Mr. Berger returned to the front door. He banged on it once with his fist, more in hope than expectation of an answer. He was unsurprised when none came. He examined the single keyhole. It did not look rusted, and when he put a finger to it, the digit came back moistened with a hint of lock oil. It was all most peculiar and not a little sinister.
There was nothing else to be done for now, Mr. Berger thought. The night was growing steadily colder, and he had not yet eaten. Although Glossom was a quiet, safe town, he did not fancy spending a long night outside a darkened lending library in the hope that a spectral woman might emerge so he could ask her what she thought she was doing throwing herself repeatedly under trains. There were also some nasty scratches on his hands that could do with a spot of antiseptic.
So, with one final look back at Caxton Library, and more perturbed than ever, Mr. Berger returned home, and the Spotted Frog was deprived of his custom for that night.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Mr. Berger returned to Caxton Library shortly after 10:00 a.m. the next morning on the basis that this was a reasonably civilized hour at which to appear, and if the Caxton was still in business, then it was likely that someone might be about at this time. The Caxton, though, remained as silent and forbidding as it had the previous evening.
With nothing better to do, Mr. Berger began making enquiries, but to no avail. General expressions of ignorance about the nature of Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository were his sole reward at the newsagent, the local grocery, and even among the early arrivals at the Spotted Frog. Oh, people seemed to be aware that the Caxton existed, but nobody was able to recall a time when it was actually in business as a lending library, nor could anyone say who owned the building, or if any books still remained inside. It was suggested that he might try the town hall in Moreham, where the records for the smaller hamlets in the vicinity were kept.
So Mr. Berger got in his car and drove to Moreham. As he drove, he considered that there seemed to be a remarkable lack of interest in Caxton Library among the townsfolk of Glossom. It was not merely that those to whom he spoke had forgotten about its existence until Mr. Berger brought it up, at which point some faint atavistic memory of the building was uncovered before promptly being buried again; that, at least, might be understandable if the library had not been in business for many years. What was more curious was that most people seemed to be entirely unaware of its existence and didn’t care very much to investigate further once it was brought to their attention. Glossom was a close-knit community, as Mr. Berger was only too well aware, for comments about hallucinations and train delays still followed him as he asked about the library. There appeared to be only two types of business in the town: everybody’s business, and business that was not yet everybody’s but soon would be once the local gossips had got to work on it. The older residents of the town could provide chapter and verse on its history back to the sixteenth century, and every building, old or recent, had its history.
All, that is, except Caxton Private Lending Library.
The town hall in Moreham proved to be a source of little illumination on the matter. The library building was owned by the Caxton Trust, with an address at a PO box in London. The Trust paid all bills relating to the property, including rates and electricity, and that was as much as Mr. Berger could find out about it. An enquiry at the library in Moreham was met with blank looks, and although he spent hours searching back issues of the local weekly paper, the Moreham & Glossom Advertiser, from the turn of the century onward, he could find no reference to Caxton Library anywhere.
It was already dark when he returned to his cottage. He cooked himself an omelet and tried to read, but he was distracted by the fact of the library’s apparent simultaneous existence and nonexistence. It was there. It occupied a space in Glossom. It was a considerable building. Why, then, had its presence in a small community passed relatively unnoticed and unremarked for so long?
The next day brought no more satisfaction. Calls to booksellers and libraries, including to the grand old London Library and the Cranston Library in Reigate, the oldest lending library in the country, confirmed only a general ignorance of the Caxton. Finally, Mr. Berger found himself talking to the British representative of the Special Libraries Association, an organization of whose existence he had previously been unaware. She promised to search their records but admitted that she had never heard of the Caxton and would be surprised if anyone else had either, given that her own knowledge of such matters was encyclopedic, a judgment that, after an hour-long history of libraries in England, Mr. Berger was unwilling to doubt.
Mr. Berger did consider that he might be mistaken about the woman’s ultimate destination. There were other buildings in that part of town in which she could have hidden herself to escape his notice, but the Caxton was still the most likely place in which she might have sought refuge. Where else, he thought, would a woman intent upon repeatedly reenacting the final moments of Anna Karenina choose to hide but an old library?
He made his decision before he went to bed that night. He would become a detective of sorts and stake out Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository for as long as it took for it to reveal its secrets to him.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
As Mr. Berger soon discovered, it was no easy business being a detective on a stakeout. It was all very well for those chaps in books, who could sit in a car or a restaurant and make observations about the world in a degree of comfort, especially if they were in Los Angeles or somewhere else with a climate noted for warmth and sunlight. It was quite another thing to hang around among dilapidated buildings in a small English town on a cold, damp February day, hoping that nobody one knew happened by or, worse, some passing busybody didn’t take it upon himself to phone the police and report a loiterer. Mr. Berger could just imagine Inspector Carswell smoking another cigarette and concluding that he now most definitely had some form of lunatic on his hands.
Thankfully, Mr. Berger found a sheltered space in the old cooperage and chandlery that afforded a view of the end of the laneway through a collapsed section of wall while allowing him to remain relatively concealed. He had brought a blanket, a cushion, a flask of tea, some sandwiches and chocolate, and two books, one of them a John Dickson Carr novel entitled The Crooked Hinge, just to enter into the spirit of the thing, and the other Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens, the only Dickens he had yet to read. The Crooked Hinge turned out to be rather good, if a little fantastical. Then again, Mr. Berger considered, a tale of witchcraft and automatons was hardly more outlandish than apparently witnessing the same woman attempt suicide twice, the first time successfully and the second time less so.
The day passed without incident. There was no activity in the laneway, the rustle of the odd rat apart. Mr. Berger finished the Dickson Carr and started the Dickens, which, being the author’s last completed novel, meant that it was mature Dickens and hence rather difficult by the standards of Oliver Twist or The Pickwick Papers, requiring considerably more patience and attention. When the light began to fade, Mr. Berger set aside the book, unwilling to risk drawing attention by using a torch, and waited another hour in the hope that darkness might bring with it some activity at Caxton Library. No illumination showed in the old building, and Mr. Berger eventually gave up the watch for the night and took himself to the Spotted Frog for a hot meal and a restorative glass of wine.