The Case of the Missing Books

‘This is where I’m staying?’

‘That’s correct,’ she said crisply. ‘Goodnight.’ And with that she shut the door, and was gone.

Israel stood and looked around him. At last he was home. His new start in Ireland. He sniffed. He thought he could smell something funny: fungus; straw; long-standing neglect; fresh paint; damp; and – what was that? He sniffed again.

It was chicken shit.

5 (#ulink_921873a1-241d-57be-9669-4f7f6ce53997)

Israel had never before been woken by the sound of a cock. And certainly not by the sound of a cock in the same room, perched like the Owl of Minerva on the end of his bed.

His eye hurt. His head hurt. His back hurt. It’d be easier in fact to say what didn’t hurt: his toes, they seemed fine, but that was because they were so cold he couldn’t even feel his toes. He was just assuming his toes were fine. His nose, also. He felt for his nose – it was fine. But where were his glasses? He needed his glasses.

He was feeling around frantically for his glasses when the cock crowed again and started strutting boldly up the bed towards him. Any chickens he’d ever met before had tended to be already either safely roasted with their cavities loosely stuffed and their juices running clear, or well boiled in soups with carrot and onions, so this living, breathing, full-throated, fully feathered chicken was something of a shock to his already shell-shocked system. It looked bigger than the chickens he was familiar with: you certainly couldn’t have fitted it comfortably into the average-sized roasting tin or casserole. Maybe it was the feathers that did it.

He tried shooing the fat clucking chicken by flapping his hands, but it wasn’t until he wobbled his tired, cold, beaten body up out of bed and turned nasty, throwing stuff from his suitcase – books, mostly, including his hardback Brick Lane, which he’d lugged around for years, trying to wade through – that he managed to chase the damned thing to the door and escort it outside. In the end it was his paperback edition of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time that did the trick. He knew that’d come in useful one day.

Outside it was drizzling rain and whipping winds again, and there were lights on in some of the outbuildings around the farmyard, and the sound of unoiled machinery, and thrumping motors, and animal noises, and Israel peered at his watch and it was six o’clock in the morning: 6 a.m.

Oh, bloody hell.

Israel had never exactly been renowned as an early riser – it was always Gloria who’d been quickest off the starting block, showered and hair-washed and away to work by the time Israel had surfaced usually – and by his own calculation he had enjoyed only four hours’ uninterrupted sleep during the past forty-eight hours, which was not good. Which was torture, in fact, probably, under the UN Convention of Human Rights – he could check that with Gloria.

He needed a lot of things right now: something good to eat, a bath, more Nurofen, a new job, a plane ticket out. But above all he needed more sleep. Lots more. Lashings of sleep.

He’d been so cold in the night that he’d got up and unpacked all his clothes from his old brown case and piled them in layers on top of himself, a kind of clothes sandwich, but that hadn’t worked: the clothes had all just slid off, leaving him cold again, so in the end he’d got dressed again; shirt and jumper and his best brown corduroy suit, including the trousers ankle-deep in shit which he’d had to roll up past his knees, two pairs of socks, and the duffle coat to weigh him down. He’d used his pyjamas rolled up as a pillow – the pillow had got soaked through with melted choc-ice.

So now he was lying there again, fully dressed, warm and comfortably immobilised, and just beginning to drop off when he heard what sounded like an explosion outside.

And there was then what sounded like licking flames – that pffung! and whoosh! of flames – and so he had to raise himself again – bloody hell! – and quickly put on his shoes and…

Bloody hell! That’s where his glasses were; he’d tucked his glasses inside his shoes last night before he fell asleep, he remembered it now, as he felt a snap underfoot.

‘Aaggh!’ he yelled, and, ‘Oh shit!’

And then he remembered that the building he was unfortunate enough to be staying in was now possibly on fire, so he wrenched open the door and hobbled outside, half-crippled, into the darkness.

There was no fire.

The lashing sound of the flames was in fact coming from a man with his back to him, dressed in yellow all-weather jacket and trousers, who was using a big humming power hose to clean the farmyard, not taking care to miss wooden doors, metal milk urns and other unsecured items, hence the clatter and the whoosh.

‘Aaggh!’ said Israel, hopping slightly on his foot. ‘Hello?’

And ‘Uh?’ said the man, surprised, turning round suddenly with the hose, and completely soaking Israel from the waist down.

‘Aaggh! No!’ screamed Israel. ‘I’m! You’ve! Aaggh! I’m soaking!’

‘Sorry,’ laughed the man, who wasn’t in fact a man. It was George, scrubbed clean, looking quite unlike she had done the previous night – she was smiling now, for example.

‘I’m soaking!’

‘All right, Armstrong,’ she said. ‘Dry your eyes.’

‘What do you mean, dry my eyes? Dry my eyes? I am soaking wet. And…Ooowww!’

‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘My glasses! They were in my shoes!’

‘In your shoes?’

‘Yes! My! Shoes!’

He bent over and carefully took his left shoe off – his thin-soled, one and only best left brogue – and shook two separate pieces of what had been his glasses onto the concrete yard.

‘Look! My glasses! You’ve broken my glasses!’

‘I haven’t broken your glasses.’

‘You have broken my glasses! If you hadn’t been doing your…spraying thing, I wouldn’t have had to rush outside and…’ Israel was hopping and shaking his head in rage. ‘For Christ’s sake! What is this bloody place?’

‘What do you think it is? It’s a farm.’

‘Right. Yes. I noticed. And are you all totally stark raving mad?’

‘No.’

‘Right! Well, if you think I’m going to settle for this, this, chicken shed—’

‘Coop,’ corrected George.

‘Whatever! This coop as accommodation, you have got another think coming. I’ll be complaining to the council about this.’

‘Right you are.’

‘Fine.’

‘Good.’

‘And now, if you’ll excuse me, I had a rather long journey yesterday and I am sick and tired of you…people, and I would like to go back to sleep for an hour or two. If you wouldn’t mind’ – he gestured towards the machines – ‘keeping the noise down a little…’

Israel turned away and began walking back to his room and immediately George turned the power hose back on again. Israel strode over to her and attempted to wrest the power hose from her hands. They struggled for a moment, cheek to cheek, hands clasped, staring at each other, like ancient warriors engaged in combat, except with a hose rather than broadswords, and in a farmyard, at six o’clock in the morning.

And in the end Israel simply let go and followed the power hose to where it met the wall, and turned off the tap.

And George marched over and switched the tap back on again. And now she was brandishing the nozzle of the hose like a gun at Israel.

‘This, Mr Armstrong,’ she said, ‘is the sound of work – not a sound you’re familiar with, clearly, although I dare say even librarians have to do something with their time to justify their wages. And if you don’t like it here, I suggest by all means that you start looking for somewhere else to stay.’