Mr Dixon Disappears

Mr Dixon Disappears
Ian Sansom

Israel Armstrong, one of literature’s most unlikely detectives, returns for more crime solving adventure in this hilarious second novel from ‘The Mobile Library’ series.The second in the ‘The Mobile Library ‘ detective series, ‘Mr Dixon Disappears’ once again features the magnificently hapless Israel Armstrong – the young, Jewish, duffle-coat wearing librarian who solves crimes, mysteries, and domestic problems all whilst driving a mobile library around the coast of Northern Ireland.Dixon and Pickering's, County Antrim's legendary department store, is preparing to celebrate its centenary. But the elderly Mr Dixon – a member of the Ulster Association of Magicians – has gone missing, along with one hundred thousand pounds in cash. It smells, pretty badly, of a kidnap.Israel becomes a suspect in the police investigation and is suspended from his job by his boss, the ever-fearsome Linda Wei. He's having to fight to clear his name.Does Israel's acclaimed five-panel touring exhibition showing the history of Dixon and Pickering's in old photographs and artefacts perhaps hold the key to Mr Dixon's mysterious disappearance? Will romance blossom between Israel and Rosie Hart, the barmaid at the First and Last? Will Linda Wei stick to her diet? And has nobody here heard of Franz Kafka? All will be revealed in this hilarious and endlessly inventive sequel to ‘The Case of the Missing Books’.

The Mobile Library

Mr Dixon Disappears

Ian Sansom

For Sean

2005–2006

R.I.P.

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#ud3167e82-73f5-537a-a996-6b61f272b3f9)

Title Page (#ua4ae4cd2-9cc3-5b32-ab68-70333b9caac2)

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2 (#u81bf3b33-ce8a-5b22-824d-eba78215452c)

3 (#uad739945-d5e1-56c6-a5f2-52c10d2d1301)

4 (#u1568d1fa-2915-5fe4-a228-70690ce9f3b5)

5 (#u320f5fa9-6089-5c2d-9457-5603d7f2813a)

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10 (#litres_trial_promo)

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12 (#litres_trial_promo)

13 (#litres_trial_promo)

14 (#litres_trial_promo)

15 (#litres_trial_promo)

16 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Mobile Library (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Ian Sansom (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

1 (#ulink_b2a20ee2-1979-5e31-96fb-69769a64fd03)

He was sick of the excuses and the lies. He was tired of the evasions and the untruths, of people refusing to stand up and speak the truth and take responsibility for their own actions. It seemed to him like yet another symptom of the decline of Western civilisation; of chaos; and climate change; and environmental disaster; and war; disease; famine; oppression; the eternal slow slide down and down and down. It was entropy, nemesis, apotheosis, imminent apocalypse and sheer bad manners all rolled into one.

People were not returning their library books on time.

‘I’m sorry, I forgot,’ people would say.

And, ‘I’ve been in hospital.’

Or, ‘I liked it so much I lent it to my sister.’ (Or my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my cousin, or my friend, who lives up country, or in Derry, or over there in England, actually, and isn’t that where you’re from?)

Or, ‘Sure, I brought it back already.’

Or, ‘No. I don’t think so. I never had that one out.’

Or, ‘I put it back on the shelves myself. Some other one must have it out now.’

Or, ‘Someone stole it.’

Or, ‘I left it on the bus.’ Or in the bath, or on holiday, or in the car and it’s in for servicing.

And, even, once, ‘It was a bad book, full of bad language and bad people doing bad things, so I threw it away.’ (Well, what the hell did Mrs Onions expect, borrowing Last Exit to Brooklyn? Israel had asked her, after he’d got her to pay the replacement cost of the book, and a fine, and had steered her safely back towards her usual large-print romantic fiction, and it turned out she had a cousin who’d emigrated to New York back in the sixties and she’d never visited and she was toying with the idea of a trip over for her seventieth birthday and she’d wanted to find out what it was like over there, and frankly, there was no chance of her visiting now after reading that filth, they were going to go to Donegal for a few days instead, to see her sister, down in Gweedore, which was quite far enough, and did Israel know if Frank McCourt had written any others?)

But mostly when they were challenged about their overdue or unreturned books, the good people of Tumdrum would just narrow their eyes and look at you with a blank expression and purse their lips and say, ‘Book? What book?’

It wasn’t funny. It was cracking him up.

He patted his face with cold water and stared at himself, freshly shaved, in the mirror hung on a nail above the makeshift sink.

He squinted at himself.

In his teens and even into his early twenties Israel had spent a lot of time looking into mirrors, trying to work out whether he was good-looking or not, which was quite a project, a hobby almost; he could have spent hours at it. Was his nose perhaps a little too large, his eyes a little too narrow, his lips too full, his ears not quite right? Pressing, important and immense as those questions had once appeared to be, they no longer seemed to bother him, he didn’t know why – he supposed that maybe there comes a time in every man’s life when he makes up his mind and decides one way or another about the cut of his own jib and has to learn to live with it, and maybe he’d reached that point, or maybe Tumdrum had just cured him of himself. Either way, it didn’t seem to bother him any more, the question of whether he was good-looking or not. What bothered him now was: am I there at all? Or, where am I? He often found himself glancing at himself in the wing-mirror of the van, trying to catch himself out, trying to locate himself, checking for signs of life.