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to being in that condition since my days at the Museum of Childhood. Which reminds me, I need to call them. Put some feelers out. I
still have a few contacts down in Bethnal Green. They might take a few. And there were so many in that room. The Masons even have a perfect Pierotti!’
    ‘All in good time.’ Leonard peered over his glasses. His watery eyes were framed between tortoiseshell spectacle frames and a thicket of ungroomed eyebrow that looked as rigid as
steel wire, and didn’t quite match his hairpiece. ‘We haven’t signed a contract yet. I sold some of her uncle’s pieces in the seventies, and Edith Mason led me a merry
dance, I can tell you. This was before I even laid eyes on what she wanted to sell. One of M. H. Mason’s dioramas, some voles in their whites playing cricket. I’d never seen anything
like it. The umpires were field mice and the groundsman was a weasel. You should have seen the pavilion. Absolutely marvellous. Though from what I understood from Edith Mason, her uncle never
recovered from the Great War. You know he killed himself?’
    Catherine nodded. ‘I read that somewhere.’
    ‘Cut his own throat with a straight razor.’
    ‘God, no.’
    Leonard sighed and shook his head. ‘Terrible. Hardly anything of his work has ever come up for auction, so beyond the dolls, I am very intrigued by what else Edith might have hidden in
that heap she lives in. Though after Mr Dore’s bizarre absence at the viewing, I’d hazard a guess that Edith Mason hasn’t changed her tactics one jot since our brief business.
I’m staggered she even remembers me.’
    ‘There was a lot of loot in that room.’
    ‘You think she should go bigger?’
    ‘What I saw will get on TV, Leonard. There’s enough for an exhibition. And if there are Mason pieces available too, well . . . Potter’s estate went for a million.’
    ‘And Potter wasn’t fit to tie M. H. Mason’s bootlaces. But we can handle it, Kitten. This firm once auctioned the contents of a castle.’
    Catherine laughed. Leonard began to smile, too, and chuckle. ‘Oh, will you make the tea? Can’t you see I’m comfortable sitting down?’ Leonard slapped the armrests of his
wheelchair.
    ‘Stop it!’ She never wanted to laugh when he made jokes about his incapacity, and always felt guilty afterwards if she did.
    ‘Here,’ Leonard offered the letter from Edith Mason.
    ‘Nice paper.’
    ‘I know. She really shouldn’t be using stationery that valuable. She should let us sell it. That’s Crane paper with a high linen rag content. At least eighty years old. I know
a collector in Austria who’d have it off us like that.’ Leonard snapped two long fingers in the air beside his awful hairpiece. ‘But her handwriting’s not what it was. She
must be close to a letter from Her Majesty. And she’ll be madder than a mongoose by now, too. But I know you can handle her. You’ve got form, girl.’
    ‘I think I love my job.’
    Leonard snorted in appreciation, then frowned. ‘Curious part of the world, though, Magbar Wood. I’ve been down there once or twice.’ He looked around the walls of the office.
‘Before I had this place. Even then it was the land that time forgot. Ever been? Didn’t you spend some time down that way?’
    ‘The Hell. Ellyll Fields. Yes. Part of my so-called childhood.’ Catherine thought of the service station and empty grey dual carriageways. ‘I went there, where I used to live.
After the viewing in Green Willow. It’s changed a lot. What I remember is gone. All of it. How did you know I was from there?’
    ‘You mentioned it once.’
    ‘Did I?’
    ‘Must have done. And the place has an unfortunate history. Kids went missing from a school there, before you were born I think.’
    Not all of them.
Catherine busied herself with the tea things so Leonard wouldn’t see her face. Margaret Reid, Angela Prescott and Helen Teme: she could even remember their names.
Everyone in Ellyll Fields in the seventies