Ballingstead lived in an unmemorable five-story building, drab red brick and concrete, with scraggly plane trees planted out front. Every runner I’d known lived on the first or basement floor—easier to lug books in and out—and Ballingstead was no exception. He buzzed me in, opening the door to greet me.
“My god, I’ve been up all night with you lot! Never tire of it, do you? Blood and circuses, all those hungry ghouls online craving meat. How can you live with yourselves? Come in, come in.”
Ballingstead resembled an Arthur Rackham gnome who’d gotten lost at the Glastonbury Festival years ago and never found his way home. He barely came up to my chin, a wizened, spidery-limbed man whose round face seemed to have been plopped atop the wrong body. He had a shoulder-length fringe of lank gray hair; flushed, bulbous cheeks; a receding chin; and protuberant blue eyes. He wore faded jeans and a windowpane-check shirt, open at the neck to display a red plastic rosary worn as a necklace.
We walked down a short hallway devoid of any furnishings save shelves crammed with books. The place smelled like a teenage boy’s room, of sweat and weed and unwashed sheets. “Tell me again who you are?” he asked.
“Shelley Wilson. I write for the Tribune. I just happened to be in London when this story broke and—”
“Yes, everyone’s very excited about it. Well, I shouldn’t say excited,” he added, though he obviously was. “We are heartsick, just heartsick, every one of us who knew Harold. The Tribune, that’s online, isn’t it? Or is that the other one? So far I’ve talked to the Metro Morning News, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Guardian. News Six just now, I told them they could send someone over, but they won’t. Who else?”
“The police?”
“Oh yes, the police! No, I haven’t gotten in touch with them yet, I suspect they may call me as well. Or just drop by.”
I glanced uneasily back at the door, but Nathan prattled on without noticing. “I’m not a person of interest, so I imagine I’m pretty far down the totem pole as far as that sort of thing goes. Pretty far down,” he repeated with emphasis, and gestured me into a room.
There’s a very thin tightwire that separates collectors and hoarders, and Nathan seemed to be barely maintaining his balance there. Boxes covered the floor, stacked so high they obscured the walls. Any bit of free space was piled with books like a frozen game of Jenga. Here, the pervasive odors were old paper and Earl Grey tea.
“Welcome to the Fortress of Bookitude.” Nathan indicated a metal folding chair alongside a leather recliner with a blanket draped across it, the only proper furniture I could see. “Pardon the sordid state of affairs, you’re the first to actually visit in a while. I don’t spend much time here, to be honest.”
I sat, after making my way past a wasteland of takeaway boxes filled with dried-up tea bags and an Anglepoise lamp perched on a carton marked DOCTOR WHO. Nathan settled into the recliner, tossing a pillow into the canyon of boxes behind him.
“So,” he said.
“So how long have you—”
“Aren’t you going to record this?” Nathan stared at me quizzically. “Or take notes?”
“Oh yeah, right.” I fumbled inside my bag for a pen. “You, uh, got a piece of paper or something?”
Nathan’s brow furrowed. He pushed himself from the recliner and puttered around the room, returned to hand me two sheets of lined notepaper. “You don’t use a recorder? Or your mobile?”
“I’m old-school.” I smoothed the paper on my knee. “Okay. You’ve known Harold a long time?”
He nodded, touching the rosary around his neck. “Yonks. I used to see him at George’s stall in Farringdon every Saturday. There were a hundred bookstalls there once, extending all the way to High Holborn, all passed down through families. It’s all gone now—they ended up building an awful Thatcherite office block there. There’s still a bit of the original brick wall, if you know where to look.”
He shook his head sadly. “It would be around 1971 when Harold and I first met. Farringdon wasn’t closed to anyone, but ninety percent of the people there were runners or dealers or scouts. Not many women, sorry. There was no bullying, but it was a genuine scrum—you needed to be fast and strong, which in those days I was.
“George had four long tables, covered with books. When you arrived they were all covered with tarpaulins. Each table was priced differently and, for years, the best table had every book on it priced for a pound. But you never knew which table would be the best table. George switched them every week, and you never knew what was under the tarp. He uncovered them one at a time, and he wouldn’t unveil the next one till the first was empty.
“It was like watching a cardplayer for tells. He’d walk back and forth between the tables, stop in front of one, and everyone would cluster around it. Then suddenly he’d make a break to another table and whip off the tarpaulin like a stage magician. Everyone would run for it and start grabbing books as fast as possible before they disappeared.”
“Sounds like a madhouse.”
Nathan smiled. “It was.”
I remembered I was supposed to be taking notes and scribbled on the sheet of paper. Madhouse.
“Within half an hour, he’d have sold two thousand books,” Nathan continued. “In forty-five minutes, everything would be gone.”
“And that’s where Harold learned his job?”
“Oh yes. Harold had a marvelous eye, one of the best. He sold enough to private collectors to lease his own place in Islington, and eventually did well enough to set himself up in Hampstead.”
His eyes blurred with tears. “I still can’t believe it’s true. Can you?” He gave me a pleading look, as though I might reveal some elaborate hoax.
“No.” I recalled Harold’s expression as he gazed at his treasure for the first time. “I can’t.”
Nathan took out a red bandanna and blew his nose, shaking his head.
“Do you know who might have killed him?” I asked. “Some kind of professional rivalry?”
“The book business isn’t like that. Or it wasn’t until now.”
“What about something personal? Love affair gone bad, something like that?”
“There were rumors…” He stopped himself and stuffed the bandanna back into his pocket. “Not my business.”
“What about a guy named Gryffin Haselton. Do you know him?”
“Gryffin? He’s one of my American customers, lives in California. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” I went on quickly. “Just, someone told me he’s a friend of Harold’s.”
“He is. Lovely chap. He used to stay with me when he visited London. Not much room for him now,” he admitted with a glance around the room.
I fought to recall another name from Gryffin’s contact list. “What about Malloy Townson. Know him?”
Nathan rolled his eyes. “Everyone knows Malloy, though some wish they didn’t. He has some strange ideas, Malloy.”
“Could he—”
“Not unless he’d lost his mind completely. Which is possible, I suppose. But Malloy has enough trouble keeping track of all his conspiracy theories, without something like this. He and Harold were good friends. Opposites attract—Harold’s open-minded as they come. Whereas Malloy…”
He held out his hand and mimed a shaky boat. “He runs with a different crowd. Folks who have ‘the right to offend.’ I have a different word for them.”
“Is there anyone who holds a grudge against Harold?”
“I’d be very surprised.” He mused, frowning. “But you know, now that I think of it, I did hear something. Where was it? Wait!”
He snapped his gnarled fingers triumphantly. “I know! A launch at Maggs for Iain Sinclair a few months ago. I was there chatting with someone, can’t remember who. But whoever it was mentioned he’d heard that Harold was negotiating for something extraordinarily rare.”
“Really?” I kept my voice even. “Do you have any idea what it was? Or who you were talking to?”
Nathan sighed. “Not a thing. My memory’s going, that’s the sad truth. But that’s interesting, isn’t it? If Harold had come across something unusual. I wonder if anyone else has mentioned it?” He thumped the arms of his chair. “I don’t think they have! You have a scoop there, my friend.”
I gave him a conspiratorial look. “Can you please not mention this to anyone right away? Just so I have time to file the story?”
Nathan thought for a moment. “Yes, all right. Though I can’t lie to the police if I see them. This might break the case.”
There was a ping, and Nathan dug in the recliner for his mobile.
“Speak of the devil,” he said, reading a text. “Here’s Malloy now. They’re headed to the Bolt—we meet there once a month with Harold. Thirty years we’ve been doing it.” He tapped in a reply, sighing again. “Now it’s just me and Malloy and William and Birdhouse.”
“Gwilym Birdhouse?” I did a double take. “The singer?”
“The very one. He dabbles a bit as a collector. English esoterica, Elizabethan, mostly. Fancies himself a modern antiquarian. Are you a fan?”
“He was after my time. I didn’t even know he was still performing.”
“I’m not sure he is. But he made enough to keep himself happy. He raises sheep in the Hebrides or Faeroe Islands, one of those places. Orkney. Sheep for wool, not eating—he’s a vegan.”
“So is Birdhouse his real name?”
“Haven’t the slightest. He’s Malloy’s friend more than mine. Harold could get along with anybody. And Birdhouse was a customer, so…”
Nathan made a show of pinching his nose. “You learn to make excuses for differences of opinion. I think he’s a crackpot. You can make up your own mind about his music. Handel, that’s my style.”
Nathan’s mobile pinged again. This time his eyebrows shot up when he looked at the screen. He raised a finger to me, spoke to whoever was on the other end, and wended his way into the hall.
As soon as he was out of sight, I grabbed my bag. The conversation had been a washout. I’d wave goodbye as I left.
I made a cursory inspection of the boxes as I left the room. Most seemed destined for Oxfam. But near the door, a stack of books caught my eye, the top one a volume of Mick Rock’s work. I paused to scan the other titles. Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia. Madonna’s Sex. All in pretty bad shape, spines cracked, dust jackets missing. If I looked inside, I’d probably find seeds and stems left from back in the day.
Then a familiar title caught my attention. I stooped and carefully removed an oversize volume from the pile.
The cover was a black-and-white night shot of five people standing in an alley slick with rain. Battered metal trash cans, a junked car. The light from a streetlamp bleached their faces a featureless white. Jean-clad pipe-cleaner legs, cowboy boots, and filthy Keds. One figure faced the camera, his hand extended warningly, mouth a smeary wound.
The others were turned sideways, staring at something on the wet pavement, just out of the camera’s line of sight. If you knew where to look, you’d see a bare foot protruding from a black puddle at the edge of the frame.
I saw it, because I knew where to look. I knew where to look because my name was on the cover.