Malcolm James Thomson - TheodoraLand

“Of course, after such a thrashing the resolve of the protagonist is always reinforced in his resolve!” Dirk suggested.

“Provided he survives his ordeal,” Bea added.

“Hah!” said Aunt Ursel, when she returned after spending the day in Zurich (her charitable committee supporting musical education) and was confronted by a Bea Schell who did not at all correspond to my description.

Dirk’s blessures she overlooked as if they were the normal scrapes and scratches of an adventurous schoolboy. And at times he did have a kind of goofy, juvenile thing about him. He was not quite as tall as his fiancée (if that she still was), wiry in build, unruly hair often held in the seminal fixie-riding hipster accessory, a snood.. Earnestly boyish, with something of that Formula One racing driver of whom we Germans were expecting so much again this season. It might have been the second thing that attracted me last year.

Since it was Ursel Lange’s weekly bridge evening the three of us would be left to our own devices although we were commanded to be ready for a hike the next day.

There was no mention of books of any kind.

Weinfelden may have a historic centre, always depicted in the tourist guides, but it is not the pulsating heart of the town. Nor indeed is the Marktplatz. Opposite Brunnenbach Bücher and Wystübli is an example of the kind of ugly civic renewal which was prevalent in the sixties and seventies. The architecture was without merit and the complex tried to be a destination shopping centre in spite of one supermarket and then another failing to prosper in its precincts. The town’s young people used to gather in the shade of the tree in the middle of Marktplatz although recently the Swiss kids had moved on and those who remained tended to speak in Balkan tongues.

“Already in the year 124 AD there was a Roman bridge over the river Thur here in Weinfelden… Quivelda, they called the settlement,” I pointed out as we entered Wystübli. Frederico’s welcoming smile for Bea two-pont-zero was broader than the one I had been given on my last visit.

“It might have been more lively then than it is now. I would have thought it a bit too sleepy and provincial for someone like you, Thea,” said Dirk, ignoring the expression on the face of Frederico who looked askance at his battered visage.

“Maybe I never told the two of you that I’m supposed to inherit the bookstore next door.”

I made this sound like a fate worse than death.

“That big house, too?” Bea Schell wondered, always conscious of matters financial, not infrequently complaining that her job was underpaid.

Säntisblick with its turrets; few private houses were more imposing other than Schloß Bachtobel further along the ridge overlooking the town.

“Doesn’t sound like you at all,” said Dirk.

“Oh, I don’t know. Zack could cover the walls with obscene graffiti and I could hold court and repeatedly tell the tale of how we solved the case of the three burned books!”

Both Dirk and Bea gave me a long, almost pitying look.

Frederico recommended the quiche.

I insisted that the locally brewed effervescent Zwickelbier was very good.

“So… ‘grave goods’! What were you thinking of, Dirk?”

“It was a story I had drafted. All it needed was to be given a current ‘hook’. Lessinger’s Agnes was easy to find. She put a condolence announcement in our newspaper. I had a brief chat with her. She assumed that three of his fifteenth century manuscripts were what Lessinger had chose to take with him to… the other side.”

“And then you reckoned that a bit of disinformation could do no harm… pointing at books very different from the three we identified.”

“It seemed like a good idea…”

“At the time,” Bea concluded, throwing me a look which begged me to be merciful.

“Did I ever say how I met Rudiger Reiß?” I asked Dirk.

“Sure! You promised us at dinner that you don’t make a habit of picking up men at funerals.”

“But there was no mention of details about the damn books until after he had left, right?”

Bea gave an exaggerated shrug.

“No. Foremost in his mind was the question of whether you were flashing your lovely lady-bits with intent or not. ”

My smile took some effort, my sigh was one of resignation.

“About the books… I guess there could be people who want no further questions asked at all. But others also quizzed the strange but helpful Transylvanian at the undertaker’s place. To satisfy themselves that the books are gone for ever? Or, suspecting a trick, to trace the ones that are the real thing?”

Bea and Dirk exchanged a look.

“Yes, some serious effort was made to… give the impression that three specific books had gone up in smoke,” said Bea.

“So it must appear,” said I, choosing the way Aunt Ursel had put it.

“Lessinger must have found a bookbinder willing and able to replicate the covers. And the inside pages would have had to be good enough to satisfy the passing curiosity of a mortician,” Dirk said, wincing either from a twinge of conscience or from the discomfort of his wounds.

“Brain functioning once more. Reassuring, that!”

Bea Schell bristled.

“Dirk’s story wasn’t such a blunder. It spread the news that three books were consumed by fire. Period. Your Rudiger has an inkling of what books they were. But more important… he and anyone else will now presume them to have been destroyed.”

“One interpretation, Bea. Another is that some could suspect that a cunning cover-up is being attempted… like some Italians made aware of my Google search for the cryptic title of the Swiss file.”

“So what is so important about three old books anyway?”

Dirk’s question I found naïve. And it was not his question to ask. It was mine, to ask of Aunt Ursel.

Would it make a difference if Aunt Ursel and her partner had emerged as winners after their card playing evening? I gave that some thought as I waited for her to return. It was only after Bea and Dirk went up to their turret that I took the books from my rucksack (with a longboard attached by ballistic rip-stop nylon proclaiming my hipster innocence of anything remotely conspiratorial) and placed them, as if on museal display, on the ledge below the big television set in the Bauernstube.

Before Ursel Lange showed up I was able to discover that she had not just archived all the matches played by Borussia Dortmund during the previous season on her Sky box. She also had every episode of the series Dirk watched over and over again, Veronica Mars .

My great-aunt said nothing when she came in and saw the books lined up and begging for a reaction.

She poured a measure of Pflümli to go with her Ovomaltine.

I rolled a spliff. Bea had at first felt slighted when I insisted on taking a taxi home. But Fairouz was also one of the local suppliers of weed and he could spare me the makings of a few small joints. No, I strictly do not carry any hash or grass with me on a train which passes through three countries.

What I didn’t know is how I was supposed to have found out about what Herr Lessinger had chosen to take with him for what was, after all, a very short journey. Yes, it was predictable that I would attend the funeral. I was fond of the vain and often cantankerous old man who had once been Ursel Lange’s lover, who had at her bidding found that the Bookshop needed another trainee.

But had it not been by accident that I’d learned that the coffin contained more than just fleshly remains? Had I not overheard Vera and Agnes I would have been none the wiser.

Although I guess I would have become inquisitive about the nature of the three books which, in my guardianship, safe in my second oven, were in something of a bibliophile limbo. They were quite unrelated, with their obvious age and the German language the sole common attributes. How probable was it that I should share my awakened curiosity at some point with close friends who happened to be, for one, an ardent if erratic investigative journalist and, for the other, no longer ghostly greige but, with ever diminishing doubt in this respect, a spook of another kind.