The Times

The Times is the newspaper whose Deaths column records Thomasina Ann Tuckerton’s death, turning a brief printed notice into both a prompt for Mark Easterbrook’s reflection and a lead in the investigation into her family. Its files offer a way to revisit the notice and pursue details that the investigators do not yet have.

The Tuckerton notice

About a week after an earlier encounter, Mark sees the name Tuckerton in the Deaths column. The notice states that Thomasina Ann, aged twenty and the only daughter of the late Thomas Tuckerton of Carrington Park, Amberley, died on October 2 at Fallowfield Nursing Home, Amberley. It also says that the funeral will be private and requests no flowers.

The concise entry gives Mark a formal account of the young woman he had known as Tommy Tucker. Its public facts—age, family connection, place of death, and funeral arrangements—sit beside his personal recollection of her, making the notice more than a record of a death. Reading it also prompts him to question whether his own quiet, scholarly life might be as wasted as he had assumed hers to be.

A record used as a lead

The notice’s appearance in The Times becomes useful to the investigation after Mark and Katherine Corrigan turn their attention to Thomasina’s stepmother. Mark initially lacks even her address. Katherine points out that Luigi may know something about Thomasina’s home and that the newspaper’s files can be consulted to recover the death notice. Together, those suggestions offer a route from a published name toward the family information needed to approach the stepmother.

Narrative significance

The Times functions here as a source of searchable public information rather than as an active participant in events. A short death entry first reopens Mark’s thoughts about Thomasina, then becomes a practical investigative resource: the same notice that marks her death can help the living trace her family. The shift from private response to documentary clue gives the newspaper a small but consequential place in the novel’s movement between remembrance and inquiry.