I stared at it and watched as he sheepishly retracted it.
‘I wasn’t peeping in your window, I promise. I’m … I’m looking for something.’
Likely story, I thought.
‘What did you lose?’
‘Um …’ He looked around him at the waste ground between Madame Bowden’s house and her next-door neighbour, messing up his already messy hair with his hands. ‘I didn’t lose it exactly …’
I rolled my eyes. He was a Peeping Tom. Or whatever. A perv! That was it. I was about to tell him when he blurted out a word I hadn’t expected.
‘Remains! I’m looking for the remains—’
‘Oh Jesus Christ, did somebody die here? I knew it, I knew there was a weird vibe about this place. I got a feeling as soon as I arrived—’
‘No, no. God no. Not those kinds of remains.’ He stooped his head low to make eye contact with me again. ‘Look, I know this looks sketchy, but I promise you, it’s nothing bad, it’s just difficult to explain.’
For a moment, we said nothing. Him crouching by the gable wall, me half hanging out of the window, standing on a kitchen chair. That’s when I heard the bell.
‘What was that?’ he asked, trying to peer inside.
I looked around and saw a very old-fashioned bell with a wire running away into the ceiling. By the looks of things, I was in my very own real-life version of Downton Abbey. I turned back to him. Henry.
‘Do me a favour. Whatever you’re looking for, go look for it somewhere else,’ I said, and shut the window firmly in his face.
Chapter Three
HENRY
I sat nursing a pint of Guinness in the same pub as the day before and the day before that. I even had my preferred stool at the bar, tucked away in the corner. ‘Tainted Love’ played in the background, and I tapped the beat with the tip of my shoe against the wood of the bar.
Sometimes I feel I’ve got to – TAP TAP – run away, I’ve got to – TAP TAP.
I was reading over my notes from the day before:
In the course of your life, you’ll spend six months looking for missing objects. An insurance company did a survey once that suggested the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day, meaning that by the time we turn sixty, we’ll have lost up to 200,000 things. When it comes to books, how many paperbacks, manuscripts, handwritten drafts have been lost or forgotten throughout history? The number is infinite. How many forgotten libraries remain hidden, like the Dunhuang Library on the edge of the Gobi Desert, sealed up for a thousand years and discovered, quite by accident, by a Taoist monk who knocked down a wall whilst leaning against it and smoking his cigarette. Behind it, he found a mountain of ancient documents, piled almost ten feet high, containing scripts with seventeen different languages. Who is to say what treasures are yet to be rediscovered, what lost things are waiting to be brought to light?
At least, that is what I reminded myself as I spent yet another night in the bed and breakfast I couldn’t afford, writing up notes in my journal about the bookshop that didn’t exist. Had it ever existed? All I had was a letter from one of the world’s most successful rare book collectors to its owner, a Miss Opaline Gray, discussing a lost manuscript. And where had I come across such an unusual piece of correspondence? In the only room in the world where possibility became reality – an auction room. I had spent years looking for the one, the big discovery that would make my name in the world of rare books, and this was the closest I had ever come.
I should’ve been on a flight back to the UK days ago. I took another mouthful of ‘the black stuff’, as the locals called it. Motivation comes in all shapes and sizes and my motivation for staying in Ireland was to avoid looking like a complete failure. That was what everyone expected – including me. If no one takes you seriously, how can you ever hope to do so yourself? I blamed my father and had no qualms about it. My very first memory of him was one of betrayal. He’d told me to stand up and ‘perform’ with my new toy microphone. It must have been Christmas and he had some of his mates over. I sang some songs, who knows what, but all I remembered was his laughter – the way it almost resembled a wolf snarling when he was really drunk. The others joined in and my cheeks burned so much I hardly noticed the hot liquid running down my legs.
‘He’s pissed himself!’ my father wheezed, falling off the chair with amusement.
I can’t recall what happened after that. My mother must have come and rescued me. But from that point on I was always tagged with the reputation of being a cry-baby; too sensitive. It didn’t help that my sister Lucinda came out of the womb with her fists ready for a fight. He respected her. In fact, we were all slightly intimidated by her. And so my position as the runt of the litter was firmly established.
Until I found that Rosenbach letter.
Suddenly, I became a man of destiny, as though all of those years missing out on vital stores of vitamin D by ensconcing myself in libraries would finally be vindicated. I ended up spending so much time reading books in the library that everyone thought I worked there and eventually, I thought so too. It reached quite remarkable levels of self-delusion when I began telling the other staff how to perform their duties. When my mother found out she was furious.
‘All that money I spent on your fees! You haven’t even sat one exam, Henry!’
Yes, but I had used the money to attend courses at the London Rare Books School, so it wasn’t all for nothing. I had a trade, even if no one else saw the extreme love of old books as a trade.
Still, I had never actually followed a lead like this … I was hardly Indiana Jones. Lucinda once told me I was about as adventurous as a bucket. Well, who was the bucket now, eh? I laughed, the drink clearly going to my head. I’d spent weeks at Ha'penny Lane looking for any sort of clue, some sign that the bookshop had existed once. A dark shadow like the kind left behind on the carpet when you move the sofa. But I had come up empty-handed.
Until the girl.