TheodoraLand. Malcolm James Thomson

       TheodoraLand

      A legacy, a plot and a loner’s dangerous quest…

      A bookshop closes and there is blood…

      TheodoraLand

       by Malcolm James Thomson

       Copyright: © 2014 Malcolm James Thomson

       Published by: epubli GmbH, Berlin

       www.epubli.de

       ISBN 978-3-****-***-*

      Contents

       Part 1

       One

       Two

       Three

       Four

       Five

       Six

       Seven

       Eight

       Nine

       Ten

       Eleven

       Twelve

       Thirteen

       Fourteen

       Part 2

       Fifteen

       Sixteen

       Seventeen

       Eighteen

       Nineteen

       Twenty

       Twenty-one

       Twenty-two

       Twenty-three

       Twenty-four

       Twenty-five

       Part 3

       Twenty-six

       Twenty-seven

       Twenty-eight

       Twenty-nine

       Thirty

       Thirty-one

       Thirty-two

       Thirty-three

       Thirty-four

       Thirty-five

       Thirty-six

       Thirty-seven

       Author's notes

Part 1

One

      SATURDAY 26 MAY 2012

      There wasn’t what anyone would call a crowd. It wasn’t what anyone would call an event. It was the Whitsun weekend and many of Munich’s inhabitants were out of town.

      I lingered at a table under a parasol, sheltered from the sun (promising a decent summer to come) outside the café on Dreifaltigkeitsplatz, Trinity Place, in the heart of the Bavarian capital. The small square is dominated by the large, popular and quite expensive restaurant Brasserie Stadtschreiber on one side. The inevitable church is at one end, a new shopping precinct at the other. Between them, across from the café, is the colonnaded frontage of what once had been a monastery. There in shadow of the arcade, was Manduvel Bookshop. Until yesterday it was the place where I worked.

      And today it would close its doors forever. The premises had to be vacated completely by the end of June, emptied of fixtures and fittings and the inventory of books.

      Yes, Bookshop, not Buchhandlung. The specialization in English language books had been a recent development, an experiment. It was an attempt to maintain a Manduvel presence in the premises where the bookselling family had opened a business in 1893. But now there was a normal Manduvel branch, the thirty-seventh in Germany, in the nearby urban mall. Maybe there was not that much demand for English books in Munich.

      “Hi, Thea!”

      I couldn’t tell him that I would prefer to be alone with my thoughts. Dirk Seehof and his fiancée, Bea Schell, were probably my closest friends. And I had, after all, had a brief affair with him the previous summer. At least he called me Thea and not Dora. At Manduvel old Herr Lessinger called me Theodora sometimes. The others spoke of Dora even if I was addressed by them in front of customers as Frau Lange. Dora sounds dumb and I am not dumb. Nor am I Dora The Explorer except when it comes to sex.

      “A sad day, Dirk.”

      For him it would be, too. Addicted to British and American thrillers, he had long been a Bookshop regular. He repeatedly complained that his own life as a free-lance web journalist lacked any of the thrills and perils faced by the protagonists described in the pages of paperback crime and mystery fiction.