The roof was so low and the small room so full of books – not only in cases against the walls, but piled up haphazardly on tables, ready to teeter over if you so much as breathed on them – that you had to stoop and make your way around the place very carefully. It must have been even harder for Luke, Annie thought, as he was taller and more gangly than her.
The owner himself, Norman Wells, was just a little over five feet, with thin brown hair, a bulbous sort of face and rheumy eyes. Because it was so cold and damp down there, no matter what the weather was like up above, he always wore a moth-eaten gray cardigan, woolly gloves with the fingers cut off and an old Leeds United scarf. He couldn’t make much of a living out of the little shop, Annie thought, though she doubted the overheads were very high. Even in the depths of winter a one-element electric fire was the only source of heat.
Norman Wells glanced up from the paperback he was reading and nodded in Annie’s direction. He seemed surprised when she showed her warrant card and spoke to him.
“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” he said, taking off his reading glasses, which hung on a piece of string around his neck.
“I’ve been here once or twice.”
“Thought so. I never forget a face. Art, isn’t it?”
“Pardon?”
“Your interest. Art.”
“Oh, yes.” Annie showed him a photograph of Luke. “Remember him?”
Wells looked alarmed. “Course I do. He’s the lad who disappeared, isn’t he? One of your lot was around the other day asking about him. I told him all I know.”
“I’m sure you did, Mr. Wells,” said Annie, “but things have changed. It’s a murder investigation now and we have to go over the ground afresh.”
“Murder? That lad?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Bloody hell. I hadn’t heard. Who’d…? He wouldn’t say boo to a goose.”
“Did you know him well, then?”
“Well? No, I wouldn’t say that. But we talked.”
“What about?”
“Books. He knew a lot more than most kids his age. His reading level was way beyond that of his contemporaries.”
“How do you know?”
“I… Never mind.”
“Mr. Wells?”
“Let’s just say I used to be a teacher, that’s all. I know about these things, and that lad was bordering on genius.”
“I understand he bought two books from you on his last visit.”
“Yes, like I told the other copper. Crime and Punishment and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”
“They sound a bit advanced, even for him.”
“Don’t you believe it,” Wells protested. “If I hadn’t thought him ready I wouldn’t have sold him them. He’d already been through T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, most of Camus and Dubliners. I didn’t think he was quite ready for Ulysses or Pound’s Cantos, but he could handle the Portrait, no problem.”
Annie, who had heard of these books but had read only the Eliot and a few of Joyce’s short stories at school, was impressed. So the books she had seen in Luke’s room weren’t just for show; he really did read and probably even understand them. At fifteen, she’d been reading historical sagas and sword and sorcery series, not literature with a capital L. That was reserved for school and was tedious in the extreme, thanks to Mr. Bolton, the English teacher, who made the stuff sound about as exciting as a wet Sunday in Cleethorpes.
“How often did Luke call by?” she asked.
“About once a month. Or whenever he was out of something to read.”
“He had the money. Why didn’t he go to Waterstone’s and buy them new?”
“Don’t ask me. We got chatting the first time he dropped in-”
“When was that?”
“Maybe eighteen months or so ago. Anyway, as I say, we got chatting and he came back.” He looked around at the stained ceilings, flaking plaster and tottering piles of books and smiled at Annie, showing crooked teeth. “I suppose there must have been something he liked about the place.”
“Must be the service,” Annie said.
Wells laughed. “I can tell you one thing. He liked those old Penguin Modern Classics. The old ones with the gray spines, not these modern pale-green things. Real paperbacks, not your trade size. And you can’t buy those at Waterstone’s. Same with the old Pan covers.”
Something moved in the back of the shop and a pile of books fell over. Annie thought she glimpsed a tabby cat slinking away into the deeper shadows.
Wells sighed. “Familiar’s gone and done it again.”
“Familiar?”
“My cat. No bookshop’s complete without a cat. After witch’s familiar. See?”
“I suppose so. Did Luke ever come in here with anyone else?”
“No.”
Annie took her copy of the artist’s impression out and set it on the table in front of him. “What about her?”
Wells leaned forward, put his glasses on again and examined the sketch. “It looks like her,” he said. “I told you I never forget a face.”
“But you told me Luke never came in with anyone else,” Annie said, feeling a tingle of excitement rise up her spine.
Wells looked at her. “Who said she was with him? No, she came in with another bloke, same sort of clothing and body-piercing.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know. They must have been a bit short of money, though.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they came in with an armful of brand-new books to sell. Stolen, I thought. Plain as day. Stolen books. I don’t have any truck with that sort of thing, so I sent them packing.”
Chapter 11
Before he cut into Luke Armitage’s flesh, Dr. Glendenning made a thorough examination of the body’s exterior. Banks watched as the doctor examined and measured the head wound. Luke’s skin was white and showed some wrinkling from exposure to the water, and there was a slight discoloration around the neck.
“Back of the skull splintered into the cerebellum,” the doctor said.
“Enough to kill him?”
“At a guess.” Glendenning bent over and squinted at the wound. “And it would have bled quite a bit, if that’s any use.”
“Could be,” said Banks. “Blood’s a lot harder to clean up than most people think. What about the weapon?”
“Looks like some sort of round-edged object,” the doctor said. “Smooth-sided.”
“Like what?”
“Well, it’s not got a very large circumference, so I’d rule out something like a baseball bat. I can’t see any traces – wood splinters or anything – so it could have been metal or ceramic. Hard, anyway.”
“A poker, perhaps?”
“Possible. That would fit the dimensions. It’s the angle that puzzles me.”
“What about it?”
“See for yourself.”
Banks bent over the wound, which Dr. Glendenning’s assistant had shaved and cleaned. There was no blood. A few days in the water would see to that. He could see the indentation clearly enough, about the right size for a poker, but the wound was oblique, almost horizontal.
“You’d expect someone swinging a poker to swing downward from behind, or at least at a forty-five-degree angle, so we’d get a more vertical pattern,” Dr. Glendenning said. “But this was inflicted from sideways on, not from in front or behind, by someone a little shorter than the victim, if the angle’s to be believed. That means whoever did it was probably standing beside him. Unusual angle, as I said.” He lit a cigarette, strictly forbidden in the hospital, but usually overlooked in Glendenning’s case. Everyone knew that when you were dealing with the smells of a postmortem, a ciggie now and then was a great distraction. And Glendenning was more careful these days; he rarely dropped ash in open incisions.