Free Remaindered by Peter Lovesey Page B

fact, you’d do a far better job than old Robert ever did.”
    â€œThat’s unkind,” Myrtle said.
    George turned redder than usual. “Yes, it was.”
    â€œWe are all in debt to Robert,” Myrtle said.
    â€œRest his soul,” George agreed, raising his glass. “To Robert, a bookman to the end, gone, but not forgotten. In the best sense of the word, remaindered.”
    â€œWhat’s that meant to mean?”
    â€œPassed on, but still out there somewhere.”
    â€œMore like boxed and posted,” the man from the coffee club murmured. “Or pulped.”
    Myrtle hadn’t heard. She was thinking positively. “Tanya didn’t altogether turn down George’s suggestion. She’d want to continue, given the opportunity.”
    Tanya was silent.
    â€œWhen someone dies without leaving a will, what happens?” George asked.
    Ivor Ciplinsky, who knew a bit about law, and led the history society, said, “An administrator will have to be appointed and they’ll make extensive efforts to trace a relative, however distant.”
    â€œI already tried,” Tanya said. “There isn’t anyone.”
    â€œCousins, second cousins, second cousins once removed.”
    â€œNobody.”
    Myrtle asked Ivor, “And if no relative is found?”
    â€œThen the property escheats to the state’s coffers.”
    â€œIt what ?”
    â€œEscheats. A legal term, meaning it reverts to the state by default.”
    â€œWhat a ghastly-sounding word,” George said.
    â€œGhastly to think about,” Myrtle said. “Our beloved bookshop grabbed by the bureaucrats.”
    â€œIt goes back to feudal law,” Ivor said.
    â€œIt should have stayed there,” Myrtle said. “Escheating. Cheating comes into it, for sure. Cheating decent people out of their innocent pleasures. We can’t allow that. Precious Finds is the focus of our community.”
    â€œIf you’re about to suggest we club together and buy it, don’t,” Ivor said. “Paying for a wake is one thing. You won’t get a bunch of customers, however friendly, taking on a business as precarious as this. You can count me out straight away.”
    â€œSo speaks the history society,” Myrtle said with a sniff. “Caving in before the battle even begins. Well, the Friends of England are made of sterner stuff. The English stood firm at Agincourt, a famous battle six hundred years ago, in case you haven’t covered it on Tuesday evenings, Ivor. Remember who faced off the Spanish Armada.”
    â€œNot to mention Wellington at Waterloo and Nelson at Trafalgar,” George added.
    â€œMichael Caine,” Edward said. He was the third member of the Friends of England.
    There were some puzzled frowns. Then George said, “ Zulu —the movie. You’re thinking of the battle of ‘Rorke’s Drift.’”
    â€œThe Battle of Britain,” Myrtle finished on a high, triumphant note.
    â€œWho are these people?” the coffee club man asked.
    It was a good question. Myrtle, George and Edward had been meeting in the back room on occasional Friday nights for longer than anyone could recall. They must have approached Robert at some point and asked if they could have their meetings there. An Anglophile himself, at least as far as books were concerned, Robert wouldn’t have turned them away. But nobody else had ever joined the three in their little club. This was because they didn’t announce their meetings in advance. If you weren’t told which Fridays they met, you couldn’t be there, even if you adored England, drank warm beer and ate nothing but roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
    George was the only one of the three with a genuine English connection. You wouldn’t have known it from his appearance. He’d come over as a youth in the late sixties, a hippie with flowers in his hair and weed in his backpack, living