The case of the missing books (25 page)

'Are you drunk?'

'No, I'm not drunk.'

'Are you hung over then?'

'No.'

'Are you an alcoholic?'

'No.'

'You look like an alcoholic.'

'Do you play chess with your mum, Conor?'

'She's rubbish.'

'I'm sure she's not rubbish. I like chess.'

'Are you any good?'

'I'm not bad.'

'I bet I could beat you.'

'Well, I'll tell you what. I'll give you a game if you tell me where you got the books.'

'Here we are, now,' said Rosie, reappearing with bin bags.

'Come on, Conor, you give Israel a hand here, please.'

'I'm going out to play,' said Conor, leaping out of bed and running out of the bedroom.

'Conor!'

There was the sound of the slamming of the front door.

'He's certainly a…boisterous little chap,' said Israel.

'Yes,' agreed Rosie.

'You must be very…proud.'

'Well. Would you mind just collecting them up yourself?'

'Sure.'

Rosie went outside.

'Ted,' she called, 'can you watch those wee ones for me a minute, OK?'

'Sure,' said Ted.

Israel could hear her shouting.

'Conor!' she called. 'Come here, this minute!'

Which left Israel to pack a couple of hundred books into plastic bin bags.

He did half a dozen trips to and from Rosie's home and through the mobile home park and to the Visitors' Car Park and the van, the plastic carrier bags sometimes spilling and splitting, and in the end Ted joined him and they said goodbye to Rosie–although there was still no sign of Conor.

'Where d'you think he got the books, Ted?'

'He's a great reader, the wee fella.'

'He's got enough books to keep him going until he's at university, though.'

'Aye, Rosie'd love him to go to university.'

'I'm sure she would, but the books, Ted–Rosie said Norman had let him have them all from the library?'

'Aye.'

'Well, you know Norman, Ted.'

'I do.'

'And he's not likely to have given an eight-year-old boy unrestricted borrowing rights, is he?'

'I don't rightly know, Israel.'

'Maybe he stole them?'

'Ach, give over, Israel. Wasn't it last week I was your criminal mastermind?'

'Yes, but—'

'And then this week it's a big conspiracy involving the council and the Shinners and the Orange Order and the Ancient Order of Hibernians?'

'No, Ted.'

'Aye, well, the wee fella's probably behind it all, isn't he, I would have thought. He's your Mr Big? D'you want to try a citizen's arrest?'

As they trudged along the grey gravel path towards the reception a man approached them, running steadily, in running shorts and windcheater.

'John!' called Ted to the runner. 'John! Hey! Over here!'

The man stopped in his tracks.

'John, it's me, Ted.'

'Ach, what about ye, Ted?'

'This is Israel, John, the new mobile librarian. Israel, John Boyd.'

'Hello, Israel,' said John, 'pleased to meet you. People call me Feely.'

'Right, well, hello, erm, Feely,' said Israel, who was about to ask the man why people called him Feely as he went to shake his hand, and found his hand engulfed by a massive muscular shake: John was over six foot tall, had a shaven head, and was built like a boxer. He looked like a younger, fitter version of Ted: the only real difference was, John was completely blind.

'What brings you out here then, Ted?'

'We're getting the mobile library up and running. Israel here's rounding up all the overdue books.'

'Right.'

'Have you any, John?'

John hesitated.

'There's a fines amnesty, but, so you're all right.'

'Great, Ted,' said John with relief. 'They were months overdue. Would have cost me a fortune returning them.'

'That's all right,' said Israel magnanimously. 'Happens all the time.'

'I've got audio books mostly.'

'That's OK. An audio book's still a book, in my book,' said Israel jocularly.

'Right.'

'Don't mind him, John,' said Ted. 'He's from England.'

'Oh, aye.'

John led them to his mobile home.

From outside it looked exactly the same as Rosie's, but inside it was done out entirely as a gym: where Rosie had her sofa and her coffee table and the Star Wars chess set, John had a rowing machine, a running machine, racks of free weights, a weights station and a huge contraption like a gibbet hung with punch bags.

'This new, John?' said Ted, patting the big metal contraption.

'The UBS?' said John.

'The what?'

'Universal Boxing System.'

'Aye.'

'Yeah.'

'Speed bag, heavy bag, and double-end striking bag all in one, eh,' said Ted, walking round, admiring the kit.

'Nice, isn't she.'

Ted took a boxing stance and threw a succession of punches into the centre of a heavy bag. There was a lovely soft sound of
oofs
.

'I've got spare gloves and wraps if you want them, Ted.'

'No,' said Ted, laughing, throwing another couple of punches at the bag. 'I'm too old for that game–beaten docket, me. It's not canvas then?'

'No, it's all this plastic these days.'

'I wish we'd had these little double-end bags when I was younger,' said Ted, moving round to another small bag, suspended between two plastic cords. He threw a punch at it and it sprang back and forwards as he leant his body to the side, ducking and bobbing.

'Good for coordination,' said John.

'Aye.'

'Cost a few pound, eh?'

'Well, got it on eBay.'

'Oh, right.'

'Got my medicine ball as well,' said John.

'God, I haven't seen one of them in a few years,' said Ted, going over and picking up a big black leather ball.

'Great for the old abdominals,' said John.

'Aye,' said Ted, and then, 'Here, Israel, catch!' and threw the ball to Israel.

Israel saw the ball coming towards him as if in slow motion, and he had a flashback, of gym at school, of being unable to climb ropes, of panicking in the swimming pool, of getting pounded in rugby, and collapsing in cross-country, flailing in tennis, as the medicine ball hit him in the stomach.

'Steady, Ted,' said John.

'Ach, get him in shape,' said Ted. 'Look at him, he's a belly like a drowned pup.'

'Aaggh.'

'Anyway,' said Ted, turning to John. 'It was about the books we came.'

'Yes.'

'What have you got?'

'Here we go,' said John, going over to a state-of-the-art sound system, which had CDs and tape cassettes piled around.

'Israel?' said Ted. Israel remained doubled over. 'Ach, come on. Stop clowning about. What have we got here then, John?
The Odyssey
, read by Ian McKellen. Any good?'

'Not bad.'

'Have you heard that one of him doing
Les Misérables
though?'

'No. I must get that out.'

Israel had staggered over. 'God, you've got most of the history of English literature on tape here,' he said.

'Aye. Well, makes a break during training: I need to cool off actually, now. Do my stretching. D'you mind?'

'No, go ahead.'

Ted and Israel left John Boyd's caravan with a bag full of audio books and John doing some hamstring stretches.

'Was he blind since birth?' asked Israel, as they piled the books into the van.

'No. He was caught in a bomb blast, up in Belfast.'

'That's terrible.'

'Yeah, it was. His wife died.'

'God.'

'Don't take the Lord's name in vain.'

'Sorry.'

'Thank you. Now you get in the back there,' said Ted, pointing to the dark interior of the van.

'What?'

'To count the books.'

'Oh.'

Israel counted, all the way back to Tumdrum, and with some allowance for bumps in the road he made a total of 284 books and 75 audio books.

'Well?' said Ted, as they pulled up outside Tumdrum Library.

'What's seventy-five plus two hundred and eighty-four?' said Israel. 'Three hundred and fifty-nine?'

'I don't know.'

'Anyway, so what's fifteen thousand take away three hundred and fifty-nine?'

'Ach, Israel,' said Ted, 'my mental arithmetic's not what it was.'

'Fourteen thousand, six hundred and forty-one?'

'Sounds about right,' said Ted.

'So that's it: we've got approximately fourteen thousand, six hundred and forty-one books left to find.'

'Not bad then.'

'That's terrible,' said Israel. 'It'll take us years.'

'You know what they say?' said Ted.

'No.'

'Patience and perseverance would take a snail to Jerusalem.'

'What?'

'We'll have this all rightened out before Christmas.'

'Hanukkah.'

'Bless you.'

They were on the road together for the best part of a week, Ted and Israel, starting off from Tumdrum around eight every morning and not getting back until much before seven, day in, day out, rounding up books from outlying farms, and from schools and hospices, and old people's homes, and big houses and flats, and a few places down almost as far as Ballymena and up almost to Coleraine, past the Giant's Causeway, and the strain was beginning to tell. Israel had drunk enough tea to drown himself and eaten enough wee buns to weigh him down while he was drowning, and everyone they met and everywhere they went was slowly becoming a murky blur, a giant milky-tea-and-biscuit-tray of Achesons and Agnews and Begleys and Buchanans, all handing back their Jilly Coopers and their Catherine Cooksons and talking so fast and in accents so impenetrable that Israel just nodded, sipped tea and ate more buns, and let Ted do all the talking. A few faces and a few places stood out: he remembered the ancient and improbable vegetarian Mrs Roulston, for example, who'd done them a nice vegetable stew for lunch one day, and who lived all by herself in a painfully neat flat above her son's butcher's shop somewhere down near Ballygodknowswhere, and who had somehow ended up with all sixty-one volumes of the library's collected St Aquinas, which she'd been working through and testing by the yardstick of the Holy Bible and her own strong Presbyterian faith; and it turned out that he had the wrong end of the stick, apparently, Aquinas. Israel also remembered a Mr H. R. Whoriskey, a big fleshy man with Brylcreemed hair, who had the library's complete set of 1970s lavishly illustrated volumes on amateur photography, featuring bikini-clad beauties and women with perms in see-through blouses, and a disturbing number of books about Hitler and the Third Reich. Also, he had dogs.

Ted and Israel had rounded up audio books, and tape cassettes, and fiction and non-fiction, and children's books, and reference works that should never have left the library in the first place, and they had a haul so big now it could have filled at least a few shelves in the mobile library, although, as it was, they were in carrier bags in the back of the van.

'What's the tally, Mr Tallyman?' asked Ted.

'Erm.' Israel consulted the tally book while Ted started singing.

'Come, Mr Tallyman, tally me bananas!'

'Ted! Ted!'

'What?'

'You're giving me a headache, Ted.'

'Aye. Right. Well. And the vice versa.'

'Anyway, the total for this week,' announced Israel wearily, reading from the tally book. 'Is four hundred and thirty-seven books, comprising fiction, non-fiction and children's titles; one hundred and twenty-two audio books; forty-two tape cassettes; five CD-ROMs; fourteen videos; an unbound set of last year's
National Geographic
magazine, and the
Sopranos
first series on DVD. God.'

'Aye, right, mind your language,' said Ted. 'How many's that leave us?'

'Erm. Hang on. Let me work it out.' Israel took a Biro and had a quick go at the sums.

'Come, Mr Tallyman…'

'Ted!'

'What?'

'Nothing. I think we're still missing about fourteen thousand.'

'It's a start,' said Ted.

'Yeah, well. It's only a start. There's only so many overdue books out there, Ted. We're never going to get them all back like this.'

'Ach, your glass always half empty, is it?'

'Yes, it is actually.'

'Then you need to learn to graze where you're tethered, but.'

'What?'

'It's a saying.'

'Right. Meaning?'

'We're doing what we can, and we're doing it methodo…'

'Methodically.'

'That's it.'

'It's not getting us very far, though, is it?'

'Ach, will you give over moaning? It's like throwing water over a dog.'

'What?'

'It's just a—'

'Saying, right. Well I'm just saying we're never going to get them all back like this. You know that and I know that. Someone's stolen the books. We need to find out who.'

'Aye, aye, right, but it's the weekend now, so you'll have to get back to your mysteryfying on Monday, Inspector Clouseau.'

'But—'

Ted turned up a lane.

'We just need to take a wee skite in here,' said Ted, ignoring Israel, as usual, 'see Dennis about the shelves, get her measured up, and then I'm away home. Friday's my night with the BB.'

'The who B?'

'Boys' Brigade.'

'Right. Sorry, I have absolutely no idea what that is, Ted–what is it, like an army or something?'

'Ach, where are you from, boy? It's like the Scouts, but, except more…'

'What? Gay?'

'Protestant.'

'Jesus.'

'Israel!'

'Sorry, Ted.'

'So anyway, you'll be doing the last call yerself. It's up by the Devines' there–if I drop you off you can walk down the wee rodden when you're done, sure. Bring you out by the big red barn.'

'Which big red barn?'

There were quite a lot to choose from round and about.

'The Devines' big red barn. "Awake To Righteousness Not Sin".'

'Oh, right, that big red barn, yes.'

Israel had quickly become accustomed to seeing walls and barns and signs painted with light-hearted biblical texts and evangelical appeals, which he'd found shocking at first, the reminder that 'Brief Life Here Is Our Portion', or that 'And After This, The Judgement', but you can get used to anything, it seems. He now found something of a comfort in the thought that all this was temporary.