‘I investigate professionally, Craig. For money.’
‘I think a few of us can come to some arrangement.’
‘Us?’
‘Booksellers. There’s someone stealing books from our shops.’
‘I thought you told me you wrote a certain amount off to pilfering.’
‘I do, we all do. But this is different. Whoever the thief is, he steals the same book from everyone. I’m talking about ten bookshops here in Sydney, one in Canberra, a couple in the country and who knows where else. Could be more but not many because there aren’t many copies around.’
‘That’s strange. Valuable book?’
‘Fairly. Worth three or four hundred dollars in good condition. It’s EB Lyell’s Northern Trekking. Ever heard of it?’
I shook my head. ‘Never heard of him, if it is a him, or it.’
‘Lyell was a him all right. Amazing man. He went looking for the Leichhardt expedition in the 1890s, or said he did.’
‘How’s that?’
A bell rang, signalling that someone had entered the shop. Craig went forward to offer his help and I looked around the book-filled space. The room was lined with bookshelves reaching almost to the ceiling and there were several aisles of shelving down the middle. Footstools and ladders, good lighting, labels written in large type, pull-out reading supports-everything a bookshop should have. Craig got deep into conversation with his customer and I headed for the Australian history section. It covered several metres and was divided chronologically and, within that, alphabetically by author. As with the other categories, there was a collection of books locked inside a glass case. I wondered whether the book in question had been in there and, if so, how the theft had been managed. I was beginning to get interested.
Craig made a sale, wrapped the book and the customer went on her way.
‘Good one?’
‘Pretty good. Nice to see someone who knows what they’re after, and I made a tidy profit. Now, about Lyell. He claimed to have conducted three expeditions in search of Leichhardt. He certainly made one that didn’t get very far. In his book he details two other treks, as he calls them-he was South African, by the way-that got a lot further. And he reckoned he found some relics.
‘But it became pretty clear that these journeys were fantasies, or fabrications. He tried to claim the reward that was on offer for evidence about Leichhardt but some experts pointed out problems with the things he claimed to have seen. He was disgraced, threatened with prosecution for fraud, but before he went back to South Africa he published this book in a signed and numbered limited edition of fifty copies.’
‘Of which you had number…?’
‘One. It’s a curiosity really, not a significant historical document. Most of the copies have disappeared over the years. I suppose there’re still a few in private hands. As far as I know, none of the libraries, even the Mitchell, holds copies.’
‘I thought they got everything.’
‘There are reasons apart from self-published books being obscure. Lyell included some stuff about him and his men having sexual contact with Aboriginal women, and some drawings. Pornographic, really-the high-minded gentlemen librarians of the time wouldn’t have touched it, even if they’d known about it, which they probably didn’t.’
‘It’s interesting, Craig, but I can’t see what help I could be. Maybe it’s just some nutter of a descendant upset about the sex and wanting to eliminate all the copies as blots on the family escutcheon.’
‘No way. Lyell was an only child and he was drowned when his ship went down on the passage from Australia to South Africa. He was only thirty, unmarried, no issue, as they say.’
I shrugged. ‘Okay.’
‘There’s something else. Whoever stole the book has an accomplice.’
‘How do you figure that?’
‘The Lyell volume was in one of my locked cases. Somehow the glass was cut and the book taken. The thief must have got someone to distract me. I checked with a couple of the other booksellers and much the same thing happened in their places. We had a bit of an email conference and they agreed to let me have a go at… nabbing the culprit and getting the books back. Of course everyone’s interested in why.’
‘Yeah, but how would you, or I, go about doing that?’
Craig looked pleased with himself. He ran his fingers through his wild hair and tapped the side of his nose in an old-fashioned gesture. Running a bookshop can throw you back to the last century, apparently. He was about to speak when the bell sounded again and he moved away.
I returned to the Australian history section and, sure enough, a glass panel in the locked case had recently been replaced. Not that I doubted Craig’s word, but confirmation is the name of the game in my business. There were plenty of other explorers’ published journals in the bookcase and out on the shelves-Eyre, Stuart, Sturt, Leichhardt himself, Giles and others-and books about them. Some were handsomely leather-bound with gold lettering, collectors’ items. I wondered what could be motivating Craig’s mysterious thief. Some kind of obsession, but what?
This time Craig didn’t make a sale. He closed the door behind the non-customer and swung the ‘Closed’ sign into place.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘This is it. I got hold of a copy of the book. Cost me a bit but I did it.’
‘How?’
‘Don’t ask, trade secret. The thing is, I put out a monthly newsletter-cum-catalogue. Goes out tomorrow. I’m going to include the book in it. Bait, see?’
‘You reckon your thief keeps an eye on such catalogues?’
‘Bound to, mine in particular. I’m… ahem… a leading player in the field. What I do is give a date when special items in the catalogue become available. That’ll be next week. The punters turn up on the day. It’s a bit of a rush for a while and then it settles down.’
‘What if someone else wants to buy the book?’
‘I thought of that. I’ll tag it as sold from the word go. I’ve installed video surveillance now-cost a bomb, but it’s worth it. Totally concealed, no warning signs the way shops usually have. You can be up there on the mezzanine in my office and watch it. You see the accomplice distract me and the thief move in. I’ll have the book on display with a card all about its history. No real security. You come down and that’s it-both birds snared.’
‘What makes you think I can snare both birds?’
‘Come on, Cliff. Have you had a look at yourself lately? You scare me and I’m sure there’s some kind of badge you can show. I don’t think you’ll need your gun.’
‘What happens then?’
‘We find out what the hell it’s all about. We hope to get all the books back, maybe get some compensation for the damage done to the bookcases. I’m not the only victim of that. What do you say, Cliff? A day of your time, maybe two if they decide to play it cool, which they won’t because they’ll be scared the book’ll go.’
Craig was almost jumping up and down with excitement as he envisaged the scenario. To me, it was all a bit strange and somehow unreal. I couldn’t fully believe in these two wide-ranging, desperado book thieves, but there was something infectious about his enthusiasm.
‘The main interest for me,’ I said, ‘apart from earning my appropriate fee, is what the fuck they’re playing at.’
‘Me, too.’
‘Set it up, Craig. I’m in.’
Craig issued the catalogue and gave Northern Trekking a prominent place with a photograph. It was priced at a hefty four hundred and fifty dollars. The launching of the catalogue, a special evening social event for the regulars to place their orders, would be a couple of days before the items went on sale. I checked on the video surveillance gear. A four-way split screen gave good coverage of the whole shop. Crisp black and white images and a running time clock. The equipment had the capacity to record all four images on a hard disk and transfer them to a cassette or a CD. Must have cost a bomb and was way over the top for a shop like Craig’s, but he was on a mission.
I told Lily, my part-time partner who was staying over at my place that night, about the case and she said it sounded like fun.
‘How’s he going to pay you?’ she asked. ‘In books?’