The Woman Who Died a Lot

“Libraries have been monstrously overfunded these past thirteen years,” I said. “The librarians had to take industrial action when the city council threatened to have gold taps put in the washrooms. Mind you, that will all change. I think you’re getting some of our funding.”

“Fifty million that I know of,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow. Fifty million was a third of our budget. “But we have to fund the Special Library Services out of that,” she added.

This made it a lot easier—Wexler’s team was expensive.

“Tell me,” she continued, “do you think Colonel Wexler is mad?”

“Yes, but in a good way. Got anyone on your staff yet?”

“A few trigger-happy nutters who were too mentally unstable even for SO-5. I told them to sod off—I want to keep gratuitous violence inside books, where it belongs.”

“Very wise. Your watch is slow.”

She looked at me oddly and pulled up her sleeve. The watch was a Reverso—the face was hidden. She flipped it over. “You’re right. How did you know?”

“I can hear it tick. And it’s ticking slowly. Not important. Anything on the ‘stolen thirteenth-century codex’ question?”

She pulled out a small pocketbook and turned to a page marked with a rubber band. “Possibly. Out of the eighty-three reported bibliothefts over the past month, only two had the same modus operandi. One in Bath and another in Lancaster. Exactly the same. Torn-out pages, then destroyed, but with the rest of the book left untouched.”

“Both by St. Zvlkx?”

“Bingo. The first a gazetteer of taverns in the Oxford area that give credit and the second a list of credible excuses to give your bishop if he thinks you’re misappropriating church funds— neither of them valuable nor particularly rare.”

“That links the books,” I said, wondering if Jack Schitt had been there on each occasion. “What are your thoughts?”

“I did some research into St. Zvlkx, and I was struck by a recurring theme in his life.”

“You mean his stealing, debauchery, embezzlement, drunkenness and the total absence of pastoral care or moral rectitude?”

“I was thinking more of his meanness. St. Zvlkx was notoriously tight-fisted. It was said that Augustus IV, the ‘Bouncing Bishop’ of Salisbury, joked that his idea of eternity would be dinner with St. Zvlkx and Kevin of Kent, waiting for one of them to pick up the tab.”

“So?”

“Zvlkx would never have used fresh vellum in his books, because it would cut into his drinking funds. He probably used secondhand books, dismantled them, scraped the vellum clean and then reused them. It’s only a guess, but I think the thief was looking for palimpsests.”

I could see what she was getting at. A palimpsest was the ghostly image of the original writing that was just still visible on the reused sheet of vellum. If the writing was from a long-lost book, it would be of inestimable value.

“Good thought,” I murmured.

“There’s more.”

She reached into her bag and brought out a thirteenth-century book wrapped in acid-free paper. She placed it on the coffee table and donned a pair of latex gloves to unwrap it. “This is Lord Volescamper’s copy of St. Zvlkx’s Book of Revealments. It wasn’t one of the books that was vandalized by our mystery book damagers. I had a look under UV light, and I can just see the original text beneath St. Zvlkx’s prophecies. I’m thinking that all St. Zvlkx’s original works were written on recycled vellum.”

“Any idea of the source book?”

She smiled. “Let’s see how good you are, Chief Librarian.” She opened the book at a marked page and pushed it across.

I looked closely. There was some text written sideways beneath St. Zvlkx’s Second Revealment, the one predicting the Spanish Armada, or, as he called it the “Sail of the Century.”

“It looks like a copy of the Venerable Keith’s Principia Accounticia.” I murmured, and Phoebe was suitably impressed. The Venerable Keith had been a contemporary of St. Zvlkx’s and also the accountant for the bishop of Swindon between 1276 and 1294. The Evadum, as it was known, explained the new science of utilizing loss-making companies to offset tax liability against profit. Monks couldn’t hand-copy them fast enough.

“There were lots of copies,” I said, “which was probably why St. Zvlkx could buy them up cheap to scrape clean and rebind in order to peddle his own rubbish.”

“I agree,” said Phoebe, producing another book, this time Zvlkx’s treatise on herbal remedies for “unwonted flaccidity,” A Short Historie of Thyme.

I stared at the two books. It still didn’t tell us why Jack Schitt and Goliath were destroying parts of worthless thirteen century books, even if they did have palimpsests of almost equally banal titles beneath them. Still, I was seeing the Goliath rep next, so it was possible I could rattle that tree a bit and see what fell out.

“I know,” said Phoebe, sensing my confusion. “Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

I picked up the phone, punched a button and asked to be put through to Finisterre.