‘Who knows how long they’ve been like that?’ she says, poking a fingernail between the edges of two of them, with no sign of movement. ‘It’s not how Walter kept records. He found them like this, overcooked in his parents’ attic, all bent and stuck, when he was cleaning out their house after his mother passed. It was the very first he knew of them, and there was no-one around to tell him more.’

The top record has a black label, with gold writing on it and a gold border scrolling around it. The text reads ‘The Hon. Talbot Baker, recorded for Lomax Purbrick’s Witnesses to History – Home of the Greatest Stories Ever Told’. Ellen stands aside so I can pick the records up. They’re thick and heavy. There’s a chip at one edge.

‘They’re shellac,’ she tells me. ‘So brittle we’ll never separate them. And no machine can play them the way they are. The voice of Senator Baker, right there, and we’ll never hear it.’

‘They’ve got serial numbers.’ The top record is WH0003/4 and, when I turn it over, the bottom one is WH0003/1. ‘Could you trace those?’

‘Don’t think we didn’t try. They’re dated, too.’ She points to the smallest writing, at the bottom of the label. ‘First record is October twenty-seventh, 1928. Fourth is October twenty-ninth. The senator was eighty years old then. It also says “Washington, DC”, right there, though we assume that’s where the company was based, since the senator never stopped living in Maine. Oh, wait.’

She tips the box over. Something in it hits the cardboard side with a thump. She takes out a deck of cards and a sheet of paper. The paper looks new, at least recent. She holds it close to herself, printed side facing her chest, blank side facing me.

‘One thing is clear,’ she says, with the tone of a barrister summing up in court. ‘Or clear enough. Why Lomax Purbrick’s Witnesses to History is nowhere to be found by Google. You see how the numbering suggests this was only their third project? What the other two were is anyone’s guess, but why the series came to an end before ever reaching record stores is not. Lomax Purbrick worked for Fox Movietone News. Newsreels with sound were a very new idea, still experimental, and the stories tended to be very short. Witnesses to History was one young man’s ambitious side project, a chance to record longer stories, perhaps. But then we have this.’

She turns the sheet of paper around. It’s a printout of part of a page from an old newspaper, the Sarasota Herald. The date is smudged, but it’s November twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, a month after the recording. The headline of the small article centred on the page reads, ‘Juggernaut Claims Life of Driver’. The driver is, of course, Lomax Purbrick, his steering gone at an intersection on the outskirts of Sarasota, his Chevrolet hitting a tree, with Purbrick himself crushed by the recording machine he had placed behind his seat.