Trowchester Blues Read online

  And that just made Finn’s fingers itch to unwrap and explore and discover, out of pure academic curiosity. Pure academic curiosity being in Finn’s case a drive almost as strong as lust.

  “Don’t be jealous, darling,” he murmured to the empty chair opposite his, careful not to stir up a grief that had finally burnt down into embers. “I’m going to assume that if you can hear me at all, it’s because you’re in a place where everything makes you happy. So . . .” Ah, perhaps this train of thought had been unwise after all. His throat was closing and his eyes welling up despite his care. He pushed on through it because it was important. Because he would not be defeated by anything as mundane as death. “Be happy for me that I’m still alive.”

  He pushed the wine away, knowing better than to drink while morose. Five years was enough. It was enough by anyone’s standards. He had perhaps, barring accidents, another forty, fifty years to live. He was not going to spend them alone, not even for Tom.

  “You’d have hated this growing-old lark anyway.” He forced a smile, picked up the one-sided conversation again. Man could not logically prove the world existed. Even Descartes’s proof that he himself existed was flawed at base. Since the universe had to be taken on faith, he felt he could hardly rule out other things more up front about their lack of proof. It was possible Heaven existed, and that Tom still listened when he spoke, even though he never replied. “Wrinkles. Sagging. You’d have despised it.”

  But that sentence led to Perhaps it was for the best you died while you were still flawless, and he was appalled he’d almost thought it.

  Candlelight appeared to be detrimental to his mood. He blew the flame out, went to curl up in the corner of the sofa in his tiny living room, and picked a book at random from the piles that balanced around its feet.

  Typically, he’d just got comfortable, just found his place, when someone hammered at the squid knocker of the front door like a judge’s gavel. He pulled a piece of junk mail out from behind the cushion for a bookmark, closing the book on it with a scowl.

  His pocket watch said ten thirty, which was—in his now unobjectionable small-town life—a little late for visitors. Something about the urgency of the knocking lit up warning signs in his head, making him consider grabbing the fire poker before he investigated. But violence, however sexy, was not really his forte, so he made do with slipping his mobile into his pocket, so he could call the police if necessary.

  The door admitted more rain, the dark bulk outside it not distinguishable until it stepped into the corridor and dripped on his matting. He let go of the sides of his phone and stepped back. Not a physical threat, then. That would have been too easy.

  Howey Briggs rubbed a hand over his bald head to wipe off the water, and looked down on him with an expression of mingled smugness and disdain. “Well, this is nice. They said you’d skipped town. I had such a time figuring out where you’d gone. You should’ve given out cards, you know? Change of address.”

  “Change of life.” Finn tried to root his weight in the corridor, to prevent Briggs from coming further in, but Briggs simply walked forwards, shouldered past him, knocking him into the wall in the process, and turned into the shop.

  It was symptomatic of their entire relationship. Even the man’s face was raw as a slab of beef, unaltered by evidence of thought, his eyes flat, suspicious, hostile, his body as ungenerous as a clenched fist.

  He stood in the largest room of the shop, running his eyes along the bookshelves, lingering over the glass Pegasus and the other curiosities, all too obviously wondering how much money they were worth. “You done well for yourself, clearly. I’ve got something that will interest you.”

  “No.” Finn second-guessed himself, put his hand back in his pocket, and punched in 999 on his phone, keeping his finger lightly hovering over the Call button. “You don’t. Whatever it is, I’m not interested. I’m out of the business.”

  “They did tell me you’d been scared off. I didn’t believe it. A little court case? I’d have thought a man of your calibre would have viewed all that as part of the game.”

  He had, at first. And then—perhaps because of the stress, perhaps because it was simply his time—Tom had had a funny turn the day before the trial. He’d been rushed off to hospital, stabilised, and tested. The doctors had said it was probably nothing to worry about, but they wanted him kept in overnight just to be sure. So Tom had kissed Finn and wished him luck, said he would see him tomorrow, victorious, and while Finn was being cross-examined, Tom had had a massive heart attack in the CT scanner and died. Alone. Tom had died alone, abandoned, because Finn had thought it would be fun to dabble a little in the resale of antiquities acquired by methods into which it did not do to enquire. That was the moment when it had all stopped being even moderately entertaining.

  Finn bit the inside of his cheek to derail memories and nerves alike. “I am three seconds away from calling the police. I don’t know how you found me, but please go back to whomever it was you spoke to and tell them I am done. Go. Now.”

  “You see.” Briggs reached in to his messenger bag and brought out a palm-sized book. Even the glimpse of the binding through his callused knuckles made Finn’s breath catch. That shade of oxblood red . . . that dusty-but-waxy look. The embossing, with some kind of ivy-like plant drawn in a style that went out in the tenth century.

  His mouth dried. He let go of the phone and pulled cotton gloves from his inside pocket. After putting them on, he held out both hands. “God, don’t hold it like that. Give it here, carefully.”

  Parchment leaves, folded in quires, hand sewn onto wooden boards, covered in Hiberno-Saxon decoration. Traces of pigments on the interlace. One or two flecks of gold leaf that hadn’t yet rubbed off. He eased it gently open and fell even more deeply in lust.

  Irish cursive script with the initial capitals surrounded by flocks of red dots.

  Briggs, grinning, made a sudden lunge for it. “You gotta turn to this page, look—”

  Finn snatched it away before it could be bruised by the impious touch. He separated the pages carefully and turned them until he could see the illumination Briggs had been trying to show him. An oddly elongated angel holding a flower out to Mary, Mother of God.

  He had to sit down in a hurry on the step between one room and the other. “This is from L—” He didn’t have anywhere safe to put it down, and his hands were shaking too much to hold it properly. “This is from Lindisfarne. A private psalter for the abbot, done in the same style. This is . . . It’s as old as Cuthbert’s prayer book. Where did you get it?”

  “Come on, prof, you know better than to ask. So how much’ll you give me for it?”

  It rested in his hands so helplessly. A legacy a thousand years old. “This shouldn’t be sold. It should be in a museum. Do you know—”

  He had been about to say, Do you know how rare these things are? This is a national treasure, beyond price, but shopkeeper’s instincts kicked back in. “Do you know how impossible something like this would be to sell on? With no provenance? Any reputable collector would arrest me the moment I tried.”

  “Mmm.” Briggs held out a hand for it. “Yeah, that’s what the other bloke said. I just thought of you because you used to be something special. And you allus had a fondness for books. Never mind. I made my profit in other things. I’ll just take this back and put it on the fire when I get home.”

  The man was enough of a savage to actually mean it. Finn hugged the book closer to himself. He’d as soon have abandoned a baby to the flames. Law be damned, morality was all on his side. He did a quick mental inventory of what was left in both tills. “I could give you two hundred pounds, but that’s my uppermost offer.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Briggs watched with an air of friendly interest as he scraped the notes together. “It don’t pay so well, honesty?”

  Finn counted the money out into the man’s palm and then pushed him to the door. “Perhaps not. But I never want to see you again. Do you
understand? This is the last time. Never again.”

  “Sure,” said Briggs with a lack of conviction that made Finn queasy. But he did at least go away.

  Finn’s whole house settled around the book on the counter. Every particle of air, every empty space, seemed to focus on it while he fell apart in a burst of nervous shuddering. Oh God. Oh God. It couldn’t stay here. Michael May the policeman was due to visit again on Friday. What if he somehow stumbled on it? What if he could tell it was here, the way these people sometimes knew?

  He had to find it a good home. And now.

  “I thought you said you were out of the business.” Dr. Martina Whinnery perched herself on the edge of a chair designed more for pretentiousness than for comfort. She had completely revamped her style in the six years since he’d last seen her—swapped faux orientalism for a charmless 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 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 reco
very 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 for them, tainted as they were by the pieces of silver with which he’d bought them. He felt as hunted and as defenceless as he’d been in the police station the day they’d arrested him. They’d put him in the cells to wait for Tom to arrive with the bail money, and he’d seen how easily he could end up spending years in this place where an ability to talk fast was always going to lose out to the clenched fist. If he was honest, that experience had scared the shit out of him, and he couldn’t face it again. Even the thought that tonight Michael might be looking in at the book club made him queasy with guilt.

  Stopping outside the shop to adjust the awning over his table of charity books (Take and donate as it pleases you. If you have no money, take anyway.) to make sure they were out of the rain, his gaze was caught by the wet cobbles, by the long street of receding shop fronts, now populated only by one other human being bundled into a dark coat and disguised under a yellow umbrella. It was a moment where everything stopped. Everything stopped and waited for him to reach his decision.

  “Never again,” he said, inviting the rain as a witness. “That was it. That was the last time. You hear me, rain? This time I really mean it.”

  He thought perhaps something had heard. The weight eased a little off his chest. The clouds chose that moment to part, and the street glittered as though diamonds had been spilled underfoot. At the touch of sunlight on his face, he breathed in, and something released in him. Who would have thought he’d been carrying that reservation all these years without even knowing it? That little hidden place that said, “I know we’ve gone straight, but perhaps . . . If the reason is good enough. If it seems like fun . . . we might go back. We don’t want to be boring, after all.”