn’t come up with anything very useful.
    We began hopefully enough. “All right,” I said briskly, stirring sugar into my coffee, “let’s start with the missing stuff. Why would someone steal an appointment book and an atlas? Maybe—maybe Bill kept his address book in the back of his calendar, as I do. Maybe—um—someone wanted to look up addresses in the atlas.”
    “In a road atlas of the American states.” Alan’s tone was carefully neutral.
    “Oh. And most of Bill’s addresses would be around here, I suppose. Or in the UK, anyway.”
    “In any case, if there were addresses in the diary, they were copies. Bill kept an address book in his desk. Quite a nice one, leather bound.”
    “Okay, scratch that idea. Wait! Maybe Walter took them home himself. I don’t remember when he said he saw it—before or after Bill disappeared. He might have wanted to try again to figure out who was supposed to be coming to that meeting. And he said he wanted to study the atlas, to get an idea of why it was marked.”
    “Yes, but you gave him the atlas yesterday. And the paramedics don’t think he was attacked this morning—more like yesterday afternoon or evening. That means he never left the museum last night. When would he have taken the things home?”
    I shook my head. “Poor Walter. Lying there for all those hours in that cold place—well, at least he wasn’t in pain, I suppose. Not if he was unconscious the whole time. Well, so probably he didn’t take the things. Anyway, I just remembered—the museum was ransacked, and the calendar and the atlas are the only things missing. So they must have been stolen. Which gets us right back where we started. More coffee?”
    “Please.” He held up his cup. “You’re going too fast, my dear. We don’t know for certain