Morningstar Manor

There were times when the tools you had wouldn't do the job. At that point most people gave up but an old timer like Ron had another option.

He made his own.

But that took more time so he had had to leave a message for Toth to put off collecting his Leica til Tuesday.

Ron was happily putting her back together again, when he heard the door open. It could have been anyone else but Ron would have put money on it being the Leica's owner come to reclaim his darling.

Something was wrong with the Leica.

Andras had got it out from the closet a few days ago, to try and take some real hand-made grainy pictures of the garden and the Manor, and this morning, when he was taking pictures of chimneys on the roof, something had made an odd sound when he was winding the film.

Grrr-- NARZ!

Not good.

Andras spent some time googling shops in the City, and then decided on one at the Foundry that had been there for quite a long time, on an American scale.

In the afternoon, he cycled there, the Leica in her case heavy on his back. He hoped his treasure didn't have any serious or debilitating problems.-

There had been a package waiting for him when he got home from work.

Old photographs of the City - taken for the Chronicle in the seventies by Daniel Bernouli. He had donated the whole archive of negatives to the Ashford Museum and at the time had said he had a bunch of copies somewhere. Bernouli had been as good as his word and the thick envelope had been in the mailroom - delivered by hand too.

Del should have hung onto them to look at home but couldn't resist slipping the glossy six by fours from the envelope.

"Wow," he said at the first one, a moody black and white shot of the sunset over Riverwalk Park, and he sat in one of the big chairs to spread the pictures out on the table, after checking that it was clean.