It would take a while to work through them and I wasn’t optimistic I’d learn much in the process, but there didn’t appear to be any other course of action open to me. I had to start somewhere. I wasn’t optimistic that George Wren’s 1959 memorandum to Greville Lashley would lead anywhere either, but I asked Pete to phone round any of his contemporaries from the secondary modern school he was still in touch with in the hope that one of them might know where I could find Dick Trudgeon. Whether Dick would have anything of the slightest value to tell me if I did find him was, of course, open to question. Also open to question were Adam Lashley’s reasons for returning to St Austell. But I felt sure I’d discover what they were soon enough, probably from the man himself. I assumed he knew I’d been sent over from HQ to track down the missing records. Whether he meant to help or hinder was unclear and perhaps unimportant. We didn’t like each other. We never had. His presence was bad news.
