laughed.
“And now I even look like a hacker! How cool is that?”
Not so cool, I thought. She’s a year older than I am but Bea now looked like a teenager. She was edging into the spotlight I had always considered my own personal space, reserved for someone flamboyant, kick-ass, intelligent, sexy, although at the moment also apprehensive.
Seven
The turret bedroom that old Frau Steinemann had prepared pleased what the housekeeper took to be the engaged couple, although she did give a young people nowadays sigh. Their balcony had room for a small table and four chairs.
From the elevation at which Aunt Ursel’s house stood the view when the Föhn wind blew was breathtaking. Under a blue sky of unbelievable clarity distant peaks seemed miles closer than they were. I pointed out Säntis, rising two-and-a-half kilometres above sea level. Bea nodded, shading her eyes with her hand to admire the stupendous vista.
Closer there was a lawn below and to one side of the house, bisected by a driveway big enough for cars to turn round to face the tall gates. At the top of the upper lawn were three beehives.
“What’s that?” Bea asked, pointing to a quirky landscaping feature, a low box hedge. It was cruciform, the planting outlining a nave, chancel and transepts, although it took up little more space on the lawn than a decent sized summer house might have required.
“My grandfather never got round to building the chapel he had in mind…”
Dirk was not to be distracted from his Kindle. How many thrillers and crime stories were held in the digital archive of the device I did not know. But I knew he was currently collating examples of beatings inflicted as ‘warnings to people not to meddle in things which were not their concern’. Did he seek kinship with fictional figures thus horribly maltreated, their suffering described sometimes in graphic detail by Child or Deaver or Harvey, Brookmyre or Jardine or Rankin, Larsson or Larsson or Larsson and God knows how many others? If warning it had been, he had got off lightly. A tooth was chipped but only his face had been punched. The bruising on his hip had been the result of his fall from his bike. Had his assailants known what splendour lurked there, his crotch might have been deemed worthy of a kick or two out of pure envy. What a dreadful pity that would have been.
“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