The Enumerator of Vine Terrace

About this book

Brighton, 1911. Abel Garrod is the most trustworthy man in town: Registrar of Births and Deaths, churchwarden, husband, father. He is also, for thirty years, the quiet keeper of a green ledger written in shorthand, every lie his neighbours ever told the census - and what each lie was worth to him. A week before census night, the ledger vanishes from its locked drawer. The thief is his own daughter, and her price is simple: one narrow lodging house in Kemp Town must not be counted. Abel knows the house. He counted it in 1881, when he was twenty-four and hungry, and what he did there began everything he owns. Now the same door is waiting, and the person behind it remembers him exactly.