Chapter Sixteen

The diocesan archive team took nine days to properly locate any surviving trace of Duncan Ainsworth's own three years as Independent Welfare Reviewer, and Melissa understood, reading the completed search report at her desk while the October light failed early over the loch behind the station, that the delay itself carried its own particular significance — a role this obscure, this deliberately unfilled after his own retirement, had evidently been filed, across three decades, in a manner considerably more haphazard than any ordinary administrative record.