Death's Autograph
by
Marianne Macdonald


The later Dido Hoare mysteries,

Ghost Walk, Smoke Screen and Road Kill, are all available from NEL.

NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY Fiction: Crime

Cover image: David Rudkin

UK 5.99

ISBN 0-340-67154-8

9"780340"671542" Also by Marianne Macdonald

Ghost Walk Smoke Screen

Marianne Macdonald was born in Canada, moved to England in her twenties
and never left.  She is a former university professor, actress and
play-write, and still is a children's author.  She is married to
antiquarian bookseller Eric Korn and has two sons.  She lives in North
London with her husband and dogs, and travels extensively.  Death's
Autograph

Marianne Macdonald

NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY Hodder & Stoughton

Copyright 1996 by Marianne Macdonald

The right of Marianne Macdonald to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 1996 by Hodder and Stoughton

First published in paperback in 1997 by Hodder and Stoughton

This edition published in 2000 by Hodder & Stoughton

A division of Hodder Headline

An NEL Paperback 1098765432 1

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the
publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British
Library ISBN 0 340 67154 8

Typeset by Avon Dataset Ltd, Bidford-on-Avon, Warks Printed and bound
in France by Brodard & Taupin

Hodder and Stoughton A division of Hodder Headline 338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH For

ABSENT FRIENDS "What thou lo vest well shall not be reft from thee
..."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Eric Korn (M.E. Korn Books) and Detective
Inspector John Crease of Islington Police Station for their kind advice
on a number of technical matters of various kinds.  The story of
William Henry Ireland is recounted in John Mair's book The Fourth
Forger (1938) and Bernard Grebanier's The Great Shakespeare Forgery
(1966).  Finally, thanks to Alex Wagstaff for reading the proofs and
liking the book.  A Wink in the Dark

A have my own personal nightmare.  It's dark, of course, and I'm lost
in the corridors of a strange building.  The walls are lined with
doors: all of them are shut.  My mother is waiting for me somewhere,
and I creep from one door to the next listening for her voice, but all
the unseen rooms are silent.

It happened like that once, when I was four or five and went with her
to visit a friend.  Obviously she opened a door and found me, because
here I am, thirty-two years old, complete with my own name and history.
But being lost in the dark comes back in nightmares now and then.

I wasn't really lost that April night I knew that my ancient Volvo
estate was heading eastward in the tangle of minor roads between
Banbury and Milton Keynes, with the Ml motorway which was my route home
somewhere ahead.  Nameless villages and invisible hills lurked in
rainswept darkness beyond the headlights, but this unknown secondary
road would lead me sooner or later to the motorway, which in due course
would bring me down perfectly safely into London.  So although I didn't
know which stretch of wet and empty road I was following at that
moment, I could reassure myself.  No problem.  Nothing important enough
to distract me from the creeping certainty that I'd spent the evening
making a fool of myself.  Dido Hoare, the world-famous-soft-touch
antiquarian book dealer.  The back of the estate car was crammed to the
roof with slightly damp cardboard boxes.  They held the collection of
books I'd bought that evening, with great difficulty, from the
optimistically greedy heirs of a retired Oxford University professor of
English literature, recently buried but once known to (and thoroughly
disliked by) my father, Barnabas.  In order to clinch this deal I'd had
to close the shop early, drive the eighty miles from north London to
Banbury through slashing rain, and spend hours persuading the family
that the dead man's shelves held no volumes that could possibly be
expected to make them rich beyond the dreams of avarice.  There's
nothing unusual in this.  As I learned several painful years ago, most
people believe that any book more than ninety years old is worth
hundreds of pounds.  Unless of course it happens to be bound in rotting
leather, in which case naturally you multiply that figure by ten.
Nineteenth-century Bibles printed in their hundreds of thousands,
yellowed late editions of Tennyson's collected poems, volumes of
sermons by eighteenth-century preachers who on a good Sunday reduced
whole congregations to slumber: these are the book dealer's horrors.

There was a time, BD of course, when I used to think that kind of thing
myself.  The way history is divided into BC and AD, my life is "BD'
before Davey and after.  "Who taught me everything I know," I heard
myself say aloud to the smeared windscreen.  Even now, the bitterness
in my own voice shocked me.  There were things about my ex-husband that
I couldn't bear to recall.  After the process of persuasion, they (that
is, the sorrowing heirs) had announced, "Now, we'll just pick out a few
things for ourselves."  They had seemed injured when I explained that
in this case I (the honest purchaser) would actually have to reduce the
price I'd offered.  After four years in the trade, it still bothers me
that people can't accept me as just a fairly successful, reasonably
straight, possibly well-meaning antiquarian book dealer not a
feather-brained bimbo or a harpy gnawing the bones of widows and
orphans.  Rather a harpy than a fool, damn it.  It had taken three
hours and more patience than I knew I had before they condescended to
accept my money.  Then they wanted cash.  The daughter-in-law had
counted it slowly.  Then they'd left me to do all the packing and
loading.  Fair enough, but now it was the middle of the night and I was
still miles from home, my shoes were soaked (probably ruined), there
was an ache in my shoulders, and I was slowly realizing that I couldn't
remember one single volume that I really wanted to own.  The eyes that
stared coldly back at me from the driving mirror told me I'd been a
soft touch.  I know.  You know?  Then why did you do it?

Because I couldn't bear to go all that way for nothing.  So you bought
a load of rubbish.  It's not rubbish, it's perfectly good, solid stock.
People want that kind of stuff all the time.  You gave them at least a
hundred too much at LEAST.  They were such awful people.  Oh, I see.
That's all right, then.  Shut it.  And then you missed the turning to
the M40.  I was tired.  And couldn't be bothered to turn around.  So
now you're in the middle of nowhere.  What happens if the car breaks
down? Because she was due for servicing last month.  I couldn't afford
it. Anyway, this car is a lady.  She never lets me down.  In my
rear-view mirror suddenly there was a pair of dipped headlights about
three hundred feet behind.  One winked out for a moment, then
reappeared.  A lecherous wink aimed at my car's stately rear end?  When
I'm tired, my sense of humour plays tricks.  It happened again a few
minutes later. I felt for the music tapes and pushed one at random into
the stereo. The opening bars of the Trout Quintet flowed gently into
the darkness. The wipers thumped.  Beyond them, the Volvo's lights
glimmered faintly on hedge and ditch as the road twisted sharply.  Some
of the boxes behind me whispered and shifted.  When I glanced into the
mirror again the road was dark, but after a moment the headlights were
there again, further back.  You, back there time you were home and in
bed.

(Time, more than time, for me too.  How long another hour, with luck?)
I was thinking with unusual longing about my flat above the shop.  Oh,
damn I'd forgotten to feed Mr.  Spock before I left.  Something else to
reproach myself for.  Davey had named him.  Why do you call your cat
"Mr.  Spock'?  Because he has pointy ears, of course.  I shook myself.
Feed the cat.  Then a drink.  Warmth ... a bath, maybe ... The books
could stay in the car until morning.  Not even in Islington would
anyone be desperate enough to break into the old Volvo for whatever
rubbish could be found in such tattered boxes.  Still, remember to set
the car's alarm.  At some point, the music had stopped.  I yawned,
caught myself, rolled down the window.  Wet air slapped my face.
Something flashed in the hedge ahead.  My lights picked out a
reflecting sign, a name but the car had passed before I could read it.
I was in a dim village street.  The dashboard clock hadn't worked for
months, but when I snatched a glance at the luminous dial of my watch,
it was after two.  I let my speed rise and then had to brake when
something small ran across the road almost under the wheels.  The
winking light was back.  The other car was probably heading for the
motorway too.  It couldn't be far away.  And then, as the Volvo reached
the summit of a shallow rise, the idea slid into my mind that I was
being followed.  Pull yourself together, Dido!

I pulled, but my eyes slid back to the rear-view mirror for a moment
too long, and my tyres rumbled on the broken verge.  The thought of
upending in a wet ditch under a rain of old books made me more careful.
But I wanted to find out.  I raised my right foot gradually so that my
speed drifted down to a sedate forty... thirty-five .. . and the
headlights closed in behind me.  Then, after all, fell back.  Perhaps
they didn't want to risk overtaking on this narrow road?  I shifted
down, and the acceleration pressed me against the seat.  At fifty-five
I changed into top gear.  The Volvo hurtled through another unlit
village.  The headlights kept their distance.  The Volvo was a heavy
metal box, solid and strong, safe.  So whatever happens, I told myself,
I won't stop.  Not out here, not alone .. . But there was light an
unexpected loom of brightness ahead.  Perhaps an all-night filling
station?  Or only some lights left on by mistake?  The black bulk of a
building masked the source, but at the last moment I saw the lighted
sign and a forecourt with a solitary figure in a glass kiosk.  I
twisted the wheel, swerving too sharply and braking hard between the
rows of pumps.  I glimpsed a startled face in the kiosk before I turned
and looked back at the road in time to see a white car, one of the
thousands of little, over-powered hatchbacks that were everywhere that
year, flash past.  There had been no tell-tale brake lights.  I
switched off my engine and sat in the abrupt silence, listening to my
heart grow quieter.  It was an effort to open the door and crawl out;
I'd stiffened up on my slow journey, and I fumbled the line and
splashed fuel as I topped up the Volvo's tank.  The cashier, an old man
with a white, night face, stopped staring at me when I went to pay.  He
bent his eyes on his greasy magazine.  I said, "Is there a telephone?"
Of course there was in some office in the darkened garage building.  He
slammed the cash drawer and pointed back west.  "Box half a mile up the
road."  But anyway, who could I phone at two thirty in the morning?
Not Barnabas, the way things were now.  Or my sister Pat, asleep beside
her husband in their St.  Albans house not so far away.  (I could
almost hear her big, outraged voice saying, "For God's sake, Dido, it's
the middle of the night and you've woken the boys ...") The police, to
explain, "There was a car.  I thought they were following me.  They've
gone now..  ."?  Once I would have phoned Davey, just for the pleasure
of speaking to him.  I gritted my teeth and shut myself into the Volvo.
While I was making sure that the doors were all locked, I wondered why
my thoughts were so out of control tonight.  Usually I go for days
without thinking about Davey.  And I hadn't even asked the old man how
far it was to the motorway.  But then knowing wouldn't bring it any
closer.  I looked again at the door catches and caught myself at it.
Damn it, what was wrong with me?  I was so tired that I wanted to put
my head down on the steering wheel and howl.  If the Volvo broke down.
There was a woman, that last winter, who broke down on a motorway and
somebody..  . They hadn't caught him.  I listened to the

engine's mutter.  It seemed normal enough.

I had almost passed it before I noticed the pale shape waiting under a
hedge.  They must have been sitting with their engine running.  In the
mirror I saw the headlights come on.

Just playing games.  Don't let yourself be scared.  Be angry!  Two can
play games, shit-head... I clutched at a feeling of outrage so that it
couldn't escape and pressed down the accelerator, waiting and being
angry.

Safe in the middle of another of the dead villages with the white car
fifty feet behind, I braked.  The lights behind jinked and fell back
even as I was shifting down and up again, driving now the way Davey had
taught me, watching the broken white line in the middle of the road,
gluing the offside front wheel to it, holding the heavy car steady on
the straight and then braking and skidding and accelerating through the
curves.

The other car was lighter and faster.  Brightness filled the back of
the Volvo and the headlights themselves grew closer and then vanished
because they were so close two or three feet of nerve-wracking space
between our bumpers.  There was no time or space to be frightened.  The
white car was light and quick, but the Volvo was a solid old monster,
its rear end ballasted by half a ton of books.  I stopped thinking,
gripped the wheel and braked hard.  But after all something in my head
didn't believe that I'd decided to do it, and I felt my own flicker of
hesitation.  Nice girls don't try to smash up other people's cars.
Almost before the Volvo's brakes bit, the other car was skidding away
and I was changing up through the gears again.  At eighty, I looked
into the mirror.  Now there was only a single headlight, perhaps a
quarter of a mile back.  The wink had been abolished.  It felt almost
like a small victory.  The darkness had changed.  Not dawn, but
something pale stretched across my horizon: the haze of motorway
lights.  I didn't notice when the white car came back, and even when I
noticed, it was as though I was awake again and could ignore it.  The
blue motorway signs slid past.  A quarter of a mile to the slip road ..
. They pulled out, driving beside me on the wrong side of the road. Not
trying to overtake.  The road ahead was empty.  I dragged my
imagination away from the image of crumpling metal.  I thought I
wouldn't give them the satisfaction of noticing them, but it was
impossible not to turn my head.  Their dashboard lights touched two
shapes, two pale faces turned towards me.  My fingers were clamped to
the steering wheel.  They cut in, braked insanely close.  My own
tactics.  My body took over, braked, felt the engine jerk and die,
heard the boxes shift.  The car felt airless and the ignition had
frozen.  Time stopped.  Five yards away, the white car went dark.  In
the instant when nothing moved, my eyes had time to see that they had a
comic sticker on their back window.  In the glow from my headlights I
read it as carefully as though it contained essential information:
CAUTION MOTHER-IN-LAW IN BOOT.  I wondered through my astonishment that
this was really happening, wondered what this strangely independent
body of mine would do when they got out of their car.

I'd been trying to turn the ignition key the wrong way.  I reversed it
and the engine caught and as it did the white car moved.  They didn't
turn their lights on until they were two hundred yards down the road.
It was then of course that I remembered that I ought to have taken
their number.  I sat with the engine running until I'd almost stopped
shaking.  Then I turned the Volvo sedately on to the motorway.

Even at this hour the London-bound traffic was heavy.  Safety in
numbers, but I couldn't stop looking for the white hatchback, because
now that it was over the anger came back: I wanted to see them crash,
see them hurtling through the side barriers, crumpling, burning.  (Just
watch the road, Dido.  Steer the car and get a hold of yourself before
you do some hurtling of your own.)

It had turned cold.  I switched on the heater and filled my lungs with
warm, stinking air.  By the end of the motorway, I'd stopped
shivering.

It was an easy run through the northern suburbs and on down the
Holloway Road.  At Highbury Corner a white car ahead of me shot off
toward Barnsbury, and I was so distracted that the Volvo's wheels
banged the kerb.

Even in the early hours, Upper Street is full of people, ordinary
people going to the all-night supermarket or walking home.  The two
from that winking car could easily be there.  Anywhere.  Any time.  You
could go crazy thinking about it.  I took a grip and told myself that
it had been a nasty experience, casual and unlucky.  Just somebody
having a perverted joke.  Hey, I was coming home last night late and
there was this woman driver creeping along the back road at about five
em pee aitch .. . Nothing had happened.  I was already beginning to
doubt the whole business.  They could have been kids out partying,
having a laugh, showing off.  I'd jumped to conclusions.  Anyway, it
was over and no real harm done: not as bad as being hit by a drunken
driver and left bleeding or dead.  It's a dangerous world, but most of
the time you just have to live with it because there isn't really any
choice.

There was kerb space just in front of my door, and I jammed the Volvo
into it with a sigh of relief and exhaustion.  At least the unloading
wouldn't be too bad.  And now I'd give myself a good big cognac, and
feed the cat, and sleep.  Suddenly every muscle hurt.  Even so, I sat
for a moment and looked up and down the street before I could make
myself get out and cross to my own door.  At least the rain had
stopped.

A Nod in Daylight

Something nearby was cheeping like a demented chicken.  I hauled myself
out of sleep and managed to summon up enough willpower to open one eye.
The noise was coming from beside the bed.  I fumbled the alarm clock
silent.  The effort left me awake but without any immediate desire to
move.

A warm weight landed on my chest and head-butted my chin; Mr.  Spock
had arrived to enquire whether I was alive.  I can recognize a losing
battle as well as anyone; rolling out from under cat and duvet, I
prepared to come to terms with Friday.  At that point I remembered the
boxes waiting in the car.

"If you were worth your kitty munch you'd unload for me," I told my
ginger tormentor.  Ignoring the suggestion, Spock moved briskly to the
windowsill and began to comment on the weather.

Coffee first.

My flat is the floor above the bookshop: the top floor of what had once
been a small Georgian terraced cottage.

The sitting room stretches across the front of the building; my
bedroom, and the room that had been divided into a small kitchen and an
even smaller bathroom, took up the rest of the floor space.  It's what
estate agents call 'cosy', meaning small, but it suits me.  There's
something light and shapely in the proportions of the rooms and the
floor-to-ceiling sash windows across the front wall of the sitting
room.  I'd furnished it Davey and I had furnished it -with
early-nineteenth-century pieces that we'd found cheaply one by one in
the little antique shops around Camden Passage, and covered the walls
with original prints and a few pretty oil landscapes that we'd come
across in the same places, and they also suit me.  At least, I haven't
changed anything in the past two years, so they must do.

Even in my rough condition, I managed to stagger into the kitchen and
grind the last of the coffee beans.  While the kettle was boiling, I
fed Spock though as I used the tin opener I was asking myself why I'd
ever agreed to act as a servant to an orange-striped tyrant and pulled
on an old jogging suit and trainers.  It's a wise fashion choice when
you are going to shift stock, because old books are the dirtiest things
in polite society.  I allowed myself my first coffee of the day, let
the cat out the kitchen window on to the flat roof of the ground-floor
extension which is the doorway to his back-yard hunting grounds,
pocketed my keys, and dragged myself downstairs.

Unfortunately, nobody had stolen either my car or its contents, so I
spent the next forty minutes moving heavy boxes from kerb to shop, then
through the shop into the back room.  Normally when I'm shifting some
lot of books

I've just bought, I keep stopping to look at things, because there's
always the chance of something strange or curious or valuable.  It's
like a private treasure hunt.  Not today.  The books were part of the
bad feeling that belonged to the night before.

I wasn't going to let myself think about the night before.

The car was empty by ten o'clock, but I was so down that I relocked the
shop and went upstairs.  If any of my regulars turned up they'd know
where to find me.  I reckoned that half an hour sitting in another hot
bath drinking coffee might even turn me back into a more or less normal
human being.

In fact, I'd had about twenty minutes when the phone rang in the
sitting room and I had to drip down the passageway to answer it.  At
that hour of the morning it was usually Barnabas, and I always need to
answer his calls now.  My father seventy-two years old, widowed for
five years, seven years retired from university teaching, and four
months past his heart attack.  For the last hundred and twenty days,
I'd been afraid of losing him after all.  Nowadays, when my telephone
rings, I answer it wet or dry, sober or drunk.

"Good morning, Dido."  It was his voice: measured and precise, with an
old actor's clarity which came from his lecturing days.  I wound the
bath towel more firmly around myself while we exchanged our usual
careful questions about one another's state of mind and body.

Barnabas said, "I've had a letter.  Not a letter -I mean a note.
Delivered to the door there's no stamp on the envelope.  I wonder
whether you can help me?"

"What?"  I wiped at the water trickling coldly down my shins and wished
I hadn't been trying to save money by turning the heating off at the
beginning of the month.

"It's just a sheet of plain paper," the voice explained in my ear.
"Handwritten.  Black ink.  All swirls and furbelows.  Obviously
disguised.  The message is entirely incomprehensible."

There was another trickle of water down my spine.  I yelled, "What
message?"

"Three lines.  First, there's the registration number of your car..
."

"What??!"

'..  . and then it simply reads, "about two miles south of Milton
Keynes, but next time question mark question mark"."

I sat down on the arm of the settee, ignoring the danger of damp
stains.  Because of course it was impossible.  Not possible, that is,
at all.

"Dido?  Did you hear..."

I spoke over his voice.  "Wait.  I have to get dressed.  I'm coming
over.  It's ..."  Well, what was it?  I tried to hide the panic washing
over me, but it made me breathless.  "I need to talk to you."

"So it does mean something!  Just explain .. ."

"Ten minutes," I said, and hung up.

The sight of my dark and empty shop troubled my conscience enough that
I paused to open the door and stick on the handwritten notice that
claims i AM OUT ON BUSINESS BACK SOON.  I turned the car, bullied my
way across Upper Street, and joined the usual traffic jam heading north
towards Highbury Corner.  An edgy north wind was blowing the rain
against my windscreen.  The calendar was insisting that spring had
arrived a whole week ago, but somebody had forgotten to inform the
weather.

Barnabas owns a flat converted from the ground floor of a big
mid-Victorian villa halfway up Crouch Hill.  I could see him watching
at his sitting-room window a tall, thin old man (obviously I take after
my mother), with sharp grey eyes under a shock of white hair, wearing
thirty-year-old cords and a sports jacket with leather patches on the
elbows.  He dresses like a fifties academic, which of course is what he
is: it's less a fashion statement than a kind of identity card.

He opened the door for me with the words, "As a child, you always were
pig-headed and abrupt."

I decided to ignore that.  "Where is it?"

Barnabas nodded me into the chaos that was the sitting room of his flat
but looked more like the accessions department of a library.  He was
still working on his edition of Tudor love poems four mornings a week
in the British Library, five afternoons here which was the excuse for
the paper avalanche on the desk under the window, and the books that
had engulfed tables, overwhelmed chair seats, and flooded across the
carpet since my mother's death.  Until he retired he'd had the luxury
of his Oxford rooms for his work.  Now he was living like an old bear
in a book-lined den.

The note on top of the mound on his desk was exactly as he described: a
handwritten flourish in black ink on thin paper, threatening because it
was both personal and anonymous.  About two miles south of Milton
Keynes..  . Last night had seemed as distant as a nightmare, and I

would rather have kept it that way.

I became aware of Barnabas looming over me, his face all attention.  If
I'd been able to think of something he would accept, I would have lied.
I told him the truth.

He said slowly, "You should have phoned me.  You shouldn't have been on
your own."

"I thought it was just chance a couple of drunks having a stupid game
with a woman driver.  There are idiots like that everywhere.  You get
used to it or women do.  You've led a sheltered life, Barnabas."

His raised eyebrows said that this was nonsense.  "It seems rather
lengthy and elaborate for a couple of drunks having fun.  However,
that's not the point.  It turns out to be anything but random."

I closed my eyes.  I could feel a headache begin to tighten my
temples.

"The men in the car knew you, Dido.  They even know about me.  Are you
sure you didn't recognize them?"

"Oh, Barnabas, it was pitch dark!  And no, I don't know anybody that
runs a newish hot hatchback."

"What about motive?"

I said weakly, "What about it?"

He glowered, letting me know I was being slow.  "It's a threat, of
course.  This note is telling us both what happened last night was not
chance, that they know us both, they can find us both.  "But next
time," he says a direct threat."

I said stupidly, "Why?"

"Ah.  You tell me."

"Which of us is being threatened?"

"That's true.  Theoretically this could be aimed at me through you."
Barnabas cleared his throat.  He was winding up to being businesslike.
"I presume you didn't take their number."

"Right at the end, when I remembered about it, they had their lights
off."  Obviously to make sure I couldn't do just that.  I pulled myself
together.  Suddenly what worried me most was his worry: not good for a
man with a bad heart.  I managed a little laugh.  "Barnabas, have you
been misbehaving?  You haven't gone to some conference to give a paper,
and called Professor Tussock a raving idiot in public, have you?"

"Tullett," he corrected me stiffly.  "And don't be so silly.  I am
always courteous poor old emeritus has-been that I am.  I'm much more
inclined to feel that you are mixed up in something shady.  Have you
brought the Mafia down on my head in my old age?  I am joking.  Am I?"
He pretended to consider it.  "I am beginning to sound like King
Lear."

I groaned at him.

"Let's take it from the other side.  Who could have known about your
trip to Banbury?"

"Only the people I was visiting.  By the way, you were right they were
a miserable lot."

"Like the old man.  Perhaps they were trying to steal back the books
you'd bought."

So we were back on our usual ground, reassuring one another.  I
adjusted my tone and said, "Quite possibly.  They were just about the
most unpleasant..  ."  Then I remembered.  "Oh, hell anyone, everyone
knew about it.  After the book fair last Monday we were all having the
usual drink, I mean drinks, and somebody suggested that a lot of us
might have an evening out.  I told them I was going to Banbury last
night to look at a library, so we put it off."

"Who was there?"

"Booksellers.  The usual.  All people that we know.  Nobody who could
have any reason to go to such lengths ... much less involving you."

He rose to the bait.  "I wish you'd stop thinking that I'm an
invalid!"

"Have you taken your aspirin today?"

He said, "Of course I have!"

He had been taking half an aspirin a day.  His doctor had quoted
figures that seemed to prove that half an aspirin a day, taken for ever
after the first heart attack, prevents others.  Barnabas says that the
whole thing is mumbo-jumbo designed to prevent more costly demands on
the over-stretched and under-funded National Health Service, but he'd
been pretty good about remembering.

"Don't change the subject!  Just think: did you tell anybody else where
you were going?"  I hadn't.  "Then, apart from that, how could they
find you in Banbury?  You didn't mention names and addresses during
this unladylike boozing session?"

I looked at him.

He looked back at me triumphantly and pushed his advantage.  "Then how
could they find you?"

My heart sank.  "They couldn't."

He waited.

"Unless they followed me all the way from home."

"Oh, dear.  What a great deal of trouble to take."

I agreed.  Oh dear.  "I left in the afternoon.  I didn't notice
anything, but then it was a common kind of car.  It was only the loose
wiring in the headlamp ... It all seems mad."

"We'll assume that there's a reason," he said briskly.  "If there's a
reason, then it can be discovered.  Let's think ... Why now!  Unless we
believe you've made a deadly enemy who has waited years to take a
terrible revenge, something must have happened recently.  Is there
something in your private life that I should know about?"

I sighed at him.

"And why drag me in?  It's as though somebody needs to apply pressure
to us both."

He stopped so abruptly that it made me watch him.  In a long silence he
crossed to the window to observe the watery sunlight in the
uninteresting street outside.  There was nothing to see out there
except the occasional passing car none of them small white hatchbacks,
as it happened but he continued to keep his back to me.  After a moment
I realized that he was avoiding my eye.  I let the silence drag on.  We
could both be pig-headed, couldn't we?

He said, "There might of course be hidden criminal depths to you which
you have carefully concealed from your doting father.  But somehow I
think it's Davey.  Isn't it?  Have you seen him?"

"Don't be silly."

"Let's," said Barnabas to the window pane, 'accept for the moment that
Davey is the one person we both know who is most likely to be connected
with some silly game .. ."

I wanted to howl.  "Let's not!  Let's not be stupid!  All that is
finished.  He's gone.  Leave it!"

"If you wish."  He cleared his throat.  "Then if that's all for the
moment, I'm going to get down to work again.  I'm not making any
progress today."  He half turned and pretended to scrutinize a
photocopy of some ancient manuscript scrawl among the papers on his
desk.  "This is actually illegible, but it does not I can see this much
at least read "Quieter of mind and my unquiet heart", whatever Tullett
said in that incompetent version he published eleven years ago."

I said humbly, "I'll phone you if I think of anything.  Be careful.. ."
and crept out, leaving him folding his lanky body into the swivel
chair at the desk.  It looked as though he had switched from one
academic problem to the next.  I wished I could too.  But we had spoken
about Davey, and that wouldn't go away.

There was a space opposite the shop about a foot longer than the Volvo.
I let the cars behind me wait until I had edged in delicately.  Then I
sat with my problem.  It made me look hard at the shop: a narrow
frontage with the door to my upstairs flat on the side; the plate-glass
window with its display of nineteenth-century children's books, some of
them opened to chromolitho illustrations (a good display, but time to
change it), the chocolate-brown sign with its gold lettering, new since
the divorce had renamed the business: DIDO HO ARE ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS AND
PRINTS.  The dark interior with its shadowy shelves of buckram and
leather bindings invited browsers.

The shop had been Barnabas's wedding present to me: the lease of the
whole building, the money for the stock, and his own expertise with the
older books, where my knowledge faltered.  Before that, I'd worked for
two years for Barrow and Bates, the big Charing Cross Road specialists
in nineteenth- and twentieth-century books.  That's where my own
knowledge had come from.

And where Davey came in.

Davey had been dealing in colour prints and water-coloured engravings,
both the real thing which gave him genuine pleasure and the
bread-and-butter prints labelled "Hand-coloured Genuine Antique', which
he was running to various central London shops.  They were
nineteenth-century steel engravings of London scenes torn out of cheap
octavos and given a water-colour wash by Davey himself, or by a girl he
knew.  Tourist-trade prints, they were; we sold them mounted on card as
slightly superior souvenirs.  After we married, they brought in a
useful regular income for our own shop from the mahogany display
cabinet by the door.

I unlocked that door, removing the BACK SOON sign.  The prints cabinet
was beginning to look empty.  I'd been putting off a decision.  I put
it off again and wandered into the office in the rear extension where
the Banbury books were still waiting in their boxes.  They needed to be
unpacked, sorted, collated for completeness, priced.  It was going to
take me the rest of the day, and probably Sunday too.  Saturdays are
the busiest day in the shop, the day when the local market and antique
shops are full of customers, so I wouldn't get anything done
tomorrow.

While I'd been away, the mail had arrived.  There were half a dozen
orders for things in my last catalogue, out a fortnight now but not yet
dead.  I ought to sort through those, write invoices, wrap and weigh
parcels, take them to the post office the antiquarian bookseller's
routine.

Instead, I sat down at the desk and stared numbly at the blank computer
screen.

That was what I was doing not really thinking, just blanked out when
the little Nepalese bell that hangs on the door jangled.  The figure
outlined against the light was unmistakable, and I realized that I'd
been waiting to see it.  My heart slid into my toes.

"Speak of the devil," I allowed myself to say, making sure he would
hear it clearly.  I felt quite proud of the steadiness in my voice.

Davey grinned at me the length of the shop.  "Hello, pet!  Coming for a
drink?"

3 Pet

I heard my voice saying, "I'll get these," as though the intervening
months had vanished and this was any Friday lunchtime two years ago,
when we used to shut the shop for the 'hour' that always turned into
two and a half, and walk together round the corner to the Crown just
before it got crowded, and stay drinking and talking me with Davey,
Davey with everybody.  I was just the person with Davey, whom everybody
knew.

The pub had been refurbished after Christmas.  It had turned into a
Hollywood-Victorian stage pub, all frosted glass, horse brasses and
imitation wood panelling.  You'd expect Mr.  Pickwick to walk in.  The
bar staff were new too.  I ordered Davey's pint and my gin from a
strange white-faced girl.  While I was waiting, I looked back at our
table in the curve of the plush bench seating.

He wasn't quite unchanged: older, muscle in the tall body running more
to plumpness.  His blond hair was longer.  He'd caught it in a little
ponytail, like the ones you see on trendy advertising men or the
street-market traders, the boys who fancy themselves.  It occurred to
me that he looked more than ever like the man on the cover of a cheap
romantic novel the one who ambushed the heroine in a sexual diversion
from her path of true love, whatever that might be.

Oh, I ought to have known better.

When I turned away, my own reflection stared at me from the mirror
behind the bar with a face confusingly framed by the shelved bottles
and their reflected doubles.  What about that face was that one changed
too?  In the mirror's depths beyond my own accusing eyes and wild short
hair, I saw Davey again.  Davey and Dido, Dido and Davey.  His
reflection took a cigarette from the pack on the table and flicked the
lighter with those tapering, curiously feminine fingers.  There was a
smudge of green paint on one knuckle.

I carried the glasses to the table and sat down at the right distance.
Barnabas popped into the back of my mind asking questions, and almost
as though he could hear them, Davey reached across and put his hand
over mine.  I heard myself say, "How's Ilona?"A really adult reaction
-well done, Dido.

He took it at face value.  "Fine.  Flourishing."

"I was surprised to see you."  (In the old days too I always used to
make the first move.  It always was my mistake.)

"I've missed you, pet."

I got my hand back and used it to pick up my glass.  "What have you
been doing?  Are you working?"  I meant, What do you want?

He laughed.  "I'm painting like crazy.  I don't sleep, I do a canvas
every night.  I have an exhibition in Hampstead next month.  And I'm
doing this and that hustling.  You know."

I made my voice sound amused.  "Nothing's changed, then."

"Not much.  What about you?  How's Barnabas?  I heard he was ill."

It was still too close to think about.  "He died," I said carefully.
"His heart actually stopped beating.  He's all right now, but it's made
him cautious.  It frightened him.  It scared me stiff."

He said something that I missed, because for a second I was back in the
darkness of that winter evening when Barnabas had slipped out of his
chair at my table and huddled on the carpet, changed incredibly into a
grey-faced stranger whimpering with pain.

"Sorry?"

"How's the shop doing?  How are you managing?  "There was a quality in
his voice that I didn't quite understand.  His face was attentive,
concerned.

"Oh, I do the book fairs by myself, of course, but Barnabas comes and
goes in the shop.  I had a catalogue out a couple of weeks ago, and he
wrote most of it."

"Somebody showed it to me.  But you have to do all the fetching and
carrying?  I've been past once or twice, and I saw that you seemed to
be on your own."

"You should have come in," I commented with what sounded even to me
like meaningless cordiality.

"I thought you'd throw a wobbly.  Didn't want to risk my neck."

It was just idle conversation, like tossing a bubble back and forth.
"Very sensible," I said.  "I suppose that I might have broken your
knee-caps if you'd caught me at an awkward moment."

He left it then, but there still seemed something evasive in his look.
I stared back.  I'd forgotten how light his eyes were: the kind of
luminous blue that you see in a midwinter sky.

"You always were tough, for somebody so small and pretty.  Anyway..  .
today I risked it."

I smiled sweetly.  "Us lady booksellers have to know how to take care
of ourselves."

"What do you mean by that?  Trouble?"

I couldn't stop smiling.  "Not particularly, but you know what
booksellers are like: gropings behind the cases at book fairs, drunken
knee-hangings under the tables, invitations to hotel rooms in Bristol.
Some of them seem to think I'm a pushover."

"Really?"

"It's my size and my feminine nature."  I breathed down into my
diaphragm.  "And being divorced.  Jimmy Fox .. ."

"Oh, that little shit.  You don't want to worry about our Jim.  Do you
want me to have a word with him?"

I said coldly, "I'd do it myself if I thought he meant it... which I
find improbable."

Davey seemed to consider Fox.  "Yes, it is unlikely.  But I think you
need a minder.  And handyman and runner.  Are you hiring?"

"Not you!"  I felt something like panic.  "I'm my own minder now.  And
it's your round."

"Lend us a fiver?"

"Bugger off," I said, and handed over the money.

I watched him walk across and lean over the bar to talk to the pale
girl, who turned pink and smiled into his blue, cajoling eyes.  I could
feel a laugh rising.  Or hysteria.  You bastard.  It's so automatic.
Davey Winner: the man who gives promiscuity a bad name ... But there
was always a purpose behind Davey's moves.  Minder?  Even if Barnabas
was right, it was hard to believe that Davey would have undertaken last
night's elaborate and dangerous ploy just in the hope of convincing me
that I needed him back.  Or was it hard?  Wasn't there something of
Davey's incurable optimism and, yes, naivety in the idea?  The only
question was whether he would tell me what was going on, or whether I'd
have to find out.  That much hadn't changed.

In the end he told me.  It came after he'd spent an hour at gossip and
anecdote and charm Do you remember?  Do you remember?  and after the
lunchtime crowd had faded back to their antique shops and offices,
leaving us nearly alone in the mid-afternoon gloom.  "Dido, I meant
what I said."

"What about?"

"Don't be smart.  About the shop."

I said slowly, "The shop's fine."

"It was fine when we ran it together.  It was a good shop.  It might
even have been a good shop still after Barnabas rode up on his white
horse and saved you from me.  At least he could help you then God, he
knows books all right!  I have an eye for a deal and what looks pretty,
but Barnabas knows."

"Exactly."  My tone sounded dry enough to mop up a swimming pool.  "And
he comes in still, when I'm going to a sale or something like that."

"So he's well enough to babysit the shop."

I felt myself scowl at him.  "It's all that's necessary."

"It isn't all you need, pet."  His voice dropped confidentially.  "Look
at it when you go back.  One person can't run a shop and do catalogues
and the fairs.  Your stock is tired, those silly little prints are
gone, you ..."

"Not you," I said.  I meant it.  "No way."

"I won't even take a salary.  Commission, half of the increase in your
profits, that's all!  Say, ten per cent of anything I run for you.  I
still know all the book people."

It felt like being hypnotized.  The panic in the pit of my stomach
pushed me to my feet, and I banged my thigh hard against the edge of
the table.  Davey's glass was empty.  He picked up his black leather
jacket and walked ahead through the heavy doors.  Over his shoulder he
was saying, "Don't worry, I just need the money."

"Not from me you don't!"

"Why not?  I know the business.  I did it for three years remember? and
full time after Barnabas set you up in that place.  It's something I
can do."

In the street he turned, waiting.

"You can do lots of things.  You can do that for somebody else.  As you
say, you still know all the dealers."

He looked curiously at me and shrugged.  "They aren't as much fun as
you.  But if you can't handle it..  ."

But I could handle it, and I knew just the right way.  "Let's say I
can't handle it," I said.  I made my fingers straighten out; the nails
had been digging into the palms of my hands.

He was watching me.  Wanting something.  He always had been unreadable.
"You're right," he said, sounding agreeable.  "Well perhaps after all I
just wanted to see you again."

"Don't -just don't!"  I remembered suddenly how he enjoyed making
scenes.  "What do you really want?"

He said, queerly, "What do I ever want?  Listen, let me just prove to
you that I mean it.  I don't even want a cut.  Well, anyway, not from
you.  I've told you I still know people, and I can get you buyers for
at least three things in your catalogue.  No, don't interrupt!  There's
the Wordsworth: you've under-priced that, and Jimmy Fox has been
advertising for one.  And the Tom Jones!  - I'll lay you ten to one I
can run that to Griffiths.  I'll ask him sixteen hundred and take
fourteen.  I didn't realize you still had the Ireland stuff, but I
happen to know that Heritage has a pet Jap customer who pays over the
odds for anything English with a provenance.  You just have to sell him
a romantic story.  I'll handle the whole thing.  I bet Heritage can get
twice your catalogue price for that.  I'll get you twelve thousand, and
take anything over that as my cut.  What do you say?"

The vision of these flying thousands made me hesitate.  Luckily or
unluckily, however, they were out of reach.

I said patiently, "The Fielding has gone, as a matter of fact, and when
I offered the Poems to Jimmy he said he didn't like the condition.  And
the Ireland is on order too at last.  Do you remember that nice
American librarian who used to come over every summer from
Massachusetts?  He'll be here next week on a buying trip, and I'm
keeping it for him.  You see?  I'm managing!"

Davey mimed anguish.  "Did you get the full price for everything?"

I almost lied.  "The usual discount," I said firmly.  "They're both
good customers."

"Tell your American not to come," Davey urged.  "Tell him that the cat
pissed on the manuscripts."

"Mr.  Spock never pisses on manuscripts.  He has manners.  And I can't
do it.  Anyway, Barnabas wouldn't stand for it.  He and Job Warren are
friends."

Davey said slowly, "Professor Warren that's it, I remember.  Come on,
Dido, you can't just throw away three thousand pounds."  His voice was
hoarse.  But money had always been Davey's true love.

I said, "Go away.  Thanks for the drink."  But when he bent down and
looked at me carefully, as though my face were a half-finished
crossword puzzle, and kissed me on the mouth, I felt as tired as though
we'd been fighting.

"See you later, pet."

I watched the back of his black jacket vanish around the corner of the
street.  I'd forgotten his habit of carrying his left shoulder a little
higher than the right.  Today it suddenly made him look as though he
were on the point of twisting on his heel and running for his life.

At the shop, I flipped the sign which still shamefully said CLOSED and
phoned Barnabas.  I felt as though I needed his kind of reality for the
moment.  Through his greetings I told him, "You may be right.  Davey's
back.  I don't mean "back", I mean he turned up.  We've been to
lunch."

Barnabas's voice came thinly down the wire: "What did he want?"  I felt
a flash of annoyance.  If only Barnabas had left things alone ... "I
don't know," I said lightly.  "Money, I expect.  He seemed bright.  Not
exactly happy bright.  The way he used to be when he had a scam on.  He
was full of ideas."  "Dido, I wish you weren't so bored."  "I'm not
bored!  What's that supposed to mean?"  "Good."  Silence.  Then I was
angry.  "I'm fed up with men!  You all patronize me."

Barnabas said, "I'm your father, you foolish child!"  I hung up.  That
conversation was going nowhere.

Besides, I was considering whether or not I wanted to cry.

Turn-up

I lay on my bed watching the lights of passing cars whiten and fade on
the bedroom ceiling.  Davey's breathing was deep and regular.  He was
probably asleep, but I couldn't be sure: typically, he was giving
nothing away.  But his body felt solid and warm against mine.  I lay
still against his back.

When I woke, my body remembered his so vividly that I wasn't sure I'd
been dreaming until I rolled over and looked at the empty and
unwrinkled space beside me.  Funny: I still always slept in my own
half.  Relief that it hadn't happened fought with .. . panic because it
had seemed so normal?  Shame?  Disappointment?  Anger?  Stupid cow.  I
got up slowly, feeling like an invalid, and wrapped myself in the green
terry bathrobe because I felt cold.

In the kitchen I could grind coffee beans, watch Spock eat, wait for
the kettle to boil.  With the water dripping through the grounds, I
switched myself on to automatic, splashed cleaner over the work tops
and wiped at the week's accumulation of crumbs and grease.  Then I
remembered to check my answering machine, discovered I'd forgotten to
set it, and gave myself the whole morning to drink coffee and read the
Sunday papers.

By eleven o'clock, when the telephone rang, I'd climbed far enough out
of the cloud of uneasiness to be able to go and answer with only the
smallest flutter in the pit of my stomach.  But of course it was
Barnabas's voice on the line.  "Dido?  Are you all right?"

I focused on the dust motes which hung in the sunlight it wouldn't hurt
to mop over the sitting room as well as the kitchen and took a deep
breath.  "Why shouldn't I be?  What about you has something
happened?"

Barnabas's voice said, "Oh no, I'm gorging aspirin, nothing to report.
But I was worried.  I tried to phone you last night."

"I was out."

"Good ... Good?"

"I got back late."

His voice hesitated.  "You wouldn't like to fill me in?"

I wanted to laugh.  "Davey took me out for a meal last night.  As a
matter of fact, he took me to an unusually flash restaurant in the West
End and even paid the bill himself."

Barnabas said, "What does he want?"  in a tone so anxious that I nearly
forgave him for asking.

"He says he misses me.  Ilona is visiting her parents, and I suppose
he's lonely."

"You wouldn't!"

I said, "Of course not.  Oh, Barnabas, do you really think I'm such a
fool?"

"It just seemed," he said slowly, 'rather a waste of a good divorce.
When I bought it for you, little did I think ..."

I took a grip on my temper and said relatively mildly, "Shut up,
Barnabas!  Or talk about something else."

"If I'm competing with Davey again, I'd better take you out to lunch.
Rocca's?"

"Provided you'll stop acting pitiful," I agreed, "I'll pick you up at
one o'clock."

"You ought to be having your meals with somebody sensible."

I hung up.  It was a kind of joke between us, that type of
conversation, but suddenly this morning it felt as though our
relationship was out of hand.

When I left university, I'd wanted to try something or somewhere
entirely new.  An American girl at my college had suggested we should
go to New York together, and we'd both wound up working for a
publishing firm and sharing an apartment near Columbia.  That was where
I was when my mother died.  I moved back to London after the funeral
without even consulting Barnabas, because it felt like the only thing
to do.

I knew he'd expect me to move in with him.  Pat, my older sister, had
remarked with tearful sentimentality how convenient it would be for
both of us.  I hadn't been so daft, but a kind of jokey pretence grew
up between us then especially in him that we were looking after one
another.  Of course for nearly two years there had been Davey, and then
things were different.  But I was determined not to let either
Barnabas's heart or my divorce become the excuse for something false. I
have always loved my father, but I value my independence, and so does
he.  Realistically, I reckoned that we would have been at one another's
throats.

Rocca's Restaurant, down by High Holborn, was Barnabas's favourite
partly because the food is pretty good, and partly because he liked the
Italian family who run it and keep it unswervingly postwar with its
brown walls, plastic grape vines, and real table cloths.  They didn't
mind us sitting there all afternoon, even on a busy Sunday.  Barnabas
maintained that Armagnac is better than coffee for a man with a heart
condition.  If only they'd stocked Irish whiskey, he would have gone
there every day.

I'd refused to discuss Davey, so Barnabas talked about his work.  Then,
over his brandy and my espresso, he got on to the sub-topic of
Tullett's edition of love sonnets, but even in my slightly distracted
state I knew that his mind wasn't on it.  I could feel a wall of unsaid
things beginning to rise up.

"All right, spit it out."

"I've been mulling things over for the past couple of days while we
were waiting.  I presume that the pranksters in the white car have been
totally silent?  And yet if they are trying to put pressure on one or
both of us, they ought to have let us know by now what it is they want.
It's not very effective to let up."

I was surprised for a moment to find that I'd stopped worrying about
the episode.  "Are you really looking forward to being blackmailed,
then?"

My father assured me that his desire for excitement was limited.

"Well, then, just be grateful.  Maybe it was a joke.

Someone who knows me was passing and just happened to recognize the
car.  There are people with a warped sense of humour who might consider
it funny to give me a scare.  I'm waiting for one of the lads to
snigger at me in a pub so I can chop him down."

"A joke?"  Barnabas mocked.  "It might have been someone's idea of a
joke, I suppose although I hope you aren't too familiar with such
humorous individuals but what about the note?  Having taken advantage
of a wild and wonderful coincidence, your joking friend extends the
joke next morning to give us all an even bigger laugh?"

Well, I'd tried.  I sighed at him.  "All right, I'm listening."

"Either someone will contact you or me any hour now can't think why
it's taken them so long or something else frightening will happen."

"Oh."  I tried to focus on that.  It wasn't a reassuring thought.
"Barnabas, you wouldn't go and stay with Pat for a while, would you?"

He shuddered visibly, but otherwise ignored my suggestion.  "I'm afraid
we should talk to the police.  Also I think that you'd better move in
with me for a few days.  I don't want you alone at night."

"Oh, but..  ."  I meant, Oh no.  But that was in normal circumstances.
So far as his suggestion was concerned, I wasn't too happy about him
being alone if there was really to be a 'something else frightening'.
"You're as vulnerable as I am, Barnabas.  I just can't think why
anybody would seriously want to ... to scare me.  I know you thought it
might be Davey, and for a while I thought you must be right.  But why?
That's all finished.  I'm not doing him any harm, I don't have any
money... it really doesn't make any sense.  Perhaps somebody's after
you, not me?"

"There have been ..."  Barnabas gazed elaborately at the ceiling '..  .
several students and at least half the English staff who might have
wanted to harass me at one time.  But not now.  Nowadays, I am only a
poor old bore.  Half of the rest of them have left the university too
and are also poor old bores.  Unless we're postulating a mad research
student who believes that I blighted his career and has been plotting
fiendish revenge in an attic in Whitechapel?  I don't remember actually
blighting any careers, though I often wanted to, as a kind of public
service to future student generations.  I still think .. ."

He hesitated, but I knew perfectly well what he meant, because when
Barnabas held a grudge he never made any secret of the fact.  Whatever
bee he had in his bonnet, I could only hope that he would avoid turning
it into a campaign.

"I suppose that you're going to give me the usual speech on the usual
topic?  I suppose you're convinced that Davey has kept some terrible
rage because of the divorce?  For God's sake, Barnabas, why should he?"
I heard my voice rising and took a deep breath.  "He got what he wanted
-don't interrupt, I've always known that you paid him off-he went off
to Ilona which is where he decided he wanted to be, and as far as I can
see he's perfectly happy there.  I'm not bothering him!  What would be
the point of his messing with us now?"

To do him justice, Barnabas blushed and covered his uneasiness by
taking a long, considering sip from his brandy glass.  "Well then.  I
suppose that fathers never know about their children, although the
police are bound to ask: do you have any murderous ex-lovers?  No doubt
you were mixed up with the Mafia in New York?"

I breathed in a mouthful of coffee and spluttered, "What an incurable
romantic you are!  I'm actually as hardworking and harmless as I
appear."

He fixed me with a sharp stare.  "Perhaps you are.  I'm not sure that,
at your age, it's entirely healthy."

"Oh, Barnabas, stop playing."

He said softly, "I'm afraid that I am genuinely anxious about this. You
see, I hate not understanding things."

I said, "I can't believe all this .. . fairy tale."  At that moment, I
meant what I said.  "There's a shamefully silly explanation for the
whole business."

"Beware," said Barnabas, 'or reality will tap you on the shoulder..."

"The waiter will tap you on the shoulder if we sit here any longer," I
pointed out.  "He might like to have a little time off.  Anyway, it's
time for your nap."

But after I'd delivered him to Crouch End and pretended to supervise
his settling down to rest, I drove home and left the car around the
corner from George Street, away from the shop.  That gave me the chance
to walk back.  I shook myself mentally.  I asked myself what I thought
I was doing.  Because even then I couldn't believe my father's
theories.  And yet I found myself watchful.  The sky had clouded over
while we were eating, and a gust of wind brought a promise, almost the
touch, of raindrops; but that was the only visible threat.  Stop it!
You'll be seeing things in doorways next.

And then when I got there, the doorway was wrong.  It took me a moment
to understand the reason: the CLOSED

sign that had been there had vanished, so that the glass in the door
appeared darker and plainer than when I had left.  Wrong.  Beyond it,
something else had changed.

I fumbled at the door (later, I could remember unlocking it) and pushed
it back with a thud against the case of prints.

The mounted engravings slid along the floor under my feet.  Beyond
them, books had been ripped from their shelves and flung in heaps, the
pages fluttering sadly in the breeze from the open door.  I fought my
way inside, trying to avoid doing any more damage as I moved.  Someone
had pulled down one of the free-standing bookcases in the middle of the
room.  I edged past the Literature section, where not a book was left
shelved, towards the door of the office.  I always leave it closed; now
it was slightly ajar.  Moving lightly on the balls of my feet, I
reached out and touched it, listened ... pushed.  Something soft first
gave way and then resisted.  I shoved.

It looked as though a pack of monkeys had been imprisoned inside.  I'd
been pushing the door against the mounds of my Banbury purchase, which
had been thrown across the floor like the books in the front room.  The
chair lay on its side, and the drawers of the old desk had been pulled
out and emptied on to the floor.  The computer monitor lay on its face.
Anxiously I fought my way over, set it up and switched on, to find with
relief that the menu came up normally.  But the parcels I'd spent hours
preparing for the post had been ripped apart, their brown paper
wrappings shredded.  Why?  I picked my first edition of Tom Jones out
of the mess and stacked its six volumes gently on the table.  One of
the spines was cracked, but it could probably be fixed.  The telephone
lay on the floor, wires dangling, and my little cash box sat upside
down beside it, empty.  The thought slid stupidly into my head that at
least I'd gone to the bank on Saturday, so I couldn't have lost more
than eighty pounds in cash and a sheet of second-class postage
stamps.

And how many valuable books?

I reached out to pick up the cash box and stopped myself: anybody so
mindless might well have left his fingerprints.  Instead, I pushed the
empty drawers off the chair and sat it on its legs.

No, no use clearing up yet.  No use crying.  No use being angry.  I
locked up without looking back.

I turned without thinking to the door at the side, the door up to my
flat.  I'd even put my key into the mortise lock before I realized that
whoever had broken into the shop might just have gone upstairs
afterwards, might just be there still... My first reaction was anger: I
wanted to roar up the stairs, only I could hear Barnabas saying, the
way he used to when I was little: "Temper, Dido!  Count to twenty-nine
.. ."

And then I remembered Barnabas saying that something else frightening
would happen.

I made sure that the mortise was still locked.  No easy escapes ... if
you are up there.  Then I eased the key out of the lock again and
walked to the phone box in the main road to dial 999.

5 Nothing

It took some time for the long, strangled clamour of the doorbell to
penetrate my sleep.  I focused blearily on the clock.  For a moment the
fact that it was past nine meant nothing.  Then a wisp of memory
returned.  I said "Damn!"  to the clock and screamed "WAIT!"  to the
bell.  Then I wobbled out of bed and struggled into the grey tracksuit
extracted from the mound of laundry I'd dumped on a chair after my last
visit to the launderette.  I stuffed my feet into a pair of clogs and
ran a hand uselessly over my hair, which needed a lot more than
smoothing.  It could wait.

When I opened the door, I found myself staring from my five-foot-three
height at the diaphragm area of a white shirt.  Stepping back mentally,
I moved my gaze up over the ranges of a weight-trainer's body in what
looked like a rather expensive grey suit jacket I'm rarely too sleepy
to appreciate good things and located my caller's face nearly a foot
above mine: big brown eyes, wedge-shaped face, and a tan that at that
time of year had to be from a lamp.  Only the shortness of the dark
hair and the fact of the grey suit betrayed that this was either a
stockbroker or a policeman, and circumstances favoured the latter.  I
could feel myself blinking at him.  As I blinked, a warrant card was
flourished in front of my nose.  The photograph did not do him
justice.

"DI Grant.  Sorry I'm late."

Suspecting sarcasm, I made sure that his expression was professionally
blank.  "No problem," I drawled, emphasizing gracious cool th and
wishing I was more awake and less unwashed.  "You'd better come up.  I
was just going to make coffee."

"I'll need to see the shop.  Afterwards, coffee would be fine."

"I'll get the keys," I said.

By the time I'd climbed the stairs again, the one thing I knew quite
clearly was that my cotton-wool brain required first aid.  If he
couldn't take a hint, he'd have to wait.  I set the electric kettle to
boil and found the instant coffee.  The milk in the fridge was sour.  I
extracted a sticky jar from the jumble in a cupboard, dumped a spoonful
of liquid honey into the black brew, and descended carrying both keys
and mug.

The uniformed policeman who'd arrived the previous day in response to
my emergency call had told me to leave everything untouched until the
CID could examine it.  In the light of Monday morning, the mess was
unspeakable.  It was hard to imagine I'd ever owned a functioning
bookshop, and even harder to believe I ever would again.  I sipped my
coffee gingerly, trying not to burn my tongue, and watched Whatsisname
the thought drifted past me that if I'd forgotten the name of such a
dishy bloke, I was clearly past the prime of life prowl along the edge
of the chaos.  He couldn't have a clue.  Nothing useful was going to
come out of this; his visit was a gesture the police had to make before
they allowed me to get on with my life.  I relaxed grumpily, drank
sweet coffee, dozed on my feet, and waited for something to happen.  It
would be nice, I told myself, if somebody actually did something.

The detective produced a small black notebook and a large green pen
from an inside pocket and threw me a quick look.  "I'll take some
notes, and then I'll have to ask a few questions."

"The uniformed policeman filled in a report yesterday afternoon."

"Just preliminary," he said.  "I like to do my own looking."

I watched him idly as he wandered through the mess, looking at
something or other from time to time and scribbling without pause.

"Miss Hoare, can you tell me what's missing?"

I looked at the mess.  "Not yet.  Your man told me not to touch..  ."

"Of course."

"He told me not to clear up until you'd been here to have a look at it.
I've plugged the phone back in and picked up the computer, that's all.
He said it would be all right."

"Well, there's no reason why you shouldn't go ahead and clear up. Apart
from the phone and the cash box, there's no point taking fingerprints
it's a shop, after all, so there's not much chance of finding anything
meaningful.  We'll send the phone and the box to the forensic people,
just in case one of the local villains got careless."

"Money," I said.  "They took the money from the cash box it wasn't
locked and the stamps.  I can't see what else is missing.  I mean, I
can see some quite valuable things that are still here.  I told the
constable .. ."

"I know."  He was gingerly retrieving the cash box and sliding it into
a plastic bag while at the same time watching me through narrowed eyes,
and I noticed irrelevantly that his nose was crooked.  Presumably
somebody had broken it for him.  It made him look more human.  My
telephone was unplugged again and went the way of the box.

I said, "I won't know for sure until I've got everything back on the
shelves, but..."

"What?"

"Look," I said, suddenly realizing what I had been thinking since the
moment I'd walked in on the mess, 'whoever did this didn't know
anything about antiquarian books."  Saying it aloud made me more sure
about it.  "For example, see that Tom Jones in six volumes?  That's a
first edition.  I've just sold it for twelve hundred pounds it was
wrapped up, waiting to be posted, with the invoice in it.  It's the
kind of good, collectable eighteenth-century work that's well, almost
like money.  Whoever broke in found it and just tossed it on to the
floor.  Do you understand?  Everybody knows that an old six-volume
novel is worth something, and pretty easy to sell.  Or..  ."  I
thought.  "Did you notice the low case under the front window?  I keep
some nice illustrated books there two signed limited editions of
Rackham fairy tales anAckermann's Oxford..."  His feet shifted, and I
realized that he had no idea what I was talking about.  Booksellers
lead introverted lives, I

guess.  "Well, those three volumes together could sell for two and a
half thousand three, with any luck.  They're fairly common anybody who
knows anything at all about old books knows what those are, and they
wouldn't be terribly easy to trace.  And yet they didn't touch them."

"You think that's strange."

I corrected him: "It's unbelievable."

"Can you think of a reason for it?"

I looked at him hard.  "Well..  . of course, they took the money eighty
or ninety pounds.  And a sheet of second-class stamps.  But why break
into a bookshop if that's all you're looking for?"

He flipped his notes shut and said slowly, "An off-licence or an
electrical goods place would be a more likely target, yes.  You don't
think of a second-hand bookshop having a lot of cash.  Of course,
you're on a side street.  They might have picked an easy target."

"It's not that easy.  People live around here, I live here!  I might
have been at home."

"They probably saw you go out."  He shrugged.  "It may be that some
kids took the chance, walked in, had fun making a pig's breakfast, and
took the money because it was the only thing they could see of any
value."

"But they didn't walk in," I said slowly.  "I told your man yesterday
-I know the door was locked when I got back."

The notebook was back.

I repeated for its benefit, "I know that the door was locked when I
arrived.  I remember unlocking it to get in.  It's a mortise lock a
high-security lock.  You can't even copy the keys.  You have to order
new ones from the manufacturers."

DI Grant looked amused.  "There aren't any keys that you can't get
copied somewhere.  It's obviously what happened here if you're right
about unlocking when you got back.  There are no signs of forced
entry."

I shook my head.

"And everything is shut up tight back here.  The bars on the window
haven't been removed, and the rear entrance is bolted on the inside
with lock able bolts .. . unless you... ?"

I was beginning to feel impatient.  "No!  They were still locked, of
course."

"What about your alarm system?"

"I don't have one.  I'm not a jewellers or an off-licence."  They'd
asked me the same things yesterday, and heard the same answer with the
same air of disbelief.  Apparently you don't run a shop in London these
days without having all the security arrangements of the Bank of
England.

"You realize that whoever did this seems to have had a key?"  His face
was totally blank.

Yes, I did realize it.  I'd spent a lot of the night realizing just
that, which was why I hadn't fallen asleep until dawn and was having to
cope now with a head like a sieve.

"Who has keys?"

"No one.  I do.  My father does."

"Cleaner?"

I looked at him ironically.  He must have seen that the present mess
couldn't quite hide the shop's normal dustiness.

"Who owns the building?  Is there a management agency?"

"My father and I have a long lease on the whole thing."

"When did .. ."

"We've been here for four years.  We changed the locks when we took it
the insurance people insisted."

"Have you ever lost your keys?  What about your father, might he have
.. . ?"

I said impatiently, "Of course not."

"At least you're insured.  You'd better let them know what's
happened."

"Yes, of course.  I'll phone as soon as we've finished."

He looked at me and closed the book once more.  "You know, that's the
only thing that seems important, and we're going to have to go on
asking the same question: where did the key come from the one they
used?  Frankly, this looks more like a grudge than a robbery.  You
haven't fired an assistant lately?"

I sighed.  "Not unless you want to count trying to discourage my father
from coming and moving books around the place."

"I'll need to speak to him."

"Why?"  He looked at me.  He put his book down on the table beside his
plastic bags.  I said slowly, "My father and I have the only keys, so
you think that he or I or both of us together did it."  I understood.
"Oh ... an insurance claim."  I looked at him with distaste.  "Look.. .
sorry, I've forgotten your name."

"Grant.  Detective Inspector."  He grimaced.  "I'm sorry, but it's
going to have to be cleared up.  You realize that your insurance people
will be on to me first thing.  They'll look at it in exactly the same
way."

I decided that the two of us were unlikely to get on very well.  "Mr.
Grant, if I were trying to defraud my insurance company, I wouldn't
have to be very clever to think of leaving the back door open into the
alley.  Also, I'd be weeping buckets of tears and telling you about the
incredibly valuable books that are missing."

He looked at me closely and had the grace to grin.  "I take your point.
So far, you've only told me about the incredibly valuable books that
are still here."

"They aren't even incredibly valuable," I observed sourly.
"Unfortunately, I don't have any incredibly valuable books."

"Even so, I need to check with your father about his keys.  I do need
to make sure that he still has them."

I hesitated.  Confession time.  "I haven't told him about this.  He had
a heart attack a couple of months ago; I keep trying not to upset him.
I suppose he has to know?"

Grant grimaced.  "My father's had a couple of heart attacks, as a
matter of fact.  You can't help worrying, but it isn't the end of the
world.  Dad is living a pretty normal life."

"I just try to make things smooth for him."

He said abruptly, "I take it your father doesn't live with you?  We can
go together and talk to him, if that'd make you happier."

There was no help for it.  I shrugged.

"Apart from that, you'd better clear up as quickly as possible and find
out what is missing apart from the petty cash.  While you're doing
that, keep your eyes open for anything they might have dropped."

I sighed.  "You mean, a clue?  Like a box of matches from a little cafe
down at the docks where we go to find a menacing gang of oriental book
thieves?"

Grant looked at me with obvious distaste, and I decided I didn't like
tall, handsome men who couldn't laugh at themselves.  He said,
"Exactly.  I see that you read old books as well as selling them."

"When I was a little girl," I observed coldly, "I used to read Edgar
Wallace.  You're saying that there's nothing you can do about this."

"We'll do what we can, obviously, but unless we find out something
about your father's keys, we probably have to wait for your stuff to
turn up somewhere.  As soon as you get things cleared up, give me a
list of every item that's missing.  I'll consult one of our people
who's an expert in stolen antiques she might have some ideas.  We'll
circulate the second-hand book shops  If we're dealing with your usual
opportunist, he'll probably try to sell your stuff somewhere in the
area."

"I can do that myself," I said coldly, 'through the booksellers'
association.  And that's it?"

"That's it.  Let's just go and call on your father, and then I can
write this up and get the wheels turning.  No wait.  I'm supposed to be
somewhere else in ten minutes.  What if I call for you at about four
o'clock?  Give you a chance to make a start here, too."  He was looking
with distaste at the rubble.  "Do you have somebody who can lend a
hand?  There's a lot to shift."

"These days," I remarked as much to myself as to him, 'my whole life
consists of moving books by the ton.  I'm strong.  I take it that you
aren't offering?"

"I'd love to, but I have to go and solve crimes."

"Like this one," I muttered, and locked him out of the shop.

I stuck the CLOSED sign on the door, and turned and looked and sighed
and levered the display case back on to its legs so that I could begin
to stack the prints in their compartments.  Never before had they
looked so shabby, so ... remaindered.  I said, "Bugger it," and went
back upstairs to make a pot of real coffee.

For the next hour, I pushed books back into roughly the appropriate
places, picking out the ones that had been damaged and putting them to
one side so that I could look at them later and decide what was worth
mending and what I should toss out.  A few spines had been torn by
someone pulling them roughly from tightly packed shelves.  Half a dozen
volumes had suffered more serious damage, and an ornate
nineteenth-century Burkes Peerage had lost its red gilt covers.  The
Ackermann and the Rackhams were safe, and the other few dozen books
which any respectable thief would recognize as worth a hundred pounds
or so.

After a while I stopped expecting to miss anything and began worrying
about Barnabas.  I'd brought down my upstairs phone and plugged it in,
but put off phoning him yet again.  I wanted to tell him about the
burglary before DI Grant did, and yet the more I sorted, the more
uneasy I felt.  I took the time to phone the insurance company for a
claims form and then went back to it.  By the time I'd finished with
one long wall, I was almost certain that nothing was missing.

I should have been relieved, but discovering that somebody had
apparently materialized inside the shop by magic and amused himself by
spilling books on to the floor had started to frighten me.  A good
honest thief I

could understand, but this was invasive and senseless.

Or rather, it was a kind of terrifying madness.

The reason I didn't want to tell Barnabas was that I already knew what
he would say.  And I knew, surely, who had broken in, if not how they'd
done it: the men in the white GTi.  This was their 'next time', and I
had to tell the police about the winking car, only how could I?  The
whole thing was absolutely insane, and who would possibly believe it?
Inspector Grant would jump to some logical conclusion.  He would be
quite sure now that I had planned an insurance fraud and concocted this
fairy tale to divert his suspicion.  Anyone, including me, could have
written that phoney-looking threatening letter.  Suddenly I found
myself shaking so hard that I had to go into the back room to sit
down.

I was there when the telephone rang.  My wristwatch said that it was
Barnabas's usual time to call me, and I still hadn't worked out what I
was going to say to him, so I answered reluctantly.

It was a stranger's voice.  "Dido Hoare?"

Out of a sudden irrational fear of what I was going to hear, I croaked,
"Yes?"

"Halloo, Michael Allyn from Quaritch here.  From your last catalogue,
do you still have item thirty-eight?  We have a customer who may be
interested."

I'd almost forgotten that I was supposed to sell books.  The master
catalogue was still lost somewhere in the mess.  "Sorry," I said,
'which .. . ?"

"Item thirty-eight," the voice repeated, tinged with reproach.  I could
imagine the voice's owner thinking that you can't get the staff
nowadays.  "Ireland, W..  ."  '

"Sorry," I interrupted him.  "Yes ... I mean, no, it's gone.  Sorry." I
hung up, reflecting that it was par for the course that the only buyer
in sight today wanted something I'd already sold.  Or maybe it was
luck, because it was hard to imagine actually being able to find any
particular book in this tip.  My temper lurched from bad to atrocious,
and didn't improve with two more phone calls from people who wondered
whether I could sell them some Enid Blyton first editions or buy some
paperbacks from them.  There are some days when you just aren't going
to win.

By this time I couldn't touch the mess any more.  The books had been
handled by the men from the white car, and a kind of sliminess seemed
to stick to their covers.  Only what choice was there?

I was still hesitating when the door rattled.  I expected to see
Whatsisname Grant or the beat constable checking up on me, but it was
Davey who stood silhouetted against the pale sunlight of the street.

"Have you buried a customer under that lot?"  he demanded, edging his
way inside.  "What happened?  This is spring-cleaning gone mad!"

"Burglars," I croaked.

He strode through the chaos and gripped my upper arms.  "God!  Are you
all right, pet?  Have you got the police?  Are you okay?"  The
tenderness in his voice nearly finished me off.

"It happened yesterday," I explained, my voice cracking.  "It's all
right, there's not much harm done.  I'm all right.  The police have
been here.  But I have to ..."  The description of what I had to do
failed me.  I could only gesture at it.

Davey strode through the chaos, looked into the office, whistled.  "How
much did they take?"

"I don't know yet.  A bit of money from the cash box, anyhow.  I'm
making a list for the police."

"Want some help?"

I slumped against a wobbling book case.  "Yes.  Aren't you busy?"

"I'm busy helping you.  I was going to take you for a drink..  ."

"I'll take you for a drink afterwards," I said weakly.

"Then I'll take you for a meal."

I asked, "Have you inherited a fortune?"  The Davey that I knew had
always been free with money, but especially when he knew there was
something to gain.  Did he think there was something to gain?

"I had a horse," he said shortly.  "I'll do this side, you do that. You
haven't changed anything since I was here, have you, pet?  Never mind,
I'll look at the labels if I get lost."

We worked into a rhythm of bending and picking up, moving in tandem up
one side of the shop and down the middle, close but not touching.  Dust
hung in the air, and the shelves filled more quickly than I could have
believed possible.

"Filthy as ever," Davey said.  "The Environmental Health ought to close
you down.  I'd forgotten what it was like."

"I'll need a bath."

"We could have one together," Davey suggested.  "There's nothing like a
good bath to start an evening.  What next?"

I was drifting back along the rows of books.  The shelves looked both
familiar and strange things near their usual places but not quite in
order.  No good trying to judge from the general look of the shelves:
better think of valuable items.

I had known from the first that the rows of illustrated books were
untouched.  Now I wandered up and down the side aisles, looking for my
best volumes.  Davey stood, watching me prowl.  The good Bewick was in
its place.  And the Grandville.  For a moment I hoped that some of the
four-decker Victorian novels were missing, but then I found where he'd
shelved them at knee height.

"Well?"

"I can't see that anything's missing."

Davey hesitated.  "In my day we used to keep the good stuff in that
little locked cupboard with the glass door.  Where is it?"

"Someone leaned on the glass a couple of weeks ago.  It's away being
reglazed with something shatterproof."

"Where's the stuff?"

"I had it on two shelves over the desk.  Not even touched.  I made sure
yesterday when the police came."

"Manuscripts?  Signatures?"

"No.  Only a couple of sheets, all rubbish.  Don't go on about it, it
doesn't make sense."  It did make sense in a mad way, but Barnabas
believed it was Davey's mad sense, and I couldn't be sure Barnabas was
wrong, and I couldn't say that, because it had to seem like an
accusation.  I shivered.  "Let's just finish, and maybe I'll see some
hole in the stock."

But I gave up eventually.  Davey had vanished into the office, and I
could hear the rustle of papers being piled together.  I followed him,
walked round the edge of the door, and found myself held and kissed
slowly in a way that like my re shelved books seemed both familiar and
unfamiliar.  He raised his head and I felt his breath in my hair.  He
said, "It's time to leave the rest of this.  I'm going to buy you a
drink.  Then I have some business to do, but after that, I'll come
back.  I don't want to leave you alone."

I buried my face in his black jacket and closed my eyes, and for a
moment was able to stop thinking.  If I spoke, I'd find myself saying
something stupid, like If you don't want to leave me alone, why did
you, and what the hell are you doing here now?  Confused, perhaps, but
appropriate.  Then he would say that I had thrown him out, and we'd
quarrel or maybe not this time, maybe we'd both grown up a bit?  But I
remembered him as being absent for months before I'd stopped
pretending.

I moved away.  "It's nearly finished.  Then I'm supposed to tell the
CID what's gone.  They won't do anything until they have a list."

"What has gone?"  he asked.

I turned helplessly from desk to table.  "I don't know.  Nothing.  I
mean, nothing except the cash.  No books."

"Vbu're lucky."

"I know.  It must have been someone who doesn't understand about
books."

Davey said softly, "Or someone who knows enough to reckon he couldn't
easily shift them?  London antiquarian books are a small world."

The suggestion stopped me.  Yes, but if you were going to worry about
that, why do it at all?  The key... I hadn't explained yet about the
key.  "Davey, why would they make such a mess on the way to the cash
drawer?"

He was watching me, eyes narrowed, oddly serious.  "Perhaps somebody
wanted to make trouble for you."

"The inspector said it looks like a grudge," I admitted, thinking, Who
could hate me so much?  I haven't hurt anybody.  Is it you?  I haven't
hurt you you hurt me.  Again I felt a fris son of panic.

Davey held me again.  "Don't.  I'm here for as long as you need me."

It was restful.  Which was strange in itself, because whatever our
relationship had been, restful was now how I'd describe it.  I buried
my face in him again and said, "I'm tired."

He laughed and ran a finger down my cheek.  "Amazing.  Then it's time
to lie down."

I didn't have a chance.

You Always Call It an Accident

I stopped in the doorway to make sure that my shop looked like a
business again, rather than a rubbish tip, and flipped the sign to
OPEN.  Then I turned round and watched Davey's back retreating towards
Upper Street and whatever it was that he had to do that afternoon.  He
rounded the corner without looking back, and I stood for a moment
breathing the fresh air.  I felt drunk.  The pub had been postponed,
but we'd shared a bottle of Muscatel that I'd been keeping, sitting
together on the bed wrapped in the duvet, laughing.

The memory warmed me until I'd closed the door.  Then I was frozen by
the thought that I'd never again step into this place without wondering
whether somebody had been there, or was waiting there still.

Little fingers of panic squeezed the air from my ribs.  I pushed them
down.  I could see perfectly well that the place was empty and
untouched.  Only the memory of another presence remained; because even
the process of clearing up hadn't erased the uneasy feeling that
everything was changed, and all bets were off.  And I recognized the
feeling.  It must be like being raped: you would ask, Why me?  What's
lurking around the corner?  When will it happen again?  Who can hate me
so much?

What I wanted to do was run away.  But you can't, so instead I let the
impulse push me into being busy.  Why on earth hadn't I already
arranged for the lock to be changed was I waiting for somebody to tell
me what to do?  And I was supposed to contact Inspector Grant.  And I
still hadn't phoned Barnabas, who'd be full of instructions, but I had
to put up with that.

I found a local locksmith in the telephone directory and persuaded him
that he could be with me in two hours.  As I was hanging up, the bell
on the door tinkled and Mrs.  Acker crept in apologetically.  Mrs.
Acker is one of my locals a browser.  She never says anything, and
almost never buys a book unless I'm having a clear-out and have set up
the one-pound bin, but I was glad to have somebody else in the place. I
left her to it and phoned the number that Inspector Grant had given me.
After twenty or thirty rings, a woman's voice said he was out and took
my message.

Which just left Barnabas.  I didn't want even Mrs.  Acker overhearing
what I anticipated would be a difficult conversation, so I left it
again and began sorting the Banbury books once more, with the office
door wide open so I could keep an eye on the shelves.  After twenty
minutes, my customer smiled her apologetic smile at me and left.

I took a deep breath and dialled.

He said without preamble, "What's wrong?"

"How can you be psychic on a Monday afternoon?"

"I've been phoning," he said.  His voice was plummy with indignation.
"Upstairs.  Downstairs.  Even your machine wasn't on!"

With a little start of guilt I remembered that my flat was now indeed
without a phone.  Just as well, that afternoon, but I must start to
carry it up and down with me until the police returned the other one.
"I've been in and out," I said.  "I've been busy.  Now look, Barnabas,
there's no harm done in fact, it seems nothing was taken but somebody
broke into the shop yesterday while we were having lunch.  And the
reason I haven't phoned you is that they pulled every book off the
shelves and chucked them all over the floor.  I've been dealing with
the police and clearing up."

I was ready for a torrent of questions or exclamations, but he said
simply, "I'm coming," and hung up before I could argue.

He was stepping out of a taxi just as Inspector Grant's car inserted
itself into the row of illegally parked vehicles on the yellow line
across the road.  They jostled one another in the doorway, both
requiring an immediate report.  I introduced them.  My father gave
Grant that little calculating stare with which he always favours any
appropriate-looking man he finds in my company.  Look out, Grant.

"Nothing," I told them both.  "There is absolutely nothing missing
except for the money in the cash box.  I'm not sure how much, but
certainly less than a hundred.  And about fifty second-class stamps and
some of those were probably useless because I spilled a bottle of
buckram cleaner into the drawer last week, and believe me, you wouldn't
want to lick something with that on it."

"I meant to mention the smell," Grant said.

Barnabas said, "Impossible.  If they were after money, they wouldn't
stop to pull the books off the shelves.  Why, anybody could have looked
in and seen them at it."

It wasn't a new thought, and I was feeling a little tired of arguing
about what had happened.  "Well, they did," I said flatly.

Barnabas shrugged it aside.  "If somebody just wanted to destroy the
business, why not throw petrol about and set fire to the place?  Much
quicker and safer, I should have thought.  You agree, Inspector?"

Grant threw him a curt nod which implied that he did agree, but would
prefer not to have to discuss it with the customer.

"There was damage," I retorted, 'but... I don't know how to explain
this: accidental damage.  It seemed as though they were just in a
hurry: pages crumpled, hinges split..  ."

Inspector Grant looked as though somebody had handed him a mysterious
parcel containing something as yet unidentifiable, but obviously
noxious.  He said to Barnabas, "You're saying that the whole thing was
some kind of practical joke?"

My father considered that.  "Or casual vandalism?"

"Not so damn casual," I said sourly.  "It must have been hard work
pulling everything off the shelves, almost as hard as picking it all up
again.  It's as though somebody was mad with anger or fear or... Why
would a burglar make such a mess .. . ?"

Asking the right question can lead to the right answer.  Something made
me remember my sister, Pat, and her burglary a year or two earlier. She
and her husband, John, live in a detached house full of possessions in
the sort of road where people keep themselves to themselves.  They'd
come back from France one day to find their patio door forced, their
smaller electrical goods removed, and assorted gold charm bracelets and
wristwatches missing from the bedroom.  The intruders had searched for
valuables by the simple expedient of emptying every drawer, shelf and
cupboard on to the floor.  Insured to the hilt, Pat had complained more
about the mess than the actual loss.  John said they were lucky: he had
heard of burglaries where blood and worse had been smeared on walls and
furniture for the luckless victim to find, whereas in this case the
mess was merely the simple, un perverted product of a vigorous and
hasty search.

' .. . unless he was looking for something?"

Inspector Grant fixed me with a kind of schoolmaster's stare.  "Are you
sure there's nothing gone?"  He looked around eloquently.  Eight or
nine thousand volumes now filled the shelves around the shop.

"You do get to know your stock," I told him coldly.

"If you say so.  Look, I don't disagree with your suggestion it could
make sense.  But if we're going to get anywhere with this, you'd better
tell me what they were looking for and why they thought it was here if
it wasn't."  He was staring from me to Barnabas with an unfriendly
expression.  He'd stopped talking about how the intruders had managed
to get in, but I realized that he still thought we were hiding
something.

In his shoes, I might have been equally suspicious.

He produced his notebook and scribbled briefly.  I could see Barnabas's
ironic expression and said quickly, "What next?"

He turned to Barnabas.  "I understand that you have the second set of
keys to this place?"

Barnabas nodded.

"I suppose they aren't missing?"

Barnabas raised an eyebrow, removed his key-ring from a pocket, and
held it up.  "No, all correct."

Grant shrugged and turned to me again.  "Can you come down to the
station later?  We'll go through the whole story again, I'll get it
typed up, and you can sign a complaint."

"And?"  Barnabas enquired.

"I'll ask around.  Somebody in the street might have seen something."
His tone of voice said that he doubted it.  "I'll talk to your
neighbours while I'm here."

I pointed out to him that there aren't many people loitering outside my
door on a Sunday afternoon.

"All the more likely that somebody would remember seeing them.  On a
Saturday afternoon around here, they could have carried your whole
stock out through the front window without anybody stopping to ask.
Shall I expect you at about four thirty, say?"  I explained about the
locksmith.  He smiled sunnily.  "Never mind, come as soon as you're
free.  I'll still be there."

When he had departed to do his asking around, Barnabas faced me.
"Why?"

"What?"

"Why didn't you let me know?"

"I was busy."

"Too busy to pick up the telephone?"

"You couldn't have done anything."

"I could at least have come round and sat watching you work.  Always a
pleasure and a surprise to fathers, you know, seeing their children's
exertions.  I would probably have seen something you missed."

I felt a spurt of anger.  "There was nothing to see."

His voice rose, and I realized that he was angry too.  "Will you credit
me with still having some mental capacities?  Just tell me what all
this is about!  Even that infant who claims to be a detective
inspector, God help us, doesn't believe a word of your story."

I controlled myself.  "Barnabas, you have no reason to think I'm lying.
I do not know what is going on.  Frankly, I think that somebody simply
came in looking for money and found there wasn't much.  Saturday was
slow.  So they messed things up out of spite.  Isn't that how burglars
are supposed to behave?"  I didn't believe what I was saying, but I
wished that Barnabas would.  "You hear about people being burgled and
finding that the most horrible damage has been done.  Remember what the
police told John?"

"But the most horrible things were 't done here," Barnabas said
coldly.  "Almost nothing was "done", was it!"

My souvenir of the re shelving remained in my every aching muscle.
"You should have seen it," I assured him.

Barnabas glared.  "Be serious.  If I were an insurance adjuster, I'd be
waiting for you to claim for a dozen books and ten thousand pounds in
cash."  He stopped abruptly.  "What was that about keys?  How did they
get in?"

"I don't know.  It was all locked up tight when I got back."

The news seemed to make my father more angry.  "You'd certainly be
advised not to make an insurance claim.  Clearly it's a fraud, and
we'll both wind up in jail.  I speak, of course, on behalf of that
imaginary insurance adjuster."

"If it's any comfort, your "infant detective" and I have already been
through all this.  He agrees with you.  For a moment he almost
convinced me I'd left the door unlocked but I didn't.  The back door
was bolted inside, so they must have gone in and out through the front.
I suppose they had some kind of master key."

Barnabas hesitated.  "Did you ever send off for an extra one?"

"Of course not.  There were never more than two."

"There are three," he said impatiently.  "Logic, logic!"

I said apologetically, "Only the registered holder is supposed to be
able to order more keys."

"I'm sure that anything can be copied if you know how," Barnabas said
loftily, once again echoing the official line.  "Don't you make an
impression of the original in soft soap, or candle wax, or something
else unlikely?  I never understood what happens then.  Well, that's it,
isn't it?"

"That's what?"

"You must know that it was Davey.  He's the only person apart from the
two of us who ever held a key.  Have you told that policeman?"

"Whatever goes wrong, it's always Davey!"  I exploded.  "You don't have
to go on!  Your key, there that's the one he used to have.  He gave it
back when he went.  How can you say it was Davey?"

I knew he was right, though.  It was Davey's way to have copied his key
somehow, months ago, when things started going wrong.  He wouldn't have
had any particular reason in mind; he just liked to feel that he always
had a hold on situations.

Barnabas shook his head.  "Obviously it's no coincidence that he's
suddenly turned up.  What does he want?"

I almost snapped, My body, of course, but I couldn't quite do it to
him.  I watched my fingers move along the front of a shelf.  "I think
he might want to come back."

There was a silence, then: "Don't."  Despite it all, Barnabas's voice
was gentle.  "Don't please even think that.  I'm sorry, I really hoped
that you were over it."

I smiled.  "I am over it.  But you never liked him."

"You know," he said slowly and still gently, 'you're wrong.  In a way,
I do like him.  He's amusing, attractive ... What do I mean?  A pity
that he's about ten years old.  I hoped, when he left, that you could
get on with your life better without having a ten-year-old child to
look after."

You were wrong, weren't you, Barnabas.

I said, "I don't seem to have had much to get on with, do I."

"There's time.  When you've really finished with him, things will get
better.  I think your mourning is nearly over."

I waited.

"But I still wonder what it is he wants.  Hasn't he said anything?"

"Nothing sensible."  I was remembering Davey upstairs in my flat, in
what had once been our bed remembering my discovery that I had been
missing him.  It was like unwrapping a Christmas present to find that
it was already broken.  For a moment I almost hated Barnabas.  I think
he realized.

"What will you say to Mr.  Grant when you see him?"

"Nothing.  Not about Davey.  We don't know."

"What will you do about it?"

I said again, "Nothing.  I don't know.  Try to work it out."

Barnabas sighed.  "I'm very sorry, my dear."

I said, "I know.  You don't have to be, though.  Will you go home now?
I have a lot to do.  The locksmith is coming.  I don't want to talk
just now.  Shall I phone for a taxi?"

"I'll find one in Upper Street."  But he stood in the doorway, and we
stared at one another until the locksmith's van edged up the street and
hovered in front of the shop.  "I wish I didn't feel you were in some
kind of physical danger here," he said, and left abruptly.

I spent the next hour following the locksmith around, watching him put
a new lock on the shop door and another on the door of the flat.  I
would have had it done even without Barnabas's parting shot.  While the
man was there, I got him to install lock able bolts on the upstairs
windows.  I hated it, but I hated even more the idea of being
unprotected.  He recommended an ultrasonic security system for the shop
and grilles on the kitchen windows overlooking the flat roof, and I let
him measure up with Mr.  Spock making plaintive enquiries.

"You," I said to my cat, 'will be on velvet, mister.  We'll be able to
leave the windows open.  You can go hunting day and night if you want
to."  The locksmith threw me a peculiar look which said, Another mad
old woman talking to her cat, and promised to have them ready by
Friday.  I wrote him a deposit cheque large enough to put my bank
account into overdraft and saw him out.

It was time to go down to the police station.  Brushing my hair, I
looked with distaste at the face in the bathroom mirror.  I was just
about to let myself out when I remembered that I'd brought the
telephone back upstairs and forgotten to plug it in.  Do it now, Dido,
or you'll forget about it and Barnabas will turn up again what had
Davey said?  on his white horse.  And (at the back of my mind) Davey
may phone .. .

It rang just as I was plugging the jack into the wall, and when I
picked up the receiver it was indeed my father's voice.  He said
without preamble, "Is it done?  I wanted to make sure."

"I'm in a bloody fortress," I assured him.

There was a silence.  I waited.

He said, "I wanted to know..."

"Well?"

"Have you told the boy detective about the other night?"

"What other night?"

"Dido!"

"All right, no.  Not yet."

"But you will?  And the note don't forget about that, it's much more
important than what did, or didn't, actually happen at the time.  I
have it here safe.  You'd better give it to them."

I clutched the sideboard.  "All right, I will."

He hadn't finished.  The little voice in the earpiece tickled and
nagged.  "There's a pattern.  Consider this.  First, you're followed,
chased, frightened; not robbed, raped, beaten, killed, or any of the
things that happen to women alone on empty roads at night.  Then I get
a note which goes to the trouble of pointing this out, just in case we
weren't bright enough to think of it for ourselves.  A

few days pass.  We are burgled, but not robbed, beaten.  You do see
what I mean?"

Yes, of course I did, because this was only what had been at the back
of my mind ever since.

"Now, they must have been in the shop for some time, to judge by your
description.  They could very well have been seen there are passers-by
even on a Sunday, even shoppers .. ."  I listened to an abbreviation of
one of Barnabas's diatribes against Sunday opening and the materialism
of our culture.  He broke off.  "So there is something worth the risk.
Listen.  I want you to consider that Davey is involved."  I started to
speak.  "Just accept that he might be.  Otherwise, you won't be
thinking clearly about..  . about whatever is going to happen next."

I took a deep breath.  "Nothing else is going to happen."

"My dear child, don't pretend you are stupid.  You must keep your eyes
open.  You are in danger.  You must defend yourself."

My stomach lurched.  There was nothing to say.

"Dido?  Listen, you are going to talk to that policeman now.  Tell him
about the car business.  You must.  It might make him a little more
inclined to take things seriously, which at the moment he is not
doing."

"I wish I knew whether things should be taken seriously," I said.  My
voice didn't give anything away about panic.  I was quite proud of
it.

Our local police station had recently been refurbished.  Great wooden
hoardings had just come down, revealing a glum-looking yellow brick
building indistinguishable, as far as I could see, from its previous
incarnation.  The enquiries area had seats along the side which seemed
to have been newly upholstered, but the walls were the same
institutional cream that I'd always seen when I walked past the glass
doors.

I gave my name at the desk.  Grant appeared, nodded, and led me through
the inner doors.  We negotiated a little knot of uniformed police in
front of the lift and turned right down a corridor lined with closed
doors.  The place looked like the offices of some unprofitable service
company.  In the green-painted room that Grant shared with two
untenanted, paper-laden desks, uncountable grey metal filing cabinets,
a dying pot plant and a computer terminal, I spent half an hour
answering questions with a tape machine whirring and a woman police
constable sitting silently against the wall.  I guess she was supposed
to protect me against male brutality.  The statement, when I signed,
said everything that I had given him.  The truth, a bit of the truth,
and nothing but the truth so far as it went.  I hadn't told him about
the white car.  I made excuses to myself, but perhaps my only reason
was that I knew I needed to talk to Davey first.

I'd walked there to clear my head; going home, I hopped into a taxi in
front of the supermarket because it was after six and he was due at
seven and I needed time to think of all the things we had to sort out.
Or maybe just to get my courage up.

By eight o'clock, he hadn't arrived and hadn't phoned.  I sat with my
television tuned to a programme I wasn't watching, remembering a
thousand other times just like this, rehearsing old speeches.  Why
didn't you just phone me?  No, above all not a wifely whine.  Perhaps
instead: Davey, what made you turn up just now?  Davey, do you know
anything about a little white GTi with two men in it?  Davey, Barnabas
thinks it was you who ... When the doorbell rang, I picked up my bag,
looked briefly at my white face in the mirror by the door, decided that
I had neither the time nor the desire to do anything about it, and went
down the stairs.

My first impression was of too many people, but there were only two: DI
Grant and the woman PC who had been sitting in his office that
afternoon.  They were so unexpected that I must have gaped at them.  He
said, "We'd better come in."

"I was going out."

"We'd better go up," he persisted, and pushed in.  I turned away and
led them upstairs before I faced him and said fatuously, "Aren't you
ever off duty?"

"As a matter of fact, I was going, but I was still in the station when
something came up on the computer, and since I knew you, and everybody
else is flat out at the moment, I said I'd drop off on my way home."

The dread welled up.  I thought I'd drown in it.  "Barnabas?"

"No!  No, it's about David Winner."

Barnabas!  What have you told him?  I said, "Yes?  As a matter of fact,
we were going to have dinner tonight, but he's late."

He gave me a sharp, odd look.  "There's been an accident..  . Funny how
you always call it an accident.  His car blew up.  I'm very sorry.  He
died on the way to hospital.  Your name was in his wallet as next of
kin, and ... Are you all right?"

7 Tell Dido

The sunlight slanting through the windows bathed a -bank of filing
cabinets, and the wilting ficus on top of it, in a brightness that did
them no favours.  Someone had brought me a plastic cup filled with
cardboard coffee, and I sat wondering how to get rid of it, looking at
the dying plant and trying to work out what I was going to say to the
man behind the desk.

Grant cleared his throat.  "I'm sorry to bring you in again.  Are you
all right?"

I said, "Yes, of course I'm all right.  I want to thank you for coming
and telling me yourself last night.  After you left, Barnabas made me
take two of his sleeping pills.  I'm fine now."

I lied.  How to say that I sat in his chair talking, holding a cup of
something distantly related to coffee, with the memory of Davey
Winner's eyes, voice, hands enveloping me so strongly that it was
somehow physical.

Inspector Grant seemed to find it necessary to make a study of the wall
behind my head.  "I'm sorry.  If I'd known .. . you had different
surnames, you see.  I didn't realize what the relationship was."

I said, "You were fine.  Anyway, I hadn't seen him for nearly two
years, not until the last few days.  I don't know why he was still
carrying my name around in his wallet."

Grant hesitated.  "Do you mind if I turn the tape recorder on?  It
might save time later."

I shrugged and shifted in the slippery chair.  I didn't want to be in a
paper-cluttered office in a police station, talking about Davey.  I
didn't even want this man mumbling apologies in a sympathetic,
embarrassed voice.  I sat breathing through my mouth.  I've found that
it makes control easier.

Grant finished his own coffee, hesitated fractionally, and tossed the
cup at his wastepaper basket.  When it missed, he frowned at it, then
at me.  "It wasn't entirely because he was carrying your name around
that I came to tell you.  He didn't die in the blast.  One of our
people went in the ambulance with him.  They were keeping him sedated,
of course, and I gather he wasn't making much sense when he tried to
talk to them."  He paused.  "They knew he wasn't likely to survive."

Another nightmare is made up of images of blood from the movies.  I
took a breath right down into my diaphragm and let it out and was able
to ask steadily, "I don't understand.  What did he say?  What
happened?"

"I have a photocopy of our man's notes."  Grant pulled a sheet of paper
closer without looking at it.  "There were a few confused words.  Your
name that was the thing.  When I saw..  . I've never known anyone else
called "Dido"."

My parents named me after a heroine in an obscure Elizabethan play.
Dido was a queen of Carthage.  Also unlucky in love.  "You mean he was
talking about meT

"About you, maybe to you.  Nothing very clear.  He said, "Tell Dido
it's really."  '

It seemed somehow characteristic of Davey to appeal to reality and then
evade it.  "Really' what?  "Is that all?"

"Nothing else makes sense.  A certain amount of, well, cursing he was
in some pain at first, despite the morphine he was getting."

I stared into my coffee, facing what was literally unthinkable.  If I
allowed it, I'd only find myself drowning in what had happened and how
I'd felt about Davey, whether he really..  . although in cold moments
of course I knew that, really, Davey wasn't the man to leave deathbed
confessions of eternal love.  Not really.  Now if ever was the point
when pretending ought to stop.

I said flatly, "It's not much of a message, is it."

"No.  I wish we knew what he started to say.  We need anything that
might throw a bit of light on this business.  What was he up to?"

There was something here that made no sense to me.  I abandoned my cold
coffee on the corner of his desk.  Up to?"

Grant leaned back abruptly in his swivel chair, looking as though he
would like to dissect meI felt a preliminary twinge in the belly.

"When a car blows up, it has to do with something nasty.  Terrorism or
serious .. ."  Then he must have seen my face.  "It was a device.  A
bomb.  Didn't you understand that?"  I got my jaw under enough control
to let out some kind of squeak.  He looked genuinely astonished.  "Then
we've been at cross-purposes.  It was a bomb the kind you see in films,
under the engine, set off either by the ignition or by a remote control
of some kind we'll know by this afternoon what sort of device it was
and maybe where it came from."

The phone on his desk rang.  He snapped, "DP and began a monosyllabic
conversation which lasted long enough for me to get ready to speak
intelligibly.  When he hung up I said unnecessarily that I'd assumed it
was an accident.  "That old van he drives ... I thought it had
finally... He never had it serviced properly, you know, he always asked
some mate of his to ... I assumed it caught fire."  I heard myself
babbling and stopped.

Grant was silent for so long that I had time to think of a dozen
questions.  I held back only because some woman poked her head around
the door, took a look at Inspector Grant's face, and retreated.

"First," Grant said, 'it wasn't a van.  I guess you are out of date, at
that.  It was a car, a new car."

New?  I was indeed out of date.  Where did Davey Winner get the money
for a new car?

"Point two: of course it wasn't any accident.  That kind of thing means
either protection, drugs or terrorism.  The liaison officer from the
anti-terrorist squad doesn't know anything about a connection."  He
cleared his throat again.  I was learning that this meant he was coming
to the point.  "It had to be drugs, given Winner's track record.  The
Hornsey police thought he'd started dealing the past couple of months
cannabis, Ecstasy, speed not just little deals for his mates, but
something bigger.  They were waiting to identify his sources, but they
weren't getting very far.  I guess they missed something.  As a matter
of fact, they were thinking of pulling him in and applying pressure. As
for a terrorist connection .. ."

I said, "No.  He talked politics sometimes, but he didn't even bother
to vote."

"He's not on the central computer, so I'm sure you're right.  So ..."

I started to say, As for drugs, he never had that kind of money.  And
remembered.

Grant noticed.  "Yes?"

I said slowly, "He had money.  I don't understand about the car.
Usually Davey was skint.  He even asked me for a job the other day. But
you say it was a new car?  And then he took me out to dinner on
Saturday at The Restaurant.  That's .. ."

"I've heard of it."

I thought, So much for neighbourhood cops.  "I mean that he actually
paid the bill.  Cash."

"So?"

"Look, he never bought a new car in his life.  I'm surprised that his
credit rating would stand it.  You should find out whether he was
keeping up the payments."

"There's no charge recorded against the car."

I didn't understand the term.

"It wasn't financed.  He owned it outright."

No.  Not my Davey.

He was watching my face.  He said, "Good!  We're getting somewhere."

"Maybe he'd sold a painting."  Davey did sell paintings sometimes.

Grant scribbled a note.  "We'll ask."

"Or he might have .. ."

"What?"

It suddenly seemed important to explain.  "Davey was ... I don't know
how to say it.  He was only dishonest in certain ways.  He felt that he
had the right.  He didn't like work except painting.  He wasn't very
good at that, but he was very serious.  He thought other things were a
waste of time.  He could always borrow money from people, and he always
paid you back if he could, if it wasn't too much, if he counted you as
a friend and not just a mark."

Of course that was it: Davey was a man you could safely trust to
certain clear boundaries; but it was never a good idea to place too
much confidence in him, because it was easy for him to get in too far
and too deep, and then, as they say, he would make an excuse and leave
the room.  I suddenly saw an image of Davey twisting and turning in a
maze, getting more and more lost.  He'd been that kind of man.

And I'd finally spoken his epitaph.

I looked up to find Grant watching me.  I took another breath.  "I
could certainly see him dealing in soft drugs, or in things .. .
trading.  Stolen goods, if you want to know.  He didn't have much
belief in ordinary honesty.  But..."

"But?"

I tried.  "But his being murdered doesn't make any sense.  I mean
deliberately murdered, not killed in ... in a fight or something.  An
accident.  I could easily see him being killed in some kind of
accident.  He was careless, you see."

He nodded slowly.  "Out of his league.  Yes we thought that too."

Well, if you want to put it that way.

"Unless he was moving into something.  There's a lot of crack on the
streets these days.  Half our work here ties in with drugs one way or
the other.  If somebody saw him as a threat..  . But street dealers
don't use bombs yet."

"You can't ask me," I said.  "In the old days I would have known, or at
least guessed.  But we haven't kept in touch.  He only turned up again
last Friday."

"So it was a friendly divorce.  But why did he just "turn up"?  How
often have you seen him since you split up?"

No, not friendly; but that wasn't police business.  And just why had
Davey turned up?  "Never, and I haven't a clue what made him turn up
now," I said honestly.  "Anyway, for up-to-date information, you'll
have to talk to Ilona Mitchell.  He was living with her.  He said she's
visiting her parents, but I imagine you can find out where that is."

I thought he looked at me speculatively.  "We've talked to her.  You're
mistaken.  She was at home.  Hysterical, and not making a lot of sense.
She said they'd been going out somewhere, and then he cried off at the
last minute said he had to do something.  So they'd had a row.  She's
still sedated to the eyeballs.  One moment she's in tears because she
could have been in the car with him, and the next she's crying because
he's dead and she isn't.  Constable Franks one of our WPCs who's been
with her doesn't think she had the foggiest idea that anything unusual
was going on."

I almost laughed: he'd been going out with Ilona, and then changed his
mind and decided to spend the evening with me.  I was familiar with
that pattern, though mostly from the other side of the fence.

At last I said, "By the way, it doesn't make any difference any more,
but while we were married, he had the second key to the shop.  Barnabas
got it from him when he left."  I was on my feet before I knew that I
was going, but I'd had enough.  I said, "I need to go away and think.
If I remember anything relevant, I'll get in touch."

He was on his feet too, switching off the recorder.  "Would you like a
lift home?"

I shook my head.  "I have the car.  I put it into your car park -I
didn't fancy risking a ticket."

I thought his face changed.  He said, "I'll come down with you."

He led me back to the entrance and out of the main door.  In the
street, he took my elbow and steered me along the front of the building
and round the corner to the big gate I'd driven through.  As we stepped
on to the asphalt of the car park, he was almost pushing me to the
left, towards the Volvo in the far corner.  I stopped.  I don't like
being pushed.  "It would have been easier to come out the back
entrance," I said, and saw it.

Near the door at the rear of the station, a green tarpaulin covered
something more or less car-shaped.  I'd seen it on the way in, but it
hadn't registered.

He said, "Damn!  Sorry.  That's supposed to have gone off to the lab in
Lambeth, but the transporter hasn't turned up from Traffic.  They'll
find anything that can possibly help."

I must have gone white, because his hand was holding my arm hard enough
to hurt.  I said, "What colour is it?"

"What?"

"Davey's car.  What..."

"White."

"A little white hatchback."  It wasn't even a question.  Oh, Barnabas,
you were right all the time.  I said, "I need to look at it.  I'm not
being morbid.  I just need to see the rear window.  Please."

At least he had the sense not to ask questions yet.  We crossed to the
distorted shape, and I stopped ten feet away because I couldn't go any
closer.  The car had been dumped with its rear end outward.  Inspector
Grant hauled at the straps and edged the tarpaulin up to the roof.  The
glass of the rear window faced me.  It had shattered and sagged out of
its frame, but I found what I had expected.  You could still read the
pathetic, silly joke on the fire-blackened sticker.  CAUTION:

MOTHER-IN-LAW IN BOOT.

I heard my voice say from a distance, "There's something else I need to
talk to you about, but I have to go home just now.  Barnabas was right,
after all.  I have to go home."

He was staring at me, eyes narrowed.  I could see him decide to go with
the flow.  That, I thought vaguely, was nice of him, probably.

"I'll take you back," he said.  "You'd better not drive.  You're as
white as a sheet."

So there was no way I was going to get out of telling the whole story,
not any more.

Personal Storm

The coffee was too strong, but at least it would obliterate the memory
of the powdered-milk stuff at the police station.  We sat at my kitchen
table, as though we were friends, until I was ready to tell everything.
Almost everything.  The white car with its unamusing winking headlight
which had been Davey's car; the note delivered to Barnabas; Davey's
reappearance; the wrecking of the shop.  Laid out in chronological
order, their meaning still escaped me.  And yet Barnabas was right:
these things were somehow connected.  Anything else was impossible.
Grant asked questions dozens of unanswerable questions which all boiled
down to the one unanswerable question: why?  In the end, he left.  He
promised to speak to me soon.  I believed him.  It had been days since
I'd had the time to do any shopping.  Perhaps I should take the car and
stock up with enough to keep me alive until I'd managed to get my life
into some kind of order?  Or perhaps I didn't care to.  I dug the dry
heel of a loaf out of the bread bin and carved two hard slices off it
to shove into the toaster.  Half a jar of marmalade lurked at the back
of one of the cupboards.  I scraped off a thin layer of mould, and the
rest was fine.  I ate standing at the window, watching Mr.  Spock prowl
restlessly along the edge of the flat roof.

When I went to check my answering machine, the light was flashing, and
Barnabas's voice was on the tape saying, "Oh Lord, Dido, why are you
never in?"  After a second or two of silence there was a sound
remarkably like a giggle.  "Well, at any rate, be warned: there's a
thunderstorm heading your way.  Call me if you need an umbrella!"
Beep.

I really wasn't in the mood, and why couldn't Barnabas ever learn to
give the time of his phone calls?  I should phone him back.  No, I
should go downstairs to phone.  There was, I reminded myself bitterly,
a kind of fairy tale about how I was running a business.  My trade
customers were used to irregular hours, most of them being guilty of
their own irregularities, but there was always the outside chance that
a millionaire might wander in off the street and give me thousands of
pounds for some obscure book he'd always longed for.

What I really wanted to do was go to bed with a gin and the television
set, but my conscience was at work.  I bought it off by pouring half an
inch of Gordon's into a clean mug, finding my keys, tucking my
telephone under my arm (why couldn't the police have returned my other
phone by now?) and heading downstairs.

I was unlocking the shop door when a shadow at my back brought my heart
into my throat.  I whirled .. . and saw that the thunderstorm had
arrived.

"Pat!"  I said faintly.  "How nice to see you."

Barnabas's description of my elder sister as a storm referred to her
manner only.  Pat is older (by four years), bigger, fairer, more
straightforward, and probably altogether tougher than I am.  She stood,
wrapped in a mac and head scarf against the wind-driven drizzle that
had begun during my elaborate lunch, looking determined.

"It says that you open at eleven.  I've been back twice.  Where on
earth have you been?"

"Lunch, cup of tea," I said indistinctly, hastily swallowing the
evidence to the contrary in my mug.

"All morning?"

Pat is a well-organized lady; her lunch-hour is 12.30 to 1.15 on
weekdays, and she doesn't even go out to work.

I said, "Police station.  I couldn't help it."

Pat's handsome pink face stiffened.  "I know.  Dad told me.  Dido, why
in heavens didn't you let me know what was going on?  I would have come
in to look after him.  I knew there was something wrong the minute I
phoned this morning, but I had to drag the whole story out of him.  Why
didn't you let me know about the robbery?  And Davey being killed?  Oh,
Dido, what is going on here?  Are you all right?"

I finished unlocking the door and got us in off the street, because
when Pat decides to take me in hand, the consequences can be lengthy
and abrasive.

"I've been so busy with the police really, Pat, I haven't had a minute
to think.  Anyway, I wasn't seriously burgled; they broke in, but they
only took a bit of cash."

I turned my back on her plaintive, "And what about Barnabas?  He must
have been worried sick.  It's not good for him, you know.  And what's
this about Davey?"  I said, "Thank you for your condolences," and swept
ahead of her into the office, looking furtively around: it looked all
right now.  Pat was exploding again.  "Condolences?  Well, of course it
was a shocking accident, but I can't say that I ever cared for him much
one way or the other, and you know you hated him!"  "Of course."  I
took a deep breath, wondering what made Pat my keeper, but knowing the
answer all the same.  Our mother's death had pushed her into feeling
ultimately responsible for her old father and her flighty younger
sister, and she couldn't get herself out of the role.  She plonked
herself down on the second chair, radiating dissatisfaction.  I caught
myself casting another furtive look around the office, as though I
expected critical comments about my housekeeping.  I placed the empty
mug with its tell-tale smell of gin on a high shelf.  Damn it, why did
I always react this way to Pat's presence?  I'd think it was just her
being my elder sister, except that I knew she affected Barnabas the
same way.  "Tell me," she demanded, 'all about it."  I temporized.
"What did Barnabas say?"  "Nothing at all.  Just about the shop being
wrecked it looks all right now and then Davey.  His car caught fire?"
I felt myself relaxing a little: apparently Barnabas had confined his
account to the basics.  In the background, I heard her voice going on.
"Well, it's terrible and I'm sorry of course I am, really.  You have
been having a time of it!  But Dido, why on earth didn't you phone me?
I'd have come down right away!  I'm your sister, you know.  You should
let me take care of you a bit more.  And Daddy -somebody ought to have
been keeping an eye on him.  In the circumstances."

I sighed.  "Barnabas has been wonderful.  I think he's enjoying the
excitement, really."  I described the great bookshop burglary mystery,
and gave her a selective account of Davey's death.  I didn't have to
say much about that: it was understood that I found the subject
unexpectedly painful.

"Heavens!"  She thought.  "I'll take Dad back with me for a week, just
for a rest."

I was tempted to agree, only I could imagine Barnabas's face.  "He'd
worry about me," I said.  Worrying Barnabas was the one thing that Pat
would not allow even herself to do.

"You come too."

I shook my head firmly.  "I have a business to run, and it's been
disrupted enough as it is.  I really think that Barnabas is .. ."  I
groped for the right words.  .. . better off staying quietly at home.
It's always so exciting for him having the boys around.  At his age ..
."  The feeling of hypocrisy stopped me in mid-sentence.

Pat was always inclined to want to put Barnabas safely to bed for
nursing.  But I went on emphasizing the value of normality and the
dedication with which I kept in contact with our father by telephone
almost continuously; so that by the time Barnabas opened the shop door,
she was weakening.

"In here," I called.  He poked his head around the end of the book
cases.  I said meanly, "I thought you'd turn up.  We were wondering
about taking you to St.  Albans for a rest..."

When Pat left, Barnabas lingered.  Remarkably, two customers arrived
and it took me a while to deal with them.  Even more remarkably, they
gave me several hundred pounds between them, and one of them expressed
a credible interest in the Ackermann.  He might come back.  Barnabas
hovered in the background, waiting for a report of the morning's visit
to the police.  When the shop was empty again, I told him.

"So now we know," Barnabas said.  "Not that any other explanation was
possible."

"But it doesn't answer any of the real questions, does it."

"No.  Still, it's good."

I said, "Just what does that mean?"

"It means .. . well, it means it's finished.  He's dead.  You're
safe."

His choice of words made me stop short.  "No more burglaries?  No more
funny notes through your door?"  I hoped that I'd spoken quickly enough
to stop him thinking about it, because there were two things I might
have said.  One: there had been a second man in Davey's car that night.
Two: until I found out who could possibly have any interest in
murdering Davey Winner, I couldn't be sure whether he might also have
an interest in me.  I'd happily leave Inspector Grant to sort out mad
bombers, but that second man worried me.

Barnabas said abruptly, "Dido leave it!"

"Are you reading minds today?"  I asked him sourly.

"Your face," he said sternly, 'is a picture.  Oh Lord, Dido, I hoped
that you didn't care about him so much."

So much?  I'd been surprised when Davey had turned up, surprised I
could want to see him again.  I'd assumed for over two sore years that
I hated him because he had somehow shamed me, and then he'd turned up
as though nothing had happened between us.

"I'd forgotten how nice he could be ... I don't really mean "nice"."

"I trust not!"  Barnabas switched to donnish indignation.  "Davey
wasn't at all nice.  Dido, wake up!  Your mother and I did not want our
daughters to be victims.  I thought we'd raised you not to be
sentimental!"

I said bitterly, "You did.  Just give me time.  I'm trying to cope!"

Suddenly he said, "I wish that you'd had a child."

I felt myself glaring.  "Ouch!  So I just felt motherly towards Davey,
did I?  That makes me a real fool!"

Barnabas glared back.  "You're allowed to have loved him."

I said, "I need to know what's going on.  I have to understand what
this is all about.  The police do you think that boy detective is good
enough to find out?"

Barnabas looked sour.  "He seems to be young for his rank, so I suppose
he's passed his exams or whatever it depends on nowadays."

"He thinks that Davey was mixed up in drugs.  He thinks it's something
to do with that."

"Then he's probably right."

"But what does that have to do with me?"

Barnabas hesitated.  "He couldn't have ... I don't know..  . hidden
something here in the shop?"

I considered that.  If Davey had suddenly needed a place that his new
contacts didn't know about to hide his stash, that could perhaps
explain his sudden reappearance.  It might even explain the break-in,
if he'd been trying to retrieve something.  I shook my head.  "If he'd
done that, I would have seen it.  He was with me all the time on the

Friday.  Unless of course one of his mates brought it in.  I suppose he
might have come looking for a ... delivery.  But it all seems pretty
casual."

Barnabas considered.  "Since the entire place was upside down, he, or
they, presumably didn't find what they were looking for."

I gave up.  "I've looked at everything in the place -moved everything
in the past couple of days."

I was lying.  What about the flat?  I'd have noticed if something had
gone missing, but what about something extra that didn't belong there?
A full search seemed to be the next step.  And I needed to do it
myself, right away.  I'd get in touch with Inspector Grant when and if
I found anything.

For a moment I could hear Davey's voice saying, Tell Dido it's really
.. . Perhaps, after all, he'd had a message for me.

If he did, there was one other person who just might know.  I locked up
twenty minutes before closing time and was in the street before I
remembered that the Volvo was still down at the police station.  Pure
frustration made me kick the kerb, and I received a very odd look from
a passing woman with a push chair who quickened her steps, obviously
thinking that London was full of madwomen and nobody was quite safe.  I
relieved her anxiety by hailing a passing taxi and removing my
bad-tempered self from her presence.

I didn't look forward to calling on Ilona Mitchell, but if anybody knew
about the second man in the car, she did.  She might even know what I
had at the shop which was so important.

I'd be damned if I didn't at least try to find out.

Misery

I knew Ilona Mitchell's address because I'd been politely forwarding
Davey's junk mail ever since he'd walked out on me.  Wilding Road is
one of the late-Victorian terraces that fill the southern edges of Wood
Green.  The house was divided into flats and, like the rest of the
terrace, had a neglected, flaking look.  I managed to wedge my
recovered Volvo into a space just opposite, turned off the engine, and
examined the building's lifeless face.  I'd expected a police guard,
yellow tape, or at least some horrifying marks on the road to show
where the car had exploded and burned, but there was nothing.  Davey's
death had not left so much as a mark on his world.

A painted sign said that the entrance to 12A was down the flight of
narrow, litter-strewn cement steps.  I followed the arrow down and rang
the bell above the WINNER-MITCHELL name card: Davey's work -I
recognized the elegant India ink lettering.  A bell rang inside but
nothing happened.  On the fourth ring a noise, or a stirring, made me
put my eye to the letter-flap and peer into the darkness.  Perhaps
there was a movement, I wasn't sure, but it occurred to me suddenly
that Ilona might be too frightened to come to the door, so I called
into the shadowy hallway.

"Ilona?  Please, let me in.  It's Dido Hoare.  I need to talk to you
about Davey."

This time I was sure that something moved just out of my line of
vision.  I waited.  "I'm by myself and I have to see you.  Let me in
please!"

For a moment I thought she would ignore me, but then I saw something
red.  I let the flap close.  The door opened a crack, on the chain, and
I could just make out two expressionless eyes.  I'd seen her a few
times, but I don't know that I would have recognized that frozen face.
I said again, "Let me in, please.  We have to talk."

The voice was as frozen as the face.  "I'm not seeing anybody."

I said, "I understand, but I really have to talk to you \bout Davey." I
thought that the door started to close.  I said quickly, "I'm not going
away."

The crack narrowed, but the chain clattered down.  "All right," she
said.  "It doesn't matter."

I took it as an invitation and stepped in, slamming the door behind me.
"Are you on your own?  You should have somebody with you."

She shrugged and walked away, and I followed her into the sitting room
of the basement flat.

Davey's big canvases were stacked around three walls.  Painted faces,
distorted and black-lined, stared out at the unmatched furniture in the
middle of the room.  I slid round the corner of a coffee table whose
surface was filled with dirty mugs and two big overflowing ashtrays,
and sat myself down on a sagging sofa.  Ilona drifted into the chair
opposite, not looking at me.  She was wearing an old red wrap, too big
for her.  There was a stain on the chest.  She fumbled at a cigarette
packet on the table.

I said again, "You should have somebody here to keep you company."

From behind a cloud of smoke she said tonelessly, "I'm going home in
the morning.  They've been in and out all the time, asking questions,
but I'm going, I don't give a fuck what they say.  I don't know
anything.  I don't even know why you're here.  If they want to talk to
me any more, they can come to Stafford."

I said carefully, "Is that where your family is?"

She shrugged again, and I took it as assent.  Her silence made
light-hearted conversation difficult.  I said, "They can't stop you
going home."

"What do you want?".

All right, then.  "I want to find out what's going on.  You know that
Davey got in touch with me a few days ago?"  There was no response, but
something in her expression changed: she'd known, all right.  "He was
in trouble of some kind.  I saw that.  "Anyway, I should have seen it.
"He said that he wanted to start working at the shop again, but he
didn't really, did he?  He wasn't short of money."  She shifted in the
chair and stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette, and I knew that was
it.  "There was some trouble about the money, wasn't there!"

"I don't know sod all about the money."  Her voice was tight.

I let my tone grow sarcastic.  "I'm not the police, you know."

She looked at me directly for the first time.  Her eyes were red and
haunted.  She'd been crying for Davey or for herself.  Her hands
twisted in her lap, and I saw the bitten fingernails.

"Do you have any cigs?  I'm out."

"I don't smoke."

"What do you want?"  she asked again.

"I want you to tell me why Davey was killed."

She let out a little bark of hoarse laughter.  "If I knew."

"Maybe you don't know, but we can work it out, if you'll just talk to
me.  "The hands went on twisting, but she showed no sign of wanting to
respond.  The silence dragged until I began to think we would sit there
together for ever.  Not a happy future.  "For example last Thursday. Do
you know where Davey went last Thursday evening?  Who he was with?"

She said, "Don't be stupid."

The answer threw me.  I shifted to a straight attack.  "I want to know
who was with Davey last Thursday night up in Buckinghamshire."

Again the explosive, hoarse laugh.  "Come off it!"  She threw me a
quick little look, furtive and yet somehow triumphant, and it occurred
to me for the first time that Ilona had always hated me.  I tried to
digest the insight.  Half by instinct I said, "All right, but I just
want to hear you say it."

She stared at me bleakly with her pink-rimmed eyes and made a
dismissive gesture with one hand.  "Okay, you know it was me.  So what?
It was just a silly joke.  No harm done."

I breathed very softly.  "I was pretty pissed off at the time, but
you're right no harm done.  Only what were the two of you doing there
in the first place?"

She said, I thought a little more readily, "We went for a drive.
Country pub, or something.  Davey saw your car heading into Banbury,
and he said it was you, let's tag along and see what you were up to."

"Funny thing to do," I said mildly.

She laughed hoarsely again.  "Well, it wasn't my idea of a good time,
but what the hell, he made it seem like it might be fun.  You know?"

I knew.  Davey had always been full of surprises.  "You didn't wait all
the time I was buying those books and loading them, did you?"

This time it was the shrug.  "Course not.  We peeled off and spent the
evening in a pub.  You were still there at closing time when we went
past, so we stopped, and then you moved off, and Davey said we might as
well go home.  Then you took the wrong turning, and Davey said we'd go
along in case you got lost."

"Very kind of him," I drawled.  "It's a shame you didn't wave me down
and say hello.  Anyway, why did he start playing silly games?"

"I don't know.  "Tears began to slide hopelessly down her cheeks.  "It
was just a joke.  He was always a silly bugger, wasn't he but funny."

"Yes," I said, 'pretty funny.  Weren't you scared at all?"

"I was scared when you pulled that stopping trick," she said, sounding
indignant.  "I wasn't scared with Davey, he's ... he was a wonderful
driver."

"So it was just accident that you happened to see me?"

Ilona appeared to be intensely interested in the hands she was holding
in her lap.  After a moment, she peered at me from under her eyebrows.
"Sure."

I shook my head, and she flushed a little but remained silent.

"It's a shame about Davey's car.  Or was it yours?  It was a new car,
wasn't it."

Nod.

"Where did Davey get the money to buy a new car?"  I asked mildly.

"How should I know?"

"Did he borrow it?"

There was something in her face that suggested I'd probably found the
right answer, but she shrugged again and said she had no idea.

"He never used to have any money.  The police told me he'd got mixed up
in drugs."

She shrugged again.  "Yeah?  Well, so what?  They can't prove it."

I pushed down against rising impatience.  "They don't have to prove it!
He's dead.  It can't do him any harm now."

She said distinctly, "Let sleeping dogs lie, then."

"Why do you think I'm here?"

"I don't know," she mumbled.  "I keep asking you."

"And I'm going to tell you.  I'm here because somebody burgled my shop,
and I know for sure that it was something to do with Davey."  No need
to accuse him outright, not in her present mood.  "I want to know what
they wanted.  Listen, Davey must have told you something about what he
was doing, and now I just want you to tell me what was going on.  Why
shouldn't you?  It can't hurt either of you."  I thought she was going
to laugh.

"Somebody murdered him.  Don't you want them to be caught?"

"What would that help?"  she asked.

I groped for the right answer.  "I think it would help me."

Her hands twisted restlessly in the thin cloth of her wrap.  She
reached for an empty cigarette packet, then threw it down and stirred
in the overflowing ashtray for the longest stub.  "I have to go out and
get some fags.  Trust you not to have any."

"In a minute," I said.

She almost interrupted me.  "Look, I don't know, Davey never told me,
just said mind my own business, so I did!  Yes, he was getting money
somewhere just lately.  I don't know what it was for.  Yes, it had
something to do with you.  He didn't say so, but he went all shifty a
couple of weeks ago.  He said .. . about your shop, that's all."

I didn't understand.  "What about my shop?"

"He said ... I thought he was going to get a share of the shop.  He
said something a little while ago about his share from the business,
getting his share ... something like that."

I digested this.  I knew Barnabas had never talked about it, but I knew
that at the time of the divorce Davey's solicitors had asked for a
division of assets.  My solicitor had put an end to that somehow.  At
the time I had the feeling Barnabas had bought Davey off- Davey was
always impatient, always wanted everything right away without waiting.
I never brought myself to ask because it had felt too shameful, but the
business had remained mine mine and Barnabas's.

I shook my head.  "That couldn't have happened, you know.  It was all
settled at the time of the divorce."

"Well, if you say so, but that's what I thought."

"It was settled in court," I assured her.  "Signed, sealed, finished.
So what could he have meant?"

She gave one of her dismissive shrugs.

A share in the business?  I struggled.  "Do you know whether he'd been
talking about it to anybody?  I mean, anybody else besides you?"

"Maybe.  Davey was always hanging around with people."

It made no sense, and I suddenly felt that Ilona had been trying to
divert me from the real story.  If so, she'd nearly succeeded.  "What
are you afraid of?"  Hang on to that because I knew from her reaction
that I was putting a finger on a sore spot.

She looked up at me from under a tangle of unbrushed blonde hair.  "I
don't know what you're driving at."

"You're frightened of something."  I made it straight and confident.
"Anybody can see that.  I think that's why you're going away to get
away from trouble.  I can't blame you.  You aren't responsible for
Davey's messes."

When she spoke, it seemed she had changed the subject.  "I need to go
out and buy some cigarettes.  You wouldn't walk down to the corner with
me, would you?  And back?  I don't like to be alone.  I'll just go and
put some clothes on.  I won't be a minute."

I wasn't sure what to expect to hear the back door slam, perhaps, or to
catch a glimpse of the old red robe fleeing up the steps, but she went
into the bedroom and I could hear her rattling hangers.  It seemed like
a chance to look for..  . what?

I heaved myself noiselessly out of the low sofa and stood inspecting
the room.  It was a mess of paints, old newspapers, books, dirty dishes
... a perfect hiding place for anything smaller than a set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.  Perhaps if Ilona was really going to leave,
I should come back and do a little breaking and entering of my own?

There was an old oak sideboard against the wall, the kind of piece that
can be found in any junk shop in the country.  It looked especially
promising.  I walked over silently and slipped a finger under one
handle.  The drawer was difficult to pull out and, as I'd expected, was
stuffed to the top with old papers, bills printed in red, and broken
pens.  It would take a while to go through it, but if Davey had any
secrets to be revealed, they were probably under my hand.  Something
thudded in the bedroom.  I pushed the drawer in quickly and found
myself looking at the top of the sideboard.  Tucked almost out of sight
under a week-old Sunday newspaper was the corner of a sheet of
second-class stamps.  I lifted up the newspaper.  It was half a sheet
of stamps, with one end stained and discoloured.  Even without leaning
closer I could smell the pungency of my buckram cleaner.

She said, behind me, "I'm ready."

For a moment I wondered whether I was going to be sick.  No.  I put the
newspaper down so that it hid the stamps entirely.  I said, "Let's
go."

We walked silently to an off-licence where she bought five packs of
cigarettes and a bottle of vodka.  Supplies for the night, I supposed.
And silently back.  Sitting again in her cloud of smoke, she talked a
little about Davey.  There was nothing else, or nothing she would agree
to remember or to guess at.  Outside the windows, dusk was falling, and
the cigarette smoke was beginning to get to me.  So in another way was
my consciousness of the stolen stamps sitting a few feet away.

In the end I gave up.  I wrote my phone number on a slip of paper from
my notebook and tucked it into the bag she had taken to the shop.

"Phone me," I said, 'if there's anything that you think might help."

She shrugged for the last time and said, Sure," and I left her in her
tobacco haze.  I thought she was probably full of guilty secrets, but I
wasn't going to get at them tonight.

I sat in the Volvo for a long time, trying to think with a brain fogged
up by cigarette fumes and Ilona's helpless misery.  I had found out
more than I'd expected, and been left with more questions.  I knew that
Davey was not only the joker in the car, but the intruder in the shop.
But I'd known that already hadn't I?  And with the second person I'd
seen in the hatchback turning out to be Ilona herself, even that avenue
had been blocked.  I'd got the confirmation, not an explanation.  What
I needed was explanations; let the police bother about proof.

There was a telephone box beside the road halfway up Crouch Hill, and I
pulled the car over and dialled the number in my notebook before I knew
what I was doing.  I was tired.  I couldn't keep hold of all this any
more, not without help.  When I asked for Inspector Grant, I scarcely
expected him to be at work, but they paged him and put me through.  Did
the man live on the job?

"I need to talk to you."

"I was just going off..  ."

"I've been to see Ilona Mitchell.  It was Davey who trashed my shop,
and it was Davey and Ilona in the car last week.  I think it must have
something to do with what's happened."

I thought there was a rather long pause.  Then his voice said, "Right.
Can you meet me at the bistro on the corner of Almeida and Upper
Streets?  I'll buy you a meal."

The day was proving to be full of surprises.  This one threw me off
balance for a moment.  But why not?  Two unbroken hours of Ilona
Mitchell had left me needing food and a drink.  Probably a couple of
drinks.  Still wondering, I said, "I'll be there in half an hour."

Hard Times

Somewhere, a bell was probably ringing unless it was just a part of the
throbbing in my head.  I opened one eye cautiously.  From his seat on
top of the wardrobe, Mr.  Spock enquired after my state of health.  I
said, "Don't ask," and set about discovering whether I could get myself
upright.  I could, but a strange thudding, like mercury reluctantly
adjusting its level in my head, brought back the memory of the evening.
Something about one bottle of Cote du Rhone following another and being
followed by a brandy or two.  There had been duck.  And a tiramisu.
Oh.

The bell stopped for a moment or two, and I contemplated collapsing;
but when it started again I padded slowly out to the sitting room to
answer the phone.

"Ummm .. . Dido?  How are you?"

I examined my face in the gilt-framed mirror above the fireplace.  I
thought it looked smug, but there was a certain darkness around the
eyes.  "I'm alive.  Just."  I closed my eyes to rest them and tried to
think about the evening.  It had gone on for hours, and there were
quite a few blanks in my memory.  I said, "I think I overdid it.  How
are you ... Paul?  "Yes I definitely remembered us reaching first-name
terms quite early on.

His voice came drily.  "I'll live."  Well, good.  I glanced painfully
at my wristwatch.  Nine thirty.  By now, he'd presumably set up a rota
of constables to ferry canteen coffee to him at ten-minute intervals.

"Thanks," I told him.  "I needed to unwind.  From the way I feel at the
moment, I must have done a lot of unwinding."

"We both did."  I tried to read the expression in his voice, but gave
up.  "Do you remember about getting home?"  Slightly alarmed, I
wondered whether I did.  There was an impression of the back seat of a
car, a certain warmth, a rather lengthy kiss at the downstairs door.  I
was pretty sure it was the downstairs door.  "The minicab," he said.
"Neither of us was in a state to drive.  Your car's still on a meter
near the bistro.  I've asked somebody to go down there and put some
money in for you can you pick it up before eleven?"

I almost made a joke about the convenience of police corruption, but I
wasn't sure whether we were on those terms yet so I cut it to, "Yes, of
course.  And thanks again."

"I'd like to do it again."

A policeman?  My generation is cynical about policemen.  "I'd like
that," I said.

I went carefully into the kitchen to find the Alka-Seltzer and heat up
yesterday's coffee.  Mr.  Spock's tin was opened and emptied -I
realized with a guilty pang that he hadn't been fed last night and then
I set about the business of turning myself into a human being again,
which involved a large mug of coffee and a hot bath.  Lying submerged,
with my eyes closed and the coffee mug balanced on my breastbone so
that it wouldn't be too difficult to lift as far as my mouth, I
contemplated the situation.  The memory of the doorstep kiss was
positive, if vague.  Well why not?  I finished the coffee, closed my
eyes, pinched my nose, and sank under the surface, then rose in a
fountain of warm water that drove Spock from his companionable perch at
the foot of the tub, and groped for the shampoo.  Clean, moist, and in
my right mind, I left to rescue the Volvo with half an hour to spare. I
was actually feeling cheerful.

The positive mood barely faltered in response to the bank statement
lying in ambush on the floor of the shop when I got back.  If I were
properly interested in money I'd be running a bank, not a bookshop.  I
checked the account charges, decided that they were correct though
excessive, and set about digesting the fact that Dido Hoare Books was
deeply in the red and that Dido Hoare Proprietor had to do something
about it.

The rest of the mail consisted mostly of catalogues, junk mail, and
small bills.  There was one order for a twenty-pound book from the last
catalogue, which I virtuously invoiced and started to wrap while
waiting for better things and keeping an eye on a remarkably tall,
bespectacled young man who had wandered in and was drifting through the
philosophy section.  He looked to me like a reader, not a buyer, and
confirmed it by departing (after much internal debate) with the
slightly damp-stained three-volume edition of Russell's
Autobiography.

I'd let him have it for eight pounds my bank manager wouldn't cheer,
but at least Mr.  Spock would eat for a fortnight.

And then the phone rang.

"Ms Hare?"

I blinked.  "Dido Hoare Books.  Can I help you?"

"My name is Cynthia Coxall?  On the local paper?"  I opened and closed
my mouth.  "I am so sorry to bother you at such a tragic time, but I
wondered whether you'd have a moment to speak to me about the tragic
death .. . ?"

I switched off.  When the voice stopped on yet another question mark, I
said, "I'm afraid I'm too busy.  Anyway, I've had very little contact
with my ex-husband for several years.  Of course it's such a tragedy,
but I'm afraid I can't help you?"  The question marks were catching.  I
pinched myself sharply and concentrated on ending the conversation.

The next caller was my friend Susie Bates.  I've known her since we
were up at Oxford together.  Our paths have diverged she went into
teaching, and was lecturing in sociology at a run-down technical
college in Kilburn.  "Dido!  I just saw the newspaper I wanted to say
how awful.  It must have been a shock, even if... you know.  Are you
all right?"

I wrenched my mind to the deduction that the news about Davey had
spread.  What was for me a kind of miasma of gloom was fresh news for
everybody else, and I realized that I hadn't even thought about this
situation.  I said, "I'm fine."

"What happened?  Why on earth?"

I demanded to know what the newspapers were saying.  It wasn't much:
car bomb, police investigations continuing ... I suddenly thought that
I needed to talk to someone I could trust, but not over the phone.  I
blessed Susie for the thought, and we arranged to meet in the evening
at her flat, which solved her babysitter problem.

After Susie, there was a series of calls, mostly from people in the
trade agog for information but hesitant about what to say on the
subject of a spectacularly slaughtered former husband.  I formed the
paranoid impression that two or three of them were wondering whether
I'd put out a contract on Davey.  After half an hour I went upstairs
and brought down the answering machine.  That freed me to deal with the
old customers who drifted in hesitantly, remembering Davey, and enough
sightseers to make me feel like a tourist site.  I was tempted to
behave like a grieving widow and shut up shop; instead, I set myself
the goal of selling at least one book to each of the tourists.  It
seemed only fair to make them pay their way.

I had just decided that I would in fact close for the afternoon on the
grounds that I didn't need all this, when Barnabas phoned.  He was
abrupt: "Dido, my dear, I've called a minicab, and I thought I'd let
you know I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

"Barnabas..  . I' But he hung up before I had the chance to say that I
was going to a movie, which meant that I had to wait for him.  I used
the time and my charm to shame a man who'd been goggling at me with
more than usual persistence into paying thirty pounds for a minor Dore,
and I was just reflecting ruefully on the value of publicity when the
doorbell jangled once more.  Not a customer.  Paul Grant.

He surveyed the scene of battle and threw me a sharp glance.  "I should
have warned you that you'd get curiosity-seekers."

I shrugged.  "I'm going to get out of here.  I might throw a book quite
soon.  Or a wobbly."  As Davey would have said.

"Good.  Then you won't mind coming with me.  Professor Hoare will take
over."

I mouthed, What?

"I phoned him.  I hope you don't mind.  I told him that I needed some
help from you this afternoon and as it's a business day I thought you
might want somebody to mind the shop.  He seemed quite keen."

It wasn't a bad idea giving Barnabas something useful to do; but I
don't like being organized.  "I can make my own arrangements," I
pointed out.  "What help?"

"I'll tell you in private.  There he is."

I noticed that he exchanged a look of complicity with Barnabas, who was
just sweeping through the door, and realized that I was the victim of a
conspiracy.  My father arrived with a more sprightly step than I
remembered seeing for some months.  He aroused customer speculation by
planting a kiss on my forehead.  "Off you go.  Good luck."  He grinned
at Grant.  "Make sure she gets lunch."  And he turned his attention to
a hovering woman to whom he set about selling a book on gardening.

"Lunch?"  Grant repeated as though the word was foreign to him.  "Maybe
later.  They're waiting for us.  Come on and I'll explain as we go."

I said, "I think I need a drink and a sandwich now.  Who's waiting?
You'd better phone them and tell them that you'll be late."

"It's my superintendent; you don't do that to superintendents.  He's in
charge of the case."

I said I'd thought that he was in charge of the case.

He said that it didn't quite work like that and embarked on an
explanation about superintendents and Area Main and incident rooms.

"Oh well," I said in tones of the deepest humility.

I thought that I caught the ghost of a grin, but it was overlaid with
something else a kind of abstracted worry which might not have been
entirely friendly.  He said, "As it happens, there's a really good fish
and chip shop on our way."

Ill

Realism

Grant double-parked his old Ford outside the house in Wilding Road
another of the policeman's privileges?  and I tried to wipe the grease
off my fingers with the paper that had held my cod and chips.  There is
something comforting about fish and chips, especially with enough
vinegar, but it always leaves me needing a bath.

"What about explaining?"  I suggested.

He switched off the engine.  "Look, it'll be better if I don't tell you
until we're inside.  You were here last night.  You left at about what,
eight o'clock?"

"Just before I phoned you.  Has something happened to Ilona?"

"No she's arrived at her mother's."  He was watching me, but I couldn't
read his expression.  Was I supposed to have done something?  "Don't
ask anything else for a moment.  Just come inside with me and look
around, all right?"

All right, Detective.

I followed him down the uneven steps to the front door.

It swung open before we got there, and a uniformed policeman recognized
my companion, stood straighter, and stepped aside.  In the sitting room
were two men.  The older one, bald, be suited and rumpled, stood in the
middle of the floor flicking cigarette ash in showers around himself
Superintendent Colley.  The younger one, introduced as DS Baden, pasted
himself to the wall by the door as though he'd been ordered to make
himself flat.

Colley flung his expiring cigarette into an already overflowing
ashtray, where it smouldered unpleasantly.  "Miss Hoare.  Good.  Thanks
for coming.  Has Inspector Grant explained?"

I said that he hadn't.

"I thought," Paul put in, 'it might be better if she looked at it
first."

Colley grunted.  I raised an eyebrow at Paul.

"Right!  Can you please look around and tell us whether you can see
anything different about the place today?"

I looked obediently and grimaced.  "Not particularly."

"Are you sure?"

So it had been a serious question.  I let my eyes stray over the room.
There was an unfamiliar blue scarf lying over the back of the chair in
which Ilona had sat -presumably she'd left it behind at the last
moment.  Dirty coffee mugs still sat among overflowing ashtrays and old
copies of the Mirror she'd made no effort to clear up.  In the cold
light of today, the place looked abandoned.

"Yes, I think it's more or less like last night.  I didn't take an
inventory.  Perhaps it's a bit messier, but I don't think she'd started
packing when I left."  I went over to the sideboard.  The Sunday paper
lay where I'd left it.

"Don't touch anything," Paul warned softly.

I drew my hand back.  "That's where I found my stamps.  Under there.
Are they .. . ?"

Colley came across and lifted the edge of the newspaper with his
forefinger.  I caught a glimpse of the sheet before he replaced it.

"You can definitely identify them?"

I assured him that there was no doubt and explained why.  Oh no, Davey
Winner was my burglar.

There was one other thing worth looking at.  I pulled out the drawer
I'd opened yesterday.  This time it slid open easily because it was
half empty.  Would Ilona have packed that jumble of old bills?  Then I
saw the slew of papers on the carpet under the coffee table.  They
looked like what I'd seen in the drawer, and they certainly hadn't been
down there yesterday.  It looked as though she'd been sorting them and
given up halfway through.

I said, "What's the joke?"

"I can assure you it isn't funny," Colley said loudly.  "Were you in
any of the other rooms?"  Obviously the kind of tough cop who prefers
asking the questions to answering any.

I got the impression that he found me disappointing.

Impressions ... I had another impression: that Davey's canvases had
been disturbed.  They still leaned against the walls, but they were no
longer stacked by size so that they would not damage one another with
the rub of a stretcher or a sharp corner against paint.  They staggered
carelessly, as though somebody had been flipping through them.

"You've searched the place."

"Not yet," Colley said.  He was lighting another cigarette.  I wondered
if his intention was to smoke me into co-operation.

Grant said slowly, "A woman who lives upstairs saw two men coming out
of here at about ten thirty this morning.  She didn't recognize them,
but she'd seen Mrs.  Mitchell leave in a taxi with her cases, so she
had a look and found the front door open and dialled 999."

"Thieves?"

"Maybe."  Paul hesitated.  "But it would be quite a coincidence, and
the video recorder hasn't been touched that's usually the first thing
that goes in a break-in."

I said, "I'm sorry, I can't be sure.  She could have left things lying
around when she packed."

Colley growled, "If my wife kept a place like this ..."  and apparently
thought better of it.

"Is it all right if I look in the bedroom?"

The men exchanged a glance which I decided to assume meant agreement,
and I slid past the sergeant.  Every drawer in the bedroom had been
emptied on to the floor.  I didn't go inside.  No one in her right mind
would leave her clothes in that state, no matter how upset she was, and
Ilona had always been in her right mind.  Unless you counted her taking
up with Davey, but then she wasn't the only person mad enough to do
that, was she?

Suddenly the realization that Davey was gone for ever hit me with a
sense of desolation so strong and unexpected that I staggered and had
to clutch at the door frame.  I issued instructions to myself to stand
up straight and went back to the others.

In the doorway I stopped for the overall view.  "The paintings have
been shifted, that's what it is: they were stacked with the largest
ones at the back, and now they're all mixed up.  Why would anybody do
that?"

"Looking for something," Colley said.  "Miss Hoare, thank you for
coming down.  I appreciate that.  I'll get somebody to drive you home.
We'll be in touch."

"I'd better drop her off," Paul said.  I thought that Colley gave him a
warning look before we retreated.

"What were they looking for?"  I asked when we were alone in the car.
"Money?  Drugs?"

He hesitated.  "There's a little screw-topped jar on the kitchen table.
Empty, but it smells of marijuana."

"Oh."  I stopped myself saying anything else.  Often in the days of my
marriage I'd found similar little jars in the flat, sometimes empty,
sometimes not.  I said cautiously, "There wouldn't have been a great
deal in a little screw-topped jar, surely?"  I knew where the missing
stash was: Ilona wouldn't have abandoned Davey's personal stock.

"Perhaps there was more," Paul said softly, 'but if there was, it's
gone.  They ransacked everything."

"It doesn't fit," I said before I could stop myself.  Talking out loud
was getting to be an awful habit.

"What do you mean?"

"Are you seriously saying that somebody killed Davey to get an ounce of
cannabis?"

"Colley thinks that your ex had got mixed up with one of the south
London gangs.  Either Mrs.  Mitchell will tell us about it, or somebody
on the street will pass the word along, or we'll find fingerprints we
can recognize in that mess back there.  He might have owed somebody
money -the new car suggests bigger money somewhere, and the contents of
that flat suggest it arrived recently.  Incidentally, the car was a
demonstrator from one of the local car firms; he bought it a fortnight
ago.  So the best guess is that something didn't work out, or some
outsiders moved in on him."

But Davey had not been the kind of man to be killed in some gang war.
He had been too ... I sank back in the seat.  Not clever.  Too shifty?
That was better.  Too cowardly?  If a man had come to him and said
something like, "Winner, hand over that pound of heroin or I'm going to
blow you to smithereens," Davey would have caved in.  He had too much
imagination to do anything else.  He would have given the man the
package, grinned cheerfully and ruefully, and vanished.  He'd been the
very model of the man who lives to fight another day.  And yet he was
dead he'd run out of elbow room at last.

Grant's car stopped outside the shop, and when I looked up, he was
watching me again.  "The only thing is," he said when he saw me
looking, 'that it doesn't explain how you're involved."

"Ilona said .. ."  I stopped.

"What?"

"Is she in danger?"

Grant looked at me with narrowed eyes.  "You think that she might have
been the target, not Winner?  Is it likely?"

"I know, but when I talked to her yesterday she was so frightened she'd
hardly trust herself to speak to me.  She was sitting there with the
chain on the door.  She made me walk to the corner shop with her as
though she was afraid of being attacked in the street."

"Ybu think the bomb was meant for her, not him?  But whoever broke in
was looking for something, and she has no form, so we assume it was
something Winner had stashed.  They searched the whole place you didn't
look into the kitchen, did you?  so we suspect they couldn't find what
they were looking for.  The obvious thing would be to lean on Mrs.
Mitchell now.  From what you've said, I'd guess that's what she was
afraid of.  Anyway, we're happy to have her out of the way."

A car drifted along the road, looking for a parking place.  The driver
hesitated hopefully behind us, and then accelerated off when she saw
that we showed no signs of moving.

I said, "Davey told her that he was going to get some money.  I'm sure
I told you this last night.  She thought he had a plan to get a share
of the business."

"Yes, you said something about that.  You also said that it wasn't
on."

"It wasn't, and he knew that."  Didn't he?

"But we know now that he was responsible for trashing your shop."

"None of this explains why Ilona is expecting somebody to come after
her.  You haven't found my key in the flat?  You don't think they were
looking for that, do you?"

"We haven't seen it yet.  But if Winner had any sense, he'd have
dropped it into the nearest storm drain last Sunday.  He'd have known
you'd change the lock anyway."

"It makes sense," I admitted, 'except that I don't understand his
motive.  Unless .. ."

"What?"

"He asked me for work.  Perhaps he just intended to demonstrate that I
needed him."

Grant shrugged.  "It's a pretty elaborate way to go job-hunting, but it
would be nice to think that's all, because that would mean you're out
of trouble."

"Why shouldn't I be?"

Grant twisted in his seat and stared at me.  "I don't know.  Just like
I don't know whether Mrs.  Mitchell is safe.  But everything in your
shop was turned over, just like the flat, and to me that means somebody
was looking for something in both places, and probably didn't find it
in either."

I said, "We know that the shop was Davey's doing."

"We don't know that he was on his own.  It bothers me that something's
loose and we still don't have any idea what it is."

I couldn't find an answer to that.  I'd been feeling that I'd come out
of the woods; and now he'd pointed out that the trees were still
everywhere around me.  I put my hand on the door handle.

"What about this evening?  I should be clear by seven or eight
o'clock."

I told him I couldn't.

"Tomorrow, then?  I have a couple of days off.  Would you like to drive
to the sea for the day?  There's a place I go to on the Suffolk coast
when I want to breathe air and look at waves for a while."

The sea.  I said, "There's the shop .. ."  and he responded with a
kiss.  It was a nice kiss.  I decided that Barnabas wouldn't mind
standing in for me just one more time.

Walk in the Wind

Paul

_aul Grant's seaside turned out to be a sweep of shingle in Essex with
the Sizewell nuclear plant squatting on the northern point.  We left
the car at the end of a deserted car park and walked south under a flat
grey sky.  The wind blowing from the east had an icy centre, like a
memory of the snow still lying on the Urals.  I raised my collar to
shield my left cheek from the bite and thrust my hands deep into my
pockets.  The dry shingle underfoot shifted and rustled.

When we got cold, we drove inland to a pub with a fire in the bar and
thick toasted ham and cheese sandwiches.  By silent agreement, Davey's
name was still unspoken.

Back in George Street, he stopped the car in front of the shop and we
sat for a moment.

"I'm going to visit family this weekend, but I'll be back on duty on
Monday morning," he said abruptly.  "I'll ring you then and let you
know what's turned up in the meantime if anything."

I could see him wondering whether to say something more and deciding
not to, and stood in the street watching his car pull out into the
thick Friday traffic.  It was as if he'd suddenly decided to back off,
and I couldn't guess why.  Davey?

Through the window of the shop I could see my father on patrol between
the rows of books.  We were busy, even for a Friday afternoon, and I
guessed that we were still profiting from our notoriety.  Barnabas
looked cheerful, so instead of rescuing him I went upstairs.

The locksmith had come and gone, and my vulnerable kitchen and bedroom
windows now wore white-painted metal grilles.  The keys sat on the
kitchen table, and I wasted five minutes worrying what to do with them.
In the end I hooked the ring over the handle of one of the wall
cupboards, where I was unlikely to forget them, and tried to resign
myself to living in a cage.  It didn't even seem necessary now, and the
locksmith's bill propped against the teapot was for a frightening sum.
I ought to go and inspect the arrangements in the shop.  Instead I made
tea.

Just after six o'clock, Barnabas arrived with the cash box and an air
of open curiosity.

"Good day?"  he enquired significantly.

I yawned; the hours in the sea air were beginning to affect me.
"You?"

He shook the cash box, which rustled.  "I've taken nearly eight hundred
pounds, and there is a magnificent burglar alarm which makes a truly
unspeakable noise.  I'd better show you, or you'll be arrested when you
open the door tomorrow morning."

"Eight hundred!"  I repeated stupidly.

"I turn out to be a salesman!"  He sounded smug.

"Furthermore, Job Warren phoned.  He arrived at Heathrow this morning,
and I invited him to eat with us tomorrow evening."

Tomorrow was Saturday, the busiest day in the week, and I said, "Oh,
but..."

"Leave it to me," Barnabas said expansively.  "I'll buy American-sized
steaks, and ice cream, and a bottle or two of the kind of claret that I
can never afford to drink in a restaurant.  You won't have to do a
thing."

I laughed.  The day at work had put my father into a sprightly mood,
and the holiday had relaxed me.  "I suppose that you've also arranged
to show him the stock?"

"Sunday," Barnabas said.  "He'd prefer not to have to compete with all
your Saturday market customers."

"Busybody," I said contentedly.

Professor Warren was head librarian of the Constance Hance Research
Library at a small New England university a large building in the
colonial style (we had seen photos), extraordinarily well endowed in
memory of a formidable American matron forty years deceased (we had
also seen the reproduction of her portrait, in mink).  He seemed to
have a free hand when it came to acquisitions, and turned up in London
every spring with a chequebook and a thick computer print-out of his
library's catalogue.  Thus armed, he toured the antiquarian book shops
He usually spent one or two days with me, moving methodically along the
shelves, spreading his selections over my packing table, re collating
and checking his catalogue, until he had chosen a few thousand pounds'
worth of books.  He paid on the spot.  For the past four years,
Constance Hance had been my best single customer, bless her.

Not only that, but Barnabas and Professor Warren got on together like
old mates, which explains the special treatment: my father did not
provide old wine and well-hung Scottish rump steaks he regards rump as
the only cut suitable for a serious steak man for just any big
spender.

"You look much less tired than you did this morning.  The boy detective
must have taken care of you all right?"

I said quickly, "Not really eight hundred pounds?  You're a marvel. You
don't want a job, do you?  What with this and Professor Warren, I'm
going to get some new stock.  It's time I did something about the
prints.  Right?"

"Excellent," Barnabas purred.  "I shall come into the shop more often,
now that I'm well.  It's too much for one girl... person.  If I were to
do a couple of days a week .. . ?"

Well, perhaps it was time for that.

I woke late on Saturday morning, feeling like a human being: an
invalid, perhaps, but mending.  I even found the energy to throw on my
clothes and go down the road to shop for croissants, fresh orange juice
and cat food.  Mr.  Spock and I breakfasted together before going our
separate ways.

My good mood wasn't even punctured when I listened to the tape on the
answering machine and found another sequence of messages from people I
barely knew, or didn't.  They included somebody from a radio station
asking whether there was any news about the investigation, and the
woman from the local paper who was apparently trying to prove that
female reporters can be just as intrusive as their male colleagues. Pat
had phoned, having got no answer from the flat, and there were a few
calls from book dealers who had actually known Davey, asking about the
funeral.  I made a note of the names of those who needed a reply and
promised myself I'd deal with them on Monday.  Then the first of the
browsers arrived.

Saturdays in Islington are usually busy.  Today the mixture of
sightseers and genuine shoppers at times jammed the aisles.  I took a
chance at about 1.30 and closed the shop for a twenty-minute break.  I
closed again at five when the crowds had started to thin, gingerly
setting the combination of key and switches that was designed to defend
the shop from all evil-doers, and fled upstairs.  I was feeling happier
than I'd done for a week as I put on my most respectable skirt and silk
shirt in accordance with Barnabas's instructions, brushed my hair until
it shone, put on some lipstick, and set off for the party.

Barnabas met me at the door.  I saw him do a quick check.  "Good!
You're wearing a skirt, and you look very nice."

I cast a deliberate look over his sitting room.  He had cleared the
papers from his dining table, and three places were set.  "Good!"  I
said.  "You've made enough space for normal human beings to eat dinner,
and it looks very nice.  When is he due?"

My father had the grace to look momentarily embarrassed, but it passed.
"A quarter past six."

"And what about the dinner?"

Barnabas sniffed.  "Perfectly under control.  Even I can manage smoked
salmon plates and a couple of steaks with mushrooms.  All we need to do
is have a glass of wine while we wait.  How was it at the shop
today?"

I told him that it was fine, although I hadn't equalled his incredible
takings of yesterday, and we went through into the kitchen.

The evening was planned as a repeat of the ritual that had developed
over the past couple of years: a leisurely dinner that would go on for
hours as the two men kept breaking off to flit from one volume of
Barnabas's library to the next, commenting, arguing and reminiscing
about the Tudor poets.  I always brought over a few choice volumes from
the shop as a foretaste of what (I hoped) Professor Warren would think
of as the delights awaiting him.  Most of the time I was simply
expected to play dutiful daughter and domestic stooge.  I was usually
the one who prepared the unhealthy meal full of red meat and puddings
Job Warren was an American of the old breed who considered cholesterol
and jogging to be inventions of a degenerate age.

Barnabas lit the grill, left the red wine near it to breathe, poured
two glasses of a cold and spicy Gewurtztraminer, and led the way back
to his sitting room where we sat for a while, Barnabas talking about
his book and me only half listening to him, sipping the golden wine,
yawning, thinking of nothing.

A smell of hot fat roused us.

"What time is it?"

I looked at my wristwatch: it was well past 7.30, and our guest was an
hour late.  "Do you think he's been looking at books somewhere and
forgotten the time?"

Barnabas dismissed my suggestion with scorn.  "The man is a titan of
punctuality, as you know very well.  I hope nothing has happened.  It's
astonishing that he hasn't phoned."  He went to the telephone and
lifted the receiver to check the dialling tone.

Not being a titan of punctuality myself, I felt disinclined to worry.
"He's probably in a taxi in some traffic snarl.  It is Saturday
evening, remember.  "The streets of central London would be full of
people driving around like lemmings.  I braved the heat in the kitchen
long enough to turn off Barnabas's smoking grill and open a window.

"I'll try the hotel and see whether they can tell us anything."
Barnabas strode to his desk, paused to peer out into the street, and
then shuffled things until he had found the necessary telephone number
scribbled on one of a thousand scraps of paper.  He dialled; I
eavesdropped on an un illuminating conversation with a desk clerk.

"He's not there, his key is in the rack, and they can't remember when
he went out," Barnabas reported.  "You heard: I've left a message for
him to phone, and the number in case he's lost it; but I presume he'll
arrive at any moment."

At 8.30, we finished two plates of the smoked salmon and put the third
one back in the fridge.  Then we watched the news on the little
television set that Barnabas affects never to turn on.  A Cabinet
minister was reported to have sold something, probably himself, to an
arms dealer; Kurds were being bombed somewhere in the Middle East; a
child was missing in Hull; Kenneth Brannagh and

Emma Thompson had gone to the preview of a friend's new film.

Barnabas telephoned the hotel again at 10.15 to no purpose.

"Not there?"

"No.  I shall phone the police."

I hesitated.  "What for?  There's probably a very simple explanation.
Barnabas, are you dead certain you arranged it for tonight?"

Barnabas said with dignity, "There is nothing wrong with my mind, or
even my memory."

I'd have to agree with that.  "Obviously something has gone wrong.
He'll phone you in the morning, and we'll take him out to Rocca's
tomorrow evening, instead."

Barnabas hesitated.  "I don't know why, but I don't like it."

I said gently, "If the hotel hasn't heard anything, then he can't have
had an accident, or anything like that."

Barnabas shrugged slowly.  "Of course not."

"Have you taken your aspirin?"

"Not yet."

I said, "Then I'll heat some milk and you can have it now."

"He may still phone."

"Well," I said, 'he probably will, especially when he hears that you've
been on to Reception all evening.  Unless he thinks it's too late."

The phone, however, remained stubbornly silent.  At midnight Barnabas
went to bed and I went home.  My chief feeling was of annoyance about
my father's disappointment.  But after all, plans do go wrong.

Coincidence

When the telephone woke me, I looked at the clock in disbelief and
pulled the covers over my face.  After i while the ringing stopped and
began again, and pretending I was in Timbuctoo wasn't working.  Wrapped
in the duvet, I navigated uncertainly into the sitting room: five and a
half hours' sleep does not fit me for either a new daj or rational
communication.

Because I was still only half conscious, I recognizec Barnabas's voice
without really hearing what he said Panic.  "What's happened?  Are you
all right?"

He was not all right.  I'd gathered that much.

"Dido, will you just come quickly?  The police are or the way.  I don't
know that I can face this on my own."

My mind sped in the only direction it could imagine "Is it Pat?"

There was a little silence, and then my father's voice came more
strongly.  "No, no Job Warren is dead."

I started a "How..  ."  but stopped myself.  "Don't worry I'm coming,"
I yelled at the phone.  I dropped the duve where I stood, and ran to
pull on some clothes and get my keys.

I couldn't even think where I'd left the car, but instinct kicked in
and hurried me round the corner.  During the night, some idiot had
pulled up within six inches of my rear bumper, boxing me into my space.
I dealt with the matter a little more fiercely than I normally would.
As I get older, my behaviour is certainly becoming less ladylike.  I
gunned the car across Upper Street this early on a Sunday there was no
traffic to speak of- and headed north.

I'd expected police cars with flashing lights, but Crouch Hill was
quiet except for a curtain twitching on one of the upstairs windows,
which confirmed that Mr.  Stanley, on the first floor, had noticed
something as he always did, whatever the hour of the day or night.  As
I rang the bell, I could just hear the rumble of voices from inside,
and the door was opened by a thick-set, red-haired man in a tired blue
suit whom I'd certainly never seen before.

"Barnabas?"  I pushed in and was relieved to find my father sitting at
the dining table in his dressing gown, looking subdued, being served
tea by a blonde girl in uniform who was beaming at him respectfully and
probably reminding him of one of his students of old.

"Dido!  Good."  Barnabas flourished his cup in greeting.  "Ybu've been
quick.  The tea is fresh."

Simultaneously, the redhead was saying, "DI Gillespie and DC Wilcox,
Holborn CID, Miss Hoare," and Constable Wilcox was asking whether she
could get me a cup and did I take sugar.

I replied, How do you do, Yes, No, and What happened?

in a single breath and went to hold Barnabas's hand.

"What did happen?"  Barnabas echoed, which told me that I hadn't missed
much.  "Yes, yes, do sit down, both of you."

Inspector Gillespie took the third dining chair and edged his clipboard
cautiously down on the table among the teacups; Constable Wilcox cast a
wary eye around the room, realized that she could not compete with the
books, and wisely gave up the quest for a chair and positioned herself
by the kitchen door.

Gillespie struggled visibly to decide where to begin.  "A few hours
ago, we found the body of a man identified by staff at the Hotel York
as a Professor Warren, an American who registered on Friday.  He hadn't
returned to the hotel last night, and Reception told us that there'd
been a couple of messages from Professor Hoare.  Lucky that you left
your phone number, sir.  We'd like to confirm the gentleman's identity,
and we'd be glad of any other information.  I don't suppose that the
American Embassy know anything about him, and it might save time if you
can help us to contact his family."

"Professor Warren is in his late fifties," Barnabas said almost
inaudibly.  "Tall about my height.  Considerably heavier than I. Blue
eyes, greying hair... I haven't seen him for a year, you understand.  I
don't know his home address, but he is the senior librarian at a
university in Massachusetts I'll write down the details."

I said, "What do you mean, you found him?  He didn't die at the hotel?
He was supposed to come here for dinner last night, but he never
arrived, and it wasn't like him not to let us know."

I thought that Constable Wilcox threw a quick glance at the inspector.
A chilly finger played down my spine.

"One of our men found the body in Bloomsbury Square just before
daybreak.  It was under some bushes and may have been there for a few
hours.  His pockets had been emptied except for his room registration
card that's how we got on to the hotel."

"Mugged?"  Barnabas asked tonelessly.  He was struggling.  I squeezed
his hand.

"We assume so."

Barnabas was quiet for a while.  He shook his head.  "He was supposed
to come here to eat at six fifteen yesterday evening.  I suppose he
went out to get a taxi..  ."

I was watching the inspector's face.  I said, "What?"

"Well, the square was full of people at six o'clock, and it was light
until nearly eight.  Nobody reported a disturbance, much less an
attack.  Of course we'll have a better idea of the time after they've
examined him."

Barnabas was wearing his stubborn face.  "He was always very punctual.
We've known him for several years, and I don't think that he has ever
been more than five minutes late for an appointment."

"You're saying that at six o'clock he must have been on his way to
you?"  Gillespie's eyes narrowed.  "That's odd."  He scribbled a
note.

"Possibly so," Barnabas was saying in his most measured tones, 'but Job
Warren would certainly not have been wandering around Bloomsbury Square
after dark instead of coming for dinner as arranged."

I said, "We see him every year when he comes over to London; I think my
father is right."

Gillespie's face expressed the sour realization that his life was not
going to be as simple as he had hoped.  The rest of us waited for him
to come to terms with this.  After a long minute he said, "It might
have been an accident.  There is a head injury... we can't rule out an
accident."

Barnabas emitted a sarcastic snort.

I said, "What kind of accident?"

"If he fell, perhaps nobody would have been alarmed.  The square is
full of street people these days kids, old drunks.  Nobody pays much
attention.  It wouldn't be surprising if one of them found him dead and
cleaned out his pockets.  It might be that."

"Perhaps," Barnabas said in a tone of voice that became more acid with
every word, 'he was hit by a car, staggered into the square, and
dropped under a bush to die without the crowds noticing?"

The inspector stiffened visibly.  "You'd be surprised, sir, how many
people don't like to interfere.  They want to avoid trouble."  He
looked accusingly from me to Barnabas: apparently we private citizens
made life difficult for the police, one way or another.  "We'll look
into it.  If you could kindly give us the address of Professor Warren's
university, we'll get on."

Barnabas went to his work table to look for his notebook.  In the
momentary silence, I said, "Have you told DI Grant about this?"

I was half expecting to get a blank look, but DC Wilcox threw the
inspector a glance that made me wonder.

Gillespie hesitated and nodded.  "We picked up the reference to the
murder up here, of course, when we ran Professor Hoare's name in the
computer.  I've been on to the superintendent in charge of the Winner
case.  I gather they haven't contacted Grant yet.  He's off duty.  Do
you have any reason to think that the two might be connected?  Did the
deceased know each other?"

I said that they had met a couple of years ago; Gillespie seemed
inclined to dismiss the link, and for once Barnabas held his tongue. He
handed Gillespie a note of the library's address.

"One thing," Gillespie said after he had been politely grateful.  "The
people at the hotel didn't actually know Professor Warren personally.
If his passport isn't in the hotel, I wonder whether one of you would
be willing to make a formal identification?"

"Me," I said quickly.  "No, Barnabas, of course I'll do it."  It wasn't
a happy prospect, but my father couldn't go through that.  I gave the
officers my own telephone number, saw them off the premises, and then
returned to where Barnabas was sitting staring into his cooling tea.

I heard my voice whisper, "Barnabas!  Oh, no!"  We looked at each
other.

My father got up slowly and came close enough to pat my shoulder.  The
touch was meant to be comforting, but somehow it had the opposite
effect, like a switch opening floodgates of anxiety.

He said, "Dido, don't."

"Barnabas, what is happening"?  That poor old man ..."

"Yes -I know.  I have an awful feeling that he was killed because of
us."

I tried to pretend I hadn't been going to say the same thing, tried to
shape the word 'nonsense', to say that it was just bad luck and a
terrible coincidence, nothing to do with anything; but suddenly I felt
too wretched to speak.  Of course it was no coincidence.  The idea was
laughable.  I could feel myself start to shake, and Barnabas was
pouring something into a glass.

"Drink it."

I lifted it and smelled whiskey.  My stomach heaved.

"It's not even breakfast time!"  I protested when I could speak.

"Who cares?"  he asked stiffly.  "It's my thirty-seven-year-old
Jameson, and it will do you good.  Sip it slowly.  Go on!"  His eyes
were fixed on me and his face was grey.  Things seemed to be out of
control, and I had to do something.

"I'm going to phone Paul Grant."

"It's Sunday."

"He gave me the number of his mobile phone.  He said he'd be away, but
it's worth trying."

Barnabas hesitated.  "Yes -I take it back.  You're right."

In my wallet I located the scrap of paper on which I'd written the
number of Grant's mobile.  It was a while before the phone was picked
up: when I looked at my watch I saw that it was still not quite nine
o'clock.  His voice was thick with sleep.

The silence after my story stretched so long that I had to say, "I hope
you don't mind my phoning," although I didn't care whether or not he
did.

"Don't be silly."  His voice was abstracted.  "Look, I'll ring in and
try to find out what's going on.  I'll get on to the Super.  They'll
probably want him to oversee this case, since there's a possible
connection.  He probably won't get much for a few hours, but I'll let
you know when I hear anything.  In fact, I'll come round."

I said, "I'll be at Barnabas's.  Do you have the address?  I want to
keep an eye on him."

In the background my father was mumbling about not letting me out of
his sight, and Paul's voice in my other ear said, "Right, stay there
until you hear from me.  Take care.  And don't worry, there isn't
necessarily any connection."

"What?"

I thought he laughed a little.  "Try not to worry.  Coincidences do
happen.  You were right to phone me."

I heard my voice rising.  "It's not a coincidence."

"Probably not.  Look, I'll take care of it."

"Will you?"  I asked.  It sounded as though I doubted him, so I said,
"Thanks' to make it better before I hung up.

I wished I could believe him.  I certainly needed somebody to take care
of it; but I had a nasty feeling that it just wasn't going to turn out
like that.

Dead Man's Bluff

In the dream, I wandered through a grassy park enclosed by iron
railings.  The ground was frozen; it splintered where I stepped.
Leafless bushes grew around the perimeter of the place.  Without
looking up I knew that it was not sky, but something that resembled a
low grey ceiling over my head.

Somewhere among the straggling bushes there lay a terrible thing.  As
soon as I remembered it, I saw or half saw out of the corner of my eye
a grey, featureless horizontal form at the far side of the rectangle
where I walked.  It kept shifting and fading, and I turned away because
if I got too close I knew that it would stand up.  I was afraid to turn
my back, and walked diagonally away, crossing two stone paths as I
went.

Ahead were the pillars of a gate; but something blurred, and the grey
shape lay between me and the way out.  I turned right, making another
long diagonal.  There was another shifting change.  Ahead of me stood a
man covered in blood.  He had no face, but I knew it was Davey, so I
said, "This is just a dream."

In the confusion between sleeping and waking, the faceless man turned
into Barnabas, leaning over the couch with a cup of tea.  I sat up
quickly.

"What time is it?"

"Nine o'clock.  We have a visitor."

"Visitor?"  I yawned blankly and tried the tea which, as usual when my
father made it, was mysteriously cool and weak.

"In the kitchen.  Your policeman."

I swallowed another yawn, put the cup and saucer down on the floor, and
struggled out from under the tangle of blankets.  I had gone to sleep
wearing yesterday's tracksuit, which meant that I felt disgusting.  I
pulled on my socks, wished that my mouth tasted less like the inside of
a shoe, and ran my fingers through my stubborn hair.

"It's all right," Barnabas assured me with more than a touch of irony,
'he says he's been "running around" half the night -I expect he'll
enjoy sitting there quietly for two minutes."

Thus admonished, I crept into the bathroom and applied soap, warm water
and a towel to appropriate places and ate a mouthful of toothpaste
while I plied Barnabas's hairbrush.

In the kitchen, I saw that Barnabas's judgment had been well founded.
Paul Grant had propped his elbows on the table; his eyes had the
strained look of somebody trying not to yawn.

"What's happened?"

"Not a lot.  I've been down in Bloomsbury Square, and I've talked to
the people in the district.  One thing: they know now that he wasn't
attacked in the square, although he might still have been alive when he
was dumped."

"How can they tell?"

"Not enough blood."

"Oh."  The remembered image of the bloody figure in my dream swam
towards me for a moment.  I pushed it away.

"What happened to him?"  Barnabas was asking.

"He was knocked on the head with the traditional blunt instrument and
then, presumably while he was unconscious, he was .. ."  To do him
justice, Grant hesitated.  "His throat was cut.  Very neat, very quiet.
Very deliberate.  Then his body was taken to the square and dumped."

"Very odd?"  Barnabas asked.

Grant looked at him quickly.  "Yes.  Yes, it is."

I felt as though I were in the nightmare again.  "What do you mean,
odd?"

Grant turned to me.  "Suppose that somebody wants to rob him.  They hit
him over the head, he passes out.  They take his wallet and run for it.
That makes sense.  Or they hit him, he's still conscious, they panic
and batter him badly and he dies and they run for it.  I'll wear that.
Or they threaten him, he yells or tries to fight them off, they panic
and pull a knife and stab him in the chest and stomach, and cut his
hands and arms, maybe, when he tries to push them off, and then they
grab his stuff and run .. ."

"But he was robbed?"  Barnabas said.

"Oh, yes pockets cleared out.  They were too busy to notice his watch,
though.  Nothing fancy -just an ordinary eighteen-carat gold Rolex
worth a thousand or three.

Holborn is very, very unhappy about that part of it."

"Not a real robbery?"  Barnabas asked.

I thought I ought to get into the conversation.  "Are you saying that
he was murdered for some other reason and they stole his money to make
it look like a mugging?"

Grant hesitated, and alarm bells rang.  Finally he asked, "What kind of
a man was he?"

"Be specific," Barnabas urged drily.

"All right.  Holborn thinks .. ."  Grant hesitated, looked at me,
looked away quickly to Barnabas.  "Holborn wonders whether there is
some kind of sexual element.  Could he have come on to one of the kids
one of the rent boys in the square?"

Barnabas looked blank.

I found myself glaring.  "Professor Warren's wife died two years ago.
He has two daughters and three grandchildren.  He's an eminent head
librarian of a New England university."

Grant grimaced.  "None of that makes him exempt."

"What is a rent boy?"  Barnabas asked.

Grant looked at him in utter disbelief, saw that he meant it, and
hesitated.  "It's an American term," he said, and stopped.

"Professor Warren," I said loudly, 'was a quiet, friendly, but quite
experienced man.  He travelled a lot, all over the world, and he lives
near Boston, which is a big city with a lot of violent crime.  I don't
believe that he would come to London and do something naive or
dangerous.  All right?"

Grant looked depressed.  "Well, there is always the possibility that he
met a nutter, or... Might he have been carrying a lot of cash?"

I tried to remember from other years.  "No traveller's cheques or
credit cards for his personal expenses.  He paid for purchases with
ordinary sterling cheques on a London bank.  Was the chequebook still
in his briefcase?"

Grant became alert.  "Briefcase?"

"He always carried it when he was over here."

"Even if he was going out for the evening to visit friends?"

I thought about it.  "Probably.  We weren't just friends -it was
business too.  We always talked books, and he carried a copy of the
library's short catalogue and his wants list.  I've never seen him
without the briefcase."

Grant pulled out a sheet of paper and consulted it.  "No briefcase. Not
in his room, either.  His passport was at the hotel.  No traveller's
cheques.  No wallet, so you wouldn't expect to find any cards.  You
can't describe this briefcase, can you?"

"It might not be the same one as other years," I pointed out.

Barnabas disagreed.  "It was always the same case."

"It was about a hundred years old .. ."

"There was nothing wrong with it!"

Paul Grant cleared his throat.

"It was a leather satchel," Barnabas said loudly, 'very like mine, in
fact.  Dark brown calf.  Rubbed at the edges.  Brass fittings and...
initials, I think.  It would have been very heavy, because he carried a
thick computer print-out of the library catalogue around with him, also
a loose-leaf notebook in case he wanted to jot down details of books he
saw that he needed to look up in the British Library, or appointments
to view stock anything to do with his schedule."

"There's certainly no case and none of those things on the list of his
belongings."

"Then it was stolen."

"Seems so.  Maybe they thought the case was so heavy it must hold
something valuable.  Anyway, it will have been dumped by now.  Unless
.. . unless it was left at the place where he was attacked.  Can I use
your phone?  I'd better let Holborn know: they'll need to put the word
out about it."

"It was quite a polished leather," Barnabas was saying with interest.
"Fingerprints I'm sure it would show fingerprints very well.  The phone
is on the desk, but mind my papers."

He led the way into the sitting room and located the telephone by his
usual means of following the cord through the labyrinth of documents. I
sat down among the mess of blankets on the couch where I'd passed my
restless night.  Barnabas sat beside me, listening to the detective's
side of the phone conversation with undisguised interest.

Hanging up, Grant let his eyes survey the room.  He took in the
temporary bed.  "Are you moving in here, Dido?  Good."

I shrugged.  "I'll probably sleep here for the time being.  Just
until..  ."  Until what?  Once I'd started to say it, I wasn't sure.  I
decided: "Until things are a bit clearer.  I don't open the shop on
Mondays anyway.  There are things I ought to do there, but I'll leave
them for the moment."

Grant hesitated.  I noticed what dark, deep brown eyes the man had.
Nice.

He said, "Look, I'm going to make sure that somebody is keeping at
least a passing eye on both this place and the shop.  All this business
with the professor might not have anything to do with the other, but
it's hard to believe.  Take care, eh?"

"I will," I said.

Barnabas sniffed but held his tongue until Grant had gone.

"Pigs might fly."

I scowled at him; I hadn't slept well.  "What?"

"If anyone thinks that Warren's death and Davey's aren't
connected..."

"How can they be?"  I growled.  "They barely even knew each other."

"They both knew you," Barnabas growled back.

"And you."

"Fiddlesticks.  At any rate, until the police know why at least one of
them was killed, I want you to be extremely careful."

"You mean ... I'm nextr It came out in a hard-boiled Humphrey Bogart
voice.  "That's silly..  . just because Davey broke into the shop and
stole eighty pounds and half a sheet of postage stamps?"

Barnabas glared.  "Don't pretend to be addle-brained.  Until we know
the reason for all this, you can't be sure.  Better safe than sorry."

"A stitch in time saves nine," I mocked him.  "There's no use crying
over spilt milk.  Many a mickle makes a muckle."  The thing is, I
agreed with him.  "Barnabas, perhaps you really should go and stay with
Pat for a little while after all."

"If you'll come too."

"How can I?"  I'd rather spend a holiday in a kindergarten.  "With
Pat's au pair, you know that they only have one spare bedroom.  Anyway,
I'll be perfectly safe at the shop now that I'm all barricaded in and
burglar-alarmed."

"But you can't stay locked up all the time," Barnabas objected.  He
stopped abruptly and looked as though an idea had come to him.

"What?"  I demanded.

"Idea," he said unnecessarily.  "We'll have another pot of tea and
something to eat, and then we'll creep out together and go shopping, I
think."

When I suggested that a shopping trip was inappropriate to our present
worries, he threatened to go alone.  I gave in to blackmail, of
course.

Two hours later we were illegally parked in the Tottenham Court Road
gingerly examining my new mobile telephone, juggling instruction
booklet and connection agreement.  I felt as though I had finally
joined the late twentieth century.  Barnabas had provided an impeccable
credit rating and a masterful insistence on immediate connection, and
it really hadn't cost him very much.

"Now..."  Barnabas was giving instructions and looking like a child
with a new but terrifying Christmas present.  "If you will programme my
number into your phone, and also 999 and the boy detective's numbers, I
shall feel almost certain that you are going to be safe.  We can call
each other every half-hour if we want to, and you get help anywhere,
any time."

Being phoned up every half-hour wherever I happened to be was the
terrifying prospect that had always before prevented me from taking
this particular technological leap forward.  There had also been
another reason.

"Barnabas, do you know how much one of these costs every time you use
it?"  This point had escaped his attention.  I told him.  He looked a
little subdued.  I said, "Never mind, you're right: it's wonderful
being able to get help in an emergency.  Let's just not go
overboard."

"Business expense?"  he suggested tentatively.

"With luck," I agreed, reminding myself to put the receipt into my
accountant's file.

"Well..  . it's worth every penny.  In the circumstances.  You'd better
read the leaflet and find out how to work it."

I said, "I'll take you home first.  This should keep us both amused for
hours.  I hope you have some food in the fridge."

"There's some smoked salmon left over from Saturday," he said slowly.

Which killed that conversation absolutely dead.

A Matron of the Arts

After I'd bullied Barnabas for a while, he agreed to keep his door on
the chain so that I could go home.  I wanted to check the shop to see
if anything had turned up; and more than anything else, I needed to
change and collect some things, because if I was about to spend another
night on my father's sofa, then I wanted to be prepared.

The Volvo was just south of Highbury Corner when the mobile shrilled
unexpectedly from inside my bag.  I recklessly pulled the car up on a
double yellow line and dug for the thing.

"Barnabas?"

"Good!  It's working!"

Charity won out when I reminded myself that Barnabas was anxious about
me.  "Of course it works."

"Excellent!  Well, now that we're sure, I can relax.  I wanted to ask
you ..."

There was a gap in the line of traffic, and I drove on slowly,
one-handed.  "What?"

"I'm almost out of milk."

"Message understood," I intoned.  I switched off.  Then I
conscientiously switched back to stand-by and drove on.  Perhaps the
real answer was to teleport myself to some other planet?

The door of the shop swung inwards against the slew of mail on the
floor: catalogues and bills, orders and bills ... I was bending over in
an undignified way to gather them up when a demonic voice began to
scream at me.  My first impulse was to run.  On second thoughts, I
hurtled the length of the shop, fitted the correct key into my new and
unfamiliar alarm system, and silenced it.  Then I leaned against the
office door jamb until my heart sank back into place.

The post looked wholly uninteresting.  But there might be cheques
probably were some cheques and if I couldn't even bring myself to open
a few envelopes for the sake of money, where had I got to?  I snarled,
tossed the stuff on to the desk and relocked the door without bothering
to set the alarm one shock a day was quite enough and let myself into
the flat.  I was dirty.  I had a rising suspicion that I actually
smelled.  I needed a bath, clean clothes, coffee ... Mr.  Spock
ambushed me at the head of the stairs with one of his dirtiest looks.
Then as always he offered his saintly forgiveness in return for
immediate food.  I opened a tin, refilled his water dish, dumped and
replaced the cat litter.

"And that's you," I said.  "You'll be all right until tomorrow.  I'll
make it up to you.  We'll spend some quality time together."  If I ever
got myself out of this incredible nightmare.

While the bath was running I wandered into the bedroom.  The naked bed
reminded me that I'd dropped the duvet on the sitting-room floor the
previous morning, and I went to find it.  The light on the telephone
answering machine was blinking: one message.  It could wait until I'd
got myself organized.

I'd got as far as the bedroom doorway when I allowed myself to remember
that Davey and I had been there together in that bed how long ago? Last
Monday.  Seven days.  As suddenly as a heartbeat his death was there in
my bedroom.

I'd tried to avoid thinking of that afternoon, but now the memory had
invaded my head.  I wondered whether I'd ever be able to get rid of
that ghost.  He had been there alive, and now he was dead.  He had sat
on that bed, and now... Suddenly it became absolutely essential to
erase the nearness of his presence there, of his touch.  I wanted to
set fire to the place.  As though that would change anything.  As
though I could burn it away.  As though death were contagious.

I was shivering.

I'd actually pulled out one corner of the sheet when a kind of
retrospective uneasiness stopped me.  Because something was wrong.  The
wrongness was connected with the bed or rather the sheet, smooth and
unwrinkled except for the corner that I'd just pulled out.  It had been
tucked wrong.

I wanted to laugh wildly.  I also wanted to run out of the flat and
never come back.  Instead, I made myself look.  Wait: think..  . What
is it?  The sheet had been folded at each mattress corner in two sharp
creases.  Not my doing:

I'm an impatient buncher, not a folder.  Not me.  Somebody else.

That was ridiculous, of course.

Also, I'm what you might call a busy sleeper.  When I get up in the
morning, the bed is always a mess: bottom sheet rucked up, duvet rolled
around me.  Yesterday, when Barnabas's phone call had woken me, I'd
left everything and rushed out.  Today, the bottom sheet of my bed was
as smooth and comfortable and absolutely wrong as it could be, and I
knew as clearly as though I had witnessed it that a stranger had walked
into my bedroom, breathed my air, searched my things ... I gritted my
teeth to stop a scream or a sob.  Wardrobe door open messy, normal.
Chest of drawers underwear scattered over the top, hairbrush and
make-up tangled in it: normal.  I looked into the drawers: the antique
gold watch chain with turquoise bead insets, my mother's crescent-moon
diamond pin, the baroque pearl and silver engagement ring... nothing
had gone.  Bathroom?  Kitchen?  Living room?

I stood in the doorway.  The sun had come out; dust motes danced in the
air.  I must somehow find the time to clean the place up.  Don't be
stupid, what does it matter now?  The television, the video player, the
music centre were there, my camera still in the drawer of the
sideboard.  I kept thinking that this thing or that was out of place,
but I couldn't be sure, I couldn't be sure..  .

The flashing light on the answering machine began to annoy me.  I
pressed a button and listened to the tape rewind.  It was a woman's
voice, familiar yet momentarily unrecognizable.  "Dido?  This is Sally.
Will you phone us,

pet?  In case you don't have the number, it's still 766590.  You will
phone, won't you?"

By the time she'd finished, I'd identified the speaker: my one-time
mother-in-law, Sally Winner.  I started to reset the machine, but
stopped because there was a second message, although the machine seemed
not to have noticed the fact: Pat's voice starting in mid-sentence."..
. and so Father should come to us for a couple of days, Dido, so will
you please persuade him?  And phone me the MINUTE you get back there,
yes?  "Click.

I stood listening to the machine reset itself.  Not an important
message.  What was important was that although I hadn't heard it
before, Sally's phone call had recorded over it.

My answering machine works very simply.  When you reset it, the message
cassette rewinds.  There is no way that you can prevent subsequent
messages from recording over older ones.  Somebody had recently
listened to the tape and then reset the machine, not realizing how this
make works.  This 'somebody' was the intruder who had replaced my
bottom sheet.  Why?  Davey?  Why?

I switched the machine off altogether, because it was my evidence.  It
felt important not to lose it; or I'd have to phone Paul Grant and say,
"Come quickly, somebody has broken into the flat to make my bed for
me': not really a credible complaint.

I reached for the telephone, but at the last moment found myself
dialling Pat's number.  She answered sharply and I could hear sounds of
warfare in the background by which I knew that my nephews were home
from school.

"I can't talk now!"  she informed me unnecessarily.  "I'll ring you
this evening.  I want to discuss what we're going to do about Barnabas
and all this business .. ."

"I'm going back to his flat quite soon," I said wickedly, 'so I'll
phone you from there and we can all discuss him."

The pause confirmed my suspicion that Pat wanted another conference
about Whether I Was Taking Proper Care of Father, and preferred to keep
it confidential.

"He's fine," I assured her sweetly; 'in fact, the whole business seems
to have given him a new interest."  I'd meant to tell her about Job
Warren, but my annoyance stopped me: why did she have to assume that
Barnabas was no longer capable of knowing what was good for him?  "By
the way..  ."  This was why I'd phoned, of course; I made my voice
casual.  "By the way, when exactly did you leave that message?  I may
just have missed you."

"Oh, it doesn't matter.  Just after I got the boys to bed yesterday, I
suppose.  You've taken long enough to ring back."

I told her truthfully that I'd been spending the time with Barnabas,
and hung up.  My intruder might have had all the hours of darkness, if
he'd needed them.  It didn't help.

Next in the order of business was to locate Paul Grant.  I tried his
personal number without success.  At the station, a voice told me that
he was out and promised to get him to phone me when he came back.  I
left the number of the mobile in case it took him a while to get the
message, and gave up, cursing.

Finally I pulled myself together to ring Sally.

Sally Winner was a retired blonde bombshell, pushing sixty when I'd
known her but still wowing 'em behind the bar of a pub in Leicester.  I
hadn't spoken to her for three years, and I wondered whether she had
changed.  I'd always liked her.

"Dido?  Dido, dear, it's good to hear your voice.  How are you?"

I could hear Davey's tones in her voice, and it took me a moment to
reply.  "I'm well, Sally.  How are you?  I'm so sorry about Davey.  I
should have phoned you."

"Thanks, pet.  It's a funny business, losing a child.  It just doesn't
seem right, even with somebody like Davey who was always pushing his
luck, eh?"

I told her I knew what she meant.

"I wanted to tell you about the funeral," she went on.  "They say we
can bury him now.  We thought Wednesday, up here.  Will you come?  You
and your dad too, if he can?  Davey told us he'd been ill, so if he
can't make it, we'd understand, but we'd be glad to see you here."

I said that I wasn't sure about Barnabas, but yes, I would be there.

"The thing is .. ."  Her voice trailed off briefly.  "The thing is, I
thought I'd better tell you Ilona will be here.  I hope you're okay
about that."

I told her that I was certainly okay about it.  I was more than okay
about having another chance to corner Ilona.  I got the details, and we
protested our mutual regard.  I still liked Sally.

With nothing else crying out to be done, I took my delayed and tepid
bath, washed my hair, put on clean clothes, and took both phones
downstairs to the shop to sort out the neglected mail while I was
waiting for my detective to surface.  The catalogues went to one side;
by the time I could read them, any bargains would be long gone.  There
were three orders from my own last catalogue, all for books that had
been sold, and bills for telephone and electricity which would have to
wait.  With only the barest of hesitations I threw everything into the
bin, which gave me a feeling of achievement.

In the midst of my self-congratulation, the shop bell pinged.  I'd
forgotten to lock the door, and somebody had decided to ignore the
closed sign.  I bounced into the shop.

"Sorry, I'm not open on Mondays.  Could you come back tomorrow,
perhaps?"

"Dido Hoare?"  The voice was soft, with a tinge of East End about it,
and monotonous; it turned the question into a statement.  "My name is
Campbell, Marty Campbell.  I was a friend of Davey's."

The intruder stood silhouetted against the brightness from the street.
I took a step forward, trying to see his face.  He was a solid man of
medium height, dressed in a grey suit and what looked like a regimental
tie.  I could see grey hair, but his face seemed too young to fit it.
There was an impression of physical hardness, like somebody who spent
time in an expensive gym.  I decided that he was lying.  Davey's
friends looked different.  Poorer, for one thing.

"Davey's dead," I said.

"That's why I came.  I didn't want to bother Ilona, but I wondered
whether you could tell me what happened?"

It made me uneasy to see him standing so still by the door.  I couldn't
focus.  "I'm sorry, I don't know... He was killed.  Murdered."

"We'll all miss him.  Do they know who did it?"

"No."  I shook myself mentally.  "How did you know him?"

The answer came without hesitation.  "I met him a year or two ago when
he was exhibiting in a little gallery in Camden Town.  I bought one of
his pictures.  I commissioned something else about three months ago: I
don't suppose he finished it."

I tried to adjust my view of this man, to see him as a patron of the
arts.  "He owed you money," I guessed aloud.

"Well, it doesn't matter now."

I said casually, "I remember that exhibition.  Which painting did you
buy?"

There was no hint of the evasion I half expected.  "An acrylic,
medium-sized an interior scene with a lot of red and orange in it.  It
was called "Senses in Sunlight 4".  Do you remember it?"

So the man was legitimate.  I duly adjusted my idea of art patrons.
"No, not really.  You liked his work?"

"He was lazy, of course," Campbell said flatly.  "I know he painted a
lot, but it often came too easy.  But there was power in the best
stuff.  I liked that.  Too bad."

There didn't seem to be much more to say, though the silence seemed to
ask me to speak.  But the shop door opened.  For some reason, I was
overcome with relief when Paul Grant stepped inside.  Campbell half
turned as Paul hesitated momentarily and then walked past him.  I
opened my mouth.

"Good afternoon.  I'd like to look at travel books, please."

I closed my mouth, and opened it again to say, "To your left."  Damn
it: my voice sounded odd, and what was Paul playing at?

"Give Ilona my sympathy if you see her," the man in the grey suit was
saying.  "Will you be seeing her soon?"

In other circumstances I might have told him about the funeral, but I
wanted to speak to Paul.  "If I do I'll certainly tell her you sent
your sympathy."

He still hesitated.  "Yes, remember me to her.  She'll know my name.
"And left at last, turning right towards the main road.

Before the door had shut behind him, I was whirling towards Grant,
words tumbling.  "Somebody's been upstairs!  That's why I phoned you.
Nothing's missing, but I..  There was only one possible explanation. "I
know it's been searched."

But Grant was leaning against a book case, ignoring the wobble, plainly
only half hearing what I'd said.  "Who was that?  I know him, but I
couldn't place him.  I have alarm bells ringing all over the place.
Customer?  Friend?"

"I said, my flat's been searched!"

He looked at me sharply.  "What's missing?"

"I told you: nothing, as far as I can see.  My jewellery is still
there.  But somebody broke in last night, all the same."  I
explained.

He said, "Let's look."

We looked; and at the end I said again, "Nothing's gone, you see.  Like
downstairs.  What are they looking for?"

"You're making a habit of this," he said.  It sounded bad-tempered.
"You mean that you can actually be sure that someone removed the sheet
from your bed and then put it back again?"

"Of course!"  I could hear my voice rising.  "Don't you make your own
bed?"

"Fitted sheets.  All right, all right.  It looks as though somebody
wanted to see if you'd hidden anything in the mattress, and they'd
prefer you not to notice.  So they're still looking.  Whatever it is,
at least they know now that you don't have it.  Winner didn't have it
either.  I wonder if they thought Professor Warren had it?"

I said, "This is crazy!  What?  How could he?"

He sat down on the edge of the bed.  "I don't want to frighten you, but
I think I should.  Look I accept that somebody searched the place.  I'm
going to send somebody round.  Nice grilles, but they obviously got in
through the front door.  You need a better lock.  And a security system
like in the shop."

I said, not particularly to him, "I hate this."

"I know, but people are being killed!  Look: what if they thought your
American had got what they wanted?  Christ knows how they found out
about him, but maybe they were doing one of their invisible searches in
his hotel room when he came back and surprised them.  So did he have
what they wanted?"

"No, how could he?"

"Okay.  That left you, so they came looking.  Unless you just haven't
noticed that something's gone, they're still looking.  What will they
do next?"

"Come and ask me where it is?"

Paul nodded down at me as though I were a clever student.  "Right.  The
best idea is for you to get out of London until they give up."

"How long would I have to stay away?  What would I do about Barnabas?
And the business?"

He said, "What happens to them if you wind up dead?"

"And you can't protect me."

He hesitated.  "I could tell you that I would, but you know it's
impossible, don't you?"

Did I?

He shifted from a hug to a little shake.  "Nobody can protect you the
way you mean.  It might work for as long as you were willing to live in
a sort of prison never be alone, always keep the doors locked, have a
guard with you in the shop."

"That's insane!  You'll catch them."  Or, at the worst, they'll have to
give up eventually.

His voice rose.  "We haven't got any idea who they are or what they
want except that it's worth murdering for.  Don't you understand?  No
clues!  Holborn don't have a hope of finding out anything about your
American unless something turns up.  We're depending on luck, more or
less.  We're just waiting for somebody to decide to talk.  Or somebody
else to be killed.  I might as well tell you that Holborn don't even
accept that there's any link between the two deaths, and my Super
Gillespie, you saw what he's like agrees."

I closed my eyes and fought the temptation to lean against him and
howl.  "I don't blame them," I admitted eventually.  "Barnabas and I
keep wondering .. ."  There was something I wanted to say, so I tried
not to think about Paul, but to concentrate on remembering.  The
thought struggled to the surface.  "Ilona.  She must know more than she
told me.  I'm sure she knew what Davey was doing."

"Agreed.  But she's not telling.  I'm going up to Stafford myself to
interview her again.  I don't hope for much, though -I know the type.
She's so scared that she doesn't trust anybody, and unless I can
persuade her that she's going to be in more trouble if she doesn't talk
to us than if she does ... I can't think what else to do at the
moment."

I said sourly, "Good luck."

He laughed and we looked at each other.  "Look, I want you to do me a
favour: go over the place once more.  Do it now, while I'm here.  I'll
be phoning a security firm that we recommend."

I sat down beside him on the bed.  "Most of the time I can't believe
that this is happening.  You really do think I'm in danger?"

Grant made a grab at my upper arm and pulled me around.  "If I could
arrest you, I'd put you away for your own safety.  Go and stay with
your old auntie or something, even if it's just for a week."

I said, "I'm staying with Barnabas tonight."

"All right.  I'll warn the Hornsey station."

"And Barnabas has bought me a mobile telephone."

His expression lightened a shade.  "Good!  Just keep the damn thing
with you.  Even in the bath.  Give me the number."

I did, and promised meekly that I would bathe, sleep and eat in the
presence of my new telephone.

"And get off to Professor Hoare as soon as we've had another look
around here.  You'd better not be alone."

"I have to take some things."

"Then look and pack at the same time.  I have time to drive you up to
Crouch Hill or follow your car, if you'd rather.  You can come back to
meet the security people -I'll make sure that they get here before this
evening."

He hesitated, and before I could read his intentions, kissed me hard
and briefly and let me go.

I searched the flat, half listening to the murmur of his voice on the
telephone.  Mr.  Spock woke up and got in my way.  Aside from
discovering that the missing eight of diamonds from a pack of cards I'd
thrown out months ago had been tucked well under the edge of the
bedroom rug, there was nothing unexpected.  Nor were there any gaps,
I'd swear to it, although I suspected that searching for something not
to be there was a bad idea.

In the end I gave up.  I stuffed a change of underwear, night things,
and my mother's jewellery into a shopping bag, and we descended the
stairs to the street with the memory of the kiss still there in the
silence between us.  At the bottom, I double-locked the flat door, then
let myself into the shop long enough to reactivate the alarm.

As we reached the Volvo, Grant said, "The man who's coming is called
Moser, from Double-A Security.  He'll be here at three o'clock on the
dot, and he'll wait for you in front of the shop.  Don't get here
before he does, and don't go in until he's identified himself-
right?"

I said that it was.

Paul put a hand on the roof of the car, waiting for me to unlock it. "I
guess we're lucky your intruder had a moment's carelessness with the
answering machine.  I'll tell you one thing: I've only once seen a
place turned over as neatly as yours, and we got pulled out of that
because we were told from higher up to back off.  That was MI5, I
think.  You've pulled some real professionals this time."

I started to say something and was stopped by the look that came over
his face.

"Oh, hell professionals.  The man in your shop I've got it!"

I remembered then.  "He said his name was Campbell.  Davey sold him a
painting last year."

Grant closed his eyes, He seemed to be inspecting a distasteful mental
image.  Eventually he said, "Marty Campbell.  He was pointed out to me
once.  The bastard even gave you his real name.  He does drugs,
gambling, protection, a spot of murder though I think he hires rather
than does nowadays.  There's a story that he's the only Englishman with
a real line to the Soho Triads.  I don't know about that, but I'm damn
sure that he's got Mafia connections.  Marty Campbell.  Shit!"

I was trying to make this fit.  "He said he'd heard about Davey's
murder.  He asked about Ilona, too you heard that, didn't you?"

"You didn't tell him where she is?"

I remembered and breathed a sigh of relief.  "No, I didn't.  You'd just
come in, and I wanted to get rid of him."

"All right."  He jerked open the door of the Volvo.  "Go on, get in.
I'll follow you to Crouch Hill, and I'll ring you later on about five.
Sit tight.  Don't do anything, don't say anything, don't be clever.
Campbell is a premier-league player... I just wish I knew what the hell
his interest is!"

I bit back a comment about how much I enjoyed being ordered around, got
into the car and locked all the doors before I started the engine.
Also, I kept enough of my attention on my rear-view mirror to be sure
not to lose his car as it followed mine north.  Nothing happened unless
you're counting the traffic jam at Highbury Corner, and there's nothing
unusual about that.

At Crouch Hill, I remembered that I'd forgotten the milk.

Tears

A slow train and a taxi driver with an insecure sense of direction
delivered me late to the crematorium.  I pushed open the door of a red
brick building that was pretending to be a church and slid on to a seat
at the back.

Twenty or thirty people were scattered about the pew-like benches.  I
knew a couple of faces: Sally herself, hunched in the front row beside
Ron to whom she had been not-married all the time I'd known her and
Ilona, sitting with a middle-aged woman I didn't recognize.  One or two
others seemed vaguely familiar, although I couldn't attach names to
them probably old friends of Davey's who'd turned up to our wedding.
Most of the rest looked like Sally's friends and customers, come to
give support.

One other caught my eye: a blond young man in the seat just across the
aisle from me, wearing an expression of harmless boredom.  It was only
because I was watching him while I tried to remember where I'd seen him
before that I suddenly realized he was examining the faces of the
congregation, one after the other, quite methodically.  That gave me
the name to put to the face: Baden Sergeant Baden.  Were the
Metropolitan Police in the habit of sending detective sergeants to
out-of-town funerals just as a mark of respect, or was he there on
business?

Or the thought trickled in as I started to listen to the eulogy to keep
an eye on me?

Presumably the minister had never known Davey.  He made a resonant job
of giving what was obviously his standard funeral speech, with inserted
references to the 'tragic and violent end' of a 'loving son and
talented artist', and finished with an invitation to us to bow our
heads and pray.  It always surprises me when a gathering of everyday
atheists follows this instruction.  I controlled my own impulse to do
as I was told and spent the time trying to see any others in the
congregation whom I ought to make a point of greeting.

There was one rotund figure near the front who looked fleetingly
familiar, but he was half hidden by the people between us, and it
wasn't until the recorded music welled up and we stood to let Sally and
Ron leave the chapel first that I recognized Dan Colbert, of Heritage
Books the only one of Davey's London friends to have made the effort.
Dan was not one of my favourite people, but I was touched that he'd
turned up.  The finality of funerals suddenly made me tearful.

Ron and Sally were standing just outside the door to greet us.  Ron, in
his Sunday suit, looked uneasy.  Sally seemed tired and washed out. She
reached between two friends and grabbed my hand as I came up to her.

"Dido!  Bless you, pet.  You're coming back to the house with us,
aren't you?"

I said that of course I was, and stepped aside to allow other people to
kiss her cheek and murmur.  There was a movement at my elbow.  I turned
to Ilona.  She was wearing a black coat and hat which made her skin
look pasty, and had applied liner and eye shadow to try to camouflage
the redness of her eyes, so that she had managed to impersonate a
miserable clown.  When she nodded at me listlessly, I smelled a blast
of alcohol on her breath and wondered whether she was carrying a flask
and I could ask for a swig.

"Hi.  Are you all right?  You aren't here on your own, are you?"

She shrugged.  "No, Mum's with me."  She indicated the middle-aged
woman in blue who was standing at the edge of the path, now wearing a
self-conscious expression.  "She didn't think we ought to come, but
Sally asked us both to stop overnight."

I said, "Good," and tried to think of some neutral topic.  Most people
keep inexhaustible quantities of small talk for use at funerals and
christenings, but mine had left me in the lurch.  "It was a nice
service," I embarrassed myself by murmuring.

"Yes.  Your father isn't here?"

"I wouldn't let him come.  I was afraid that the return trip might be
too much for him in one day."

"Oh.  Yes ..."  Her voice trailed off.

I cleared my throat.  "Not many of us here from London.  Do you know
any of the locals?  I don't seem to."

"Well..  ."  She stopped.  "That man over there by the kerb.  Do you
know him?  He isn't talking to anybody, and I wondered ..."

I looked.  "That's a detective from London.  One of Inspector Grant's
men.  He hasn't said anything to you?"

Ilona shook her head.  I thought she seemed relieved.

"And," I added, seeing the man himself weaving his way in our direction
through the thinning crowd, 'there's Danny Colbert.  You know him,
don't you?"

She seemed startled, and looked at Colbert from under the brim of her
black hat.  "Yes.  And I don't want to talk to any of Davey's friends
today."  She left me abruptly, and I watched her cross to her mother
and grab at the older woman's arm.  The two of them climbed into one of
the undertaker's limousines.

"Dido, love, sympathy if that's in order."  Colbert had joined me.  He
had dressed for the occasion in what Davey once called his "Oscar Wilde
mode' long black overcoat with astrakhan collar, black wide-brimmed
hat, grey silk foulard, and a stick.  Outside a suburban crematorium in
Leicester, he looked astonishing.

I said, "Thank you, Dan, sympathy is always in order in this hard
world."

He lowered his voice confidentially.  "I trust that Barnabas is well,
though absent.  Doesn't Ilona look like the bride of Frankenstein,
though."

"Barnabas is fine," I said quickly, 'whereas Ilona is not fine."

He changed tack with characteristic swiftness.  "She is bearing up
marvellously, too.  I must just say hello to her."

"I don't think you can.  She's not feeling well.  Her mother's with
her.  Why don't you drop her a note?"

"Because I don't have her current address, my love.  Can you give it to
me?"

I shook my head.  "Actually, Danny, I don't have it either.  I'll tell
you what.  See that man over there in the grey suit?  The one on his
own?  He's a detective sergeant from London.  I'm sure that the police
have Ilona's address.  Why don't you have a word with him?"

Colbert raised a quizzical eyebrow.  "How terribly inappropriate.
Still, if that's what it takes .. ."  He hesitated.  "I suppose that
you came by train?  What time are you going back?  Perhaps we could
travel together and exchange gossip, to say nothing of a few buffet-car
gins?  Will you be at the fair this weekend?"

I had entirely forgotten about the monthly book fair in central London,
at which we both usually had stands -there had been other things on my
mind.  "I imagine so."

"Taking anything that I might be interested in?"

"I hadn't thought about it..."

"Dido!"  Sally's voice was pitched to reach me over conversations and
the sound of cars starting.  "Are you coming, pet?  Bring .. ."

I realized that she was going to suggest that I brought my
interesting-looking companion, and moved with speed.

"Just coming!"  I trilled, grimacing wildly.  Sally is sharp; I caught
the ghost of a grin as I turned back to my companion.  "I'll see you on
Sunday, I guess.  "Bye!"

Sally crammed me into the leading limo between herself and Ron, and we
returned to their flat in the mood of chatty relief that always seems
to follow when a funeral service is completed, and there is nothing
more daunting to face for the rest of the afternoon than tea and
relatives.  The other passengers were two middle-aged women to whom Ron
introduced me.  Family.  Their names promptly vanished from my
memory.

Teacups and plates of food were laid out on the dining table, but
preceded gratefully by unlimited quantities of Scotch.  I helped myself
to a drink of a size appropriate to a near-widow and went looking for
Ilona.  At first I thought she had lost herself, but then I found her
sitting in a corner of the kitchen, holding a drink considerably larger
even than mine.  I found a kitchen chair and plonked it and myself down
between her and the rest of the world.

"When are you coming back to London?"

"I don't know.  Might not be for a while.  Mum wants me to stay up
there with her."

"What about the flat?  All your things?"

"Well, I'll drop back and pack anything I want.  Most of the stuff was
Davey's.  Ron is going down to get that.  If I ever go back to London,
I'll rent somewhere else anyway."

"Yes, of course."

"I'd always be reminded, there."

"Of course.  Look .. . did you talk to Paul Grant?"

Ilona looked puzzled.  "Who?"

"Inspector Grant.  I thought he was going to see you at your mother's
place?"

I thought she looked evasive.  "Oh him.  They don't know a damn thing,
do they."

"Have they asked you?"

She drained her glass.  "What do you mean?"

"Who you think killed Davey?"

She looked at me stolidly.  "How should I know?"

"But you must suspect somebody."

She held out her glass and half stood up, as though she were going for
a refill, but I didn't move and she couldn't get past me without a
physical struggle.

"You're dreaming.  I don't know anything about it."

I reached out and removed half a bottle of Scotch from the hand of one
of the middle-aged ladies who was passing, and filled both our glasses.
I wasn't sure that I could actually drink Ilona Mitchell under the
table, but I was counting on her having had enough already to be at a
disadvantage.

"Ilona, tell me one thing: where did the money come from?"

"What money?"

"Davey's money.  The money he bought the car with, the money he took me
out to dinner with a couple of days before they killed him."

She sat very still.  "He was out with you?  He said it was business."

I took a deep, only slightly wobbly breath.  "It was business,
actually.  You know perfectly well that it wasn't really an accident
when you and he found me that night in Banbury.  He knew I was going to
be there, and you came looking for me."  I hesitated, because I wasn't
sure whether I wanted to frighten her or appeal to her for help.  "You
must have known what that was about.  Why was Davey trying to scare me?
What, exactly, did he want?"

She was silent.  I saw her knuckles tighten on the glass.

I sighed.  "The police know it was Davey who broke into my shop.  What
was he looking for?"

She took a sip of Scotch.  "He didn't say."

"But he was looking for something."

She examined her drink.  "Yeah."

"And he never said what?"

A thread of disbelief must have crept into my voice, because she looked
directly at me then.  "No, never.  But he didn't mean you any harm, not
really.  He always liked you, you know.  If you hadn't turfed him out,
you and your dad, he wouldn't never have left you."

Well, if that was what Davey had told her... I let it pass for the
moment and concentrated on the story.  "Tell me what you really
think."

She lowered her voice.  "The one thing I do know, he was in a corner.
He was working for somebody, yes -don't ask me who, because he'd never
say."  She continued to watch her drink as closely as though she were
waiting for it to change colour and play the National Anthem.

After the silence had stretched on too long, I said, "Don't you even
suspect who it might have been?"

I was surprised when she flashed me a brief and, I could have sworn,
ugly look.  Her voice rose a little.  "I swear he never said.  The only
thing .. ."

"What?"

"The only thing he ever said about it was that he met the man a couple
of years ago, while he was still with you.  I thought..."

' What?"  It was like drawing teeth.

"Well, I got the idea that some friend of yours introduced them,
somebody he was hanging around with in the old days, when he was doing
the hand-coloured prints.  You know."

She stared me in the eye, and her chin jutted out.  Was I supposed to
have introduced Davey to his fatal new employment?  I stared back until
she returned to her contemplation of her drink.  "But I don't know
that, either.  Davey didn't believe in telling you his business, did
he.  There was just a lot of money for a little while, more than he'd
ever had before."

"What was he doing for this man?"

Ilona laughed shortly.  "He said, running errands, minder, that kind of
thing."

"Drugs?"

She hesitated.  "Maybe.  Must have been.  He wouldn't say.  He owed
somebody, and they were pushing him.  Maybe he lost something or had it
taken off him.  He was scared."

"So he was killed by the man he owed?"

Ilona shivered silently.  I poured her a bit more.  I poured myself a
lot more.

"There's got to be some way of finding out who it was he was working
for."

She shook her head.

But there did have to be a way, because I couldn't live like this.  Out
of the whiskey mist, a memory swam.  I said, "Oh before I forget: I
have a message for you.  Somebody called Marty Campbell sends his
condolences."

Her body jerked as though I'd hit her, and she hesitated for just long
enough that I knew she was going to lie, and said, "Who?"  As suddenly
as though a tap had been turned, tears were pouring down her face.  I
kicked my chair aside and reached out a hand to take away her glass. As
I pulled her to her feet, I felt myself wobble slightly.  How much had
I drunk?

Somebody came up behind me as Ilona stood there with her head down,
weeping and speechless.  I turned and saw Ron.  "She ought to go to
bed."

He looked alarmed.  "I'll get her mother."  People gathered and the
weeping Ilona vanished.

Sally was there.  "You'd better have a cup of tea," she said, 'and a
sandwich.  You two weren't having a row, were you?"

I shook my head, feeling infinitely tired and depressed.  "Of course
not.  We were trying to work out who killed Davey, though or why."

Sally regarded me grimly for a moment.  "Better not find out, maybe?
It's not your business.  Leave it alone."

I whispered, "Maybe," because I hadn't the time or energy to explain
why now it was my business more than anybody else's.  I put a spoonful
of sugar into my tea.  Hang the pounds, I needed something
strengthening, and the sight of the little triangular sandwiches just
made me feel sick.  I wished that I wasn't a two-hour journey and more
from my home, because that was where I wanted to be: safe in my own bed
with all the doors locked, contemplating my discovery that Ilona did
know Marty Campbell, or at least his name, and that she was scared to
death of him.  And that if she feared him so much, then there was an
equally good reason for me to be terrified too.

17 The Knot

"I am, after all," Barnabas was saying, 'an experienced detective.  In
a manner of speaking.  Not that I'd lay claim to pursuing criminals in
the usual sense retrieving heirs or inheritances or erring spouses." He
caught himself and blushed.

I said, "Put your finger on this while I tie the knot."

It had been a confused kind of morning.  I'd been woken early by
Barnabas, phoning nervously to ask whether I'd made it safely through
the night back to my own flat, and only reassured by the evidence of
his own ears that I was alive and the mobile still worked.

It was too early to go downstairs and too late to go back to bed, so I
crept out into the corridor and carefully disarmed the winking red
lights of the new state-of-the-art security system, by which apparently
I was linked to the police, the Army, and possibly NATO.  Then I made
coffee and had a bath.

At that point I made the mistake of noticing the rising tide of
grottiness all around.  I cleaned carpets, dusted, and put away the
dishes that had accumulated in the drying rack over the past week.
Finding two black beetles in the cupboard under the sink, I swept them
up and tilted them into my rubbish sack let them live in luxury at the
dump, not with me.  I even took the sack out for Friday's pick-up. Then
I made more coffee, ate toast and the last of the dry-cured bacon
lurking in the bottom of the fridge, and listened to the nine o'clock
news.

I was so wired by my own virtuous efforts that I decided at that point
to go downstairs and begin packing stock for the book fair on Sunday
morning.  It's unusual for me to get down to this chore before about
Saturday closing time, but I know myself: it isn't wise to ignore a
rare access of such energy, because it goes away again as suddenly as
it comes.

I'd pulled armloads of books off the shelves and was standing, pencil
in hand, looking at the copy of the French yachting quarto by Philippe
Daryl with the smashing coloured title page (and wondering whether I
had the nerve to price it at 350) when Barnabas's second call of the
day came through on the office phone: had I remembered that Saturday
was Thomas's eighth birthday?  No, I hadn't.  My younger nephew, a
frightening, self-confident child, had barely crossed my mind for
weeks.  Family is family, though, and a shopping expedition was
unavoidable.

Which was why I was now crouching in the emptyish space in the middle
of my father's sitting-room carpet, enveloping colourful boxes in a
still more colourful spaceship-adorned wrapping paper.  If I could get
them to the post office on my way home, I'd still be able to open the
shop for the afternoon.

"I'm a textual detective.  I investigate errant vowels, missing words
and unidentified poems.  I've never made a bad mistake at any rate,
never published one.  That bow looks crooked."

I said, "That's the last bit of ribbon, so it will have to do.  Anyway,
kids tear the paper off birthday presents so quickly that they never
notice."

"And my insight isn't doing a blind bit of good."

I said, "This is real life.  People getting killed.  Sally up there in
Leicester thinking that it's indecent for her to be alive when her only
child is dead.  Ilona scared out of her wits about something she
doesn't dare talk about.  Job Warren's daughters .. ."

"I know, I know.  And if you're running a metaphysical image to its
lair, at least you have a text.  All you do is gnaw at it until you
eliminate the other possibilities and work out what it really is."
Barnabas passed me a sheet of brown wrapping paper and went to sit at
his desk under the window.  He looked tired.

He'd been brooding, and I knew that Professor Warren's death had
touched him in a way that Davey's hadn't.  He felt that Davey had gone
into things with his eyes more or less open leaving aside his genius
for ignoring life's little realities and been caught out.  His death
had been so horrible that I couldn't let myself even think about its
sudden violence; but it was the blind unfairness of Job's slaughter
that hit Barnabas harder.  Personally, I kept wanting his death to have
been an ugly accident of modern life and nothing to do with us.  Then
Barnabas could stop feeling responsible.  Then I could stop feeling
pursued .. .

I looked at my wristwatch.  "Nearly one o'clock.  I'll drop these off
at the post office.  They can go first class -it'll cost the earth, but
it serves us both right for forgetting.  They'll get there by Saturday
morning."

"I'll give you the money for the postage.  Do you have to go back? Ever
since you told me about your intruder, I've been worried whenever
you're out of my sight."

I gave him a quick peck.  "I know.  But I can't stop living.  And the
way things are there now, I don't think that a cockroach could get into
the flat without hordes of policemen turning up.  Besides nobody's
actually tried to hurt me.  Remember, even the search was done
carefully to keep me from noticing."

Barnabas nodded but still looked doubtful.  "Well, ah, do you want a
cup of tea before you go?"

I conceded that I did, and Barnabas put the kettle on, cleared his
throat, and said, "Do you want to tell me about the funeral?"

"Not really.  I was glad I went.  Sally hasn't taken against me or
anything."

"What about Ilona?  I wonder whether the boy detective shouldn't arrest
her for questioning and put the fear of God into her?"

"She's too frightened to talk about it."

"The man from the Mafia?"

I grunted and went to take the milk out of the fridge.  He was running
out again.

"If..  ."  Barnabas began and stopped to pour tea before heaving
himself into speech again.  "If Davey was looking for something when he
broke into the shop, and somebody else was looking for the same thing
when they searched your flat, what, I ask myself, will they do next?"

"Give up," I said, 'with luck.  They must realize, by now, that I don't
have whatever it is."

' Suppose they think that you know where it is?  Or that Ilona does,
for that matter?"

I drank tea and tried to think.  "We keep going round and round.  And
anyway, you realize that would let Job Warren out, because he hadn't
been near us this visit.  You know, Barnabas, maybe he isn't connected
after all?"

Barnabas shifted in his chair and raised an index finger.  "I remember
what I was going to say before you distracted me: if Davey was looking
for something in the shop, it must have been a book.  What else would
you possibly try to hide in a bookshop?  I think we've been postulating
something much too complicated all this while.  Now: why was poor
Warren coming to see us?  To buy books!  And so they killed him."

"Books?"  I stopped listening, because it felt as though a lot of rusty
cogs and levers were stirring and clattering into a new pattern.
Something cold grew in the pit of my stomach.  I cut the knot.

"Ireland."

"Dido?"

I whispered, "The Ireland Collection.  Oh God, Barnabas, that's it! I'm
such a fool!  Davey, I never told you, he said ... I can't remember...
He said he had a buyer for the Ireland.  Wait.  No he said that..  .
that he could run it to somebody who'd give us over the catalogue
price.  I told you he was full of ideas!"

"What did you say?"

"That it was already on order."

"And he said ... ?"

"I don't..  . oh."

"You told him about Warren?"

"Yes.  Yes, we talked about it.  Davey wanted me to tell Professor
Warren that I'd already sold it.  Yes."

For a long time we stared at each other over the teapot while I tried
to dig into my memory.

"He said .. . damn it, I wasn't paying that much attention.  You know
what he was like.  I do remember him saying that we shouldn't throw
three thousand pounds away.  But why!  Even for ten thousand pounds, or
fifteen why?  Barnabas, it's nothing!  He must have been absolutely
desperate ..."

I could hear my voice rising.  I stopped myself.

"You're as white as a sheet.  Drink your tea.  Would you like something
stronger?  Dido, my dear?"

"Where is it?"

I wasn't talking about his whiskey.

"I haven't moved it."

When Job Warren phoned from Massachusetts to say that he wanted the
collection for the Constance Hance, and that he was coming to London,
I'd passed on Barnabas's usual invitation.  Then I'd packed up the
Ireland things in an old cardboard box and dumped it in a corner of
Barnabas's sitting room.  They were Professor Warren's little treat:
this year's conversation piece picked out to show him during the
evening, bait for his visit to the shop.  Every year there was the
little treat.

I slid the box out from under the table and opened the flaps.

The Ireland Collection consisted of thirteen old books and a folder of
faded letters and manuscripts smelling of dust.  It had turned up a
couple of years before on a buying trip Davey and I had made to the
West Country just before he had removed himself from my bed, if not my
life.  I'd found them when I'd opened a box on the floor of a bookshop
in Hereford whose proprietor had recently purchased several country
house libraries of no very great interest.

The moment I saw it, I knew it was treasure.

Over the next year I'd carted the collection around to book fairs with
decreasing enthusiasm.  I'd also catalogued the lot, as a collection,
twice.  At various times people had looked and said how interesting it
all was, but nobody had showed the slightest desire to buy it.

When this kind of thing happens and it happens all the time among
antiquarian dealers at first you think that everybody is blind or mad
not to appreciate what a wonderful, exciting, unique find you are
offering them.  But after a while you decide that you've simply made a
mistake and you might as well accept the fact.  For my last catalogue
I'd decided to make one final attempt before giving in and putting the
thing into auction.  I'd even raised the price.  The collection had
been sitting at 6000 ever since we'd bought it.  I put it up to 10,000
five figures is a more eye-catching sum, I thought, and what the hell.
I've noticed that raising the price of an unsellable curiosity to
ludicrous heights very often succeeds.  Magic.

But Davey had said twelve thousand, and probably meant more.  That was
multiplied craziness.  What kind of lies had he told somebody about
it?

I pulled everything out, one item at a time, and laid it all on the
carpet.  The dull pages, rubbed sheepskin and cracked hinges smirked at
me.  Why on earth had I ever got excited about this mouldering pile?
Why had I thought that anybody would pay ten thousand pounds for such
rubbish?

A copy of the catalogue entry sat on top of the books, but I scarcely
needed to refer to it I'd used the same paragraph several times, and I
almost knew it by heart;

IRELAND, William Henry and Samuel An interesting collection of books
and also autograph mss belonging to the celebrated Shakespearean
forger, W. H. Ireland, whose excuse was, "I only did it to please the
old man' (like Cain and Electra but I digress) and his father, Samuel,
the engraver and litterateur.  Thirteen books from Samuel's library,
all with his elegant signature and date of purchase, three with his
bookplate, one (Mrs.  Elizabeth Montague's Essay on the Genius of
Shakespeare, 2nd edn."  1770) with extensive annotations, mostly
ejaculations of approval.  Together with one ms and five als from
various correspondents, mostly brief and social, and A LETTER FROM W.
H. IRELAND (2pp May 1794) hinting at a forthcoming 'find' ("If it
should be what my hopes predict how it will confound the skeptics').
The books are in rather poor condition, some showing scorch marks,
perhaps evidence that they were part of the collection which was in the
Birmingham Library fire in 1879.  The letters are in excellent order,
though that from the son shows traces of a mount.  Full details on
request.

As a collection (20 pieces in all) 10,000

This had been written by Barnabas, of course, in his best
fusty-academic style.  He'd made it sound tempting and romantic hadn't
he?  I looked up at the author from my seat on his carpet.  "What am I
going to do?  I'd better take them away with me."

"Leave them for the time being.  They'll be safe here, and I should
like to find out why Davey or anybody else would think that this
collection is worth killing for.  If he did, of course.  He was an
obsessive liar.  As for you, my dear, you'd better phone the Constance
Hance and ask whether they still want this.  It's .. . what, about
seven a.m. there now?  Try in two hours.  The sooner this is out of our
hands, the happier I shall be."

I felt too dazed to argue.  The box would certainly be safer here for
the moment.  And the scheme came in a flash at the book fair on Sunday,
I could buy drinks for everybody to celebrate having got rid of the
Ireland Collection at last.  Word gets around fast at the fairs: soon
forty antiquarian book dealers would know that Dido Hoare had struck it
lucky, and that the Ireland Collection had left the country.  If that
message didn't reach any interested party in about half an hour, I
didn't know booksellers.

Clutching my new idea, I felt almost cheerful for the first time since
Davey's death.  I calculated it: seventy-two hours to go.

The Dutiful Son

I turned into George Street and left the car where I could see it from
my windows.  It wouldn't have surprised me much to come home to a hole
in the ground, but both street and shop looked normal, and the security
alarm above the window was displaying its diligent little red flash in
reassuring silence.  I stumbled into the shop, disarmed the alarm
system, and burped.  Apparently stress affects my digestion.  The
present situation had to be changed before it changed me into a
belching wreck.

On the principle that when you are under attack the best thing to do is
call in the guards, I rang the police station and caught Paul Grant at
his desk for once.  The relief of hearing that odd, barked greeting,
"DI," left me speechless for a few seconds.

"It's Dido .. ."

He cut through.  "What's wrong?"

"Nothing at the moment."  What, exactly, was I expecting to get from
this call?  I hesitated.  "I need to talk to you about something that's
come up.  Could we meet... could you come over?"

He echoed my own hesitation.  "Have you eaten?"

"Can you?"

I thought there was another pause before he laughed.  "Even policemen
are allowed lunch.  Besides, it is business, isn't it?"

We agreed that he would finish what he was doing and pick me up in ten
minutes.  That gave me just time to phone the Constance Hance, locate a
voice that admitted to being Professor Warren's assistant, and find out
that they knew nothing about the Ireland Collection, certainly had
initiated no purchase order, and had no authority to make any kind of
arrangement and would it be all right if the library got back to me as
soon as possible?

"Actually," I explained grimly, 'somebody else wants it."  Hearing
myself use the high-pressure salesman's age-old threat though more
truthfully than usual I started to babble self-consciously.  "Of
course, I consider that you have the first refusal, and I wouldn't
dream of giving it to anybody else if you still want it, but I really
must know soon.  Very soon."

There was a silence from the other end, and then the politely dubious
tone that I would have used myself, finding some complete stranger
trying to pressure me into paying fifteen thousand dollars for
something I'd never heard of.  "The thing is," the voice explained
doggedly, "I don't know anything about Job's purchase orders, and
nobody knows at this moment in time what the university is going to do
about replacing him or extending the acquisitions programme.  That kind
of thing was always his baby.  I guess it could take weeks to sort it
out."

That was more or less what I ought to have anticipated.  I promised to
fax him a copy of the catalogue entry, and he promised to get a
decision from some administrator by Monday; but I suspected that I
wasn't going to get rid of my embarrassing possession easily, after
all.  I had a momentary, shameful impulse to offer him the collection
for the price of the postage, but I couldn't quite force myself to take
this wise but drastic step.  Stubbornness?  Or just greed?

I tore the relevant page out of a spare catalogue, stuck it to a sheet
of my business stationery, and went around the corner to a print shop
with a fax machine.  When it had gone off to Massachusetts, I felt as
though I'd come to a blank wall.  Monday was four whole days away.  It
felt like much too long to go on living in a war zone.

I stopped to buy some indigestion tablets and was examining my face in
the mirror over the hand basin in my office, wondering whether it was
middle age or tension that was making my body crumble, when the shop
door rattled.  I was so worried about wrinkles that I stopped long
enough to wipe some face powder over them before I could bear to go and
let Paul in.

He was looking depressingly good.  He grinned, bent down, and planted a
kiss on the end of my nose.  I held his hand a little too tightly,
probably and reciprocated.

"How are things?  How's your father?"

"Things could be better, but he's all right."

"What about you?"

I hesitated.  "Not so good.  I'm not used to this drama... I keep
thinking that somebody's going to jump me."

He looked quizzical.  "The alarm system should help."

"It keeps reminding me of things I'd rather not think of."

"Has something happened?"

"Yes and no.  Not exactly happened."  I stopped, because I'd just
realized what my problem was: I was wanting somebody like Paul to hold
me tight and tell me that everything was going to be all right, that he
would see to it and I wasn't to be afraid.  It was a rather shameful
insight.

As a matter of principle I stepped back and looked up at him with what
I hoped was a mature and self-reliant expression.  "I've been talking
to Barnabas, and I think we've worked out what this is all about what
they're looking for and how Job Warren got involved."

He looked at me intently.  "Shall we go and sit down and talk?  You
look as though you need a drink.  Can you close for a while?"

I felt as though I needed not a drink, but about half a bottle of gin,
so I explained that I had no problem with that.  "Good.  Look, let's
get you right away from here.  Come back to my place.  It's private,
there's lots to drink, and we can send out for a pizza.  We won't be
interrupted there."

The idea of being both safe and private was so welcome that my
indigestion vanished.  I could even contemplate the pizza.  "Can you
leave work just like that?"

"I can't.  I haven't."  He grimaced oddly.  "I'm interviewing you
again.  You've just told me that you've cracked it remember?"

"And you've just invited me to your place?"

He jerked his head.  "Don't tell my Super that I'm fraternizing not
until it's all wound up, at least.  But I don't believe you've done
anything criminal have you?"

For some reason it hadn't struck me that policemen might be discouraged
from personal involvement in their work.  Being in a worrying mood, I
worried about this complication as I locked up, and went on worrying
for the duration of the drive.

It took us twenty minutes to get through back streets to a warehouse
conversion overlooking a minor canal just north of the Isle of Dogs. We
took the lift to the top floor, standing close, and he unlocked a heavy
wood-and-steel door into a bright space with tall, uncurtained windows
and bare brick walls dotted with big rock band tour posters. Apart from
the tiny bathroom by the front door, the flat was a single big room,
maybe fifty feet square and eighteen feet high.  I found myself
examining the place with curiosity and growing surprise.  Books and
what looked like Indian objects filled industrial shelving along the
far wall, sofa and chairs clustered under a window in one corner, a
kitchen with stainless steel cupboard doors fitted into another, and a
bed that consisted of a platform on scaffolding above another cluster
of chest of drawers, cabinets and a hanging rail sat opposite the
windows.  Along the wall to our left was a music system with the
biggest loudspeakers I'd ever seen outside a rock concert the
neighbours must love this and a stack of rectangular black cases marked
with what I vaguely recognized as trade names of instrument-makers.

"Yu're a musician?"

Paul grinned.  "No, I'm a policeman.  I'm renting this place from a
friend who's on tour at the moment.  There's a bottle of Chianti I can
open, or beer, or Scotch?"

We settled on beer, and he produced bottles of German lager from the
fridge.  "And I promised you a pizza.  Are you hungry, or should we
talk first?"

"Talk," I said, and told him about the Ireland.

My story left him looking bewildered.  "I'm sorry, but I don't really
understand.  I've never heard of this Ireland character.  Is the stuff
valuable just because he owned it?"

"I don't know how to answer that."  I hesitated, wondering how to
explain.  "It was a famous scandal at the end of the eighteenth
century.  Look: Samuel Ireland was the kind of father who assumes that
his teenage son is a useless slob, and William needed to impress him.
He decided that the way to prove himself was to become a great poet,
but he wasn't too bright, and Samuel was not amused.  When that didn't
work, William decided that he would discover some manuscripts by
Shakespeare.  Samuel was an antiques dealer by trade, you see, a bit
sharp himself he's supposed to have forged some Hogarth engravings. But
the point is, he really was crazy about Shakespeare.  William reckoned
that as Shakespeare had died only a hundred and seventy-odd years
before, it was perfectly possible that somebody might still come up
with some unknown manuscripts."

"Sounds to me like a con."

"Well, it was just possible.  Shakespeare had been almost forgotten
until about twenty years before this, you know.  The Shakespeare
industry was only just starting up, and a lot of people expected that
some unpublished work might still turn up."

"What happened?"

"First, William started to collect antiquarian books -which his father
naturally approved of- and then he was tempted by the idea of forging
some Elizabethan documents.  His father accepted them as genuine right
away."

"Little bugger," Paul laughed.  "So he forged some plays and presented
them to his father with love and kisses?"

"He began with legal papers that he could copy from old documents,
because he was working in a solicitor's office where genuine Tudor
files were stored.  From reproductions I've seen, I'd say that his work
was unbelievably crude, but apparently Samuel thought it was genuine.
It wouldn't fool anybody today for a second.  Then William tried
composing letters and poems, and he and a friend concocted a story
about getting them from an eccentric old gentleman who insisted on
remaining anonymous."

"And Samuel believed them?"

"Enthusiastically.  Not just Samuel, either.  In the end William
produced a brand-new Shakespearean tragedy which was put on at Drury
Lane.  It was published I've read it, and it's dire.  A lot of people
in the audience realized, and there was very nearly a riot.  But a lot
of other people still argued it was genuine.  There was an awful fuss.
Most people finally decided that Samuel was the forger.  It all went
very public, with everybody taking sides, until Samuel died."

"So it ended in tears."

"Well, it didn't lead to a lot of happiness.  The saddest thing of all
was that when William Henry finally confessed, his father wouldn't
believe him.  He said that

William was too stupid to be capable of writing the stuff.  He never
accepted the truth."

"That is a sad story."  Grant finished his lager.  "Would you like
another?"

"Not yet.  Thanks."

"All right, I can see somebody who collects old books eighteenth
century, you said?  getting excited about this.  But just how excited?
How much is it worth?"

"I had it marked at ten thousand pounds."

"In this last catalogue of yours?  And you'd sold it to our American
friend?"

"To his library.  Well, he said they wanted it.  Formally speaking, it
wasn't on order, but as good as."

"And Winner wanted it too.  What did he think it was worth?"

"He said he could get a couple of thousand over what I was asking, but
he probably thought it was worth more, because he'd have wanted a
turn."

"Was he right?"

That was my problem, the one thing about the situation that bothered
me.

Antiquarian books have no 'real' value.  They are worth what somebody
is willing to pay.  Prices are usually negotiable, especially higher
prices.  So while I could accept that Job Warren had been killed to
prevent him taking the Ireland Collection out of England, I still
couldn't see how the books were worth two lives.  There was still
something missing from the equation, something I hadn't worked out.

Paul persisted: "But it's definitely the only thing that connects him
and you and Professor Warren?"

"Yes .. ."  That was the only way to read it.

He put his glass down on a battered oak table that stood at his elbow,
hauled himself out of the armchair beside mine, and stood looking down
at me like a man awaiting my confession.  "Could you be wrong about the
value?"

"How wrong?"

"You know..  . very wrong."

I shook my head.  "No.  Possibly.  I guess so."

He gave me an appropriately bewildered look.

"As a matter of fact, I'd priced it up for this catalogue."  I told him
how long I'd had the collection, how often I'd tried to sell it, and
how many people had looked at it and then regretfully refused the
bargain.  I wound up, "So you see, there are all kinds of reasons for
saying that the value is up to ten thousand pounds.  Except that nobody
would do all this for ten thousand pounds, would they?"

"No.  Not that there aren't people around who'd kill you for sixty
pounds to buy crack.  But not in this case.  Those two murders must
have cost real money to set up.  This is ridiculous!"

"That's how I feel.  So then I must be wrong after all.  I don't
understand."

I was circling uselessly around my own confusion, when he interrupted,
"I'd like us to go to bed now.  What do you think?"

I considered pretending a maidenly surprise and decided not to be
stupid.  For one thing, I liked his eyes.  Furthermore, it seemed like
the best offer I'd had in a long time.  Finally, I'd never made love
before on a mattress on top of scaffolding.  It all made sense.

He turned out to be a good lover an explorer, gentle.

Lying afterwards holding and being held, thinking how long it had been
since I'd felt the warmth of a new body, the hardness of bone and
muscle against me, it suddenly came to me also that he had been
wonderfully tactful.  Not only had we somehow got up that ridiculous
scaffolding without awkwardness, but a condom had come naturally to
hand careful children of the sad AIDs age that we are now.  I'd done a
lot worse in the past.  So I smiled like a cat and lay in a cloud of
contentment, listening to distant sounds in the passageways of the old
building and to the pulsing of blood in the veins.

Inevitably, Paul's bleeper ended it.  He cursed in a muffled kind of
way, stirred, unwrapped us.  I closed my eyes against his departure and
waited for the murmur of his voice on the phone.  His end of the
conversation began with an unintelligible exclamation, followed by a
series of half-audible questions.  I heard the phrase 'half an hour',
groaned mentally, and tried to tell myself that there would be other
afternoons.

He touched my cheek, and I opened my eyes to find him staring at me
over the edge of the platform.

"Emergency?"

"Ilona Mitchell's been attacked.  I have to go."

"What?  Is she all right?"

He vanished from sight, and I could hear him gathering our things
together from the floor around our elevated nest.

"She was beaten up.  She's in the Whittington.  They say there's no
permanent damage.  I have to go and see what she has to say."

A bundle of clothing appeared over the edge of the bed.

and I started to sort things out.  "You mean the hospital in Archway?
What's she doing in London?"

"Came back to get things from the flat.  Somebody must have been
waiting for her and roughed her up."

"Why?"

"Exactly!  Come on.  I'll drop you off at your place on the way."

"Will you let me know how she is?"

He looked up at me and apparently wasn't put off by the sight of my
struggles to wriggle into my tights while perched inconveniently at
head height.  "Are you going to be at home this evening?  I'll drop by
as soon as I've finished and we can .. . Oh, damn."

The thought came to me at the same time.  I smiled at him demurely as
he lifted me down to ground level and said, "Maybe there'll be time
this evening to phone out for a pizza."

llona

When I finally listened to the answering machine, I found that, apart
from a call from Pat, the tape was full of Barnabas's plaintive
enquiries.

Pat's number rang at length without result, but Barnabas responded on
the first ring.

"It took you long enough," he grumbled.

"I was out.  Why?  Is something wrong?"

"Of course not.  But you didn't answer your mobile when I tried it, and
I've been anxious."

I recalled guiltily that I'd turned the mobile off while I was with
Paul and then forgotten it, and wondered not for the first time whether
I was up to the high-tech life.  "I'm fine," I said quickly.  "By the
way, Pat phoned me."

"Me too."  He sounded thoughtful.  "She told me all about the child's
birthday party.  She had some mad idea that I might take the train out.
Sometimes she doesn't realize how tiring do I mean to say tiresome? -I
find ten small boys at once.  I told her that there's a ..."  His voice
faded for a moment into a line crackle.  "I take it you did post it?"

I reassured him.  Then I hesitated, wondering whether I should give him
the news about Ilona.  On the whole, it seemed better to delay that.

"Look, please don't worry if you can't get me on the phone, it's just
that I'm rushing around a lot.  I haven't even had time to pack for the
book fair yet."  That sounded normal enough.  I had no intention of
saying anything about Paul at this stage, either.

"What was that?  I missed part of what you said.  The sound fades."

"It does seem to be a very bad line.  I... Hello?"

There was a moment's silence, and then his voice returned.  ... the
library?"

I said, "Barnabas, this line is awful.  Hang up and I'll ring you
back."

"No, don't bother.  I'm looking out of the window, and there are
engineers working at the junction box on the corner.  I'll ring you
later.  If you're going out, take the mob '

His voice sank into what sounded like a background of scratching
sounds, and I hung up.

My hand was an inch from the telephone when it rang.  I picked up the
receiver, expecting to hear Barnabas again, but it was Paul Grant.

"Hi.  Are you busy?"

"Not really."  No, no, only a book fair to pack up, but I had no
intention of allowing that chore to get in our way.  "How is she?"

"Her face is a mess, and she has a broken arm, but she'll be all right.
Look can you come over here?"

"To the hospital?"

"She says she'd like to see you.  It's Queen Elizabeth Ward."

Nagged by curiosity, I locked up the shop for the final time that day
and went upstairs for my things.  At the last moment I remembered the
mobile, checked that it was on stand-by, and pushed it into my shoulder
bag.  Mr.  Spock was out somewhere, so I left his entry window open a
few inches beyond the bars, set the alarm, and went out of the door
with the inaudible promise that I'd be back to perform tin-opening for
him before long.

I drove on past the hospital entrance and was lucky enough to find a
parking space a hundred yards up the hill.  When I walked back, I found
the familiar, tall figure pacing inside the glass entrance.  He gave me
the kind of quick peck that you could miss if you weren't looking
closely.

"Is she all right?  Has she said anything about what happened?"

"There were two men.  She's given a description: vague, but maybe
she'll be able to pick someone out of our photo files tomorrow.  They
slammed her around for a while, and I gather they've left the flat in a
worse mess than before, if you can imagine it.  Do you mind if we go
straight up?"

He steered me almost silently along a couple of crowded corridors, and
up an escalator, to a closed door.

"See whether she has something that she wants to tell you.  Take it
slowly.  She's had a fright."

He knocked on the door and opened it for me, and I slipped inside ahead
of him.

We were in a side room, small and dimly lit, but even in the gloom I
was shocked into a small exclamation at the sight of the puffy,
darkened face against the pillows.  Ilona's eyes opened in their
setting of bruises and flickered at me.

I heard myself whispering, "I'm here.  How do you feel?  Is there
anything I can do for you?"  I sat down gingerly at the side of the
bed.  Her left arm was in a splinted bandage.  I gently took her right
hand.  There was a bloody abrasion on the back of it, and bruises
darkening over her wrist bone.

"I feel lousy.  How do I look?"  Her voice grated hoarsely, and the
eyes flickered at Paul, standing behind me.  "They've phoned my mum.
She'll be here in the morning."

"Do you have any friends you'd like me to tell in the meantime?"

She shook her head and winced.  "Got to remember not to do that."

"It must hurt."

"Unh.  Not too bad now.  My arm hurts.  The rest's just scrapes and
bruises.  They say I won't be scarred."

That's lucky, but who did it?"

A grimace passed across the damaged face.  "Never saw them before.  My
fault.  When I got there the front door was on the latch, and would you
believe I went in anyway?  I saw that the place was a tip, but they
were hiding in the bedroom and they grabbed me before I could get out.
Christ, I was scared!  When I yelled, they bashed me."

"They didn't..  . ?"

"No, just slapped me around.  I could feel the bone go when I fell.
After a while they went away.  Could hear them in the other room.  Kept
still.  When they left I dialled 999."

Behind me, Paul cleared his throat.  His voice sounded over-loud after
our whispers.  "I'm going to get a cup of coffee.  Will you sit with
her for a while?  I'll be in the cafeteria.  Just fifteen minutes, all
right?"

I guessed that whatever was supposed to happen was going to be between
the two of us.  We both waited for the door to close.  I went on
listening to her slightly hoarse breathing.  In the end I said, "Who
were they?  They weren't just burglars."

"Don't be stupid, of course not.  Somebody's boys.  Wanted to hurt me,
make sure I didn't talk to anybody.  Bloody cops!  As if I would .. .
only they didn't leave me alone."  The laugh was quiet and bitter.
"Always trouble, talking to bloody cops."

What about sleeping with one?  a small internal voice remarked.

"They'd been looking for something.  Didn't find it I got that much. So
they decided to wreck me when I walked in on them.  Aren't I a stupid
cow?"  She stopped.

"You're awfully brave," I said carefully.  "I'd have been scared
rigid."

"More mad than scared.  Anyway, I'm out of it.  I'm going home with Mum
as soon as I can get myself out of here."

I breathed in and out slowly, thinking that this was the time.  "Do you
remember what you said when I came to see you just after Davey died?"

Her eyes flickered at me again.  She was silent.

"These men they're part of Davey's problem, aren't they?"

There was another silence.  I began to wonder whether

I'd misjudged.  Then a kind of decision seemed to harden in her face.

"And they beat you up because of the same thing."

She was listening.

"Then shouldn't you tell DI Grant everything you can?  At least they
wouldn't have anything more to gain from pressuring you."

I couldn't read her expression until her lips twisted bitterly.  "Don't
worry, I'm not going to let them find me again."

I said slowly, "Even if you stayed at your mother's, it might not be
safe.  Stafford isn't so far.  If they want to find you again, they'll
probably manage it, unless the police can get them first."  I thought
about it.  "Somebody searched my flat the other day.  If I'd walked in
while they were there, I suppose they'd have done the same thing to me
that they did to you.  My father is an old man with a bad heart, and it
wouldn't take much to kill him.  I have to end this business!"

"Best keep quiet, then."

"Don't you understand?  They aren't going to let it go.  And they
killed Davey," I said.

It was a little while before she said, "Yes."

I said, "I don't even know why.  Help me, please.  I really need to
know what you know."

A small voice said from the bed, "I don't know anything.  Honest. Davey
just said that you had something worth a hell of a lot, and by rights
it was half his.  I guess he told them about it that lot."

"Told who?"  Her dramatic hints made me want to shake her, except that
she looked as though she'd fall to bits if I tried.

"All right, but if you ever tell anybody I told you, I'm dead, because
I don't know what, but I might know who.  There was this man that Davey
met through one of your friends one of the book people.  He worked for
him sometimes."

"For the bookseller?"

Her voice grew thinner.  "For the boss.  I told you that before.
Listen, I'm dying for a cig.  Can you light me one?  They're in the
drawer."

I found the pack, lit a cigarette, and pushed it into her undamaged
hand.  Ilona dragged and blew out smoke slowly.

"Sometimes Davey'd be out all night, and when he came in he'd have
cash.  Once or twice, there was quite a bit.  I asked once, and he said
this man had to be around council estates over Kilburn, surveying or
something, and he took Davey along in case he had any trouble from the
local lads.  Davey could handle himself, you know."

"Oh, yes," I agreed.  Though never as well as he thought he could.  I
took the 'surveying' with a whole handful of salt.  It was drugs
obviously.  "You say he got this job through a bookseller friend?
Who?"

For a moment I thought she had fallen asleep, but then she whispered,
"No, can't remember.  Odd name, foreign maybe.  I guess maybe sort of
French."

I didn't know of any French booksellers in London.  "Can you describe
him?"

"No."  She sounded defensive.  "I met all kinds of booksellers with
Davey, when we was .. . were selling the prints you know."

"And you really don't know which one it was?"

I caught a trace of disbelief in my voice.  So did she, because we were
both silent for a while.  I thought she'd finished, and I pushed my
tired mind into overdrive, but the only name it came up with was
Jean-Pierre Tessier's.

Jean-Pierre had a market stall.  When he was feeling prosperous, it
moved to the fringes of Portobello Market; in bad periods it sometimes
turned up in Church Street.  Apart from rubbish, he sometimes had
nineteenth-century illustrated books on his stall, especially breakers
faulty volumes with the engravings that Davey used to tear out and
colour.  We'd dealt with Jean-Pierre a bit in the old days.

Another name pushed itself into my head, and the image of that strange,
solid, white-haired man who had introduced himself so politely.  I knew
absolutely certainly that there was no question about this one.  I
said, "He was working for Marty Campbell, of course."

She was silent, but it didn't matter any more.  I softened my tone,
became ingratiating.  "I still don't understand why all this happened.
What were they expecting to find in your flat?  They searched it twice,
didn't they once the day you went up north.  What had Davey left
there?"

"I said, I dunno.  Look, I know that Davey owed them money for the car
and things.  S'pose to pay them off, like, he'd agreed to handle
something for them .. ."

"Hard drugs?"

"Maybe.  Anyway, he was out of his league, wasn't he.  S'pose he was
doing a job for them and it went wrong, and they wanted their
investment back.  You get deeper in, with them.  Or maybe he even sort
of stole something from them.  Maybe he said he'd lost it, and they
thought he'd hidden it.  All kinds of things could've happened."

I waited, seeing that as usual she was circling around the real truth.
When it seemed she had stopped, I said gently, "I guess if you owed
somebody like Marty Campbell a lot of money, no matter why, he'd be
sure to get it back.  Right?"

"If you say so.  Just then, at the end, he was worried all the time."

"And so Davey told them I had something really valuable that he could
get his hands on, and when he did he could pay them what he owed."

You could picture the whole thing: Davey, in over his thick head,
getting desperate, squirming .. . All right, pet, don't worry; I'll
find a way.  Always another scam.  Saying, Look, I can get my hands on
money.  Everything I owe you.  My ex has something really great.  Must
be worth a hundred K at least, and it's half mine.  Just give me a
couple of days ... "He had a key to the shop, didn't he?  One that he'd
got months ago, without me knowing.  And he came looking for this
valuable thing.  He didn't find it, though.  Do you know what it
was?"

She stared at me seriously.  "Look, he never wanted to tell me anything
about this, you know, 'cause it was dangerous, but I did some guessing,
and I asked, and things came out sometimes."

"He must have convinced them that there really was something good, and
then he couldn't produce it.  Is that why they killed him?  Or..  ." It
took me a couple of seconds to work it out.  ... they thought that he'd
got it and was holding out on them.  That's why they killed him.

That's why they keep coming back to your flat, looking for it."

All she would say was, "Yeah, maybe.  I guess so."  I pushed it, but in
the end she sighed, "Look, forget about it, it's all just an idea I
had.  I don't expect it's right, but if it was you'd want to keep out
of it, because it's real trouble.  You don't know."

If only.  "Just forget about it?  Forget what they did?"

Her voice became stronger.  "Yes!  Davey's dead, but that doesn't have
anything to do with you, you're fucking alive, and so am I."  The easy
tears were flowing down her bruised and puffy cheeks.

There was a name now.  Confirmation.  And another name still to find: a
French bookseller, somebody Davey had known well enough in the old
days, somebody with criminal connections the missing link.  I needed to
think.  I had to go back over the last couple of years and remember the
necessary link.

There was a tap on the door which opened to let in both Paul and a
staff nurse wanting to get rid of us so that Ilona could sleep.  I
promised I'd come again.  Or was it a threat?

Paul bundled me silently away from the door, where a uniformed
constable was now sitting motionless and obviously on guard.  Down the
corridor, he asked, "What did she want?"

I stopped to consider that.  "I'm not really sure.  I think ..."

"What?"

"I think she wanted to warn me to be careful.  Not to talk to you.  She
seems to think that if she keeps quiet it will all go away.  She's
scared to admit that she knows what's going on."

I told him the skeleton tale of the French bookseller and Davey's
occasional employer, and the hints about their falling out.  I gave him
Marty Campbell.

Paul stood very still, staring over the top of my head with the kind of
absent-minded intensity that leaves you certain that your companion is
cursing vigorously inside his own head.  It was minutes before he
asked, "What about the other one?  We need a tie-in.  I'm not saying I
don't believe her.  In fact I'm sure you're right; why would Campbell
have come to see you except to find out where Ilona had gone?  But we
aren't going to get any cooperation from him!  We need the identity of
the other man, the bookseller who ties them in.  I can lean on her if I
have to, and I will the stupid little cow."

I couldn't answer.  I was pretty sure that Ilona hadn't said everything
there was to say, but I didn't know; and something made me want to
protect her.  Loyalty between wives, perhaps?  I laughed, and the sound
was more bitter than I'd intended.

"What is it?"

"It's perfectly likely that Davey didn't tell her anything.  He was
like that with women.  Look, I've got to think about it.  I may be able
to remember somebody from the old days.  I'll try."

"I'll have another long talk with her tomorrow."

I warned him, "She thinks that if she talks to you they'll come back
again."

"She's probably not wrong.  Even so, I'll have to persuade her.  She'll
be safer in the end if we can tie this up."

"I keep telling her that finding them is the only way."

"Never a truer word.  And?"

"Not convinced."

"Unh."

He walked silently beside me out of the building and up the street to
the Volvo, withdrawn into his own thoughts.  As I unlocked the car, he
seemed to notice me again.

"I'm off duty in half an hour.  Have you had anything to eat yet?"

I told him I was still waiting for the pizza.  There was something
else.  "If you do find out who the link is the contact will that mean
you'll be able to arrest Campbell?  You see, she really believes that
if she talks to you, they'll kill her."

"It depends.  At the moment, all I could do is bring him in for
questioning.  He'd just laugh in my face, because there's not a scrap
of evidence against him.  Somebody's going to have to tell us the whole
story and then go into the witness box.  I don't see this being solved
through external evidence if there was any, we'd have found it before
now.  There's our funny bomb, of course, but that would tend to let
Campbell off, if anything."

I stared.  "Funny bomb?"

"Well, yes ..."

"Explain?"  I suggested.

"We've got the full forensics report at last.  They studied pieces of
the device that they found, and some of the components seemed odd.  In
the end it was sent to a lab in Germany, and they've identified some of
the material as Russian.  Apparently a lot of Moscow gangsters have
taken to bombing their friends."

I stared at him.  "Russian?"

"Crime is international these days," Paul observed darkly.  "With the
IRA in suspension and the Libyans quiet, things are changing.  Anyway,
that's what they say."

"And there's no connection with Campbell?"

Paul shrugged.  "Well, you wouldn't expect the big-shot to do his own
dirty work."

"Can't you guarantee Ilona anything?"

"We could keep her name off the record, if it came to that unless it
was essential for her to go into the witness box."

Oh yes?  Unless it 'came to that'?  I began to understand Ilona's lack
of enthusiasm for a deal that might give her nothing but trouble.

"Let's leave it until I report back and talk to people.  About the
pizza we could manage a bit better, couldn't we?  I know a nice,
convenient place in Upper Street, not far from you.  We could meet
there as soon as I'm off.  And then I can make sure you get home
safely.  You do need a bodyguard."

I laughed at him, but without disagreeing.  "I'll check on Barnabas," I
said, and produced my mobile.  Perhaps after all I could get used to
technology.  However, when I dialled I got the 'unavailable' tone.  I
switched off uncertainly.

"He's been having trouble with his line," I said.  "The repair men were
in the road, earlier, but it doesn't seem to have come back yet."

Before I had stopped speaking, I felt a tide of uneasiness rising.

Paul saw it in my face.  He pulled the phone out of my hand.  "I'll
tell the station that I'm going to check on him and get them to phone
in to the hospital and warn my constable that I've left.  Let's not
waste time.  Look, my car is in the hospital grounds and I'll get there
faster than you could."

Bug

"I find this increasingly ridiculous," Barnabas observed gustily.  "Of
course I'm all right!  What should have happened to me?"

"Your telephone is dead!"  I snapped.  "You're the one who's always
complaining if I'm not on the end of the line whenever you decide to be
nervous."

He gestured helplessly.  "Perhaps we should calm down.  Come in, both
of you, I feel the need of a sherry."

Paul and I entered my father's sitting room like the United States
Cavalry arriving at full gallop into the middle of a Sunday school
picnic.  Barnabas began his usual act of trying to find three seats
which, if not actually empty of papers at the moment, could at least be
cleared without too much effort.

He said, "And my phone is working now.  The engineers fiddled about
outside for a while .. ."  He broke off long enough to revert to his
old tutorial habits and pass out servings of amontillado.  Paul
inspected his nervously, giving me the impression that polytechnic
students weren't normally given sherry by their tutors.  "One of the
engineers came in and checked it when they'd finished."

Paul put his glass down quietly on a pile of books.  "Checked in
here?"

Barnabas's expression slowly became thoughtful.  "Yes.  He said they
were pretty sure that the trouble was outside the house, but they
weren't absolutely certain."

I made a guess.  "Perhaps we shouldn't be letting strangers into the
house?  Not just at the moment?"

Paul got to his feet and wandered over to the work table where the
telephone balanced on top of the usual pile of books.  I noticed then
that the box that held the Ireland Collection was sitting on the desk
chair and one of the volumes near the telephone looked familiar.

I said, "What have you been doing?"

Barnabas winked.  "Looking at the books.  Collating.  Page by page.
Looking at watermarks.  Looking for anything that shouldn't be there,
in short."

"And the manuscripts?"

"More likely, so I was saving them for last."

"And you let a stranger into the place with that stuff sitting
around?"11 hissed.

"Do you really think a stranger would notice anything?"  Barnabas
retorted; but his tone was apologetic.

I tried to be fair: to inspect the room with the eye of somebody who
was not familiar with it.  All right: the place did look like a cross
between a jumble sale and a compost heap.

I opened my mouth, but Paul, following his own thoughts, was picking up
the telephone.  We watched him listen, hesitate, and put the receiver
back.

"Where was this man working?"

"Outside.  There is a box on the side of the house to the right of the
stairs."

"Wait here a minute."

Paul left.  Not being the kind of person who does as I'm told, I
followed and found him crouching over the metal box where the telephone
lines entered the building.  There was an untidy tangle, but Paul,
ignoring it, was nosing away at the metal box itself.

"He's been working at this, all right; I can see scratches where the
cover's been unfastened."

"Why are you worried about it?"

"Maybe I'm jumpy about anything out of the ordinary right now.  I'm
going to use my mobile and find out whether Telecom had their engineers
here today.  What's your father's number, again?"

I told him, backing away from the box.  Not that I really thought it
had been booby-trapped.  I went back into my father's flat, and we made
desultory conversation until Paul returned.

"Whoever he was, the phone company has no record of a problem here," he
reported when he reappeared at the door of the flat.  "They're sending
one of their managers over as fast as they can.  We'll know about this
in ten minutes."

When a car drew up outside, he vanished again.  From the window I
watched him intercept a man with a tool kit.  Grant was showing his
warrant card and explaining something.  Then the two of them moved to
the corner of the house, the tool box was opened, and I waited while
the engineer did things.  He pointed.  He shook his head.  Paul turned,
saw me standing at the window, and grimaced.  A minute later, he was
back.

"The telephone's been tapped.  He cut into the line and put in a little
transmitter.  That's what's giving you a slight echo on the line there
seems to be a bit of feedback."

"Good heavens," Barnabas said, looking interested.  "You've removed
it?"

"In fact..."

I said loudly, "In fact what?"

Paul looked at my father.  "It can be taken out quite easily if you'd
like.  Only..."

I was a little surprised by the sharp glance my father gave him. "You'd
rather not?"  he asked.

Paul grinned at him.  "Unless you find it impossible to deal with, I'd
like to leave it in place until we find out who's eavesdropping."

"What do you mean?"  I asked.  "My father depends on that phone .. ."

"What's involved?"  Barnabas asked.

"The device is broadcasting to a receiver within about two hundred or
two hundred and fifty metres from here.  They'll be able to listen in
on your conversations.  Oh -and I should warn you, they'll be able to
make out the numbers that you dial on outgoing calls."

My father looked calm.  "I'm beyond the age when my phone calls deal
with embarrassing matters.  I need to be able to phone the doctor, of
course, and Dido."  He looked at me severely.  "That is, provided she
remembers what's going on and doesn't say anything silly."

"I'm not likely to forget that we're being listened to," I assured him
grimly.

"Ye-e-es, but you'll have to try not to sound self-conscious," Barnabas
agreed annoyingly.  "I'd better not phone Pat it would be best if they
didn't get her number but she can phone me and we'll bore any stranger
rigid, I'm sure.  As for any other... I can't think there'd be any harm
in it, and obviously it gives us the advantage."

"Yes: it will give us a chance to find where they are, and perhaps
catch them," Paul said briskly.  "I'll get rid of the engineer and
phone the station.  I'll ask them to put out a couple of men on foot.
If they're in a van in one of these streets, we'll have them inside
half an hour."

"What if they're indoors?"  I demanded.

"Harder.  We'll have to try to locate any empty property that they
might have got into.  I'd better get on to the post office.  Their
delivery men have a habit of noticing when property is empty and when
somebody moves in."

"Ask Mr.  Stanley," said Barnabas.

"Who?"

"Upstairs."

I said, "Of course.  Mr.  Stanley on the first floor always knows
what's going on around here."

"I will go and ask," Barnabas said firmly.  "It will probably be much
faster than talking to the postman.  I'll tell him that you're a family
friend looking for temporary accommodation in this vicinity.  Is there
anything I haven't thought of?"

Paul looked bemused.  "Yes, all right.  That should do it."

"Give me ten minutes."

We listened to his footsteps slowly climbing the stairs and heard his
knock.  After a moment the upstairs door closed.

"We'll hear him coming back," Paul said.  He was right about that, and
we were standing innocently on opposite sides of the sitting room when
my father returned, flushed with success.

"Mr.  Stanley says that there's an empty flat on the first floor of the
little block just down the hill, and For Sale boards out in front of
two houses in the street behind us; also a Mrs.  Palmer, at number
seventy-three, has recently sub-let her place for a couple of months
while she is visiting a daughter in Australia."

Paul looked amused.  "Do you reckon that's all?"

My father said that he thought it probably was.

I could see that Paul was anxious, and assured him that I was capable
of getting myself back to the Volvo without his help.

"You don't have to put up with this," I said to Barnabas when he had
left.  "Though you probably deserve to suffer.  Imagine, letting a
stranger in like that when you spend half your time moaning about me
being careless!"

"It's different."

"How different?"

He said, "Just different.  Anyway, there's no harm done.  They didn't
come to hurt me, they came to get information by bugging my phone.  I
am perfectly safe from interference now that they think they'll be
getting information through me.  As long as that thing is transmitting,
they'll be perfectly happy that they have both of us under their
thumbs.  It's not in their interests to take any steps against either
of us.  Now, that..  ."  He broke off and seemed to be listening to a
private suggestion.  Eventually, he went on, "So I shall phone you
before bedtime and enquire whether you had a good day and you can tell
me about it."

It was so obviously different from what he had been going to say that I
exploded: "You're up to something!"

"I am," he said with measured dignity, 'finishing a scholarly task.
Until I've completed it to my satisfaction, I shan't be leaving the
flat.  By the by, Dido, we ought to arrange a code."  I stared at him.
"Something simple.  If, for example, I phone and mention the name of
Professor Tullett, that means that I am in immediate danger and want
you to send the police.  If I mention that I am thinking of going over
to Dublin in a few weeks, that means that I have some news that I wish
to communicate without it being overheard."

"Ybu could just mention Ireland," I said sourly.

He said stiffly, "Dublin, I think, will do."

"Maybe they'll have caught them by tonight," I sighed, 'and have you
had your aspirin yet today?"

He glared.  "I have NOT forgotten it."

I said, "Well, take care," and left.

The sky over the hill was red with sunset as I crossed the road.  I'd
half expected to see signs of police activity, but nothing was
happening.  The lights were beginning to come on in the windows of the
Victorian villas, and a bus approached.  I ran for the stop.

What I hadn't remembered was a piece of family history.  If I'd thought
of the stories Barnabas used to tell when I was little of how he'd
worked in Signals Intelligence during the war, I might possibly have
made an inspired guess.  I'm not sure.  Anyway, that was a long time
ago, and I was absorbed in my own wars now.

Fair to Middling

Frankly, my attitude to book fairs is mixed; sheer torture alternates
with a tinge of anxiety, the occasional dollop of greedy triumph, and
quite a lot of boredom.  To begin (and for that matter, end) with,
there's the physical exhaustion of loading and transporting a large car
full of heavy books and clattering folding book cases, and then heaving
them on to a trolley, along pavements, and up and down stairs to get
them into the exhibition rooms of the hotel off Russell Square where
the monthly event is held.

In theory there are porters to help and often, with luck, in practice.
I have even been known to bat my eyelashes.

You arrive at an ungodly hour on Sunday morning already feeling tired,
and spend an hour 'setting up' unpacking and shelving books while badly
hindered by an unruly scrum of your fellow dealers digging for
unnoticed and under-priced treasures, like hyperactive bargain hunters
in the first hour of Liberty's sale.  Then, having completed that stage
and hopefully made enough to have got the cash flowing, you heave
yourself into action and join the vultures around the filling shelves
of later arrivals, looking in turn for some unconsidered trifle.  All
good fun, but a bit bruising.

At one o'clock the doors open and it's every man and woman for itself
until the fair closes for the day.  At two minutes past seven, we're
all in the hotel bar manoeuvring over buying rounds of drinks and
boasting or moaning -depending more on character than hard fact about
the day's business.  For me, this time, it was the real business of the
day.

At four minutes past the hour I took a breath right down into the
abdomen and said clearly, to the dozen men and my old friend Veronica
who were shuffling into a ragged circle of chairs around two tables
convenient to the bar, "I'm buying this one."  Into the little hush of
curiosity that followed, I threw my planned announcement: "I've sold
the Ireland Collection at last.  It's been on my hands for so long, I'd
started to think of leaving it in my will.  Never mind I've packed it
off now, thank God.  What will you all have?"

"Irish collection of what?"  a voice asked at my shoulder.  "Not that
it matters, I'll have a Mine anyway, since you're offering."

I smiled dazzlingly at Jeff, the cockney bookseller who hails
confusingly from Swansea, and told him, "Not "Irish", Ireland William
Henry," in a voice that did its best to carry twenty yards to the far
end of the room.  I added a few tempting details and received the
appropriate murmur of congratulations and spate of orders from a
captive audience.  I offered Jeff my silent and secret thanks for
giving me the opening I'd needed.  However, despite keeping my eyes and
ears open, I couldn't detect more than friendly interest anywhere.
Perhaps it was too much to hope for.  However, the story would spread;
with luck it would reach its target, and with a little more luck
somebody would back off long enough for me to make my lie come true.
The next day was Monday, the day I'd been promised an answer from the
Constance Hance.  Dear old Connie: just let her come up trumps
please.

I paid over a fair percentage of my day's profits to the barman and led
him and his heavy tray back to my table, believing that it was money
well spent.  In my optimism, I even joined the group for a noisy and
lagerish Indian curry afterwards, with the result that it was past
eleven o'clock by the time I got back to the flat.

Barnabas's inevitable message awaited on my answer machine: he was fine
and getting some work done.  It was too late to call him.  I negotiated
with the cat, washed my face, and fell into bed in a hopeful mood.
Surely, surely the worst was over.  If I had any dreams, they weren't
the kind I wake up remembering.

Sometimes I think nobody goes to the second day of book fairs,
especially not the exhibitors.  By the middle of the afternoon I'd sold
four books and two of those on behalf of absentee friends with stands
near mine.  The profit from my own two minor sales had already gone on
a glass of white wine and a chicken sandwich at the pub down the
road.

Returning at 2.40, I found that Alan Gates, one of my neighbours, had
accepted a cheque for my Ackermann.  The signature was unfamiliar to us
both, but Alan said that he had seemed like a nice man.  I shut my
mouth, crossed my fingers and prayed.  Then my deputy went off to a
rendezvous, presumably in the hotel bar, and it was my turn.  I settled
dutifully on to the folding chair crammed between his stand and mine.
The one customer in sight was a distant figure making his way along the
side aisle from shelf to shelf, looking at everything and buying
nothing.  I speculated on the possibility that he was gradually
transferring dozens of valuable little things into inside pockets of
his mac, and sank into a kind of bored stupor.  It was two hours before
I could even think of starting to pack up, and until then I proposed to
gather my strength.  It had been raining gently when I came back from
the pub.  Getting my boxes and shelves home dry was going to be a
struggle.  I yawned and started wondering why I'd chosen to make my
living in this unlikely fashion when I might still have been working in
a lively and comfortable publisher's office in Manhattan.  Or why I
wasn't clever enough to have got myself happily married to a prosperous
doctor, like Pat, with a nice, modern house and nothing to worry about
except the school run.  I was getting another bout of indigestion.

By ten past seven I was struggling with my overladen trolley halfway
along the two hundred yards from the hotel door to the Volvo, parked as
close as I could find space for it which was as usual around two
corners and down the mews when my mobile began to trill.  I stopped,
draped myself over my load to shelter it from the drizzle, and switched
on.

"Dido?  What are you doing?"

"Hello, Barnabas.  Listen, this isn't a good moment."

"You sound breathless."

I said, "I am breathless.  Is everything all right?  I'm just loading.
Can I call you back?"

"No need.  I was hoping to see you this evening."

I pricked up my ears and said carefully, "All right, why don't we eat
together."  I thought quickly.  "Can you hang on until I get home and
unload, or are you too hungry to wait?"

"There's no rush."  His tone was reassuring: he had picked up my worry.
"I just wanted a chat.  You know, I've been thinking of getting away
for a few days now that spring is here."

I stood upright, forgetting about the danger of rain on books, and
waited.

"Yes, well, my book does seem to be progressing, but I want to have a
look through the collection at Trinity College some time."

I cleared my throat.  "You mean, Trinity College, Dublin?"

Barnabas replied mildly, "They do have an excellent collection of early
printed sources, and .. ."

We both seemed to be getting a bit too close to the mark.  I
interrupted, "Look, I'm nearly finished here, so if you're all right,
I'm going home.  We can talk it over later, but I really think you'd
better ask the doctor whether you're well enough to go off on your
own."

"You're right," my father appeared to concede.  "I'll make an
appointment tomorrow or the next day."

"In the meantime," I said quickly, suddenly aware of water running
along strands of hair and trickling down my neck, "I'll get there as
soon as I can.  We can talk about eating when I arrive, all right?"

Barnabas broke the connection, and I gritted my teeth and continued.
For one reckless moment, I had considered dropping everything and
rushing off to Crouch Hill, but the consequences of such irresponsible
behaviour would be very time-consuming, and I abandoned the idea.
Besides, I had to visit my answering machine.  I groaned, grabbed the
handle of the trolley, and heaved myself into motion.

It was just after eight when I double-parked outside the shop,
staggered in with the first carton of books, dumped it inside the front
door, remembered to disable the alarm, and panted into the office.  The
red light on the machine was blinking repeatedly, and I had to listen
through three messages offering to sell me books that I didn't want
before the American voice I was expecting began greetings,
explanations, and finally apologies.  There were new budgetary
constraints this year.  There were decisions to be made about The Way
Forward.  But unfortunately and regretfully they were obliged to pass
on this one.  Maybe in a few months' time.  They hoped to receive my
future catalogues.

I switched the machine off and stood for a moment in the gloom with my
heart sinking into my stomach.  Jilted by Constance Hance after so long
... But I decided to worry about it later; for the moment, Barnabas's
call seemed more important.  Mentally I straightened my shoulders and
set about unloading the car and dumping everything inside the front
door.  I washed my hands and face at the office sink, reset the
answering machine, locked up, and got back into the Volvo.  I was
halfway along Upper Street when I remembered forgetting to set the
security alarm.  Somehow it didn't seem to matter now.  By 8.30 I'd
parked and was ringing the bell.

Barnabas opened the door so promptly he'd obviously been watching at
the window.  I started to say, "Are you all right?"  but the look on
his face stopped me.  Something had happened, but not quite the triumph
that I'd expected.

"Have you found something?  Barnabas, the Constance Hance phoned: they
don't want it..  ."

The thoughtful look deepened into an odd mixture of amusement and
relief.  "Don't they, indeed.  It's just as well."

Exasperation.  "Barnabas..  . I'

He hauled me into the flat and across to the desk.  He had drawn the
curtains.  The reading light had been positioned to the right of the
book, and I saw that he had brought the lamp from his bedside table and
positioned it on the left.  In the strong pool of even brightness, a
calf-bound quarto lay open at the place my father had marked with a
slip of paper.

I recognized the collection's Plutarch: North's translation of
Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, the source of three
or four of Shakespeare's plots.  As a matter of fact, the recognition
was instantaneous because this volume was the wreck of the collection
as well as the biggest book in it, with its front cover detached, the
back one missing, and the first four gatherings including the title
page also missing presumed dead.  The passing centuries had browned the
pages and rotted the stitching so that the spine of the volume was
dissolving, while dust and mould had given it the smell of the tomb.
I'd nearly thrown this volume out several times,

but Samuel Ireland's book plate on the inside of the flaking front
cover had prevented me.  This decay had once been a valuable 1579 copy,
and it still added a kind of horrible authenticity to its companions in
the collection.  That thought, or a sort of historical fastidiousness,
had prevented me, finally, from disposing of this disaster.

Oh, let's be honest: booksellers can never bear to throw anything old
away.

Barnabas pointed.  "What do you see?"

"A disintegrating book," I said promptly.  "I really wonder why I
didn't chuck it."

My father said quietly, "Don't be silly."  He ran the tips of his
fingers over what looked at first glance like any other stained page.

The lower third of the left hand page was blank had been left blank by
the printer.  Under the bottom line, if something made you look
closely, marched a dozen lines of faded handwriting.  The old ink had
faded to sepia barely darker than the paper itself, illegible.  It
looked like verse.  I peered at the ghostly markings.  "This is
impossible, Barnabas.  It's contemporary handwriting, isn't it?
Sixteenth or early seventeenth century?  What is it notes on the
text?"

My father's voice remained sober: "It's easier with a magnifying glass.
That is a short handwritten passage from The Rape ofLucrece, by William
Shakespeare.  The initials "W.S."  stand at the bottom of the passage,
if you look."  He pointed, his finger not quite touching the page.
"They appear to be consistent with one form of Shakespeare's signature.
Also, the handwriting of the passage looks to me to be consistent with
the initials.

Observe the capital S here.  In addition though this seems almost a
minor point in the circumstances there are two slight variants of the
poem as published in 1594.  I can't as yet guess whether they are later
revisions or an earlier form."

Breathing was suddenly difficult.  "Is it real?"

"I don't know.  For what it's worth, you'll recall that this is the
volume with Samuel Ireland's book plate.  It must have been in his own
collection, and may have had nothing to do with his son' sum work."

There was one fact shrieking at me.  Davey had found this.  He hadn't
told me, but he'd seen it, all right, and he'd known what it was.  Or
what it might be.  Or maybe wasn't.  I remembered to start breathing
again.

"I can't believe it."

My father shrugged slightly.  "I'm not a Shakespearean scholar, so I'll
only say that it seems to be of the right period unless, of course,
it's a very high-class forgery.  We'll have to show it to a
specialist."

"Davey would have assumed that it's real.  Unless you think that he
might have .. ."

"Done it himself?"  Barnabas shook his head decidedly.  "I think not.
As I say, I'm certain that it is of the right period.  Well more or
less.  Davey didn't have the knowledge to do this.  And in answer to
the next obvious question, I've looked at our letter, and at the photos
of William Henry's so-called "Tudor" handwriting in the Grebanier book.
William Henry's handwriting is, ah, illiterate.  This is not his
writing."

"Davey wouldn't have cared," I realized suddenly.  "He'd have told
himself that it was good enough anyway to get him out of trouble.
Perhaps even to get himself a lot of money."

"Indeed."

"Barnabas," I said, 'what do you suppose this would be worth?  If it
really is, I mean.  Genuine."

We considered that question, staring at each other.  From one point of
view I knew the answer, working from the old principle that a book or
manuscript, like any antique, is worth what a collector will pay.  I
touched the page with my clean fingertips because Shakespeare had also
touched it once, perhaps.  How much would you pay to touch this piece
of paper?  And to own it?  The powdery roughness of the surface
reminded me of dust.

"It's been worth a couple of deaths."

"We must get rid of it," Barnabas said promptly.  "It is much too
dangerous to keep.  The problem is that I don't quite know how. Perhaps
the Constance Hance would take it after all, given the new
circumstances?  At a higher price, obviously."

"Too rich for them," I disagreed.  "I get the impression that they're
going to spend a long time re-evaluating their purchase programme. What
about a bank vault?"

"I thought of that.  If nobody knew about it, that would be the best
answer.  But I don't have to say that unless you and I were to move
into the vault with it..."

No, he didn't have to say.  I snatched my hand away.  "Let's get out of
here.  Let's leave it and go.  You can spend the night at my place.  I
don't want to be in the same room with it."

Barnabas chuckled unexpectedly.  He seemed a great deal more cheerful
than I felt; no doubt the scholar in him was enthralled, I told myself
sourly.

"In the short term," he said, "I couldn't agree more.  I've been ready
for dinner for the past two hours.  We'll leave it here and go to
Rocca's, shall we?  Or somewhere comfortable.  I'll even spend the
night in George Street, if it will make you happy.  And by tomorrow, in
the light of day, we'll have thought what to do."

"I'm going to phone Paul Grant for help.  I'll do it from the car,
after we've got well away from here.  Come on."

My father had closed the big book and was inserting it gently on to a
top shelf full of old, leather-bound volumes, making the space for it
by removing two of his own.  To my feverish imagination, it sat there
shrieking.  I took a grip and admitted, coldly, that in fact the thing
blended into my father's vast collection.  He put the two displaced
treasures on top of the mounds on his desk and we turned to go.

"I'll leave a light on," Barnabas said.  It was the only sign of
nervousness he had betrayed.

As for myself, I couldn't get into the Volvo fast enough.  If I'd owned
a big illuminated sign reading "It's in my father's flat: take it and
go!"  I swear that I'd have bolted it to the roof of the car and set it
flashing.

"We'll drink a really nourishing bottle, I think," Barnabas decided as
I turned towards the Angel.  "A bottle of the Barolo.  It's been a hard
couple of days' work.  Those lights are about to turn red, Dido."

I braked in time.

22 Raiders

The telephone was ringing much, much too close to my ear.  I listened
to it dreamily.  Eventually, I managed to remember that I'd made
Barnabas sleep in my bed last night.  Apparently I'd been so exhausted
that exile in the sitting room hadn't kept me from happy
unconsciousness.  Anyway, I was lying wrapped in spare blankets on my
own sofa.

I struggled up, reached the receiver, and pulled myself together long
enough to make "Ummm?"  sound like a greeting.

"Dido, how are you this morning?"

The voice belonged to my father, who I'd assumed was still asleep in
the other room.  I took a grip.

"Where are you?  I'm still asleep."

"It's ten o'clock.  Well, nearly.  I've been back here for two hours. I
tried not to disturb you when I left because you seemed tired."

"Where are you?"

"At home, of course.  I have work to do."  His voice had taken on a
warning tone, which reminded me about the probable listener.  The
memory distracted me: damn it, what was Paul Grant up to, leaving
Barnabas with a compromised phone for so long?  My anger reminded me
that I still hadn't been able to get through to him, either: more
unfinished, and increasingly urgent, business.

"Um.  Right."  I was thinking as quickly as I could, which was not top
fast.  "All right.  I mean, is everything all right?  You don't need
anything?"

"Of course I need something, Dido; that's why I'm phoning."

I woke up.  "Go on."

"I need to be taken shopping.  I seem to have run out of food of all
kinds.  And stamps."

I blinked, leaned on the sideboard, and thought about this.  It was the
first time in history that Barnabas had ever phoned me up and demanded
to be taken shopping.

"In fact..  ."  His tone suggested that he was considering.  "In fact,
why don't you bring your young man with you?  He could make himself
useful carrying the potatoes."

Paul Grant?  Bring a policeman to carry potatoes?  Alarm bells rang.
"Good idea," I said heartily.  "I'll see if he's free.  We can all have
coffee together."

"I'm out of coffee," Barnabas replied patiently, 'but you have the
right general idea.  I'm awaiting a delivery at ten thirty, but I
should be ready to leave by the time you get here."

Delivery?  I wondered whether this was some Barnabas code meant to
confuse the listeners, but it hadn't been prearranged, and it was
certainly confusing to me.  At least it wasn't the coded call for help.
I surrendered and rang off: I'd go and demand an explanation face to
face.

My mobile rang two minutes later while I was in the bathroom.  This
time it was Paul.

I said, "I thought you'd vanished.  What's happening about Barnabas's
telephone?  Is it still tapped?  We can't go on this way.  Haven't you
located them yet?"

"Never mind that."  His tone was peremptory; he seemed to be having
difficulty keeping his temper.  "Listen, what the hell is your father
up to?"

I said cautiously that so far as I knew, he was up to doing a little
shopping, and that he had requested our joint assistance.

"I know."

"You what?"

"We have a tap on his line from the exchange.  It's all right, he knows
about it."

"He didn't tell me.  Do you have a tap on mine too?"

Paul's voice was impatient.  "Of course not, or I'd have got your
consent."

"So you already know that he wants us both around there.  I'll be
leaving as fast as I can get out of the door.  Are you going to meet me
there?"  I couldn't stop myself adding, "I missed you this weekend."

He said quickly, "I missed you, too.  Listen, I'm in the car on my way
up to Crouch Hill.  Or I mean I'm supposed to be.  At the moment, I'm
stuck in traffic.  What I wanted to ask is whether you know about this
pick-up?"

"Pick-up?"

"He phoned one of the big security companies about forty minutes ago.
My man only just got around to listening to the tape, or I'd have been
over there before now.  He arranged for an armoured van to pick up a
parcel at ten thirty, and he asked for two hundred thousand pounds'
worth of insurance.  Damn this traffic.  Why did he use his phone?  Did
he forget the tap?  What the hell is this all about?"

Feeling distinctly as though I'd been punched in the stomach, I said
breathily, "I know he didn't forget the tap, but I don't have time to
talk.  I'll see you at Crouch Hill.  Can you get there quickly,
please?"

"At the moment," Paul's voice grated, "I'm sitting in the usual jam
just north of Highbury Corner.  It's solid, and I can't even turn off.
If you're coming up, take another route."

I hung up on him and went to insert my unwashed body into yesterday's
clothes.  The jacket had picked up a prominent red wine stain on the
sleeve and was probably not the outfit I would have chosen for a
romantic rendezvous, but there was no time to do anything about it.  I
checked that the mobile was in my bag, grabbed my keys, and dashed.
Forewarned, I took the Volvo in a great detour eastwards, because I
didn't have the advantage of a flashing blue light or two-tone siren or
anything.

Even so, I got there first.

Barnabas greeted me amiably at the door.  I said, "Barnabas!"

"What?"

"Have they been?"

"Who?"

I counted backwards from ten.  "The security firm.  Has it gone?"

Barnabas regarded me benevolently.  "How did you know?"

"Paul phoned.  The police heard every word you said.  So did the other
lot, of course.  Why did you call from your own phone?  You could at
least have gone upstairs!"

Barnabas beamed me into his sitting room.  "They were all supposed to
hear it.  For goodness sake, Dido, stop puffing at me you sound like
Pat.  Use your brain!  I particularly wanted them to hear: your boy
detective doesn't seem to be able to do anything, and I was becoming
uneasy about sitting around wondering which of us was going to receive
the next visit.  Do shut up squeaking, Dido!  I planned it all in the
middle of the night when that blasted animal of yours decided to visit
my pillow I mean yours and woke me up.  It was only a matter of getting
the security van here before they had time to do anything about it.  I
made the arrangements from a public phone on my way home, and I
confirmed from here just before the van was actually due to arrive shut
up Dido.  Now they realize, I hope, that the book is out of our hands.
With any luck, they may assume it's gone to America.  We ought to be
safe for the time being."

"But," I said and sat down uncomfortably on a chair which turned out to
hold a slippery pile of newspapers.  "All right, where did you actually
send it?"

Barnabas looked amused and a little smug.  "I told you, I'm not really
qualified.  The next step is to consult an expert.  Mackenzie in
Birmingham should be able to judge the holograph, but if he can't, then
it will have to go on to the Folger in Washington.  Either way, we can
do with having it out of our hands.  Satisfied?"

A familiar car was drawing up to the kerb in front of the house.  I
said hastily, "What are we going to say?"

Barnabas sighed.  "A censored version of the truth, I should imagine.
I've identified the valuable object.  I've sent it off for
verification.  We are going to the supermarket and the post office.
What else?"

Well, what else?  .. . and yet I had the curious feeling that there was
something else if the two of them would just give me a moment to
think.

I went to open the door, but the path was empty and Paul still sat
inside his car.  He beckoned.  When I leaned down to the car window, I
found him listening to his mobile with a kind of grim concentration, so
I climbed into the passenger seat and waited.  He switched off.

"Trouble?"

He didn't smile.  "We're getting reports that an armoured van has been
hijacked on the Holloway Road.  It's the firm your father phoned.  I
think we can assume that it's the same van.  I've told our people to
get straight into the empty flat where they've been monitoring your
father's phone and arrest everybody there.  We'll have to see what we
pull in."

I got my voice under control, more or less, and asked, "You mean that
you knew where they were?  Why didn't you tell Barnabas?  He's worried
because he thought you weren't doing anything ..."

"All right, so I hear!  Your father got fed up waiting, and as a result
it looks like we've lost a security van and two men.  Why can't he mind
his own business?"

I'd often felt the same way about Barnabas, but it wasn't down to Paul
Grant to say it.  On the other hand ... "What's happened to the
security men?  Are they all right?"

"We don't know, damn it!  I haven't got the whole story, but it sounds
as though they were followed from here and jumped at their next stop by
armed men.  Now they've vanished, along with the van.  There's a radio
tracer attached to the vehicle, of course, so we'll catch up with them,
but..  . If they've been killed, I hope your father can square that
with his conscience."

"How did they manage it?"  I asked humbly.  "They were awfully
quick!"

I didn't like the look in those brown eyes this morning.

"How?  Well, why not?"  His voice was stiff with anger.  "These people
have resources, and they must have been on to the van by the time it
left here.  Is he in there?  I want to know what he thinks he was up
to!"

In the circumstances, I suppose, it was understandable, but I still
felt like hurtling to Barnabas's defence.  If Paul expected a
respectable old man to anticipate the kind of violence that normal
people only see on television screens, he was out of touch.

We got out of the car just in time to see my father coming down the
front steps with a big nylon shopping bag in one hand.  Perhaps he was
counting on Grant to be easier to deal with in public, but I could
almost touch that half-controlled fury beside me.

"Barnabas, they've got it!"

"What?"  He came to a startled halt.

Paul growled, "I don't know what kind of trick you were trying to pull,
but the security van has just been hijacked, and we don't know yet
whether the men are alive or dead."

Barnabas frowned.  "Lord, I didn't realize it would be so easy!  I
assumed those security firms were safe.  They're always standing around
at the bank, looking military and keeping watch in helmets and what
not..."

Paul twitched his shoulders impatiently.  "Let's go indoors while you
tell me what all this is about."

Barnabas looked mildly embarrassed and decidedly stubborn.  "I'm sorry,
but I really can't.  I have an appointment later this morning which I
must keep, and a couple of minor errands which have to precede it."  He
noticed the expression on our faces.  "I suggest that we stop wasting
time.  If we get into your car, Inspector, you can drive and I'll
explain as we go.  You can stay in touch with your people, and if you
have to go somewhere in a hurry, we can get out at once and go on by
taxi."

I said, "Barnabas, they GOT it!"

He frowned.  "Well, obviously they got the van, but they may not have
found my parcel.  There must be a lot of parcels, and they may not have
had the time to search for it.  Inspector, I really do assure you I
didn't think for a moment that it would go this far."

Grant controlled himself with a visible effort and ushered us both into
his back seat, putting me in my place: member of the public.  My mind
turned uncontrollably to the memory of that bed on its scaffolding
platform.  I got hold of it and reminded it of the serious things that
were going on.

He turned the key in the ignition, signalled, and pulled away from the
kerb.

"If you head for the clock tower in Crouch End," Barnabas suggested
humbly, "I'll be able to do everything I need to around there."

"What," Grant demanded very clearly, 'was this parcel worth two hundred
thousand pounds?"

"A book," Barnabas said simply.  "One of that collection of books which
Dido was selling to Professor Warren to his library, that is for ten
thousand pounds."

Grant braked irritably behind a small van which seemed to be unable to
decide whether or not it was turning right.  "Dido told me.  You mean,
you found the thing that everybody's been looking for?"

Barnabas leaned back in his seat and embarked on a lecture.  He had
finished the short version by the time we came to the crest of the
hill.  We ran gently down towards the lights at Crouch End while he
expanded.  Grant was suitably impressed by the idea of a genuine piece
of Shakespeare manuscript, and curious about the financial
implications.

"It's complicated," Barnabas told him.  "Like an old master painting:
it's valuable, very valuable, but you can't just sell it."

Grant drove along a high road lined with illegally parked cars, edged
to the right, and stopped on the double yellow lines just outside the
post office.  He turned his engine off and said, "I'm not convinced."

Barnabas mimed polite resignation.  I said, "Why?"

"Let's take the example you mentioned: a painting.  Nowadays, a stolen
painting is more or less worthless.  The more famous it is the more
valuable the more worthless it turns out to be.  Remember "The Scream"
a couple of years ago?  Ugly Norwegian thing.  There was lots of
publicity, reproductions everywhere, including on the Internet, items
on television, articles in the newspapers.  That theft was supposed to
have been political a variation on terrorist hostage-taking and they
probably didn't intend to sell it anyway.  But if they'd tried, it
would have been dangerous impossible.  They got the painting back.  The
thing is, everybody knows about these things and they aren't going to
buy something like that from a dodgy source.  Your Shakespeare poetry
may be worth something to you, but it's worthless to anybody else.
Well..  . isn't it?"

Barnabas said something appropriate.  I shut up.  If Paul was right, it
wiped out certain assumptions.  In fact it seemed to put us back where
we'd started.

Not quite.  Because something had happened: the news that Barnabas was
sending off a valuable parcel had resulted in immediate action.
Somebody knew about the Shakespeare, all right: it was just that we
still hadn't identified them.

"I am going to buy stamps," Barnabas announced, and let himself out of
the car.

"I'd better go with him."

"All right."  It was still a growl, but the anger seemed to be
softening.  Perhaps we were going to be forgiven after all.

Paul stayed in the car to make calls.  I rushed after Barnabas and
joined him in the queue which was slowly inching its way towards the
counter.

"He's right," I mumbled.

Barnabas sighed grumpily.  "He's right in his own lights, but we still
don't know enough about their intentions.  Are you feeling all right?
You're looking pale."

I said, "I'm feeling sick because I haven't even had coffee, much less
breakfast, and we've lost a treasure worth a fortune.  I'm fine."

"Don't worry."  Barnabas patted my hand.  "It was insured.  It cost a
great deal, but I did insure it."

"They won't pay up, you know.  They'll demand evidence of its value,
which we haven't got, and then they'll demand compensation for those
men if they've been hurt.  They'll sue you, and then they'll sue me for
not keeping you under control."

"You are indeed in a bad mood," Barnabas said with unexpected mildness.
"Ah!  At last!"

I wandered back towards the door and stood watching with half an eye
while he engaged in negotiations with the woman behind the screen.  I
felt uneasy about Barnabas.  I was sure he was up to something he
wasn't letting on about, but a car horn blared in the street,
interrupting my concentration.  When I looked out, Paul's black Ford
was pulling away from the kerb.  I caught a wild wave of a hand before
it vanished.

Something new had happened so quickly that he couldn't stop to
explain.

At my shoulder, Barnabas was saying, "Good!  Now for one or two other
little calls before .. ."

"Paul's just taken off.  He was in a hurry."

"I saw.  They've probably found the van," Barnabas said simply.  "It
wasn't ever going to vanish, you know."

"I hope those men are safe."

"And so do I, of course.  I never really thought..."

"I know.  What's next supermarket?"

"Not exactly," Barnabas said.  "Actually, that will have to wait."

Knowing my father, I narrowed my eyes at him and said, "What's up? Come
to think of it, why did you want Paul Grant in the first place, and why
are you looking so happy that he's gone?"

Barnabas took hold of my elbow and steered me briskly out of the
building and towards the clock tower.  "I wanted his company to be sure
of getting away from the house safely.  Let's just say I'd become
uneasy.  It was all beginning to feel..  . you know, as though
something was about to happen."

Oh yes?  "And why did you want to get rid of him?  Is it this important
appointment you mentioned?"

"Precisely.  You said you're hungry?"

"Absolutely sick with hunger," I sighed, not exaggerating.

"We'll go and have coffee and Danish pastries.  There's a quarter of an
hour to spare."

"Before what?"

"Before the next stage of our investigations," he said pompously.  "Do
come along!"

23 Heritage

Physically restored by an almond Danish, two cups of cappuccino, and
some hard talking, I stood in the street watching Barnabas's taxi
disappear southward.

He'd got rid of me.  Not only that, but he'd done it by sending me on
an errand I didn't like.

Of course it was perfectly true that somebody had to approach Dan
Colbert at Heritage Books, find out whether Davey had been lying about
a Japanese customer, and pump him for the buyer's name if he existed.
For preference, without warning him that he was being pumped.  And
certainly without letting him develop the slightest suspicion that I'd
been lying when I announced the sale to the Constance Hance.  Dan was a
gossip, and if he ever guessed the truth, all my scheming at the book
fair would have been in vain.

If I'd had my wits about me, I'd have done the pumping days ago instead
of rushing around like a headless chicken all this time.  Why don't I
have a logical mind?

Unfortunately Barnabas does have a logical mind.  He had pointed out
that, of all possible pumpers, I was the logical choice, a point he'd
been putting to me pretty forcibly over coffee.  The problem was that
my qualifications consisted largely of Dan Colbert's tendency to lay
hands on me.  I had no wish to play Mata Hari, so I knew that I would
have to be unusually fast-moving if I were not to emerge from my visit
rumpled in body and temper.

I would even have preferred another little talk with Ilona Mitchell,
which might have been just as profitable.  I was beginning to know how
her mind worked.  Confront her with the truth, and she'd confirm it in
a sideways, well-maybe fashion.  I'd even got as far as phoning the
hospital on my way to the bus stop, which was how I learned that she
had discharged herself the previous afternoon.  I wondered whether Paul
knew.  We seemed to be having a communication problem.

There was one more thing bothering me as I climbed aboard a bus in a
less-than-angelic temper: Barnabas had some plan of his own which had
involved getting rid of me.  He hadn't even pretended otherwise.  By
the time I'd got to Bloomsbury, I was not in a pretty mood.

Colbert's shop was situated in one of the narrow streets just south of
the British Museum.  Its window, as I was impressed to see when I
arrived on the doorstep, held nothing but a black vase with white
carnations, and a tasteful display of extravagant French art bindings
arranged on the mahogany shelving which at once obscured the interior
of the shop and promised treasures within.  I paused for an elaborate
acting out of what I hoped would look like sudden interest in rococo
gilt.  My mood was not improved when I happened to notice the CLOSED
sign and realized that the performance had been unnecessary.  My watch
said that it was half past twelve -two hours after the sign promised a
shop open for business.  Presumably Colbert required additional
recovery time on a post-book fair Tuesday morning.  Don't we all!  I
kicked the door furtively and retreated to a dingy cafe across the
street.

Despite the formica-with-plastic-flowers decor, the Italian staff made
excellent coffee.  I was so encouraged that I ordered a plate of
mushroom ri sotto and settled in at a window table to admire the view
and wait.

The shop invited admiration.  Or did I really mean envy?  The position,
the phoney leaded windows, the door with its mouldings all spoke of a
reputable prosperity.  Not for Colbert the worry about thinning stocks,
dubious second-rate libraries in Banbury, or the empty spaces in a
prints cabinet.  He'd even got himself a new shop sign since I'd been
there last: a shiny, self-congratulatory board with gilt Gothic letters
on a midnight-blue background proclaiming in a self-confident way that
this magnificent place was COLBERT'S HERITAGE BOOKS.  If I could afford
a shop like that... I whispered it to myself: Colbert's Heritage.

He was, of course, English as far as I'd ever heard.  He was Daniel
Colbert, and he always pronounced it "Coal-hurt'.  But originally it
was a French name, all right.

Oh, Ilona, why couldn't you just bloody tell me?

Just after 1.30, when I'd finished off the delicious ri sotto without
even noticing it, the plump figure of Dan Colbert (Coal-hurt, Cole-bare
the name, and therefore his very identity, had become unfamiliar)
strolled into sight from the direction of Tottenham Court Road.  He was
not hurrying.  He looked pale and preoccupied, and I chalked up a
mental plus for guessing a hangover.  He too stopped outside the window
and stared at the display.  It didn't seem to give him as much pleasure
as it would me, if I'd owned it.  I watched him unlock the door, stand
hesitating on the threshold for what seemed like minutes, and then
drift inside.

Finishing my second coffee, I allowed him another ten minutes to settle
in so that it wouldn't appear that my arrival was anything but
accidental.

Nevertheless, as I stepped through the doorway I thought that a shadow
crossed his face and lingered just long enough to be noticed: as though
I was the last person he either expected or hoped to see.  It threw me
off balance.  I paused without meaning to and gave him the chance to
recover himself and bustle forward.

"Dido!  Poppet!"  I received an embrace and a peck that hit my ear.
"How nice?  On a shopping expedition, I hope?  Anything specific?"

I assumed an air of businesslike propriety.  "Just stock-hunting.  One
or two sections seem to be getting a little thin, and since I was down
this way..."

Colbert made a visible effort to grin amiably.  "My pleasure, of
course, though it's rather a mess downstairs.  I haven't had time to
unpack from the fair."

I allowed a sympathetic smile to play over my face.  "Still, mustn't
complain, must we?  Anyway, I've seen what you had at the fair, so that
doesn't bother me a bit, I'll start up here and just carry on."

If it had made any sense, I would have said that the proposal struck
him with horror.  For some reason he didn't want me anywhere near him.
It was so contrary to Colbert's normal flirtation that I was afraid I
might let him see my surprise.  I smiled most sweetly.  I thought his
hangover deepened.

"I have to go out in a minute .. . Sotheby's.  Sale."

If it hadn't all been so odd, I'd have enjoyed seeing him squirm.  But
I'd have preferred to have known the reason.  I gritted my teeth
mentally, checked to make sure that my intentionally inane smile hadn't
cracked, and got down to business, because whatever the reason, he was
certainly off balance.  This was my chance to push.

"I'll just have a look around until you need to leave, shall I?"  It
didn't sound like my voice at all.  "You know, I have some American
money coming in, and it does seem to be the time to restock."  So
there.

I stepped swiftly towards the nearest rank of illustrated natural
history books, dug into a pocket for my notebook and pencil, and
reached for the first volume that met my eye in order to establish my
serious intentions.  Colbert hesitated, murmured unintelligibly, and
retreated to the large desk in the corner of the room, from which he
always issued invoices and watched for shoplifters.  I pretended to
immerse myself in the task of finding something to buy.

"Are you sure there isn't something in particular... ?"  he asked after
a few minutes.

"Just for stock," I replied pleasantly.  Time to strike now.  "Our last
catalogue went rather well, and we're a bit low.  You know."

"Oh."  There was a silence that somehow promised something more.  I
waited, almost unaware of the volume I was pretending to collate.
Surely he had to take the opening I'd given him?  I replaced the book,
considered, and pulled out a Bewick.  A lorry passed in the street,
rattling the window.  I risked a covert glance out of the corner of my
eye.  Colbert appeared to be examining the grain of his desk top.

"Yes," I sighed.  "We've had a couple of big orders, and my stock looks
a bit thin.  I need to pick up a few things for the June book fair. You
know the kind of thing.  This Bewick is nice, but not quite .. ." I
hesitated and moved slowly down the rows of shelves, inspecting spines.
 Colbert shuffled his papers.

Next step .. .?  I said, obviously absent-mindedly: "Isn't it awful
about Job Warren?"

A handful of papers slid from the desk on to the floor.  Colbert
precipitated himself after them, vanishing behind the desk in a way
that would ordinarily have been comic.  "Yes."  The voice was muffled
by his efforts.  "London is becoming abominably violent."

I sighed.  "Yes, isn't it."  Be careful now.  "We were devastated.
Apart from the fact that he was such a good customer, he was a friend.
You know, he'd just bought the Ireland Collection from us, and he was
coming round for dinner, to discuss provenance and things you know the
very night he was killed ... Oh!"  I straightened up and replaced
another random book on its shelf.  "What a strange coincidence.  I've
just remembered Davey said you were interested in it too!"

There was another pause which lasted so long that I finally spoke into
it myself: "But of course, Professor

Warren had got it for the Constance Hance before I knew you were keen."
I listened to the silence and worked out the next move.  "Did you see
him, by any chance, this time?"

"No!  Alas.  He would have come, of course."

"Yes, I remember this was one of his regular stops.  Well, we've both
lost a good customer.  Now that he's dead, I suppose I'll have to
explain about the provenance to his successor."  I picked another book
at random and was lost in contemplation of its engraved title page.  Go
on, then!

"Provenance?  There isn't a question about that, is there?"

I kept my eyes on the page.  "Mmmn."  I suddenly discovered that I was
enjoying myself.

"Well, do tell.  Can I help?"

"Oh, I'm sure we can satisfy the library.  There's no question about
title, and of course the origin of the stuff is perfectly clear. Didn't
Davey say you had an enquiry about it?  Some regular customer? Anyone I
know?"

"No, oh no.  Just a businessman, not a collector."

I raised my eyebrows and gave him my full attention.  "Not a collector?
Then why on earth was he interested in buying it?"

Colbert's hands fumbled.  "It's a little complicated.  He ... Mr... It
was somebody who was introduced by one of my export customers.  He
wanted something for a Japanese business associate, a present, a
sweetener, I suspect.  The details I do not know, of course.  I
happened to think of the Ireland Collection.  Just the right thing for
Japan, you know very English, quirky, old, expensive .. . but with the
strong yen, something of a bargain.  Can't think why you never offered
it to me, my poppet.  I could have shifted it to Japan months ago."  He
cleared his throat.  "You haven't a problem with it, have you?"

I turned back to the bookshelves.  "Oh, no.  Just that Professor Warren
died before he'd come to us.  You know how he always paid by cheque at
the end of his visit.  Still, I'm sure that the Constance Hance will be
all right.  The collection has probably reached them by now.  I'll have
to write them a long letter about provenance, of course, but..."  Now
for the hook.  '..  . I'm sure they'll keep it."  I picked up a
gleaming, calf-bound quarto which might have contained a collection of
Superman comics, for all I would have noticed.  I considered it.  "I'm
sorry I didn't think about offering it to you, though.  I know you have
a lot of foreign customers.  Look, if by any remote chance something
does go wrong because of Job Warren's death, I mean I'll get back to
you.  You could put me in touch with your businessman.  There'd be the
usual in it for you, of course."

I was proposing the kind of mutual deal that we often make. Booksellers
often pass on customers we can't deal with ourselves, and consider it
only polite to be offered anything from a drink to a couple of hundred
pounds in recognition of the favour.  So I was taken aback when Colbert
burst out, "I don't think it would do."  He noticed my surprise.  "In
fact, I'm sure they won't be interested any more."

I raised an eyebrow.  "Really?  Why?"

"No, he ... I've found him something else.  Dickens.  In parts."

I sighed and turned away, digesting the news that

Colbert's client was now out of the Ireland market.  Well, of course,
there could be a perfectly simple reason for that, but if he was lying,
there seemed to be no way I could tell.  For the moment my inventive
powers had failed.  Paul Grant, of course, might have better luck, or
greater influence.  The thought cheered me up.  At least I'd
established that there had indeed been somebody interested in the
Ireland, and if Colbert had his own business reasons for not wanting to
give me a name, the police could certainly get it.

I almost started to leave, then realized that it would be a mistake. If
I went now, Colbert might be left with the impression that this
conversation had been significant, and I didn't want a lecture on
minding my own business.

I said, placing a bright Baskerville Milton with a dazzling title page
on the edge of Colbert's desk as my justification, "I'll have this. And
I'll just pop downstairs to see whether there's anything else."

The basement sale room was approached by a flight of stairs at one side
of the shop.  It was where Colbert kept most of his less valuable
volumes, since it was less under his eye and therefore more vulnerable
to customers with large inside pockets.  I was surprised and maybe
worse than surprised to find him stumbling downstairs after me.  I had
a momentary vision of him chasing me breathlessly among the book cases,
but he hesitated halfway, apparently caught between following me and
needing to watch the shop.  He crouched slightly, bringing his angle of
vision down below the st airhead and stopped.  I heaved a sigh of
relief and became absorbed in a shelf of nineteenth-century
three-volume novels, trying to ignore his awkward stance.

I might have been frightened, except that as far as I could see from
furtive glances out of the corner of my eye he was looking as uneasy as
I felt.  What the hell was going on?

I heard the shop door open and close.  Somebody asked a question.
Colbert hesitated, glanced briefly in my direction, and bobbed back up.
I could hear a muffled conversation.

What was wrong with the man?  Or was there something in this basement
room that was wrong?  There seemed to be nothing very different to the
last time I'd been here.  A door that I knew led into Colbert's little
store and packing room stood slightly ajar.  I listened for a second to
slow footsteps creaking overhead and the murmur of voices, then slipped
across to peek into a windowless little cupboard.  I switched on the
overhead light, suppressing a moment's anxiety about burglar alarms and
booby traps.  At one side, the usual rolls of padded plastic wrap and
brown paper hung on rollers from the wall.  Colbert's packing table
itself contained small piles of books, and a couple of wall shelves
held the usual dusty scattering of packing tape, cardboard, and padded
envelopes.  It was just like my own place.

Puzzled, I checked the empty st airhead again and slid towards the
table.  The books were orders for posting with an invoice protruding
from each.  Could the thing that I was not supposed to see be an
invoice in the name of Colbert's mysterious and valuable business
customer?  I tiptoed round the table, peering at the slips, but they
all seemed to have the names of libraries on them.  Ironically, one
large order consisting of a double pile of calf-bound volumes with a
few plastic-enveloped broad sheets perched on top was invoiced in
Colbert's affected italic to the Constance Hance.  I skimmed the rest
and found nothing helpful.

The inaudible conversation droned on over my head as I returned to the
outer room, and examined it helplessly.

All right, I was missing something.

Was he just worried that I'd stumble across some stolen book on one of
the shelves?  From time to time I'd heard whispers that Heritage Books
was not above buying a valuable volume for much less than the normal
price, no questions asked.  Was it possible that he'd actually lifted
something from my stand during the book fair?  I could have been too
preoccupied yesterday to notice something missing.  But why would he
have put such a thing out on the open shelves for anyone who wandered
in to see?

When I heard the shop door closing, I picked up a Trollope and advanced
on the stairs.

Colbert met me, saying, "I'm sorry to chuck you out, my love, but I
must be off..  just as I began, "I'll take this and the Milton .. ."

I couldn't have brought myself to stay longer anyway.

I wrote out a cheque, accepted my parcel, and allowed myself to be
hurried into the street.  I'd taken one deep lungful of exhaust fumes
and moved about five steps towards New Oxford Street when Colbert
emerged, locked the door, and scuttered off in the opposite direction.
He managed to escape without having to notice me.

When he was safely out of sight I dug out my mobile,

tried Barnabas's phone, and gave up when it had rung a dozen times.  It
wasn't really surprising that he hadn't got back, but I did want to
find out what he'd been up to, so I said, "Bugger' in a frustrated tone
that came out loudly enough to draw surprised glances from a group of
four middle-aged American tourists heading towards the British Museum.
I hailed a passing cab.  When I'd given the driver Barnabas's address,
I leaned back and tried to relax because it had been a busy day
already, and there was quite a lot of it left.

A kind of twitching uneasiness, a mental itch, kept me tense.  As the
cab turned into Southampton Row and headed towards King's Cross, that
uneasiness grew.  My arrival had made Colbert so nervous that he'd
revealed his feelings almost honestly, and .. .

Yes, I'd missed something.

I'd actually paid the driver, given him an unnecessarily large tip out
of sheer absent-mindedness, and climbed halfway up Barnabas's front
steps, before I knew what it was.

Colbert said he had not seen Professor Warren this visit.  Yet on his
packing table, where I'd never have seen it if I hadn't been nosing
around, there sat a big pile of books addressed to the Constance
Hance.

When Job went through one of his favourite book shops there was always
a huge pile of his purchases for the bookseller to ship.  I thought
about it.  Of course, I could have found an order from a catalogue, but
if Colbert had issued a catalogue in the past four months, I certainly
hadn't seen a copy.  Besides, Professor Warren wouldn't have ordered
books to be sent unseen if he was just about to arrive in London.  He
would have phoned Colbert, the way he had me, and asked him to keep
things to one side.

And there wouldn't have been an invoice yet not until he'd examined the
books and decided to take them.

Job Warren had gone to Colbert's shop and Colbert had lied about it and
there had been no possible reason to lie about it, no reason at all.

I found myself inside Barnabas's flat without any memory of opening his
door.  Because there was a reason for the lie the only possible reason.
Colbert would only have lied because he didn't want anybody to know
that he had seen Professor Warren.  And the only possible reason for
that was that he knew something about the murder.

Someone would have to ask him about that, wouldn't they?

But not me.

Indigestion

"Not so mysterious," Barnabas said soberly.  He had returned just
before me, and we were sitting at his kitchen table sharing a pot of
tea.  "I was doing exactly the same as you.  You mentioned that you'd
had an enquiry from Quaritch about the collection.  I took a taxi down
there, found Allen Ferrars from whom I was buying books when you were
still in the nursery and asked him about it."

"And?"

"He hadn't dealt with it himself, but he found the client's card."

"For goodness sake, Barnabas, tell me!"

"The customer was a Mr.  M. Campbell.  It meant nothing to him, or to
me for that matter."  He looked at me carefully.  "You've heard the
name."

I had.  Oh yes.  My chain of villains was complete, and it fitted too
well to be much of a surprise.  While I was wondering what to do about
it, I asked automatically, "Was there an address?"

'12A Wilding Road."

"What!"

"That's correct, he gave them Davey's address.  It doesn't help much,
except to confirm .. ."

I said, "Yes.  Oh, hell, Barnabas, why doesn't Paul Grant phone?"

"I suppose your mobile phone is switched on this time?"

I was saved the bother of replying by the trilling coming from inside
my shoulder bag.  When I'd disentangled the machine from a nest of
crumpled tissues and bus tickets, I said, "Hello, Paul.  What's
happened?"

"Hello, Dido."  He sounded less edgy than when I'd seen him last.
"We've found it.  It was dumped in among the lock-ups on a council
estate in Tottenham.  It was reported by a couple of schoolkids walking
their bull terrier.  And the men were inside shaken, but all right."

I mouthed the words, "All right' at Barnabas, who was trying to listen.
He nodded and relaxed.

"You didn't by any chance find the book?"

"No.  They went through everything, but the driver says they were
looking for something specific.  They grabbed a few bags, and your
father's parcel is certainly missing.  They shifted to a car that was
waiting there; they were long gone by the time we'd arrived."

"What about the ones who were listening to my father's telephone?"

"We'd spotted them in the empty flat just up the road, and we sent two
cars in to pick them up the moment we got the news about the security
van.  We missed them by a few minutes.  They just left everything and
scarpered,

probably when their mates let them know they'd got the van."

I excused myself and summarized the story for Barnabas, who remained
remarkably stoical for a man who has just lost a national treasure.

"What happens now?"  I demanded.

"Looking for witnesses, trying to get a line on the car they were using
.. ."

"Tell him," Barnabas commanded.

His voice was loud enough to carry, and Paul said, warily, I thought,
"Tell me what?"

I said, "Marty Campbell, I'm afraid," and explained.

"You're sure about all this?"

I said, "No, I'm not sure about anything.  But I had a very strong
impression.  It can't hurt to get the name of Dan Colbert's customer at
least.  Maybe it's all perfectly innocent."

"Maybe it isn't."

I agreed.  Because if I were a suspicious kind of person, I might think
I knew why Dan's customer was no longer interested in the Ireland
Collection.  You can't purchase something you've already stolen.

Paul asked, "What's Quaritch?  Are they all right?"

Barnabas, beside me, looked shocked.  I explained: "More than all
right.  Respectable and aristocratic.  Like Harrods."

Paul seemed to snarl, "I'll check.  It all has to be checked out.
Colbert first, though.  He won't be at the shop, so where does he
live?"

I said I thought somewhere in south London.

"All right, I'll see what I can find.  I'll be waiting at the shop in
the morning if we can't get to him tonight."

"He'll give you the name?  He'll tell you if it's Campbell?"

"Oh yes," Grant said shortly.  "And of course it's bloody well
Campbell."

"Will you tell me what he says?"

"Where will you be this evening?"

I said that I wanted to wash my hair.

"Then I'll ring in about an hour, an hour and a half.  Or drop by."

I thought, Promises, promises, and poured another cup of tea.  My
father seemed preoccupied.  I assumed that he was immersed in the
problem of how to persuade an insurance company to pay up, if worse
came to worst.  Good luck to him, I thought cynically.  As for me, I
just didn't believe it would happen.  Any of it.

Some time after midnight I sat in the living room, damp around the
edges and wrapped in my green terry bathrobe.  Comforting.  It was as
quiet outside as London ever gets, though the traffic never really
stops.  Down in the street a car door slammed.  It was quiet enough to
hear the footsteps, and when my doorbell rasped I was already halfway
to the window.  Paul Grant's wedge-shaped face looked up at me when I
leaned out.

"I brought this."  He held something up toward me like a peace
offering, and after a moment I recognized my own telephone and laughed.
"Is it too late?"

I shook my head vigorously and went down to let him in, feeling the
little bubble of excitement explode under my breastbone.  We kissed
behind the closed door.

"I thought you weren't coming."

"Sorry.  I've only just got away from my desk.  DIs don't arrange work,
you know we just do it."

I got hold of myself.  "You must be coming it with the overtime
rates."

His eyes closed for a moment.  "I think we got paid overtime, once upon
a time, if I can remember three or four reorganizations ago.  I save on
food."

"Can I... ?"

"I wouldn't mind a sandwich."

By a kind of miracle I had both ham and acceptably fresh bread.  There
was even a slightly dry scrape of Dijon mustard.  We sat in the kitchen
eating ham sandwiches and drinking Scotch under the yellow eye of Mr.
Spock who was doing his statue act on top of the fridge.

"Tell me, then has anything turned up?"

Paul shrugged.  "We traced your elusive colleague to an address in
Kingston-upon-Thames, but he wasn't there.  I've also been phoning
round trying to find out where Marty Campbell is living at the moment.
Somebody thought he might have a flat in the Barbican.  I'll try to
check in the morning.  We spent a couple of hours taking the men who
were in the van through our photos, but they don't admit to recognizing
any of the people who jumped them."

"What's next?"

"I'll catch Colbert at his shop as soon as he gets there tomorrow.  I
mean today.  A thousand to one he'll tell us that his customer was
Marty Campbell.  The question is whether he can give us an address."

"He may not be willing to," I warned him, thinking again of all the
blanks, all the questions that needed to be asked about Colbert's
behaviour.

"I know.  The other thing is to get a forensic team into that flat on
Crouch Hill.  They left the place in a rush, and they must have
forgotten something.  We should at least get fingerprints, and I'll be
surprised if they aren't on record."

I asked the question that had given me such anxiety for the past few
hours.  "Is my father safe now, do you think?"

Paul looked at me seriously.  "I think you can assume that you're both
safe enough.  They've got what they wanted, and there's no reason for
them to come back.  How is your father taking it?"

"All right," I said.  "Quite cheerful.  He was trying to get rid of the
thing, you know, and he has not quite the way he intended, but at least
it's gone.  I don't believe we'll ever get it back."

Barnabas had been very casual about the loss.  I told myself he was
being courageous, and that it was the best thing for him, in his
health, to take it like that.  But it left me feeling that there was
something I didn't understand.  Apparently he had persuaded himself
there was something unreal about the whole episode.  Almost as though
the Shakespeare autograph had been just one of Davey's fictions.  What
seemed to console him was that he had made a copy facsimile of the
writing, so that the variant version of the poem had not been lost.
When I'd remarked, perhaps slightly heatedly, that it didn't seem to me
to be much of a substitute for the real Shakespearean touch, and that
it certainly wasn't worth the same money, he'd given me a lecture on
the inflated values of antiques, and a moral sermon which came down
more or less to the point that we ourselves had never had any special
moral rights to the holograph.  All very philosophical, no doubt, but
we both knew that the people who had got the Plutarch were killers with
a lot less right, either legal or moral, than we had.  In fact, the
whole thing made me mad.

"It is a terribly small, fragile thing, but we might be lucky," Paul
said hesitantly.  It didn't sound as though he thought so.

"At least nobody else was killed."

He echoed, "At least nobody else was killed."  The sandwiches were
finished.  "Dido?"

"Yes," I said, "I'd love you to stay."

We slept and woke and slept again.  When I woke for the last time it
was because there was a bell warbling and a startled movement from
beside me as Paul woke and delved under the pillows for his mobile
phone.  I lay on my back, eyes slitted against the daylight, watching
him.

"Grant."

He listened to a lengthy speech, but at the end of the first sentence
he was rolling out of the bed.  I retrieved the duvet and hid under it,
paying attention.  He had started to gather his clothes with one hand,
still listening.  After a long time, he said, "Stay there and keep an
eye on the place.  I'll pick up the warrant.  What time is it?  It'll
be ready by now.  Say half an hour."

He switched off and began to dress.

"What is it?"

He looked at me for the first time, bent over, and kissed my forehead.
"That was my man down in Bloomsbury.  He says some old girl turned up
with a key just after he arrived, and opened up."

I considered.  "That's Mrs.  Wigginton, I expect.  She's part-time.
Doesn't know anything about books, but helps out weekends and when
Colbert is away: takes money, writes invoices, and wraps parcels."

"Wigginton?  Right.  Then he turned up a quarter of an hour later.
Spoke to her, opened the post, fussed around a bit.  Looked jumpy, my
sergeant said, as though he was waiting for something.  There was a
phone call, which seemed to make him very anxious."

I said, "Your man seems to have seen a lot.  Where on earth was he?"

"Coffee shop across the road, having his breakfast, with binoculars."

"Oh," I said.  "I know it."

"There was an argument of sorts.  Then he made a phone call himself,
even shorter but a bigger argument.  Then he had a word with Mrs.
Whatsit and left in a hurry."

"Where to?"

"She said he told her that he was going to be out all day, and that she
should open up tomorrow morning too, unless she heard from him."

I propped myself up against the pillows.  "Is your man following
him?"

"Following?  No, of course not.  What we need just now is to have a
close look at the shop, especially his paperwork, customer lists,
anything that might tell us how he's involved with Campbell assuming
that he is.  I prefer talking to awkward witnesses after I have some
kind of facts under my belt: it makes life easier.  For me, I mean.

Last night I arranged to get a warrant to search the place, just in
case I needed it.  I told them I was expecting to find evidence
relating to Professor Warren's murder.  I'll go and get on with it
now."

He kissed me again, struggled crookedly into his jacket, and flung open
the bedroom door, tripping over the waiting cat as he headed toward the
stairs.

I roused myself to yell, "Phone me!  Let me know what you find!"

A half-audible reassurance drifted up, interrupted by the slamming of
the front door.  Mr.  Spock arrived on my bed.  He had spent the night
in tactful exile the tact had been mine and was not in a good temper.
Neither was I. Apparently being a policeman's partner consisted largely
of being dropped abruptly at the wrong moment.

After a while I told myself that staying in bed wouldn't help, and set
about the business of the morning.  I had my own shop to open up and
the rest of my life to get on with, and there was something about the
past hours which had left me uneasy and restless.

Dido, that was a nice night.

Of course it was.

That was sex.  You ought to get more of it.

You don't say!

You're feeling wonderful this morning.

I think I'm feeling tired this morning.

Don't whinge.  The man is lovely.  You're getting old.

Yes, lovely.

What's wrong with you?

Nothing's wrong with me.  I don't know what's bugging me, all right?

Yes you do.

It's the morning after, that's all.  Piss off.

I bathed, dressed, stroked and fed Spock apologetically, listened to
the news from Bosnia, drank coffee, and finally tucked my restored
telephone under my arm and trudged down to the shop.  It wasn't until I
was unlocking the door that I remembered about the stack of book
cartons and folding shelves which was blocking the right-hand aisle.  I
still hadn't unpacked from the weekend fair.

Just for one fleeting moment I thought of backing out and running away
to sea.  Instead, for no very good reason except perhaps the lack of
any credible alternative, I left the CLOSED sign up for the time being
and began re shelving the books.

I worked quickly.  If I was going to open up for lunchtime business,
the aisle had to be cleared.  I made my mind a blank and turned into a
machine.  It was not quite eleven when I finally shelved the last
quarto and manoeuvred a tottering pile of empty cardboard boxes through
the door and into the office.  The last touch was to plug in the phone,
and I stepped back then and ran my eyes over a shop which looked normal
for the first time in a month.  Just at that moment, normality seemed
wonderful.

Time for a coffee before I opened for business?  I assured myself that
there was and went out, locking the door behind me without bothering to
set the alarm.  Another sign of normalcy.  In celebration I decided
that there was time to make a pot of real coffee, and I put the water
on to boil, ground the beans, and opened a window a little wider.  The
late April sun poured on to my flat roof,

and I stood for a moment to watch Mr.  Spock basking in its warmth,
flattened and luxurious.  The kettle began its first tentative hum
before the water boiled.  I wandered out into the sitting room yawning.
And saw the red light blinking on the answering machine.

Paul?  Damn it, he might at least have tried the downstairs phone and
had a quick word, even if he hadn't found anything at Heritage.  Didn't
the man understand that I'd be waiting to hear?

I rewound the tape, gradually realizing that it was an unusually long
message, and started it playing.

And the voice after all was my father's.

25 Twist

The message needed two hearings, and still it made no sense.

Dido?  Good morning.  Will you listen to this carefully, please, and do
EXACTLY what I ask you.  It's eight o'clock.  I'm waiting for the post
to arrive.  It will contain the Plutarch.  I'll explain later.  As soon
as it arrives, I am going to take it to show to somebody.  I discussed
this with Allen Ferrars yesterday, and he agrees that this is best in
the short term, although the book will probably have to go over to the
Folger if first impressions are that it's authentic.  Clear so far, I
trust?  Now, I want you to come over here at about ten thirty.

I looked at my wristwatch.  I was late.

Assuming everything goes to plan, I won't be here.  Just let yourself
in and have a look around.  I'll leave you a note.  I expect, knowing
you, that you'll probably want to join me.

I probably would, at that.  Or was he in fact asking me to follow?
Barnabas?  What are you up to?

From some kind of obscure feeling that I'd better preserve the message,
I left the machine switched off and rang the station.  After the usual
three-minute wait, somebody informed me that DI Grant had left.  I
tried his mobile without any result.  Stopping long enough to peer at
my bloodshot eyes in the bathroom mirror and reflect that I was
incubating a headache and another bout of indigestion, I flung aspirin,
Alka-Seltzer and my hairbrush into my bag, grabbed keys and mobile, and
ran.  I gave a moment's thrill to a van driver by rushing across the
road to the Volvo without looking both ways first.  Taking the
experience to heart, I set off towards Crouch Hill at a more sober
pace.  I was fifty minutes late by the time I drew up to the kerb
outside my father's house.

The mobile rang.  I slammed the car door and leaned on the garden wall.
"Yes?"

"Hi."  This time it was Paul.  "Sorry I didn't get back to you, but
something has come up.  Your father isn't answering his phone, so
you'll have to help me if you can."

Confusion.  "What?"

"Your father said Professor Warren always carried a briefcase around
with him."

I straightened up.  "You've found it?"

"An old-fashioned brown leather case, with a big computer print-out of
book titles headed "Graduate Research Library" ring a bell?"

I felt sick.  "That's his.  Where did it turn up?"

"In the shop.  Tucked away in a dark corner under a table in the office
.. . Hello?"

"I'm still here," I said hastily through the buzzing in my ears.  "I...
I must have almost stumbled over it.  I'm glad that I didn't see it."

"You're right it was best not to touch it."

That was not what I'd meant.

"We're doing a hard search now.  If he was killed here we'll find
something a spot of blood, a hair there's always something.  I think it
must have happened here, because it's the obvious explanation for the
briefcase."

"Why wouldn't they get rid of it?"

"I don't think they noticed it.  It was pushed well back out of
sight."

I leaned even harder on the Volvo.  "Do you mean that Colbert killed
him?"

"We'll have to ask him.  But if he didn't, then he damned well knows
who did."

After a moment, the only thing I could think to say was, "This is
horrible."

"Yes.  Look ... I'll keep you informed."

I said thank you.  Then I switched off.  Afterwards, I remembered that
originally it was I who had phoned him, and that there had been a
reason for it, but I felt too sick to ring back.  I didn't even want to
think about DI Grant, Heritage Books, or murder: finding out what
Barnabas was up to was about as much as I could manage just now.  I
breathed deeply until I knew that I'd make it the few steps to the
flat, and let myself in with my set of keys.

Of course, he wasn't there.

The message had said to look around.  A padded envelope lay opened on
the desk, with a Recorded Delivery label on it; it was addressed to
Barnabas in his own handwriting, and it was big enough for the
Plutarch, so I had no doubt what it had held.  I held it up to the
window for a closer look.  The faint postmark said it had been mailed
in Crouch End the day before.

After a moment, I stopped laughing long enough to work out what he'd
done.

The famous stolen parcel had been a decoy: one of his own
seventeenth-century books probably he owned quite a few or maybe even
another one from the Ireland Collection, perhaps one with Samuel's book
plate temptingly displayed in it.  Either would have been enough to
fool the hijackers, if not an expert.

The old stories popped into my head, the ones my father used to tell
Pat and me about his intelligence work during the war.  When you
cracked an enemy code, you had to make sure they didn't find out, so
that you could both intercept their plans and feed them false
information in return.  You had to be tactful, because if they
suspected the truth you lost your advantage, and maybe they twisted
things around and fed you the false information instead, and led you to
disaster.

Barnabas had worked in Signals Intelligence during the war.  He'd
really enjoyed himself.  He would never forget the old tactics.

So he had used his telephone as a channel of communications with the
enemy.  So long as they didn't know he knew about them, he could feed
them anything.  He told them that the Shakespeare autograph was leaving
our possession, and they'd believed it and hijacked the security van.
With their attention distracted, my crafty old father had calmly
inveigled Paul Grant and me into escorting the real thing to the post
office, where I had unknowingly watched him post it back to himself for
safety.  No wonder he had been so unworried by the theft.

The trouble was, as I seemed to recall, the need for secrecy meant you
could never be certain who was misleading whom.  Also, you could never
do anything that might tell the enemy you were on to them.  We were so
busy making sure the Germans didn't realize we'd cracked their code
-Enigma, it was called that when we learned they planned to bomb
Coventry we couldn't do anything about evacuating the city.  Because
then of course they would have changed it.  I seemed to recall that a
lot of civilians had been allowed to die because of that.  They claimed
that it was justified because it meant we won the war.

Maybe, this time, it would work.  So, Barnabas: what did you do next?

He was taking the real book to show it to somebody.  Not Allen Ferrars,
obviously.  It had to be somebody much bigger than that: a scholar, an
authority on Shakespeare so eminent that his word would be credible
even in this incredible situation.  Was I supposed to guess?

No I was supposed to find a note.  I examined the desk.  The papers had
been put away; nothing there was of special interest.  The box that
held the remainder of the Ireland Collection seemed the other obvious
place, but there was no note inside.  If anything was in the kitchen,
it had been put out of sight, which seemed unreasonable.  The bathroom
proved equally tidy and unhelpful.

In the middle of Barnabas's neatly made bed sat his old yellow leather
suitcase with an envelope centred on the lid.  I tore it open, fumbled
with the sheet of paper inside, and unfolded a long paragraph of
Barnabas's cramped handwriting.

My dear .. .

By this time you will have realized that I'm not coming back there
today.  While the coast is clear, I'm taking it up to Oxford to ask
Tullett... I sat down with a bounce on the edge of the double bed.  ask
Tullett to have a look at it.  There is no one else whose judgment I'd
trust in these overly dramatic circumstances.  I mean about
Shakespearean material, of course; he was and remains hopeless with the
earlier stuff.  If he reckons it is authentic, then the next step as
you know will be to send it straight over to Washington.  Or take it,
perhaps?  I am catching the next train, and suspect that you'd insist
on following me, so will you save me the trouble and bring along the
little case?  I shall probably have to stay up overnight.  You'll know
where I'm staying, of course, and if you decide that you can't make it
up there, perhaps you'd just give a ring and leave a message so I
shan't be worried, and I shall be back some time tomorrow.  Be careful.
B. Suppressing my natural impulse to throw his note and his overnight
case across the room, I re dialled Paul's mobile.

For once, he answered before I could fret.

I said, "Listen to this one," and told him.  Even read him the whole
message.

There was one of those things which are traditionally described as 'an
eloquent silence'.

"I'd better go after him," I said quickly.  "He shouldn't be left
carting that..  . that thing about on his own."

"I suppose so."  Paul sounded cold.  "When you catch him, I wish you'd
section him.  Or maybe send him off to Washington out of my way.  Why
Washington?  Is he going to take over the White House?"

I started to explain about the Folger Library, but he broke in.

"Don't you realize it's possible that Colbert is following him?"

I hadn't.  Damn it!  "It has to be a coincidence.  Doesn't it?  His
absence?"

"No.  Well ... possibly, but no.  I'm thinking about the phone call
that Colbert received.  Who could have told him, at nine in the
morning, that your father was packing a suitcase to go away?"

I said loudly, "Nobody.  Could they?"

"Well... I suppose, theoretically, they might have had someone watching
his flat because they'd discovered that they hadn't got the real thing
and were wondering whether he still had it.  When he went out carrying
a parcel..  ."

'... or a briefcase .. ."

'..  . they would have followed him.  There'd be no problem, at
Paddington, finding out where he was going.  Presumably Colbert was
told to go with him, or after him at the very least."

My indigestion kicked into action.  "Colbert?  Last night, when he
wasn't at home, he must have gone to check the book they stole.  He
would almost certainly have worked out that it was wrong valueless.  He
had the whole night to examine it."  If it had been me, I couldn't have
waited an hour to see all that fame, all that money..  . "Paul, I'm
going straight to Oxford."

"I don't suppose you'd listen to reason?"

I told him that this didn't seem the moment to start doing that.

"All right.  I'll meet you in Oxford.  Where will I find you?"

"I'll be looking for him.  There are only two places he'd think of
staying: his old college Queen's, in the High Street, in one of the
guest rooms or the Randolph Hotel if Queen's is full."

"I'll leave as soon as I can get hold of a police car.  I can make
better time in that.  Look for a message at the hotel reception, or
with the college.  And I'll ring through to Oxford CID as I go and warn
them to expect trouble."

"I wish you were coming with me," I said, and switched off, because
there was nothing to be done about that.

I stopped to swallow two aspirins and, for good measure, brushed my
hair in preparation for the fray.  It was just after noon as I pulled
away from the kerb, and I calculated that Barnabas must have arrived by
now wherever he was going.  At least the traffic shouldn't be too heavy
at this time of day, and barring road works I might get into central
Oxford in ninety minutes.  I headed the Volvo towards the Westway and
the M40 to see just how far my luck could be pushed.

26 Going In

Once past the heavy traffic heading towards the M25, I allowed myself
to start thinking again about Barnabas, carrying the perilous Plutarch
and accompanied by thugs.

It wasn't real thinking.  Worrying that's the correct description.

I put my foot down until the Volvo slowed to a crawl on the long rise
up to High Wycombe, reminding me that I still hadn't arranged the car's
overdue service; but over the crest of the Chilterns, the rest of the
trip was quick.

I'd decided to take the A40 into the city.  It meant a long drive
through built-up areas, but would take me straight past Queen's and
might save a minute or two in the end -if things worked out that way.
Once past the shops, and the red light at the Headington crossroads, I
made satisfactory time until the cars creeping down St.  Clement's
forced me into second gear.

I used my mobile to phone as I drove.  On my third attempt, I'd
persuaded somebody to answer the phone in the porter's lodge at
Queen's.  No, madam, we have not seen Professor Hoare today and I do
not believe that he has booked in to stay.  Oh yes, madam, I would
certainly recognize the professor, as I have worked here for seventeen
years.  Of course I will be glad to give the professor a message.  I
suppressed temptation and merely said I would try again later.

At Christ Church, Professor Tullett's base, another voice with
identical intonations informed me that Professor Tullett was not there,
and not expected, and that the speaker would of course be glad to give
the professor a message if he did return unexpectedly..  .

My problem was imagining what message would cover the situation.  "If
'my father turns up, please take his book away from him, tie him up so
that he can't hurt himself, and throw the book out the window'!  I
opted for tact and left instead the simple statement that I was just
arriving in Oxford to meet my father who was, I believed, intending to
visit Professor Tullett, and I would ring back in an hour.  Even as I
did so, the Volvo was progressing at last over Magdalen Bridge and into
the old city.

I turned into Longwall and surrendered myself to the peculiar system of
filters and diversions with which Oxford struggles to pour
twentieth-century traffic through its mediaeval core.  After a
quarter-hour's crawl around the Parks, and a couple of painful turns, I
abandoned the car in St.  Giles, hoisted my father's overnight bag out
of the passenger seat, and began to trudge towards the Martyr's
Memorial.

Now that felt appropriate.

My goal, however, was the Randolph Hotel on the corner of Beaumont
Street a yellow-brick pile built in the style that I always think of as
Victorian-Baronial.  When we used to live in Oxford, my father bought
me an elegant tea there at the end of every school term.  I suspected
that his real intention had always been to treat himself to the
Randolph tonight, and hang the expense.

The main door was flung open in front of my nose by a porter in a black
suit whose manner suggested that he believed me to be at least a lady,
and probably a marchioness.  He was, obviously, a skilled worker.  I
sailed in trying to look like an absolute duchess, and stopped.

The lobby swirled with tourists, and the clothes and voices around me
were mostly American.  I'd hoped to find Paul Grant lurking there with
a little fighting circle of plain-clothes detectives, but if any police
were in attendance, they were keeping a very low profile.  There was
certainly no sign of Paul among the armchairs, mirrors, flowers and
bodies.

A second porter, seeing me with Barnabas's ancient case, jumped to the
obvious conclusion, snatched it from my hand, and swept me over to the
Gothic-style reception desk.  An equally smooth thin man behind it gave
an impression of a courtly bow and wondered whether he could help me.

I repeated my story: "I'm here to meet my father.  If Professor Hoare
has booked in already..  ."

The impression of a bow froze, and I caught a speculative look that
told me I'd come to the right place.

"May I ask who is enquiring?"

I told him that I was the one who was doing the enquiring, and was
puzzled for a moment to see him consult a scrap of paper on the desk.
Curiosity gave way to sheer bewilderment when I craned my neck and
caught a glimpse of my own face a photo, taken at the wedding
reception, of me cutting the cake and simpering sideways at Davey's
profile.  Barnabas must have found it in his billfold.  It goes without
saying that I hadn't seen or thought of that image for a very long
time.

But I was being identified.

Evidently I resembled myself.  The bow turned into a knowing beam, and
the thin man grew confidential.  "Professor Hoare is resting in his
room, room 108.  He asked me to let you have the second key."  It was
produced and pushed across the desk.  "He has booked you into room
219.I also have a note for you.  The porter will take you up now, if
you are ready."  Another key was produced and handed to the porter, and
an envelope to me.  "There's no need to sign the register.  Your father
has taken care of everything."

Booked in, was I?  I'd walked into somebody else's scenario, but
swallowed a protest and trotted after the swift-moving porter and my
father's case.  I hoped Barnabas was intending to pay, because I
seriously doubted that I could afford the Randolph this month.  On the
whole, working booksellers can't, though I had stayed once when the
Association had negotiated special room rates for a book fair at the
hotel.  (Even the Randolph makes some concessions to modern life.) I
turned to face forward just as the lift doors were closing.

I looked back towards the main entrance just in time to see Marty
Campbell step in from the street.  He was about fifteen feet away, and
looking in another direction, but I

ducked.  I had an impression that he was not alone.  They probably
hadn't noticed me.

By the time the lift had reached the second floor, I had the beginnings
of a plan.  The first thing was to get rid of the porter.  I pressed
forward on his heels, and we arrived slightly breathlessly at 219.  He
unlocked the room and made a valiant attempt to usher me inside -I got
a quick impression of cream paint, dark carpet and cream-coloured
furniture and demonstrate the light switches and other such pleasures,
so I pressed too much money into his hand and more or less bundled him
out.  Then I flung myself on the bedside telephone and dialled 108.  I
was expecting anything, but all that happened was that Barnabas's voice
said, "Hello?"

"I'm here.  In my room.  I'm coming down to you now.  Listen, Marty
Campbell just came into the lobby..  ."

My father's voice became fussy and precise.  "Have you actually read
the order?"

My eye fell on the unopened envelope.  Did he mean that?  "No," I
said.

"I thought not.  Room service.  I would prefer to have Earl Grey,
assuming that you haven't run out.  Can you bring it in about fifteen
minutes, please?"

For a moment I was confused.  Then I realized that "Room service'
hadn't been spoken to me, but to somebody who was with him, somebody
demanding an explanation for the phone call.

I found that I could still speak.  "Are you in danger?"

"No, not at all."  If anything, he sounded amused.  "And I would prefer
lemon with that tea."

Right.  "I'll read your note first.  Can I ring back then?"

"Not really."

"I'll phone the police."

"That won't be necessary, thank you."

The telephone clicked and went dead.  I turned cold.  Or maybe I'd gone
cold a few minutes earlier.

I ripped open the hotel envelope.  There was no form of address this
time, and the words straggled with the writer's hastiness.

Dan Colbert was at the station.  Must have followed me.  He pretended
he was surprised.  Tried to get rid of him by doing some telephoning,
but he wouldn't leave.  Dropped me off by taxi, so will presumably be
back shortly.  I can and will deal with this.  Don't worry they have no
reason to do me any harm, rather the reverse.  It's important that you
stay in your room with the door locked.  Hang on to my bag until I
contact you, and make no attempt to bring it to my room.  Stay in your
room.

The last line had been underscored so violently that his pen had
pierced the paper.

I would have thought it through if I'd had the time, but time had just
run out.

An Oxford phone book sat in the bottom of the bedside stand.  I found
the number of the police station, dialled, remembered that I would need
an outside line, dialled again, and asked for the CID in a voice so
urgently authoritative that I was put through at once.

"DI Morrow."  It was a woman's voice.

"My name is Dido Hoare.  Have you been contacted by

DI Grant from Islington, London?"

The voice became urgent.  "Miss Hoare, I know who you are.  Inspector
Grant has just left here with two of our men.  They're going to the
Randolph Hotel.  There was a message from the hotel desk to say that
one of their guests, your father I think, had asked for assistance.
Where are you?"

I gave her my room number.  "If they're on their way, then I'll go down
to the lobby to meet them," I said.

She was speaking when I hung up, but I couldn't help it: I needed to
know what was going on, and it looked as though nobody except Barnabas
himself would have answers.  I pounded a fist against my knee. Think!

Barnabas had been delivered to the hotel by Dan Colbert, who'd then
gone to get Campbell.  They'd known about my father's movements.
Colbert must have followed him on to the train.  Presumably he'd let
Campbell know where they were heading, and had been instructed to stick
to him until Campbell arrived.  My Volvo wasn't the only car to go
blazing up the motorway that day.

But my father had seen what was happening, and taken steps to keep me
out of the way, before Colbert could bring in reinforcements.  Barnabas
had also managed to call for help.  Why on earth hadn't he just left
the hotel while he had the chance?

Leaving that practical question to one side, I opened my door far
enough to look out.  The only person in sight was a maid who was
harmlessly wheeling a trolley towards the end of the corridor, so I
slipped outside and made sure that the lock caught behind me.

Wait a minute: think.  There was a reason why he hadn't fled: he
intended to talk to them.  He was using the book as bait and making
sure that both Colbert and Campbell would be caught in the act of
trying to steal it.  He must have believed he could provide Paul Grant
with some kind of evidence against them.  It would be just like my
father to decide that this was the only way to get rid of our problem;
it matched everything else he'd done through all this crazy business.

Instead of going along to the lifts, which they might be watching, I
found some service stairs through a door at the far end of the hallway.
It was two double flights to the ground floor, and I flung myself down
them, hanging on to the rail, and burst into a carpeted corridor which
turned at a right angle towards the lobby.  I trotted past a bar, ran
into a bunch of the Americans who apologized vaguely, and hesitated
near the lifts.  The lobby was not very big, and it was getting
crowded.  I searched again among the gathering bodies for a familiar
tall figure, and wondered what to do about the fact that nobody
appeared to know anything about the drama on the first floor.  It all
looked so normal that I groaned with sheer helplessness.

A hand gripped my arm bruisingly from behind and I was pulled backward
into a little alcove with a public telephone.

"Paul!  Oh, thank God.  Barnabas .. ."

"All right, I know."

"But you donV I stammered.  "Marty Campbell got here ten minutes ago.
Probably Colbert is here too, though I didn't see him.  I know that
they're in my father's room, because he spoke to somebody when I rang
him there, and he couldn't talk to me."

Paul shook his head impatiently.  "I know.  Colbert, Campbell and two
of Campbell's thugs are in there with your father.  One of the local
detectives got into staff uniform and let himself in with a couple of
clean towels.  Your father is all right.  No, listen] He's talking to
them.  I'd warned our constable to be sure that your father didn't seem
distressed.  He couldn't stay, of course, but he said your father
looked fine and they all seemed perfectly friendly."

"Well, why don't you go in and arrest them?"  I howled.

Grant put a hand over my mouth.  "Because Campbell's men are usually
armed, if you must know, and we aren't -yet.  Anyway, I don't want to
risk a shooting here.  There are too many people around, not to mention
Barnabas.  We're watching the lifts and the stairs, and waiting for
more units.  We'll have the hotel sealed off in ten minutes.  When it's
secure, I'll phone up to the room and talk to Campbell.  If a pro like
Campbell knows he's boxed in, he'll be sensible."

"Paul, can I point out to you that if they have guns, they also have a
hostage?  What makes you think they'll give up?"

"They'll give up because it won't pay them to do anything else."  He
had gone vocationally deaf.

"They've already killed two people!  And you think they'll just blush
and say, "Sorry"?"

Paul flushed.  "I don't have time to talk criminal psychology with you,
I'm trying to get a job done and keep Barnabas safe.  Listen, I want
you to go back to your room and stay there.  I'll call you when it's
all over.  We'll argue about it then."

He pulled me forward to the lift, watched while I got in, and punched
the button for my floor before pulling back.  I didn't say, My father
has a bad heart, he's an old man, I know he's going to be killed now by
his heart if not by one of their damned bullets.  I turned as the doors
were closing, and caught a glimpse of his face, preoccupied, just
waiting to make sure that I did as I was told.

When the lift stopped and the doors opened, I pressed the button for
the first floor.  That corridor was deserted and silent except for the
noises drifting up the staircase from the reception desk.  If there had
been any sign of the police it might have been different, but I crossed
the dark red carpet without stopping to think.  Everything felt
unreal.

The door of room 108 was closed and I couldn't hear anything through
the thickness of the wood.  It was too risky to use the key, so I
rapped on it sharply before my nerve went.  "Barnabas, it's Dido!  Can
you let me in?"

The ensuing silence seemed so long that I started to wonder whether
they had killed him already and gone.  I stepped back.  But the door
opened then and Colbert stood back to let me walk inside.

Supping with the Devil

I heard the door close behind me, but I was too busy checking the room
to worry about it.  Paul had been right: Marty Campbell was watching me
with an expression that revealed absolutely nothing.  Colbert, behind
me, was muttering some kind of protest.  Barnabas looked up from an
armchair beside the coffee table.  His face betrayed exasperation. That
left two strangers, one sitting beside Campbell and one lounging
against the wall -I put them down as Campbell's minders.  Barnabas and
I were rather outnumbered.

"Dido!  For just once in your life, you might have .. . Well, never
mind.  I should have known."

"Are you all right?"  I asked humbly.  But I could see that, for some
incomprehensible reason, he was.  Certainly he was quite calm.  Unlike
me.

I opened my mouth and realized that I didn't have anything to say.

"Would you sit down, Miss Hoare?"  That was Campbell, upright on the
chair by the desk which he'd turned around to face the room.  He was
wearing an Armani suit; his black shoes gleamed and his white hair
could have come straight from the hotel barber shop.

"Dan, give Miss Hoare your chair.  You can squat on the bed."

All right, if we were being polite ... "It's scarcely worth it," I
said.  "I've come to take my father down to the lobby before things get
out of hand.  I don't care what you people do about it, but I really
think that you ought to leave the hotel quickly."

Campbell smiled slightly.  "You've called the police?"

I said grimly, "I didn't have to.  Barnabas, will you come?"

"Not for one minute, please."

It was a new voice, heavily accented: something from the eastern edges
of Europe but overlaid with American.  One of Campbell's thugs.  I
looked at the bear-like man who was overflowing the second armchair,
and revised the judgment.  Not one of Campbell's thugs.

He was a middle-aged man with a square, heavily lined face and bright
blue eyes under a thatch of spiky iron-grey hair, badly cut.  He sat
quietly, powerfully relaxed, his broad workman's hands lying easily on
the arms of his chair and his short legs stretched out comfortably.

A thug, but not Marty's.

Barnabas said, "This is Mr.  Grigor Bakatin, a Russian gentleman.  He
is the one who wants to purchase our Shakespeare autograph.  Mr.
Bakatin, my daughter Dido."

I was registering the word 'purchase' as the broad face shifted
suddenly into a grimace that was obviously meant to express
friendliness.  It didn't fool anybody.  Bakatin heaved himself to his
feet, grabbed my right hand so quickly that I hadn't the chance to
flinch, and bowed astonishingly over it.  The hand that had shot out to
take mine was topped by a gold Cartier wristwatch, as I couldn't help
noticing.

"Miss Hoare, I am delighted making your acquaintance.  Please to take
my chair.  We can talk."

"Sit down, Dido," said Barnabas grimly.

I sat in a kind of dream in which sheer terror struggled with
curiosity.  "What's happening?"

"We're negotiating," Barnabas said outrageously.  I took a wobbly
breath.  Right: he was trying to string them along until help arrived.
I was in favour of that strategy.  Barnabas explained chattily, "As I
understand it, Mr.  Campbell owes Mr.  Bakatin for something ... a
business deal."  My father's voice skated lightly over the phrase,
declining to make any judgments.  No matter how carefully I looked, his
face was as calm and expressionless as Campbell's.  I suppressed a
squeak of sheer panic.  "Mr.  Campbell has offered to arrange the
purchase of our, um, Shakespeare item on Mr.  Bakatin's behalf

Keep them talking ... "What about the Japanese customer?"  I asked.

"A figment of somebody's imagination," Barnabas said drily.  "It's good
to get these confusions cleared up so that we all know where we
stand."

I said, "What do you mean, "purchase"?"

Bakatin broke into a slow, confident grin.  "I am buy ink  Or to speak
more precisely, Mr.  Campbell is buy ink on my behalf.  Shakespeare ...
we Russians love your

Shakespeare.  He was English with a Russian soul.  It is my great
privilege to own a poem written by the hand of a great spirit.  The
professor has explained everything about this, how it was discovered by
a great lover of Shakespeare two hundred years ago, how it was lost...
It is a romantic story.  I will take the book, but I will send
photographs to the professor, X-rays, everything he needs, and he will
publish about the poem in his academic publications.  It will be my
privilege."

"It will also guarantee that the document is genuine and that you have
a proper title to it just in case you were ever to wish to sell it for
its full value," Barnabas added in the careful tones of somebody who
has been saying the same thing over and over in the hope that everybody
will understand his full meaning.

I began to grasp what was going on and opened my mouth in outrage.  And
closed it again because I suddenly saw that the big man was sincere
about one thing: whatever he was, he really loved our Shakespeare.

Barnabas was watching me closely, but it was Campbell who spoke,
shaking his head slightly as though his scalp itched.  "It will make
Mr.  Bakatin very happy."  He looked at me with the first flicker of an
expression which I couldn't quite identify.  And wasn't sure that I
wanted to.  "Your father is right -I owe him."

I said, "I guess you must owe him a lot.  Mr.  Bakatin, if you don't
mind my asking who are you?  You speak very good English.  It sounds as
though you've lived in the United States?"

Bakatin looked at me with a kind of instinctive rage that changed, in a
flicker, into unlikely laughter.  "I am business man now.  The new
Russia.  Before I was KGB, and yes, you are right, I was for some years
at the Washington Embassy."

I thought, So this is the new world.  Businessman, Mafia, secret
service thug, and lover of Shakespeare ... Barnabas said, "Dido, would
you mind getting the book and bringing it here."

I mimed bewilderment.

Bakatin misunderstood.  He leaned over me and grasped my hand
earnestly, looking into my eyes.  "You will get your money.  Two
million dollars.  You may have either dollars or Deutschmarks, only
tell me.  You will get the money, on my honour, cash."

From beyond the man's bulk, Barnabas said, "I believe you.  Either of
those currencies will be perfectly acceptable.  Dido .. ."

"Barnabas .. ."

"The Plutarch is in the little case you brought with you."

I staggered mentally and told myself not even to think about what might
have happened.  And then I heard a voice that sounded like mine say
quietly, "There is just one little matter that all of you are
forgetting, and that's two men being dead, and one of them was Davey,
who was a fool and never really hurt anybody, and one of them was Job
Warren, who was a lovely old man ..."  The sentence ended in a gasp as
I heard what I'd been babbling and went cold and stopped.  And found
myself crying for Davey, for Job Warren, for me.

Behind a curtain of tears, Barnabas was springing up and rushing
forward; but the big Russian arrived before him.  I was swept up into
the bear's grasp, and there was a kind of roaring whisper: "Of course,
of course, you must cry, but not now."

Barnabas cut through: "Dido!  Go now!"

Bakatin let go.  The ghost of a much quieter American-Russian whisper
said, "It is all right.  You will find out."  I thought, a moment
later, that I must have imagined it.

"Go now, Dido.  "That was Barnabas again.

"I can't leave you here with them!"

"Don't be ridiculous.  What's going to happen to me?"

Campbell was beginning to seethe with frustration.  It wasn't a happy
sight.  "Is the thing in your room?  Colbert, you'd better go with Miss
Hoare and get it.  Don't hang about, there's no time left."

He nodded at the fourth man in the room, the one who'd been lounging
against the bathroom door frame.  I saw him palm a mobile phone and
begin to mutter into it.

No time .. . that was my danger and also my advantage.  I kicked my
paralysed brain into action.  I'd stopped crying for the moment, but my
face was wet.

"All right, Barnabas, I'll do it.  Listen, Dan comes with me to get the
book, but the rest of you leave this room when we do.  My father must
be left alone.  As soon as he locks the door behind us, then I'll go
with Colbert and give him the book.  It's up to you how you get it out
of the hotel."  Colbert the least of evils, I was thinking.  I had
despised Dan Colbert for a long time.

There was a universal hesitation.

I screamed, "There's no time for anything else!  Don't you know that
there are police in the hotel already?"

Campbell said, "Do it!  You know where we'll be.  Miss Hoare, you do
understand that if you do anything stupid you'll both hear from me,
don't you!"  His face was almost as white as his hair.

I didn't bother to answer.  The five of us tumbled out of the room into
the corridor which was still miraculously deserted.  I wondered
distractedly whether the police had cleared it, whether they were
lurking just out of sight, whether momentarily there would be a burst
of gunfire and I would be dead.  I wondered whether it would hurt.  I
caught a last glimpse of Barnabas's anxious face and said, "Close the
door.  Don't worry, I'll give them the book.  It's a deal, all
right?"

I turned away and heard the door slam behind me and the chain rattling
into its socket.  Campbell, Bakatin and their minder turned to the
right, and I deduced that I wasn't the only one using the service
stairs that night.  Whether they had found some way out there, past the
police, I neither knew nor cared.

Colbert grabbed my wrist and tried to pull me towards the lift.  His
hand was cold with sweat, and his face distorted in a grin of hatred,
fear, rage.  The face of Job Warren's killer.  I kicked, and he let out
a shriek as my heel connected with his shin.  The sound had the effect
of snapping me into a kind of fearless excitement.  I snarled at him,
"Keep your hands off me and come on.  Don't hang about.  If you want
the book, you have about one minute to get it and get away.  Do you
understand?"

For a moment I thought he had gone mad.  He was grinding his teeth and
fumbling in a coat pocket.  I thought, icily, He has a knife .. . And
then I realized what I should have seen before: Colbert wanted me dead,
me and Barnabas both, because our story meant the end of

Dan Colbert the antiquarian book dealer, the end of Heritage Books.  A
life for a life .. .

My voice came from a long way off, saying, "If you don't want Marty
Campbell to skin you alive, you'd better come and get that book."

It was the most effective thing I could have said.  Colbert blinked and
regained control; his hand came into sight, empty.  I was safe until I
put the Shakespeare autograph into his hand.  I turned my back on him,
the way you do with a mad dog who will attack you for looking at him,
and trotted to the lift doors to punch the button.  The indicator,
which said that the lift was on the ground floor, did not move.

"Stairs," Colbert said behind me in a kind of strangled groan.  We
flung ourselves up them, past two middle-aged women who had given up on
the lift and were wandering down to tea.  On the second floor a porter
was wheeling a luggage trolley away.  I hissed at Colbert, and we
marched briskly and, I hoped, inconspicuously in the other direction. I
slid my key into the lock and flung the door wide because I expected to
find the room packed with policemen.  It should have been, but it
wasn't.

The case was on the luggage rack where the porter had left it.

I whirled on Colbert.  "Stay at the door!  Keep watch up and down the
corridor you don't want the police creeping up and cornering you here.
"And I don't want you any closer to me than absolutely necessary.

Colbert agonized, but hung back in the doorway and followed my
instructions, nearly dislocating his neck in the attempt to watch me
and the lift doors at the same time.

Barnabas's case was unlocked.  My heart thumped with horror: it had
been left unguarded here for however long the business had taken it
felt like hours.  I scrabbled among the striped pyjamas and clean
underwear and touched a hard, rectangular object wrapped closely in a
bath towel.  Yanking it out, unwrapping the towel, I held up the old
quarto in its disintegrating leather binding.  Now what?  Not stopping
to think, I opened the quarto at the familiar page.  In the light from
the overhead lamp you could just make out faded sepia scratchings.  I
carried it open to the door.

"Look, this is it: this page.  You see?"  I thrust it open into
Colbert's hands, and watched his gaze slide from my face to the dim
writing.  Then I hit him in the stomach with both fists.  Off balance,
he gasped and staggered backwards.

I slammed the door.  Leaned against it.  Reminded myself not to faint
until I could get the chain on.  There was no air in the room, so I let
myself slide down the slippery surface of the heavy, sheltering
mahogany until I was on the carpet, leaning against the wall.

The telephone on the bedside table began to ring.

28 Roundabouts

We were in no state to patronize the dining room, so room service had
provided not merely Barnabas's long-delayed pot of Earl Grey tea, but a
great silver salver mounded with assorted triangular sandwiches of
smoked salmon and rare roast beef, as well as champagne, flutes and an
ice bucket.

Barnabas sat upright in one of the big stuffed armchairs with the food
spread on the coffee table in front of him.  Even after everything that
had happened, he seemed to be full of a triumphant energy.  I slumped
in the second armchair and swore I would never worry about his health
again.

Paul faced us from the upright chair which had recently held Marty
Campbell.  He was both cheerful and preoccupied; his mobile phone was
positioned on the table beside him.

We were on our second bottle of Krug.  Barnabas had insisted.  I'd
calculated the cost of this snack, added it to the rate for my bedroom
and this rather overwhelming be fire placed room in which Barnabas was
ensconced, and considered protesting.  On second thoughts, what did it
matter?  A couple of bottles of Krug weren't likely to make much
difference to our financial ruin.  I thought I began to understand the
attitude of the jet-set ne'er-do-well who goes bankrupt in luxury: you
would simply and rationally decide that you might just as well enjoy
yourself before the bank sent in its bailiffs.

The champagne was making me drunk.  "It's the bubbles," I remarked to
nobody in particular.

The room telephone rang.  Paul snatched at it, listened without
comment, and hung up.

"For you?"  asked Barnabas in a mild rebuke.

"Hospital.  He's dead.  They did what they could, but the car had gone
right over him."

My stomach lurched, and then I thought about it and realized that there
was a despicable part of me that was relieved.

"What about the others?"

"There's no sign of the car."

Barnabas said innocently, "It was quite surprising, the way they got
away."

It had all been in the planning.  A car had been waiting in the
entrance to the hotel garage, the one that most people never think
about because there is never enough space for you to park there.
Campbell had left a driver sitting in a new Rolls-Royce, a car that had
apparently looked too grand to be suspicious.  Having received its
passengers Paul said they had doubled through the service door to the
bar and out on to a fire escape over the ballroom the car had emerged
from the gateway, turned sedately to the left, and vanished without
haste in a direction that would take it to the railway station, the
bypass, or anywhere else in the northern hemisphere.

Immediately after its departure, one of the porters saw the injured man
lying where it had been parked.  As Paul said, the car had been driven
over Colbert.  Though not, it seemed, over the Plutarch, of which there
was no sign.  Well, just as Colbert needed to get rid of Barnabas and
me, so I suspected that Campbell was happy to rid himself of Dan.  You
couldn't see him having any further need for an antiquarian
bookseller.

The staff had raised the alarm, police had converged -it had taken a
little too long for the ambulance to get the few hundred yards from the
Radcliffe Infirmary through the evening traffic in St.  Giles, but it
probably hadn't mattered much in the end.

Even now, hours later, I kept remembering that treacherous, consoling,
bear-like embrace and the whispered reassurance.  I shivered, and
finished my drink.  It doesn't do to have any illusions about people
like Bakatin: and no, Colbert's death wasn't my fault.  NO!  But I kept
wondering whether I had accidentally negotiated it as apart of the
deal.

I wasn't going to mourn him, but this was something else that would
visit my dreams.

I held out my glass for a top-up.

"Did you say something?"  I was aware of Paul staring at me
speculatively.

Maybe I'd forgotten to tell him about Bakatin's whisper.  Maybe I'd
heard it wrong.  What did it matter anyway?  I said, "I guess Colbert
actually did kill Professor Warren."

Paul shrugged and selected another sandwich.  "When your librarian
turned up in his shop, he must have thought his luck was in.  It was
his chance to make sure that the Shakespeare stayed within reach.  He
may have attacked him on impulse, in a panic and phoned Campbell.  It
sounds from your description of his behaviour as though he wouldn't
have minded a throat-cutting we'll be looking hard at the knife we
found in his pocket, by the way.  But he would have needed help getting
the body out of the shop.  They've found some prints on that big table
in the basement of his shop: one of Campbell's people was certainly
there recently, and I don't suppose he's a collector.  Of course,
Campbell and your Russian friend were bound to help him out, since they
still needed him to identify the thing that Davey had been trying to
sell them.  But after today, they wouldn't risk having Colbert around
any more.  He was only their technical expert, and he was redundant as
well as unreliable."

Barnabas frowned.  "Unreliable?"

"Colbert would certainly have wound up telling us all about who ordered
Davey's death.  I know that type.  He was no longer of any use to them,
and Campbell would know we'd probably be able to pressure him into
testifying against the rest of them.  Amateurs are always dangerous."

I didn't miss the glance he threw my way, and I didn't like the way he
was labouring the point.  Though when I had time to consider my
behaviour that night, I'd probably be consumed with horror.

Barnabas said, "That Russian may be difficult to catch."

Paul laughed.  He sounded bitter.  "Russian mafia.  He's probably out
of the country already, and if he is, we're all going to get a slap.
He's not a nice man."

Barnabas and I stared, and Barnabas asked the obvious question: "You
know about him?"

"My Superintendent got on to Interpol as soon as I gave them the name.
Everybody knows him.  He runs the Moscow office of an organization
responsible for about half the drugs trade between Western Europe and
Southeast Asia."

"Oh!  So that's .. ."

Paul looked at me.  "What?"

I was thinking it through.  "Campbell said, "I owe him".  There was
some drugs shipment that went wrong, wasn't there .. . Perhaps Davey
got involved.  Perhaps he made a mistake.  So he owed Campbell, and
Campbell owed Bakatin ..."

"If we'd caught them," Grant said angrily, 'we'd be able to ask.  But
well, we've told Heathrow to watch for the Russian, but I don't suppose
it will do any good.  He's probably crossing the channel already,
heading for Brussels."

"What about computers?"  Barnabas demanded.  Maybe he was drunk too.
"What about the marvels of modern science?  They'll catch him at some
border.  A character.  I almost liked him."

"You," I said, 'were positively cosying up to him.  I still don't see
what you were trying to do."

Through the haze of tiredness and alcohol, I saw Barnabas watching me.
He smiled a little.  "I was getting rid of them, of course.  Forever.
In the only way that seemed to me to be likely to be permanent."

"But they've got it!"

Barnabas sighed.  "I'm well aware of the fact.  Don't you understand?
My whole scheme was to let them get it in circumstances that would make
them think they'd won and would give them no motive whatsoever for
harming anybody else.  In fact, I was able to persuade Bakatin that not
only was he getting a bargain, but his satisfaction depended on you and
me remaining alive and cooperative."

"But Barnabas!"

"What have they got?"

I said stubbornly, "They've got... I don't know, perhaps a tremendous
piece of English literary history.  Shakespeare's personal copy of the
book that gave him the plots of three or four plays.  Shakespeare's own
work, his handwriting..  ."

Barnabas sipped his champagne.  I waited.

"Yes, they may.  But shall I tell you what Allen Ferrars actually said
to me?  He said, "Nobody will authenticate that.  Ever.  It's
fascinating, but there is no possible way of knowing whether the thing
is what it seems to be.  There is not enough authentic handwriting for
a comparison, as you well know.  You might perhaps manage to prove that
the inscription is of the right period, give or take a few decades, but
no modern scholar can ever be certain that Shakespeare wrote it
himself, and no one in their right mind would risk their reputation on
it.  You will have to sell it to somebody who likes mysteries.  If you
want to know the truth, I suspect the work of a copyist, or even
another forger not William Henry Ireland, but someone twenty years
before him.  I would offer ten thousand for it, probably, if it passed
closer examination."

"I realized he was right."  Barnabas got into his oratorical stride.
"In this mean tail-end of the twentieth century, when academics spend
their working hours writing out departmental business plans and
worrying whether they'll get their short-term contracts renewed thank
God I got out of it when I did no one in his right mind would risk the
ridicule of being found wrong about something like this."

"Why were you so sure they wouldn't harm either of you?"  Paul asked
suddenly.  I looked at him, but he had his eyes fixed stubbornly on the
sandwich tray.

"When I explained to Mr.  Bakatin that he needed to have a document
describing the provenance of the Plutarch, and that he needed me to
give it to him and to be prepared to back up the story in public, he
understood the point immediately.  He may love Shakespeare, but I'm
sure that he also loves the idea of owning something monumentally
valuable.  I used the analogy of the stolen painting, and he took the
point.  He may have personal experience of such things: he said
something that made me wonder.  That, of course, was why I calculated
that it would be best to deal with him: he wouldn't dream of risking
his only guarantee of the value of the manuscript."

Barnabas amazes me.

"Will you really do a provenance?"

"And will they deliver the money?"  Barnabas countered.  He didn't fool
me.  There was a reckless gleam in his eye.

"How much is he supposed to be paying?"  Paul asked soberly.

Barnabas said, "Two million dollars."

Paul laughed.  He at least seemed to have no illusions about the
Russian's promise.

"He was very convincing," I heard myself say; 'he seemed to mean it."

"Two million roubles, maybe."

I wondered how close two million devalued roubles would be to ten
thousand pounds.

"For a genuine piece of Shakespeare, of course, it wouldn't be enough,"
Barnabas sighed.  "I wonder whether I shouldn't have held out for
more?"

"Who would buy it?  Honestly, I mean not like tonight."

"The Americans, probably.  It would go to auction, of course.  I
imagine that the Folger would bid for it, and no doubt an export
licence would be refused, there would be a national appeal, and so
forth.  That is, of course, assuming that people did accept the thing
for what it appears to be.  Ultimately some library would buy it and
keep it in the dark, in a locked, temperature-controlled,
humidity-controlled case.  If you were in Washington, or London, or
wherever, and you had the right credentials, you could go and have a
look at it."

I could see Paul considering this.

Barnabas expanded.  "It's like a religious relic.  Well... I wonder."

We looked at each other, with the question hanging in the air between
us.

Paul said, "I'd better get off.  It's late.  Are you driving back to
London in the morning?  I'll be tidying things up and trying to square
my Super tomorrow, unless I have to fly off to pick up some prisoners
somewhere.  Will you come and talk to me officially the day after?  For
the record."

I looked at Paul.  Barnabas looked at us both, cleared his throat, and
said, "I'm just going to the bathroom to wash my hands, if you'll
excuse me."

When he had shut himself in, I said, "You could stay.  Barnabas seems
to have booked me into a double room."

Paul was looking at the tray.  "I can't tonight.  Look, there's
something I've been shying off saying, but you probably knew that I'm
married.  It's been finished for a few months now.  That's why I'm
staying at my friend's place.  But tomorrow is my daughter's birthday,
and I said I'd get over to the house first thing in the morning with
Gina's present."

Why wasn't I surprised?  I asked carefully, "How old is your
daughter?"

"Four."

"I hope she has a happy birthday."  I hesitated, because this was
delicate for us both.  "Are you thinking of trying to get back
together?"

He reached for the Krug and divided the last of it between our glasses.
"I don't think so.  Sometimes it's all right and sometimes it's
impossible.  I don't know what's going to happen."

No, I thought, nobody ever does.

A little while after he'd left, Barnabas emerged and sent me off early
to bed as though I were still a child.

And Swings

I was in the middle of writing a guarantee card number on the back of a
cheque when the phone rang.  Smiling professionally at my customer, I
ignored it until I had returned his card and handed over the 1824
quarto edition of British Poets.  My credit card bill had just arrived,
and it had left me in no doubt that I was going to have to concentrate
on selling books for a while.

Besides, it went on ringing until I got there and picked it up.

"Dido?"  Barnabas's voice interrupted my greetings.  I could hear
panic.  "Can you come?  Or maybe I should phone the police.  Or the
Army.  I think they do it."

I groaned.  "Hello.  Stay there.  I was just closing anyway."

I didn't stop to set the alarm it seemed less essential these days but
trotted straight to the Volvo, shouting, "Get out of it!"  to the dog I
found inspecting a wheel.  Highbury Corner was not, of course, clear.
Sometimes I think that Highbury may defeat me drive me away from
London, or possibly England.  Sometimes I dream of never seeing that
roundabout again.

Barnabas met me at the door.  There were two hectic red spots on his
cheeks which I didn't like the look of.  I said, "Sit down.  Calm down.
What is it?"

"I am perfectly all right," he lied.

"Have you taken your aspirin?"

"I took my aspirin last night.  I shall take my aspirin again tonight.
I think it's a bomb."

For the first time in three weeks I felt that familiar thump of panic.
"Where?  What's happened?"

"I'll show you," he said, and towed me towards the bathroom, where he
stood blocking the doorway.  I peered around him.  The bathtub was
filled with water, and in the water was a parcel that looked like an
overgrown shoe box wrapped in brown paper.

I gaped.  "Why would it be a bomb?"

"The doorbell rang, and when I went out that was sitting on the top
step.  It isn't stamped it was delivered by hand.  I must admit that I
thought of Davey."  He hesitated.  "I begin to feel a little foolish. I
may have panicked."

"It must be safe now, anyway," I said.  I leaned over the tub and
touched the box gingerly.  It sat firmly on the bottom of the tub.
Barnabas removed the plug and we contemplated the parcel as the water
oozed out, tinged with the pale blue of running ink.  His name and
address were faded but still visible.

"Perhaps we ought to have a look before we phone for help," he
conceded.

I said drily, "I think we should.  Knowing our luck, it's probably a
couple of valuable books that somebody wants to sell us."

Barnabas grimaced and lifted the heavy, dripping parcel into the hand
basin.  The wrapping paper was soggy and fell away in lumps from a
disintegrating cardboard box that claimed to hold jars of sun-dried
tomatoes.  Barnabas delicately lifted away a sodden lid.

He had been soaking tightly packed bundles of American bank notes.

After a very long moment Barnabas said, "Ah.  What a lot there is. They
can't be real."

I dug out one bundle.  The paper band around it fell away, and I was
left with a sodden, compacted handful of what seemed to be
one-hundred-dollar bills.  I peeled the top one away gingerly.  The
face of Benjamin Franklin stared at me in a friendly kind of way beside
small letters that assured me that this note was legal tender for all
debts, public and private.  I turned it over cautiously to the picture
of Independence Hall.  The thought struck me that these things would
buy me quite a lot of independence.  I couldn't explain to Barnabas why
I was laughing.

Having lived and shopped in the States for several years, I was pretty
familiar with the currency though not necessarily with the higher
denominations and this looked and felt all right.  Closely examined,
the engraving was clean and sharp.  The serial number of the note in my
hand was different from the next one in the pile.  They weren't even
consecutive; apparently someone had kindly ensured that we were
presented with used notes.

"Believe it or not," I sighed, "I think they're genuine.  In fact, I'm
sure they are.  Oh, Barnabas .. ."

"If they are," my father said hastily, 'the paper won't dissolve, the
ink won't run.  Perhaps you could dry them with the iron?  Or... if we
dry them flat they'll be quite all right.  I don't think I've ever seen
quite so much cash in one place at one time."

He extracted a soggy note from the top of one bundle and smoothed it
experimentally on to the bathroom mirror, where it stuck.  "There.  It
will loosen and fall off of its own accord as it dries."

"You can fit two on to each tile in the room," I suggested brightly.
"There's enough here to cover the walls.  Art students do that kind of
thing they're called "installations"."  I was probably a little
hysterical.

Barnabas seemed amused.  "Bakatin, of course.  We already knew that he
believes in paying his debts."  That was too close to the thought of
Dan Colbert's death.  Barnabas coughed.  "Not just like this, of
course; I assumed there'd be a postal order or something appropriately
anonymous in an envelope with a first-class Russian stamp.  Though I
can see the attractions of the cash economy.  No doubt he will write to
me from Russia to ask for his authentic provenance.  I shall compose an
authoritative document, with footnotes and a bibliography, and you will
pay some person with a computer to lay it out beautifully with
typographical ornamentation and print it on parchment with a laser
thing.  It's the least we can do.  Good Lord, I wonder how much there
is?"

"Two million dollars?"  I suggested.  I pushed down the impulse to
start laughing again at the impossibility, but I couldn't stop my hands
shaking.  When we had finished counting up and plastering on, I
consulted the exchange rates in the newspaper.  I'd been right.  Well,
actually it was close to two thousand dollars over.  Maybe he was
contributing to the bank's commission charges.  We were richer by
something like 1,282,052.

I didn't believe it yet, so we went to drink a pot of tea at the
kitchen table, from where we could watch the bathroom door.

"I think," he said after a long silence, 'that we should keep this
money.  You have sold a book that's all."

"It's dirty money," I said.  "Drugs money.  Blood money."

Barnabas said mildly, "I believe that most money is, taking the arms
trade, Third World debt, oil pollution and factory farming into
account.  Of course, the tax bill will be horrendous.  Well, if you
want to give it all away, I shan't object.  Do you want to donate it to
charity, then?"

I closed my mouth and considered that question.  I examined my poverty,
Barnabas's state of health, the attitude of my invisible letter-writing
bank manager, and the moral state of our culture.  Also my own state,
moral and physical.  I even to blow my own trumpet briefly recalled
Ilona Mitchell's current homelessness.  It isn't so difficult to adjust
to certain kinds of possibility.  To a utilitarian approach.  I'm not
proud of it.

This was as good a time as any.

I said, "Actually, Barnabas, I'm pregnant, and I've decided to keep the
baby, so no, I don't want to give it away.  Not all of it, anyway. What
I want is to be a rich single parent."

Barnabas had dropped his cup, which duly smashed.  Tea splashed over
our feet.  After a while, sitting amid the wreckage, he said, "I'm
glad.  I think.  Dido, do you mind if I ask ... Has he gone back to his
wife?"

I'd told him about Paul.  He hadn't spoken about it again until now.

"I presume he has.  I'll probably be seeing him some time, because I
understand that it's an off-again-on-again thing.  That's what he told
me.  He can't get rid of the marriage and he can't keep it together."

"You wouldn't marry him?"

I laughed.  I wouldn't marry him.  Paul Grant was quite definitely
desirable, but I had no plans that seriously included him.  Not at the
moment.  I said, "I think you're going to have to be the man in her
life.  Or his."

He looked at me closely.  "I suppose it is Paul's?"

I hesitated though not from any doubt, because Paul was a responsible
kind of person and we had always used protection.  Besides, the dates
weren't quite right.  It wasn't a question of the fact, but of how I
was intending to deal with it.  Oh well.  Head-on, as usual.

I said, "I guess now that I've told you, I'd better phone Sally.  I
have a horrible feeling that she's always wanted to be a
grandmother."

Barnabas said, "Good grief!"

In the silence, I heard the first drying bank notes fall off the tiles,
rustling to the bathroom floor like autumn leaves.