Coincidence: A Novel Read Free Page A

woman. Instead he made the unconvincing claim that the woman had thrown herself from the cliffs at Millook, not very far from Bude.
    A second event occurred in the spring of 1993. A decorator in Cumbria came across two suitcases on the top of an old oak wardrobe. It was this discovery that set in train a sequence of events that led to the mystery of Azalea’s origin being solved. But that story is still to come.

2
    June 2012
    T he plain, painted sign on the office door reads ‘T. Post, PhD’, and beneath these words, in a smaller point size, ‘Lecturer: Applied Philosophy’. It is something of a forbidding legend, its minimalist presentation not especially welcoming to casual callers.
    But just above this uninviting plaque, someone has helpfully pinned a more informal notice. This one is on a sheet of drawing paper, fastened with a pin at each corner in such a deliberate way that you sense the occupant of the office must have placed it there himself. It is a caricature drawing, in charcoal, of the kind that artists do for tourists in Leicester Square or Montmartre, and it portrays a lofty, angular man with a wildly exaggerated nose and chin, a quiff of disobedient hair and a disproportionate set of rabbit teeth. No one could consider this a flattering portrait. Although, on closer inspection, there is a kindness to the eyes, a becoming smile and a look of gentle amusement about the subject. The man in the drawing is leaning forward over a table, across which he has scattered half a dozen dice. Every die shows the number six. Now the twinkle in the subject’s eye has some meaning. He is, perhaps, a magician. Underneath the drawing, the artist has added a legend. ‘Thomas Post’, this caption reads, ‘the Coincidence Man’.
    We’ve leaped forwards three decades from the fairground in Totnes, and the case of the foundling girl. This part of the story takes place in London, in the glorious Olympic year of 2012. We are in the upper corridor of a nondescript building in the university quarter of north London, and we are following Thomas Post, PhD down the dimly lit passage and into his office. We can see, at once, many of those features that the caricaturist chose to amplify. Thomas Post seems to roll along, a curious, angular fellow, a lummox, tall, awkward, in an ill-fitting jacket and large round spectacles. His arms swing clumsily, as if they are somehow too long to control. He pushes the door shut and folds himself down into his office chair and, in that moment, but just for that moment, he is the man in the sketch; all he lacks are the dice, and the inscrutable smile.
    The small office obeys the principles and traditions of academe in its furnishings and its general sense of disarray. Sunlight streams in from an attic window. There is a solitary desk, its territory occupied with books, papers and computer devices trailing tangled, disobedient wires. There are bookshelves, themselves overladen, and an armchair and a whiteboard that carries faint fossil traces of charts and tables that have never been fully rubbed away. There is a small worktop, designed, or so it would appear, exclusively for the making of tea.
    This is the workspace of Thomas Post, PhD. There are few personal touches, apart from his array of mugs and the books. A poster of a steam train, dog-eared and faded, looks as if it may have belonged to a generation of occupants of this room. A postcard of the seaside is pinned up beside his desk. Otherwise, the walls are populated by charts and more books. A photograph in a frame on the desk appears to be the only private image. It’s a snapshot of a woman on a hillside with the coiling blue of a lake far below. It could be Scotland, perhaps, or Wales. The woman is laughing. She has been caught by the camera unawares, and her hands have flown up to rescue her hair – hair the colour of an autumn maple.
    Thomas lets his upper body cantilever forwards like a tree being