Lost Property

The Lost Property office at Carrow Street handles about eleven thousand items a year.

Umbrellas are forty per cent of it. Phones, headphones, keys, water bottles, and — a category that surprises everybody and that Fenella has stopped explaining — a steady annual trickle of single shoes.

The system is ninety days. An item comes in, is logged, is shelved, and after ninety days it goes to auction or to a charity or, in the case of the shoes, into the skip.

There is one exception on the shelf and it has been there since 4 November 1998.

The exception

It is a viola case.

Inside it is a viola, a bow, two spare strings, a rosin, and a folded sheet of manuscript paper with about sixteen bars written on it in pencil.

It was handed in at Carrow Street on the 15:20 from Peterborough on 4 November 1998 by a guard who is now dead.

It has been logged, re-logged in 2004 when the system was computerised, and re-logged in 2016 when the system was computerised again. Its file reference has changed three times. Its ninety days expired on 2 February 1999.

Why it is still there

Because of a note.

The 1998 paper ledger survives in a box in the back and the entry for the viola has, in the original clerk's handwriting: Do not dispose. See K.M.

K.M. was Kathleen Mulready, who ran the office from 1981 to 2007 and who is also dead, and who never wrote down what she meant.

There is no further note anywhere. Fenella has looked, properly, over three separate periods across nineteen years.

The instruction is therefore from a woman who is dead, referring to a woman who is dead, for a reason nobody recorded — and it has held for twenty-seven years, through three system migrations, four office managers and one relocation, because every single person who has looked at it has decided that they are not going to be the one who throws away a viola that somebody once thought was worth a note.

What has been tried

Advertised in 1999, 2004 and 2011.

The instrument was examined by a dealer in 2004, who valued it at somewhere between eight hundred and two thousand pounds and said it was a decent student instrument of no particular distinction, German, probably 1930s.

The manuscript has been photographed and shown to four musicians. It is sixteen bars of something unfinished. Two of them said it was competent. One said it was better than competent. All four said it was not anything they recognised.

There is no name anywhere. Not on the case, not in the case, not on the manuscript. There is a bus ticket in the accessory compartment from a route that stopped running in 2003.

Fenella

Fenella has run the office since 2006. She is fifty-eight. She has taken the viola out and looked at it perhaps forty times.

She is not sentimental about the job and would like this understood; she disposes of about ten thousand items a year without a flicker, including things that are obviously precious, because that is the system and the system is what makes the office work.

She has, twice, put the viola on the disposal list.

Both times she took it off again. The second time she got as far as the van.

What happened in March

A woman came to the counter about a coat.

The coat was recent and straightforward and took four minutes, and Fenella was doing the paperwork when the woman said, "Sorry — is that a viola case?"

It was on the shelf behind, where it has been since 2016.

Fenella said yes and, because it was quiet and because she has told this story perhaps two hundred times, told it.

The woman listened to all of it. Then she asked if she could see the manuscript.

Fenella showed her the photograph, which is what she shows people, because the original is in a sleeve.

The woman looked at it for a long time.

"It's an exercise," she said.

"Sorry?"

"It's not a piece. It's a species counterpoint exercise — second species. You'd write this at about grade six theory." She turned the phone slightly. "It's a homework."

What that means

Fenella has thought about this constantly since March.

For twenty-seven years the manuscript has been the reason the viola felt significant. Everybody who saw it assumed it was a composition — something in progress, something that meant something, sixteen bars of a person's work.

It is a school exercise. Almost certainly a child's. Probably done on the train.

Which does not make the viola less lost. It makes it a child's viola, and a child's homework, on a train from Peterborough on a Wednesday in November 1998, and a child who arrived somewhere without either.

Now

The viola is still on the shelf.

Fenella has, for the first time in nineteen years, started looking again. Not for an owner — the owner is about forty now and has had twenty-seven years to ring — but for the exam board, because a grade six theory paper in 1998 was sat on a specific date by a specific number of candidates, and the records may exist, and it is the first genuinely new thread since 2011.

She is aware that it will come to nothing.

She has told the office she is doing it "for the file," which is not true, and which nobody believes, and which nobody has questioned.