The Bad Book Affair: A Mobile Library Mystery (32 page)

Read The Bad Book Affair: A Mobile Library Mystery Online

Authors: Ian Sansom

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Suspense, #Mystery, #Mystery & Detective, #Mystery & Detective - General, #Humorous fiction, #Humorous, #Missing persons, #Detective, #Fiction - Mystery, #Fiction - General, #Librarians, #English Mystery & Suspense Fiction, #Jewish

“In short, Pearce Pyper was a man who was fully human, who knew who he was, and who was prepared to share himself and his life with others. Gathered here today, in our grief, we should be mindful of what the Bible teaches us: that to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to laugh, and a time to mourn. As Christians, we believe in the life eternal, and the world to come. But we also believe in the good of
this
life, and that the lives of the good show us what it means to be truly human. And so today we should not only mourn, but we should celebrate the life of our brother, Pearce Pyper, born twenty-sixth of June 1918. Died twenty-ninth of September 2008.”

More hymns followed—“Praise to the Holiest in the Height,” “Ye Holy Angels Bright.” Hopeless sobbing. Prayers. The blessing. And finally the escape outside.

“Well,” said Ted, who stood smoking outside the church, waiting for Israel and the other pallbearers to load the coffin back into the hearse. “There we are, then. Another man down.”

“Yep,” said Israel.

“Can’t be all bad, if it’s got you in a shirt and tie, mind.”

“Yeah.” Israel wiped at his eyes. Ted had teamed his usual black leather car coat with a black tie and shiny black slip-on shoes.

“Ach, ye’re all beblubbered there, look. Here.” Ted thrust a crumpled, unironed handkerchief into Israel’s hands.

“Thanks.”

“Good elegy,” said Ted.

“Eulogy,” said Israel. “Yes. It was good, wasn’t it?”

“I tell you what he didn’t say about Pearce, though,” said Ted, crushing his cigarette butt under his heel, and bending over to pick it up and pocket it. “Ouch.”

“You all right?”

“Yeah. My back, just. You know what he didn’t say?”

“What?”

“He didn’t mention that the old fella was completely buck mad,” said Ted.

Israel gave a little laugh.

“Mind, takes all sorts, I suppose.”

“Yes,” agreed Israel. “I suppose it does.”

It was a private interment, so Israel drove with Ted back to Pearce’s for the wake. Cars were parked all along the driveway up to the house, and inside there was an atmosphere
of unforced joviality, quite different to anything Israel had experienced at any funeral in England. Women were busy serving tea and coffee, and men stood around chatting, in their overcoats. Everyone who was anyone in Tumdrum—which is to say, just about everyone—was there. Sandwiches were piled into pyramids, and bottles of whiskey were being passed casually from hand to hand. Minnie was doing the rounds with a platter of sandwiches.

“Och, Israel,” she said. “Sandwich?”

“What are they?”

“Ham. Ham and cheese. Ham and pickle.”

“Erm. No thanks. I’m vegetarian.”

“Oh, are you? I always forget. There’s crab paste somewhere.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“Lovely service, wasn’t it? I might get him to do mine.”

“Yes,” agreed Israel. “Very good.”

Israel wandered among the crowds, from room to room. Linda Wei waylaid him in the library. She was wearing a man’s dinner jacket and trousers, with a corsage, a pillbox hat, and bright red glasses.

“You’ve heard about the books, have you?” she said.

“Pearce has bequeathed them to the library service?”

“You knew?”

“He mentioned it to me, yeah.”

Linda raised her eyebrows in dissatisfaction.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do with all these,” said Linda, glancing around despairingly at the tens of thousands of leather volumes. “Sell them, probably.”

“Right.”

“Pay for some new computers.”

“Uh-huh.” Israel couldn’t be bothered to take the bait.

“You’re unusually quiet, Armstrong.”

“Yeah, well, you know. Just thinking about Pearce.” He was staring at the space on one wall where a bookshelf had been removed: the shelves that had done for Pearce.

“Have you voted yet?” said Linda.

“No,” said Israel. “I don’t think I’m going to bother.”

“If you don’t vote you’ve no right to complain about whoever gets in.”

“That’s true,” said Israel. “That is very true.”

He made his way out of the library, out onto the terrace, where he found George sitting on a bench, smoking, staring out across Pearce’s garden toward the farm in the distance.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” said Israel.

“I don’t,” said George, stubbing out her cigarette. “I’ve something for you, actually.”

“For me?”

“For your birthday.”

“Really?”

“It is your birthday, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is.”

She took a small package from her handbag.

“It’s a book, I’m afraid,” she said, handing it over.

“I don’t know what to say,” said Israel.

“Thank you?”

“Thanks. Shall I open it?”

“Maybe save it for later,” said George.

“OK.”

They sat in silence together, shivering. Israel sighed.

“Big sigh,” said George.

“Was it?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t belong here,” said Israel.

George laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what? What’s funny about that?”

George took a deep breath.

“Let me tell you a secret, Israel. No one belongs anywhere.”

“But you’re from here. You were born here. You grew up. You’re going to—”

“And you think I don’t ever wish I wasn’t?”

“Well. I don’t know. I just…”

“Everyone’s the same, Israel. We want what we can’t have. That’s the meaning of life, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, is it?”

She turned and looked at him. He looked at her.

His phone rang.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I’ll maybe see you back inside,” said George.

“Yeah. Sure. Fine.”

It was Gloria.

He thought. For a moment.

He let it ring.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

F
or previous acknowledgments see
The Truth About Babies
(Granta Books, 2002),
Ring Road
(Fourth Estate, 2004),
A Mobile Library Mystery: The Case of the Missing Books
(Harper Perennial, 2006),
A Mobile Library Mystery: Mr. Dixon Disappears
(Harper Perennial, 2006),
A Mobile Library Mystery: The Book Stops Here
(HarperCollins Publishers, 2008). These stand, with exceptions. In addition I would like to thank the following. (The previous terms and conditions apply: some of them are dead; most of them are strangers; the famous are not friends; none of them bears any responsibility.)

Amy Adams, Thomas Adès, Ingeborg Bachmann, Korrena Bailie, Georges Bataille, H. E. Bates, Hector Berlioz, Ingrid Betancourt, Dirk Bogarde, W. E. Bowman, Susan Boyle, Max Bruch, Carla Bruni, John Burnside, Vince Cable, June Caldwell, Lucy Caldwell, Eric Cantona, Helen Carr, Nina Cassian, Steve Chamberlain, Stavroula Constantinou, Alan
Coren, Simon Cowell, Curious Candy, Boris Cyrulnik, Charles D’Ambrosio, Edwidge Danticat, Jacobus de Voragine, Denis Diderot, William Donaldson, Ed Dorn, Scott Douglas, Gwyneth Dunwoody, Francine du Plessix Gray, Geoff Dyer, Mircea Eliade, George Ewart Evans, Harold Evans, Maureen Evans, J. G. Farrell, Penelope Fitzgerald, F. S. Flint, Kinky Friedman, Elaine Gaston, Elizabeth Gilbert, Ben Goldacre, William Golding, Martin Green, Hannah Hagan, Patrick Hamilton, Salma Hayek, Geoff Hill, Tom Hodgkinson, Holywood Cricket Club, Steven Isserlis, Philippe Jaccottet, Stephen Kelly, Natalie Kirk, Janusz Korczak, Shane Leslie, Doris Lessing, Joshua Levine, Colm Liddy, Derek Lundy, Humphrey Lyttelton, James MacMillan, Marcel Marceau, Annie Martz, Simon Mawer, James McAvoy, David Mitchell, Haruki Murakami, Rafael Nadal, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Barack Obama, Gina Ochsner, Jay Parini, William Parkhurst, Andrew Pepper, Grayson Perry, Richard Price, Elizabeth Reapy, Alasdair Reid, Derek A. Roberts, Robin Robertson, Eoghan Ryan, Julian Schnabel, Varlam Shalamov, Michael Shannon, Ammon Shea, Barrie Sherwood, Gary Shteyngart, Sixth Bangor Scouts, Rory Stewart, Parminder Summon, Joyce Sutphen, Tilda Swinton, Margaret Twohy, Fred Voss, Peter Wild, Sheena Wilkinson, Qian Zhongshu.

About the Author

IAN SANSOM
is a regular contributor to
The Guardian
and the
London Review of Books
. He lives in Northern Ireland.

www.iansansom.net

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

ALSO BY IAN SANSOM

The Book Stops Here

Mr. Dixon Disappears

The Case of the Missing Books

The Impartial Recorder

The Truth About Babies

The Enthusiast Almanack

The Enthusiast Field Guide to Poetry

Credits

Cover design by Milan Bozic

Cover photograph of book by 123foto/iStockphoto

Cover photograph of grass by Xsandra/Shutterstock Images

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

“Bookmobile,” courtesy of Joyce Sutphen, was previously published in
Coming Back to the Body,
2000.

THE BAD BOOK AFFAIR. Copyright © 2010 by Ian Sansom. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

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