Read Online Death be Not Proud by C F Dunn - Free Book Online Page B

chocolate in my bag,” I offered.
    I fished out a couple of Kit Kats without looking, tapping in another set of data with one finger. Water sloshed in the mugs in the sink and a faint scent of washing-up liquid drifted. The young woman returned and leaned over my shoulder while drying a mug.
    â€œTry Northampton – they’ve just digitized their collection,” she suggested.
    The screen hesitated, then coughed up a snazzy home page with interactive links. I scanned through them, opening page after page of irrelevant information.
    â€œNope, nothing there either. This is going to be a waste of time without any more information to go on.”
    I scrabbled my hands through my hair, feeling my plait begin to unfurl, and becoming conscious for the first time of a slight numbness in my fingers. I disregarded it and pouted at the machine. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I were working on my own, but I was all too aware of eating into someone else’s time.
    â€œNaw, love, there’s plenty more where that came from.” She put a mug of steaming tea down next to me. “You’re not supposed to drink in here, but we don’t take any notice. No original documents to worry about, and if they’re closing it down, what does it matter? Do you have an occupation to go on?”
    â€œThanks for the tea. Doctor – no, surgeon, but I don’t know when he qualified – or where, for that matter.”
    â€œTry the National Database for the Royal College of Surgeons – that’s the most comprehensive.”
    This was straying from my own territory; I wasn’t as familiar with the sources for later archive material. She sat on the wheeled office chair, her ample frame spilling comfortably over the edges of the seat, and picked up the remaining Kit Kat, unwrapping it and slicing cleanly through the foil with a fingernail. Mine had already begun to melt in my fingers; I nibbled the chocolate, feeling it dissolve further in the warmth of my mouth.
    â€œMmm… not a bean,” I mumbled stickily. “Perhaps I should be widening the time frame. I’ll try another thirty years.”
    â€œWorth a try.”
    The door opened behind us.
    â€œJudy, there’s someone at the front desk for you – said you were expecting them?”
    â€œYes, right love, I’d forgotten. You OK here?” she said to me, already standing. “Be back in two ticks. Biscuits in the tin by the kettle.”
    I found no record of Matthew in any of the Surgeons’ databases I searched; his name drew a blank wherever I looked. I found “Lynes” all right, some with an “i”, one or two with a “y”, but no one with his first name in Britain, and I began to think my hunch that he originated in England had been wrong all along. Which meant looking through the US databases. I groaned, but before I resigned myself to that inevitable route, I took one last long shot at the English records.
    I went back in fifty-year chunks, typing in key words and scouring the records for each period from 1850 backwards for 200 years, covering the region from Cambridge through Rutland to Stamford. Again, nothing.
    I pushed away from the desk abruptly, and leaned back inthe chair, rocking on the back legs, my cross between my lips as I wrestled with the problem facing me.
    I knew that a Lynes family had lived in the region in the early seventeenth century – that had been confirmed by the reference to the name in the journal, and had jogged my memory when I first met Matthew. I knew that they held land there, and that one of them had been Nathaniel Richardson’s master. But as Matthew had pointed out so evasively when I mentioned it to him, Lynes was not such an unusual name, and the chance that it might be the same family was remote beyond the realms of reasonableness. But then, there was nothing reasonable about my suppositions, so why let a little thing such as being