Not Dead Enough

up.’
    ‘Of course,’ Ravensbourne said. ‘Whatever I can do – I will try.’
    Grace opened the folder and pointed at Brian Bishop’s birth certificate. ‘I gave you the name of this chap, Desmond Jones, and asked if you could establish if he had a twin, and the twin’s birth name. There were twenty-seven possible babies all with the same surname. You suggested you could bypass having to go through each one simply by looking up the records from the index number on the birth certificate.’
    Ravensbourne nodded emphatically. ‘Yes, correct.’
    ‘Could I ask you to double-check for me?’
    ‘Of course.’
    Ravensbourne took the birth certificate and went out of the room. A couple of minutes later he returned with the large dark red, leather-bound registry book, put it down with the birth certificate next to it and leafed through it anxiously. Then he stopped and checked the birth certificate again. ‘Desmond William Jones, mother Eleanor Jones, born at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, 7 September 1964 at three forty-seven a.m. And it says Adopted , right? This is the right chap?’
    ‘Yes, he checks out. It’s the one you gave me as his twin brother who doesn’t.’
    The registrar returned to the tome and looked down the page. ‘Frederick Roger Jones?’ he read out. ‘Mother Eleanor Jones, born at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, 7 September 1964 at three fifty-two a.m. Also subsequently adopted.’ He looked up. ‘That’s your twin. Frederick Roger Jones.’
    ‘Are you sure? You couldn’t be mistaken?’
    The registrar turned the book around, so that Grace could see for himself. There were five entries.
    ‘That birth certificate you have, it’s actually a copy of the original – the original is this entry in here, in this book. Do you understand that?’ the registrar asked.
    ‘Yes,’ Grace replied.
    ‘It’s an exact copy. This is the original entry. Five entries to a page – see – the bottom two are your chaps, Desmond William Jones and Frederick Roger Jones.’
    As if to demonstrate his veracity, Ravensbourne turned over the page. ‘You see, there are another five on this—’
    He stopped in mid-sentence and turned back a page, then turned it forward again. And then he said, ‘Oh. Oh dear. Oh, my God, it never occurred to me! I was in a hurry when you came to see me, I remember. I saw the twin – you were looking for a twin. It never occurred to me—’
    There on the next page, the top entry, in neat, slanted black handwriting, was: Norman John Jones, mother Eleanor Jones, born at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, 7 September 1964 at three fifty-seven a.m.
    Grace looked at the man. ‘Does this mean what I think it means?’
    The registrar was nodding furiously, half out of embarrassment, half from excitement. ‘Yes. Born two minutes later. The same mother. Absolutely!’

122
    Back-issue after back-issue of the Argus newspaper sped past Roy Grace’s eyes. He sat hunched in front of the microfiche unit in the Brighton and Hove Reference Library, scrolling through the film containing the 1964 editions, slowing down occasionally to check the dates. April…June…July…August…September.
    He stopped the machine halfway through the 4 September 1964 pages, then slowly cranked forwards. Then he stopped again when he reached the front page of the 7 September edition. But there was nothing of significance. He read through each of the following news pages carefully, but still could find nothing.
    The splash of 8 September was a local planning scandal. But then, two pages on, a photograph leapt out at him.
    It was of three tiny babies, lying asleep in a row inside the glass casing of an incubator. Inset next to this was a photograph of a small, mangled car. Above was the caption: Miracle Babies Survive Horror Death Crash . And there was another photograph, of an attractive, dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties. Grace read every word of the article straight through, twice. His eyes went back to the picture of the babies in the incubator, to the woman’s face, to the car, then he read the words again, cutting through the sensational adjectives, just picking up the facts.
    Police were investigating why the Ford Anglia veered across the A23, in heavy rain early on the evening of 6 September into the path of a lorry…Eleanor Jones, single mother, science teacher…thought she was carrying twins…had been undergoing treatment for depression…Eight and a half months pregnant…kept