“Thank you,” said Gwen.

“When do I get to meet him?” asked Iris.

“Oh,” said Gwen in surprise. “You haven’t, have you?”

“Haven’t met your son, haven’t been to your house, haven’t met your in-laws.”

“I haven’t exactly been in a position to have people over,” said Gwen. “I still live there at the sufferance of the Bainbridges.”

“And they wouldn’t want me sullying their doorstep,” said Iris.

“You wouldn’t like them, anyway.”

“Probably not. You don’t like them, and you’re an astute judge of character. But I would love to meet your son. I adore children. In theory. We could talk about art and aquatic mammals and other things beginning with ‘A.’”

“I’ll see if I can pry him away for a visit to Mummy’s office,” said Gwen. “Would that be acceptable?”

“Entirely.”

She grabbed her half of the daily correspondence and opened the top letter. The two worked in silence for a few minutes.

“What sort of wager did you have in mind?” asked Gwen.

“Tuppence on Conyers,” said Iris.

“Same on Donnelly,” said Gwen.

“Done,” said Iris.

They broke for a light lunch, then closed the office for the afternoon.

“If we had a secretary, we could do this without guilt,” said Gwen as she hung up the “Closed” sign. “We could waltz out the door, calling over our shoulders to the prim and efficient Miss Betsy—”

“Miss Betsy?”

“For the want of a real name. ‘Mind the store, Betsy,’ we’d call out. ‘We’re off to investigate a prince.’”

“And she would say, ‘Again?’ and then resume her typing,” said Iris. “Betsy sounds ideal. We should hire her immediately.”

“Maybe we could find out from Sally who typed his script,” said Gwen. “It was neat and error-free, I noticed, and I was using the third or fourth carbon.”

“Good thought,” said Iris as they reached the street. “Now, on to Colindale! You can read my notes on the train.”

An hour later, they walked towards the entrance to the British Library’s newspaper repository.

“It’s enormous!” exclaimed Gwen.

“Newspapers take up a lot of space over the years,” said Iris. “And there are an awful lot of them. Every town has one.”

Gwen stopped suddenly, looking off to one side. The burnt ruins of a large building lay beyond a temporary fence.

“They bombed a library?” she asked in shock.

“Errant hit,” said Iris. “There are factories nearby. Or someone jettisoned their bombs while fleeing. It doesn’t matter much the reason. The records and times of hundreds of places over hundreds of years were destroyed, mostly small-town and Irish papers. It’s not exactly the burning of the Library of Alexandria, but a terrible loss nevertheless.”

“Birth announcements, weddings, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, all gone,” said Gwen sadly. “All of those people existed once.”

“Well, the London papers survived, so let’s go find our Mr. Talbot,” said Iris.

“Assuming he’s not from a small town or Ireland,” said Gwen.

Iris led her to a reading room with large windows at the upper levels and shelf after shelf of tall bound volumes. There were several desks with large, flat, slanted tops, almost like easels, but solid.