Chapter 13
EDINBURGH
The Reader stood in his library and took a deep breath through his nose.
The scent of the books was intoxicating.
He could feel the aroma of the paper travelling through his lungs and into every pore of his body.
He loved books. Lived for them, ever since he was a young teenager and his father had been handy with a belt.
He had started reading after finding the small book exchange.
You bought a book, took it back when you’d read it and he’d give you two-thirds of what you paid for it and then he’d sell it again.
He had been a voracious reader back then. And of course, there was the local library, but they only held so much stock. Sometimes he’d buy a book and keep it, and read it more than once.
Now he was holding the paperback in his hand, the one he got from the café in Leith.
The one belonging to the filthy cop. He wouldn’t take this one back because if it sat there, they’d have his DNA.
The old man in there was a book lover. He’d told The Reader this one day when they were talking.
The Reader had been probed about his line of work: was he retired?
No. What did he do for a living? Stock market.
Investing. Entrepreneur. It was all true, but very vague.
It wasn’t always that way. He led a very different life, one of privilege some might say, but he had got there through hard work and determination.
He had met his wife, Nancy, through a mutual friend.
At a dinner party at the friend’s house, just like millions of other people met their other halves at such a function.
It hadn’t been a blind date, as there were several other single people there, as well as married couples, not including the hosts.
He hadn’t been seated next to her at the dinner, but diagonally across, and he had caught her looking at him a few times. He’d looked back, catching her staring at him, and she had smiled cheekily and given a small laugh into her glass before looking away.
The woman who was sitting to his left loved herself, and proceeded to tell him how she had been a model years ago. The Reader thought it could very well have been modelling socks. She had the kind of voice that would scrape ice off a windscreen on a winter morning.
Dinner dragged, and might have tempted him to take his own life had it not been for the old colonel sitting on his right.
Drunk, brash, amusing him with anecdotes from his days in the army, Colonel Murray – Mustard to his friends – had been a hoot.
But looking to his right had kept his eyes away from Nancy.
He had reached over to grab one of the wine bottles occasionally so he could look over at her.
Twice she was chatting with a dashing young man to her right and wasn’t looking over at him.
‘Shot his bloody bollocks off, he did,’ Colonel Mustard said, and The Reader had looked away and hadn’t a clue whose bollocks had been detached from their rightful owner.
‘Sounds like fun,’ he said.
The colonel looked at him with a stern face for a moment, before bursting into laughter.
‘It was! I’ve never had so much fun.’ He downed the contents of his glass.
The Reader didn’t know what the liquid was, but it was having its effects on the older man.
‘Of course, they don’t let me have a gun nowadays, more’s the pity,’ he added, solving the mystery of who had been the one pulling the trigger.
The Reader hadn’t asked who had been on the receiving end, friend or foe.
The house was large, detached, old, cost a fortune to run but was private, the hostess had told him as they were in the vast library after dinner. Colonel Mustard had been poured into the back of a taxi after having mistaken a large potted bush outside the front door for the outside bathroom.
He didn’t know it then but, Nancy, the woman who would be his wife, had gently persuaded him to leave at that point. The house was at the end of a long drive so there were no prying eyes, nobody hiding behind net curtains and no dog walker passing by with a mobile phone and a sense of indignation.
The colonel’s wife – who, The Reader assumed, didn’t have the nickname Miss Scarlet – had stood while the taxi driver helped the old boy into the back after the promise of a big tip, even though he suspected he would be throwing a bucket of soapy water across the rubber floor shortly.
‘I know a place we could go and have a quiet drink,’ Nancy said to him as they stood in the small group of people watching the taxi driver wrestle the colonel, like it was a new contact sport and the old boy was giving it everything he had but was losing badly.
‘A bar?’ The Reader said.
‘A café. I feel like a nice cup of tea. It would feel weird if I was sitting in there on my own, reading a book.’
He raised his eyebrows and smiled at her. ‘You’re a reader?’
She gave a brief laugh. ‘Yes. There aren’t many of us left, if you ask some people.’
‘I’d love to,’ he said.
‘Read my book?’ she said, teasing him.
‘That too. But go to this mysterious little café.’
‘There’s nothing mysterious about it. It’s open twenty-four hours and there’s always somebody in it through the night.’
He looked at his watch. ‘It’s almost midnight.’
‘The witching hour. Maybe I’ll turn into a pumpkin or something.’
‘We’d better get a move on, then.’
That night had been wonderful, sitting drinking endless cups of tea until the breakfast cook came in and they ordered a fry-up. Neither of them felt tired, but when the sun came up, they went their separate ways.
The Reader waited a day to call Nancy, and they arranged a proper date. It was the start of something magical. He fell in love with her on the second date and asked her to marry him three months later.
They didn’t want to wait long, so they arranged a day for their wedding.
It turned out that would be the day of Nancy’s funeral.