The Bad Book Affair: A Mobile Library Mystery by Ian Sansom

Maurice.
    “Not if you’re nagging at her she won’t come round.”
    “I didn’t work all these years so my daughter could—”
    “It’s nothing to do with you, Maurice.”
    “It’s everything to do with me!” said Maurice.
    “She’d be fine at art college.”
    “Doing what? Hanging around a bunch of dope-smoking layabouts!”
    “ Layabouts ? Nobody says ‘layabouts’ anymore, Maurice.”
    “I say ‘layabouts.’”
    “Anyway, she’s got years to work it all out.”
    “You have to plan ahead for these things, I keep telling you.”
    “Maurice, you go on ahead and get yourself elected, and let me worry about her.”
    “She’s had a five-star education. Pony, clubs, the best of everything. When I was growing up on Corporation Street I’d have given anything to—”
    “Maurice, please. You’re on repeat. You’re making a speech to me. I’m your wife. Remember?”
    “How could I forget?”
    “And I’ve not had my coffee yet. So let’s not get into all this now.”
    “Fine.”
    Mrs. Morris stubbed out her cigarette and took a final sip of her coffee.
    “She’ll be late,” said Maurice, “if she doesn’t get up soon.”
    “She won’t be late! Now, just leave her be. God, you’re such a control freak.”
    Maurice was not a control freak. He had, for example, left much of the design and furnishing of the interior of the house to Mrs. Morris, whose tastes in home furnishings ran rather to the exotic. Left to his own devices, Maurice would have tended toward basic dictator chic—chandeliers andgold plates, with brocaded curtains and brand-spanking-new mahogany. Pamela had more bohemian tastes: tapestries, antiques, curiosities. He’d even allowed her to paint a mural on the kitchen wall, bold and Bloomsbury-style, when they first bought the house, depicting the mountains of Mourne and the cottage they had there and which they used as their bolt-hole. But the kitchen had since been vigorously extended with steel and glass and a table which could accommodate a large, catered dinner party, and the Mournes mural with its little cottage had long since disappeared.
    They sat in silence, the two of them, sipping their coffee, as distant as any long-married couple. Maurice looked at his watch.
    “All right,” said Mrs. Morris. “I’ll go and get her up.”
    “Thank you,” said Maurice.
    The right order had reestablished itself.
    As he explained to the police and to the press later that day, the first thing Maurice Morris knew about his daughter’s disappearance was the sound of his wife screaming.

8
    S undays were always the real challenge for Israel in Tumdrum. On Sunday, Tumdrum’s sheer Tumdrumness somehow intensified: the place seemed to hum not only with its average everyday senselessness and pointlessness, but with an extra tone, a deep overtone or undertone—a void—of doom, as though a dark-cloaked chorus had arrived and was lamenting the steady encroachment of catastrophe in the last scenes of some long, depressing opera about the terrible fate of Everyman: Sibelius, Benjamin Britten, Don Giovanni , Simon Boccanegra . O Tumdrum! Weh mir! Weh mir! And on Sundays, as a consequence, with the thrum of doom in his ears, Israel always suffered from a combination of queasiness, headaches, and a nausea ofa kind both physiological and philosophical that would doubtless be familiar to anyone who’d been out on a Saturday night drinking, or at an amateur production of a play by Harold Pinter, or at home listening to the Saturday night play on Radio 4: He was a man of sorrows, despised, rejected, and acquainted with grief .
    Sometimes, to dispel the Sunday doom and anxieties Israel would go to the pub—the First and Last. But it only ever made things worse—the First and Last leaned more toward the Omega than the Alpha—and anyway, in the end he would always have to return home, to the converted chicken coop, his room like a prison cell, no more than twelve feet by twelve feet, with bare