Not much to go on, at first glance: not much to indicate what John had meant when he said that this was one for the books. Unless geographical gazetteers were the books he had in mind.
Further examination, though, showed that he’d used the A to Z as a notebook, too. The inside front and back covers and the blank spaces on the title and copyright pages were filled with densely written lists. They seemed to be lists of names, and the ones at the front of the book included a lot of people that I actually knew – my own name was there, along with Juliet’s, Carla’s, Bourbon Bryant’s, Reggie Tang’s.
Other names, set off in a different column, were new to me, or stirred faint echoes in my mind that I couldn’t turn into meanings right then. Silver. Cornell. Moulson. Lathwell. Richardson. Lambrianou. Hart.
The list inside the back cover seemed to be of places rather than people: Abney Park, Eas [bne
I flicked backwards and forwards between the various lists, my eye drawn automatically to the parts that were easiest to read, avoiding other stretches where the density of the crossing-out and rewriting made individual words hard to decipher.
I turned my attention to the key, on its makeshift boot-lace keyring – and I looked at it with a certain degree of professional interest because breaking and entering has been a hobby of mine at various points in my life.
I put the three items back in the eviscerated bag one by one, thinking that there must be some easier way of solving the John Gittings conundrum. The matchbook cover, I noticed now, had a string of figures written on the back in red biro. A credit-card number? No, only eleven digits, where a credit card would have sixteen.