Free Book of Stolen Tales by D. J. McIntosh

rob you.”
    Norris took offhis glasses and rubbed his eyes once more. “He waited till after I left for the day. Until Charles was alone. I fear I’ll never see Charles again.”
    â€œHow can you be so sure?”
    â€œThe police are still looking but I know he’s gone. I’m just waiting to hear where they’ve found his remains. Charles was a man of … shall I say, determined punctuality and habit. Even though he lived in a flat a mile away, this was his home. He’d arrive every morning at precisely eight. Neat as a pin he was. Dressed in a suit every day I knew him. He’d hang up his jacket as soon as he came in and put on an apron to work in. At seven thirty in the evening, promptly, he’d take his hat, lock the door, and cross the street to the public house for a glass of sherry and his evening meal. His faithful routine, six days a week. On Sundays he’d walk in Kensington Park and take afternoon tea in the Orangery. The only exceptions were regulated holidays and his three-week excursion abroad every August. Set your clock by him, you could.”
    â€œHow old is Mr. Renwick?”
    â€œSeventy-two. Not that he held any truck with celebrations.”
    â€œYou’ve worked together for a long time I gather.”
    â€œFrom well before we set up the business. We met at Eton. We were outsiders. That’s why the two of us were naturally drawn to each other.”
    â€œWhy outsiders?”
    â€œHe was the only boy in the school with a disability. Picked up some sort of pathogen as a youth living with his parents in the Near East. The illness crippled his bones and caused a permanent limp. His spine was badly distorted so he had to walk bent over. And his skin was permanently affected. The other boys nicknamed him the dwarf. A nasty slight. Renwick was short anyway and his spinal deformity forced him to stoop. I was his only friend.
    â€œThe bullying drove him into his shell. Like a turtle he was after that, always afraid to stick his neck out into the wide world.”
    Norris’s account of Renwick’s suffering struck a nerve. I’d witnessed other kids on the receiving end of the merciless treatment my schoolmates doled out to the weak ones. “Kids can be cruel. What about his family?”
    â€œHe came from blue blood; his father was a diplomat in the British foreign service—a vice-consul in Persia and later promoted to ambassador to Iraq. Charles regaled me with stories of how his father had to pretend to lose at backgammon when he played with the Hashemite King Faisal II. ‘Wars have been ignited over less,’ he’d say.
    â€œAnd I was a scholarship student without a penny to my name. No silver spoon for me. We were both odd types; that’s why we sought each other out. That and our dedication to books. From Eton we went on to Cambridge together.”
    â€œWhat did you study?”
    â€œComparative literature.”
    â€œDid that include fairy tales?”
    Norris smiled. “Yes.”
    â€œDo you know why Renwick wanted Basile’s The Tale of Tales ?”
    Norris’s eyes brightened. “I can show you more easily than telling you.”
    I followed him over to the printing presses. Norris ran his hand lovingly over one of the machines. “A Kluge letterpress. Impossible to duplicate this quality nowadays. We use movable iron type. This was Charles’s specialty. He had a genius for selecting a typeface that perfectly suited the personality of the book. You can’t get the same look with computers. The text they produce is too perfect, too homogeneous. And Charles brooked no mistakes. He almost drove us into bankruptcy once when he destroyed an entire printing of a custom folio ordered by a collector. There’d been a slight error. I insisted we could print a new page and rebind but he wouldn’t hear of it.
    â€œThe codex, the custom of binding books, is relatively new, you