There was a story here, inside this tiny domed room, perhaps one that was not told anywhere else. What that story was, Rachel could not fathom, but there had to be a way to unravel it. Every document she pulled from beneath the plinth brought forth more information, though deciphering anything from the tiny handwriting was tricky and time-consuming. Sometimes Rachel spent an hour or more trying to untangle the words of a single sentence. If she were to get anywhere, she had to first find a place to start, but even knowing how to do that was an overwhelming challenge. In the end, Rachel decided that the best thing to do was put all the papers into date order.

Perhaps, by the time she had created a timeline out of the mass of notebooks, scrolls and paper, she would at least be able to put a name to the initials that appeared on so many of their number – E.A.M. Rachel didn’t know how much time she had – sooner or later, she was going to have to tell Alan Crosswick what was up here and let him deal with all it meant. For now, though, Rachel kept it to herself.

Rachel tried to make sure she got up there in the last glance of dusk so that she could open the aperture and look out on the world below. It gave her something to look forward to on those days when she’d found yet another distant acquaintance she had to inform of Cullen’s death. He’d had more friends than Rachel had known, which should not have been a surprise at all, given how garrulous the man had been in life. He’d made lifelong friends out of the briefest acquaintances – something she knew from personal experience, after all. The camera obscura room, even though E.A.M. still remained an immutable mystery, gave Rachel a chance to escape from the weight of her days without ever having to set foot outside her home, let alone the village. She’d never been able to see the village at night, though. Once the sun had set, the camera obscura didn’t work, unable to pull in enough light to cast its magic on the full moon of the plinth.

The night before Cullen’s funeral, after Rachel had closed the bookshop and cashed up, she fed Eustace and climbed the steps up into the small domed attic room above her bed. For some reason she felt closer to her old friend up here, perhaps because the knowledge of it had been shared between them and no other living person. She could imagine him up here, leaning over the camera obscura plinth, studying the workings of the village he’d lived in all his life. Was there a shade of him here, still, a shadow remaining that had not yet faded?

There was still some light in the sky and so Rachel opened the skylight and adjusted the lens, tilting the angle at the horizon with its sinking sun, and then bringing it lower to swoop towards the hill and the village.