The Frequency of Us
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Synopsis
*** A BBC2 BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB PICK ***
*** BBC RADIO 4 BOOK AT BEDTIME ***
'A fascinating, beautiful, heartwarming novel. It kept me gripped from the very first chapter' -- BETH O'LEARY
In Second World War Bath, young, naïve wireless engineer Will meets Austrian refugee Elsa Klein: she is sophisticated, witty and worldly, and at last his life seems to make sense . . . until, soon after, the couple's home is bombed, and Will awakes from the blast to find himself alone.
No one has heard of Elsa Klein. They say she never existed.
Seventy years later, social worker Laura is battling her way out of depression and off medication. Her new case is a strange, isolated old man whose house hasn't changed since the war. A man who insists his fiancé vanished many, many years before. Everyone thinks he's suffering dementia. But Laura begins to suspect otherwise . . .
From Keith Stuart, author of the much-loved Richard & Judy bestseller A Boy Made of Blocks, comes a stunning, emotional novel about an impossible mystery and a true love that refuses to die.
'Enthralling, a real thing of beauty. Dazzling' -- JOSIE SILVER
'The Frequency of Us is a novel with a bit of everything: a sweeping love story, wonderfully complex characters, and a sprinkling of the supernatural. I loved it, and know it'll stay with me for some time' -- CLARE POOLEY
'A complete joy! An intelligent, intricate and emotive mystery' -- LOUISE JENSON
Release date: March 25, 2021
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages: 400
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The Frequency of Us
Keith Stuart
‘What is it?’ I groaned, turning away from her, pulling the blankets up and over my head. She switched on her bedside lamp.
‘Will, we have to go.’
For several seconds, I still couldn’t understand her, desperate to return to the peace of unconsciousness. But then I heard for myself. The ululating wail of the sirens, and beneath them a sound like rolling thunder coming in. The bombers. The bombers were back.
Elsa was up and out of bed, pulling on her thick dressing gown, bumping against furniture in the darkness, a growing frenzy of movement and panic. I sat up, rubbing my eyes, and for a few seconds I entertained the possibility that the planes would pass overhead, as they had every night before last, on their way to Bristol. But just as I was about to reassure Elsa, we heard the high-pitched whistling sound of falling bombs, dozens of them – a horrible choir. Then multiple impacts, low and distant.
We looked at each other.
‘I’ll need to get dressed,’ I said. ‘I have to report in.’
‘You can’t, you were out all day yesterday. For God’s sake, let someone else go.’
‘It’s my duty.’
As I dressed, Elsa peeled back the black curtain and looked out of the window. From here, we had a panoramic view over the city; it was one of the reasons my parents bought the house. How lovely, my mother often said, to see Bath laid out before us like a picture postcard. Last night, we’d seen a very different prospect, vast areas on fire, like some awful vision of the apocalypse.
‘Will,’ said Elsa. ‘There’s someone in your workshop.’
A cold chill went up my spine.
‘What? Are you sure?’
My shirt still unbuttoned, I joined her at the window and looked out toward the end of the garden. Sure enough, there was light seeping from beneath the workshop door. A shadow moved inside.
‘Looters?’ said Elsa.
‘Surely not. I’ll go and see.’
‘No, Will, we have to get to the cellar!’
There were more long droning whines, seemingly nearer now, and then three massive explosions that shook the whole house. Outside, someone very nearby was screaming. The sound jolted me back to yesterday; the houses on the Lower Bristol Road, all obliterated, like a row of grotesque blackened skeletons. Bodies in the soot.
‘You go,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a quick look, there’s a lot of equipment in there that . . . ’
‘Oh forget your damn contraptions, Will, come with me. Bitte!’
‘I’ll only be a moment, darling. I promise.’
When I opened the back door and looked out beyond the garden, the horror of it all hit me again. The smoke billowing beneath the red glow of the flares; the rumble of falling masonry; a smell in the air like molten tar. From further down the hill the gut-wrenching sound of another explosion, then cries from God knows where. Another wave of bombers was coming in for its turn at the city, untroubled by the pathetic patter of distant anti-aircraft fire. Bath had no defences of its own. No one had expected this.
I felt a hand on my elbow. Elsa was behind me in the doorway. I turned and kissed her.
‘Go to the cellar,’ I said.
She looked at me desperately, but started stepping back toward the cellar door, and for a moment I thought of following her. Instead, I scrambled out toward the workshop. My father had built it many years ago; my brother and I helped him, carrying bricks along the garden in a rusty old wheelbarrow. There had once been an orchard down there, he told us. As I got closer to the door, I could hear someone speaking inside; instinctively, I looked around for a weapon, a spade or pitchfork, anything. But then as my senses gathered, I realised with a start that I recognised the voice. I wasn’t sure whether to feel shocked or relieved. I opened the door very slowly.
The interior was mostly lost in shadow, but a single lamp illuminated the large work table in the centre of the room, crammed with half-built wirelesses, tools and components. At the rear, a window overlooking the city let in a little more light, revealing the metal shelves lining the walls, loaded with more tools and parts. My father had tinkered with his car in here, but for me it was always wireless sets; there were several models I had bought or scrounged from work, several more I had made myself. And there, sitting at the desk with his back to me, one hand desperately fumbling with the dials on my radio transmitter, was a small boy, dressed in striped pyjamas.
‘David,’ I said. I spoke quietly, calmly, so as not to startle the lad, but I was aware we had to get out. ‘David, what on earth are you doing here?’
Before he could answer there was a series of blasts, not far from us, perhaps along the road toward Camden Crescent. The whole building shook, releasing a shower of dust from the low rafters.
‘David,’ I said again, gritting my teeth to stop myself from yelling.
‘I’m calling Daddy,’ he said. ‘He’ll rescue us.’
‘I’m sure your father is on his way, but we have to get to safety. Does your mother know you’re here? David, she must be frantic.’ I was terrified she would be out looking for him, combing the streets while the bombs fell. Should I take him back to his own home? He lived only a few houses along from us, but it seemed a tremendous gamble.
‘Come with me to our cellar, you’ll be safe with us. I’m sure Elsa will sing to you. Some of the songs she has been teaching you on the piano, perhaps?’
He turned away from the transmitter and toward me.
‘ “The Grand Old Duke of York”?’ he asked.
‘Yes of course.’
‘But my daddy . . . ’
‘Your daddy will know we are in trouble. He’ll fly in his plane and he’ll shoot the Germans down, I’m sure of it. But for now, we have to go.’
‘But how will he know?’
‘The RAF has lots of technology to let them know what is happening in the war. I’ll tell you all about it inside.’
I wished I’d never taken him out to see the workshop; a few months ago he’d been over for his weekly music lesson, talking about his father and his Spitfire, and I’d told him about how pilots used radios to talk to each other. ‘Come and see,’ I had said. I showed him the transmitter and explained how it worked. He had asked, ‘Could I talk to Papa on that?’ Since then he’d been a regular companion, helping me to clean the sets, replace valves – I enjoyed his enthusiasm, it reminded me of myself at his age.
Through the grimy window I could see flames licking the skyline. Something vast was on fire down there – perhaps the whole city this time, perhaps everything. And then my eyes rose slowly, attracted by an all-too-familiar noise: high up, but caught unmistakably in the bright moonlight, there were three bombers, heading in our direction, stark and black like mythical beasts.
‘Oh Jesus,’ I whispered.
Without thinking I leapt forward and grabbed the boy, knocking the chair from under him. He screamed and grasped at the radio microphone, but I had him in my arms as the noise grew louder. This is it, I thought. We either dive under the work table or make a run for the house. I had seconds to choose.
The house.
David screamed and punched at me as I kicked open the workshop door. ‘Here we go, old boy,’ I said and I bolted out onto the path.
Almost immediately a gust of hot, smoky wind hit me, filling my lungs. The sky was molten, the glow of fire reflecting in the windows of the houses. I stopped for a moment, almost transfixed by the horror of it, but the planes were so close now, I had to be fast. It was a steep climb back up the garden to the house with David in my arms, and after all that had happened yesterday I was worn out, my muscles ached. There was a cacophony around me. The sound of throbbing engines filled my ears like blood.
About halfway across the garden, I saw a figure standing in the doorway to the kitchen. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust, but it was Elsa and she was shouting something. I was about to yell that she should go to the cellar, but then I saw her look up and her face distorted into an expression of pure, undiluted terror. She covered her eyes with her hands and fell back into the kitchen as though she couldn’t bear to see what was coming. I looked up too.
And it was the strangest thing.
All of a sudden, everything seemed to stop. The screams, the rumbling, the crashing. It was as though a great peace had descended. There was a blinding light seemingly focused on us from somewhere very high up, as though we had been picked out by a theatrical spotlight. I saw raindrops swirling in the vortex like jewels. I was enraptured, frozen to the spot. Through the light and the whirling rain I was aware of a strange whooshing sensation that seemed to herald something approaching very fast. And I knew. I knew in a second of calm clarity what it was and that it was too late now to do anything. I held the boy close to me and bent over him as though shielding him from a sudden storm.
‘David,’ I whispered. ‘Hold tight, son.’
I’d been told that the survivors of the London Blitz had a saying: you don’t hear the bomb that’s coming for you. I was surprised, in those luminous seconds, to discover it was true.
I woke with a jolt and for several seconds I couldn’t take in where I was or what had happened. The objects around me were unrecognisable. What was the last thing I remembered? The bomb. The boy in my arms. There had been a bright light, then an unbearable pressure, as though we were being flung back by a crashing wave, then blackness. Afterwards, there were fragments of memories – lying in my garden, people gathered around, shouting. One man, his face was coated in soot, he looked half mad. He grabbed me by the arms and he said, ‘You saw it, didn’t you? You saw it!’ . . . He was furious no one was listening to him. Then I was inside an ambulance. Then nothing for what felt like days.
‘Mr Emerson?’ A voice was calling my name. A figure approached me through the blur.
I groaned, ‘Where am I? What happened?’
‘You’re in the Royal United Hospital in Bath. You’ve had a bump to your head.’
With this information, things swam into focus. I could recognise the chaotic activity of the ward: the rows of metal beds, nurses running, vast black blinds over the windows. My head felt like it had been split open, it was agony just to breathe. In the bed next to mine, a man was moaning weakly, his right arm and leg bandaged, his face ludicrously swollen and blackened with bruises. The bed on the other side was empty, but the ruffled sheets were smeared with dry blood.
The nurse hovered back into my field of vision, her face gaunt and tired, but filled with a sort of determined kindness.
‘You were brought in yesterday morning,’ she said. ‘An ARP warden found you lying in your garden, unconscious. We’ll need to check you over when a doctor is free. How do you feel?’
‘Pain. A lot of pain.’
‘I can bring you some aspirin, but morphine is being rationed.’
She was about to race away to someone more deserving, but I grabbed her arm.
‘My wife,’ I said. ‘She was in the house when we were hit.’
The nurse fixed me with a quizzical stare, and my stomach lurched at the thought that she was trying to summon the courage to give me terrible news.
‘You were brought in alone. I’m sure she’s safe. I can ask around for you. What’s her name?’
‘Her name is Elsa,’ I said. ‘Elsa Klein.’
‘I’ll have a look around,’ she said. ‘It’s chaos, mind. The hospital has taken some damage – the gas is off, we had no water for a day, the wards are all full to bursting. But I will try.’
Later that day, the nurse returned. She gave me a pained smile.
‘Mr Emerson, I’ve phoned the casualty report line and a colleague at St Martins, and there are no records of an Elsa Klein being brought in.’
I allowed myself a second of relief, but then, from her expression, I knew her report was not over.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s just that, there’s no record of anyone else living with you at that address. I spoke to one of your neighbours who was brought in yesterday evening. He told me . . . he told me you live alone, Mr Emerson. You’re not married.’
‘I have to go,’ I said, lifting myself up. The pain in my head was like a gunshot.
‘You can’t,’ said the nurse. ‘We need a doctor to see you. You might have a brain injury.’
I struggled to my feet. I was wearing starched pyjamas in a faded blue, like prison clothes. ‘I have to find my wife,’ I said. ‘I’m fine. For God’s sake, let me go.’ The nurse looked around. They clearly needed beds – casualties were still being dug out of the wreckage and brought in by exhausted ambulancemen. ‘I will see my own doctor as soon as possible. I’ve got to get out of here and find Elsa.’
In the end, another nurse came by and handed back my torn, dirty clothes. Disorientated and weak, I half walked, half staggered from the hospital. A bus pulled up outside and I boarded with a rabble of similarly tattered people. An elderly woman sat next to me, smartly dressed and shivering.
‘The world’s gone to Hell,’ she said. And from then on, she said nothing.
There was little obvious damage as we drove down Coombe Hill in the afternoon sun, but then as we approached the city along Upper Bristol Street, the carnage became clear – rows of houses with their windows blown out, roofs collapsed, smoke pouring from the skeletal remains of a motor garage. Groups of workmen gathered at the sides of the road, shovelling rubble from one place to another. There were pieces of furniture lining the pavements, packed suitcases left abandoned, and over everything a grey haze drifted like some poisonous fog. The road was closed before the turning up to Queen Square because of a ruptured gas main, so we all had to get out and walk. We were like a weird huddle of refugees, padding slowly and aimlessly along – but when we reached the square we all stopped together. The Francis Hotel had been hit, its grand Georgian façade ripped in half, a fissure running through it like a valley. You could see what was left of the bedrooms either side of the crater – the luxurious wallpaper, a nightgown hanging from the back of a door, a pristine bathroom sink with a washbag still perched by it. People who had never seen inside the building stood and gawped. A man was having his photograph taken in front of the smoking debris. I stood for a second too, as though entranced, until I remembered why I had to keep moving. I told myself Elsa must still be at home. But surely there was no home now. I had a flashback to the moment in the garden, the young boy David in my arms, and the dead certainty of something hurtling towards us through the inky darkness. The blast, the immense pressure – how had I even survived? I knew I would be returning to nothing but rubble. Oh God, Elsa. The thought of her set me running.
When I reached Lansdown, there were chilling sights along every street. Great piles of fallen masonry where shops and houses used to be, trees blasted bare of leaves and branches, roads burst open. Everywhere, there were groups of workmen, desperately attempting to shore up the roofs and walls of damaged properties. Memories of the first night of the bombing flooded my brain – the rescue squad I had joined at the beginning of the war – a lot of retired builders and civil engineers and me, tunnelling into the maws of obliterated cellars, amid screams and smoke. Did someone tunnel in and save Elsa? I had a sudden thought of how strange it was, to be making this familiar journey home and to be fearful that everything I knew and loved had been destroyed.
On turning the slight corner before the terrace that led to my own home, it was clear there had been a direct hit on the street. Several buildings were little more than jagged remains, ghostly amid the black dust clouds. Silent rows of men dug at the ruins like some nightmarish harvest. My eyes sore and teary with grit, I had to feel my way past two trucks parked in the road, my back aching, my head throbbing horribly. Two boys ran through the fog toward me, laughing, one carrying a painting in a grand wooden frame – it depicted a quiet country scene. A man shouted, ‘Come back, you little bastards! You’ll be hung for this!’
I reached the Barneses’ house and knew I was almost home. A gap appeared in the smog and I stopped dead and looked up, breathing heavily.
‘My God,’ I said.
Avon Lodge was still there. The windows were all blown out, some roof tiles were broken, and a length of guttering had fallen down – that was the extent of the visible damage. The same could not be said of the house which used to adjoin my own, and the next two further up the street – all obliterated. A man I recognised from one of the local civil defence meetings wandered over to me through the smoke, wearing dusty overalls and carrying a pickaxe. He was obviously attached to one of the work parties trying to shore up the street.
‘Is that your place, lad?’ he asked, taking a battered cigarette from his pocket and nodding toward Avon Lodge.
‘Yes,’ I replied in a dazed far-off voice.
‘You’re bloody lucky,’ he continued after lighting the cigarette. ‘Three bombs hit further up the road. Blast took out a whole row. The house next to yours got dragged down with ’em,’ he nodded at Avon Lodge again, ‘but this’n stood its ground. Then another bomb hit further down the street. Four bangs in a row. Usually it’s five. The Luftwaffe missed you out, lad.’
‘My garden was hit,’ I said.
This time he shook his head, smiling. ‘You might have caught some shrapnel from the blasts up the road.’
‘But I was standing out there. I saw it coming down.’
‘Lad,’ he said. ‘If you were in that garden when a bomb hit, we wouldn’t be here talking. I’d be collecting bits of you in a wheelbarrow.’
But I was certain. Perhaps the apparently uninjured façade of the house was a gruesome trick hiding an apocalypse behind it. I fumbled in my trouser pocket for my key, opened the door and burst into the hallway.
‘Elsa?’ I shouted.
There were books all over the floor in the study and a few of my mother’s ornaments had been displaced from the shelves in the parlour and smashed on the floor, but nothing else. I rushed through to the kitchen. Here there was more damage – the windows had been blown out and the frames splintered to smithereens leaving gaping holes in the wall. Dust and rubble covered the floor and work surfaces like muddy snow. I ripped open the cellar door and ran down, taking three of the narrow steps at a time. No sign of her, our Morrison shelter empty and unused.
‘Elsa?’
I ran upstairs banging open the doors as I went. The bathroom, the guest bedroom, and then our own bedroom, all virtually undamaged, all desperately quiet. By some miracle, the house was safe. But Elsa?
And then I had the strangest thought. Mother’s ornaments, her horse brasses, her china figurines of Victorian children – we had packed them away last year. Elsa had never liked them, but she had politely suffered them with great patience for as long as she could. Then one morning, we were reading in the parlour and she turned to me and said, ‘I’m sorry, Will, either they go or I do.’ And we wrapped them in newspaper, placed them gently in an old wooden crate and took them down to the cellar where we tended to store everything we didn’t need or like. Why were they back in the parlour?
A chill ran down my spine. I have no idea why I did this, but I found myself walking slowly toward the wardrobe in our bedroom. I opened the door.
Elsa’s dresses were gone.
In a frenzy, I checked every drawer in our dresser – everything of hers was missing. I looked around the room. All the little prints and photographs she had pinned to the picture rails, mostly torn out of art magazines, were gone, as were her books. I walked backwards and stumbled into the bed, sitting down heavily. I put my hands up to my head and rubbed at my eyes. The room was swirling in and out of focus.
‘Elsa?’ I shouted again. ‘Elsa!’
I told myself I had to stop, calm down and think. I had to be logical.
Her aunt, I thought. She’s gone to her aunt’s – that’s where she had been living before she moved in with me. But that made no sense – she would have left a note. My thoughts coddled like sour milk, the gash in my head was bleeding again. I pictured Elsa, the last time I had seen her, standing in the doorway to the back garden. She had been calling something, but I couldn’t hear her above my own desperate thoughts. Now, in the quiet of the bedroom, I realised with a start what it was. ‘Go back.’ She had been screaming at me to go back.
Where are you? I thought. Oh Elsa, where are you? I staggered away down the stairs and had to stop and vomit. Then somehow, I was standing in my kitchen doorway, as Elsa had that night, looking out over the garden. The lawn was strewn with debris – great chunks of blackened brick and mortar, the back of a wooden chair, a doll’s head, a lot of glass – and there was a wide, shallow crater in the vegetable patch I had dug in the centre of the garden. But this all seemed to be debris from the houses hit further up the road, as the workmen had told me. I stepped out into the cool air and looked back at the house – apart from the windows and frames, and a few gouges in the brickwork, there was little damage. But surely the bomb I saw would have brought down at least the lean-to? I staggered over the garden, preparing myself to find her body. I knew from the first night of the bombing that death was capricious and random – we would be digging beneath destroyed houses and finding people alive with only scratches. But then we’d discover someone who had been killed by a single piece of shrapnel as though targeted by a sniper.
I found nothing of Elsa – and part of me knew I wouldn’t. Because it wasn’t just Elsa who was gone, it was everything she’d ever brought into our home. Had someone taken it? Had someone taken her? My head was thudding, my guts swilled. And then I fell to my knees and looked around. There’s that phrase jamais vu? It means ‘never seen’ – it’s when you look at something that should be familiar but it suddenly seems alien. That’s how I felt – about the garden, the house, everything. I had a recollection of that night, of holding David in my arms, looking upwards, and the swirl of light around me like a vortex, and it had felt, at the very end, like I was falling. I thought to myself, where have I landed?
I started shouting again, ‘Elsa! Elsa, where are you?’ whirling about like a madman. And then everything was black, and it would be black for a long time.
Standing outside the decrepit house in the lashing autumn rain, I am struck with the certain knowledge that I’m in completely the wrong place – and also, if I am being honest, the wrong life. I am tired. I am wearing an anorak. I have no direction, no drive, no friends.
I check my watch. It is 9.47 a.m. I am having my first existential crisis of the day. This seems about right.
Leaning my old Raleigh bike against the garden wall, I push my glasses back up, then drag my personal organiser out of the saddle bag, flipping to the page where I’d scrawled down the address. No, this is it: Avon Lodge. I shove the organiser under my anorak so its pages don’t turn to papier-mâché in the rain, then look up again at the large, dark Victorian house in front of me.
It probably would have been beautiful once. Bath stone, bay windows, two ornamental turrets above the attic rooms, to give it a sort of fairy tale grandeur. But now the façade is blackened and pockmarked, and there are huge cracks in the stonework around the windows – which are themselves spotted with mould. Rain streams down the wall from a vast crack in the iron guttering; the front door is missing a glass pane and the porch roof seems to sag with age and damp. There are black sacks filled with rubbish piled next to the wall. The way that it is set back from the road, separate from both a smart row of houses on one side and a vast construction site on the other, Avon Lodge looks as though it has been quarantined with some horrible contagion.
Surely no one could actually live here? Especially not an eighty-seven-year-old man?
I check the address again, taking the organiser out, looking down at the paper then up at the house. It still feels like something is wrong. Actually, it feels like everything is wrong. Here, now, yesterday, the day before. Stop. Calm down. I just have to breathe deeply. In through the nose, out through the mouth. I’m in the right place. It might not be the place I want to be, but that’s okay. I need to block out the voice in my head that tells me I will mess everything up. Unfortunately, it always comes up with such interesting new ways to torment me.
I decide I should walk up to the house and try to peep in through one of the windows, but when I push the garden gate it collapses from its rusty hinges and falls to the path with an almighty clang. Once I’ve recovered from the shock, I try to lift it back up, but it is too heavy and wet, and it falls from my grip, landing only millimetres from my feet. Deep breaths. I nudge my glasses up again and then check my hands for injuries because I don’t want to get tetanus and die in convulsions. I examine them at some length, turning them over, letting the rainwater wash off the mud and rust. When I eventually look up again I realise with a start that the porch door is now open and a man is standing there staring at me.
‘Can I help you?’ he says.
Three months ago, I moved back in with my mum. She came to collect me from a hospital in South London and drove me home. For a few weeks I barely left my bedroom, and then one morning she opened my curtains and told me it was time to get a job. ‘I have a friend who runs a home care agency,’ she said. ‘They’re desperate for staff. Two weeks’ training, then all you have to do is travel around Bath talking to old people. You can manage that.’ I didn’t get a say, but that was probably fair. Her twenty-nine-year-old daughter was living at home again, doing nothing but slouching about looking sad and untidy and watching crap television.
So I started work at the Regency Home Care agency. It sounds posh but is in fact housed on the second floor of the ugliest 1960s office block in Bath town centre. I did my training, learned first aid, learned how to dress and wash other people, how to manage medications (particularly ironic in my case). Then they unleashed me on a few clients – a stressful month of burnt meals, buying the wrong shopping, eking out awkward conversations with confused pensioners who wanted to know where the other carer was – the one they liked. I figured I’d be let go as soon as my probation was over. But I wasn’t.
Then on Monday, Jane, the managing director, called me into her office. I like Jane, but I also fear her. She is smart and steely and together. Eight years ago, she was working part-time as a TA at the secondary school where my mum is deputy head – she was divorced with two kids, busy as hell, but also caring for her elderly mother. It all got too much so she put her mum into a care home, thinking it was the kind thing to do, but her mum was neglected and bullied by the staff and she died a few months later. Instead of being racked with guilt, Jane studied management at college, then quit her job and opened her own home care agency – a whirlwind of guts and resolve. I know that my mum supported her; she helped her financially, she babysat for Jane’s children when the going got tough. Now Jane is returning the favour.
‘We have a situation,’ she said. A familiar sinking feeling started dragging at my insides. Clearly, this was it, my notice of termination – Mum’s influence clearly had its limits. Another crisis for her to cope with.
‘Last week I got a call from a colleague in social services,’ she explained. ‘They are very concerned about an old gentleman named Will Emerson who lives next to the big property development on Lansdown Road. There was some sort of accident at the site a couple of weeks ago – a gas cannister exploded, huge bang, and the neighbours found Mr Emerson lying in his back garden in a hysterical state. They called an ambulance and the police arrived too. Mr Emerson told the attending officer that his wife Elsa was missing and they had to help him find her. But the officer checked with a few of the neighbours and they said he lived on his own and had done for as long as anyone remembered, and there were no records of anyone else occupying the property. Thing is, he’s been reported to social services several times in the past – people have seen him wanderi. . .
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