Free Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues by Alex Beecroft Page A

the scent of desiccation in the air perfect for the long-term storage of books. Around the walls, the larger volumes lay on wide shelves, somehow dispirited and drained by the blue light. Smaller volumes stood isolated between marble bookends like prisoners in chains. He hadn’t the heart to read their titles or to touch them, so tired they looked.
    Maybe it was regret that made him realise suddenly—and clearly far too late—that he could have taken the book to the authorities, who would have restored it to its original owner. But no, when he tried to imagine himself voluntarily entering a police station, giving a statement in the face of their thinly veiled officious hostility, well. It didn’t compute. He couldn’t see that happening, ever. This, therefore, was the only choice.
    “Here.” She placed the abbot’s psalter into an empty niche just above a red-painted Mexica codex and below an extraordinary fan of knotted cords that he thought must be a quipu. “Here will be perfect.”
    “With the South American books?”
    She looked at him as if he were stupid. “With the other books I can’t read. I don’t know about you, but I’m not fluent in Anglo-Saxon and have no desire to become so.”
    Perhaps he was stupid, because it hadn’t occurred to him at all. “You’re just going to look at the pictures?”
    “What a romantic you are.” She smiled as she ushered him back out and closed the two doors firmly on the secret room. “I don’t even need to do that. Every so often I let a fellow collector in here, and I look at their faces when they see all the books they will never possess. That’s my prize. I spend my entire career healing psychological hurts. Which, when you think about it, is not very balanced. It’s such a refreshing change to be able to pour salt into the wound and rub it in hard.”

Friday morning, he took the five thousand pounds he had charged her into the bank. “Come into a windfall, Mr. Hulme?” said the cashier, far too cheerily for a day on which dank leaves were sticking to the gutters and everyone around him smelled like wet sheep.
    “Blood money,” he replied, shocking himself. Five years out of the business, and he had evidently got into a bad habit of being honest. Fortunately his eccentricity saved him. The cashier giggled and looked at him with the half-worried, half-expectant look of a girl who didn’t know what he would do next and wasn’t sure if she liked it.
    “Don’t tell me it was one of those books where you have to sell your soul to be able to open it?”
    Finn covered a wince by raising his eyebrows at her, and redirected her interest as well as he could. “Well, you sound like someone who would enjoy the fine selection of fantasy novels I have in the Jules Verne room. Why don’t I see you in my shop more?”
    “I don’t like all that old stuff,” she said, bundling the notes together with an elastic band and printing him a receipt. “Now if you started stocking real books—stuff published this century, I mean—then you might be talking.”
    “Alas, I have no room for your modern trash.” He tucked the receipt into his waistcoat pocket with his heart beating faster than it should and a tremble in his fingers he found most irritating. “If it’s not bound in leather, I’m not interested.”
    The cashier tipped him a wink. “Said the actress to the bishop, eh?” And they both laughed as he made his way back out into the rain.
    It was a good recovery from letting slip an accidental truth, but the regret came back almost as soon as he was alone. Was it really any better for the abbot’s psalter to be locked in a sterile cage where it would never be read than it was for it to be burned? And if it wasn’t any better, then for what reason had he just sold the integrity he’d been working so hard to establish since Tom died?
    He bought Danish pastries at Bernadette’s on the way back for himself and for Kevin, but couldn’t muster much appetite