Free Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues by Alex Beecroft

industrial aesthetic replete with polished concrete and galvanised steel.
    She had done herself over in the same style, now aggressively tubular in a silvery-grey dress that hardly moved when she did. Her plum-coloured hair looked positively dishevelled by comparison despite being lacquered as heavily as her nails.
    Finn had had second thoughts the moment he’d located her new address. No longer in the bohemian environs of Bayswater, but now in a waterfront property in London’s dockyards. Clearly doing well for herself and determined to flaunt it whether or not the In Thing spoke to her on any honest level.
    Her bookcases were built into the walls, covered with sliding doors of polished aluminium. He hugged his briefcase to his chest as he stood in the middle of the area in her warehouse designated as a living room by the possession of three Eames chairs all facing a blank white wall. Presumably some kind of projection system would, when desired, throw moving pictures up there, and perhaps give the place the illusion of colour for an hour or so a week.
    He didn’t like the thought of the abbot’s book being left in those morgue-like shelves.
    “I am out of the business,” he said, and tried to rest on the edge of one of the chairs. It flexed in a disconcerting way under his weight. “This is a one-off, I assure you. But the book . . . the book! I couldn’t leave it in the hands of philistines. You’ll know why, when you see it.”
    Dr. Whinnery smiled at him with a professionally warm and encouraging smile. Shrink to the stars as she was, it wouldn’t do to exhibit her own monomania in any clearer way, but he saw it. He recognised it as one enthusiast to another. Behind the polite face, something ravenous had just perked up. “Then by all means let me see it.”
    He had tried to make the book feel at home by wrapping it in a burgundy silk handkerchief and nestling it in its own little casket—in this case an old letter-writing box with its innards removed. He placed the whole thing on a coffee table badly made out of spoons and noted how the presentation intrigued her. “You’re in love with this one?” she asked.
    “Of course,” he agreed. “Of course I am. Anyone would be.”
    She unbent a little, taking the box onto her knee. Opening, unwrapping. And then her purple-painted mouth fell open. “It’s genuine?” She pulled on her own gloves and reached inside.
    “So far as I can tell.”
    His conscience was a little assuaged by the tenderness with which she lifted the book from its setting, the care in her fingertips, the way she kept her face slightly tilted away so as not to breathe moisture on it. “Where did you get it?”
    “You know that,” he brushed the question off with a theatrical hand gesture. “Its owner sold it to me, of course. I have all the necessary documents and affidavits here.”
    In fact he had smudges on the side of his right hand where he had written them out, concocting a believable provenance for the thing and forging the paperwork to match. That part he still quite enjoyed—giving the book a backstory, telling the tale of its heroic survival down the years.
    She barely glanced at them, having seen enough of his work in the past to know it was good. Instead she stood with the book in one hand and drifted to her coffin-like shelves. Hauling a chatelaine of keys up from inside her skirt, she unlocked and opened one. Inside not a bookshelf at all, but a second door, this one with fingerprint sensors and a twelve-digit pass code.
    “Do you want to see?” The glance over her shoulder might have been taken as flirtation, but he was fairly sure it was just pride. She wanted him to look and want and know he couldn’t have. Given that he wanted to brain most people who took a precious volume out of his shop, he was familiar with the feeling.
    “Love to.”
    It was another room that looked as if it had been reassembled wholesale from the belly of a submarine, the dim lighting and