Long Sonata of the Dead by Andrew Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

literature, the tall shelves march up and down.
    The library is an organic thing that has developed over the decades according to a private logic of its own over many levels and floors. There are hiding places, narrow iron staircases and grubby, rarely-visited alcoves where the paint on the walls hasn’t changed since the days of Virginia Woolf. Sometimes I think the library is really a great brain and we, its members who come and go over the years, are no more than its fugitive thoughts and impulses.
    You never know quite what you may find in the stacks. There are many forgotten books that perhaps no one has ever looked at since their arrival at the library. Where else would I have found The Voice of Angels , for example, or learned about the long sonata of the dead?
    Now there was a serpent in my booklined garden of Eden. Its name was Adam.
    I went down the paneled stairs to the issue hall on the ground floor. I arrived just as Adam came through the security barrier. He was putting away the plastic-coated membership card in his wallet. So he was a member, not just a visitor.
    He turned right and went into the little side-hall where the lockers are. I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t recognize me. He never really noticed people. Anyway, unlike him, I had changed a good deal since he had last seen me. I had put on weight. I had an untidy beard, streaked with grey. I was going bald.
    I lingered by the window that looks down into the Lightwell Reading Room. I opened my notebook and pretended to examine one of the pages. The book fell open at the entries I had copied from the computer catalogue when I had first searched for Francis Youlgreave in the name index. Only two of his books were listed there: The Judgement of Strangers and The Tongues of Angels. They were both reprints from the 1950s.
    On the edge of my range of vision I saw Adam crossing the hall to the long counter that divides the staff from the members. He laid down a couple of books for return. The nearest assistant did the little double-take that people do when they encounter the famous and smiled at him. I couldn’t see Adam’s face but his posture changed—he seemed to grow a little taller, a little wider; he was like a preening peacock.
    He turned away and passed behind me into the room where the photocopiers and the catalogues are. The two books remained where they were for the moment. I went over to them and picked up the top one. It was a survey of fin-de-siècle British poetry; it had been written in the 1930s by a man who used to review a good deal for the Times Literary Supplement. I had looked at it for my Youlgreave research but there wasn’t much there of value and Youlgreave himself was barely mentioned.
    The assistant looked up. “I’m sorry, I haven’t checked that in yet—would you like to take it out?”
    “I’m not sure. But may I look at it? And at this one.”
    She scanned the labels and handed the books to me. I took them upstairs, back to the reading room, and settled at my table. The other book was a biography of Aubrey Beardsley. Again, I had come across the book myself—Beardsley had provided the illustrations for an 1897 collector’s edition of one of Youlgreave’s better-known poems, “The Four Last Things.” There wasn’t much about Beardsley’s connection with Youlgreave—merely the usual unsupported claim that they had moved in the same rather louche cultural circle in London, together with an account of Beardsley’s struggle to extract payment from Youlgreave’s publisher. But the page that mentioned the episode was turned down at the top left corner, an unpleasant habit that some readers have; Adam used to do it with my books and it infuriated me.
    I knew then that this must be more than coincidence. That was the second shock of the afternoon. Adam was almost certainly researching Francis Youlgreave. The bastard, I thought, hasn’t he got enough already? Hasn’t he taken enough from me?
    I continued