The roof was so low and the small room so full of books—not only in cases against the walls, but piled up haphazardly on tables, ready to teeter over if you so much as breathed on them—that you had to stoop and make your way around the place very carefully. It must have been even harder for Luke, Annie thought, as he was taller and more gangly than her.

The owner himself, Norman Wells, was just a little over five feet, with thin brown hair, a bulbous sort of face and rheumy eyes. Because it was so cold and damp down there, no matter what the weather was like up above, he always wore a moth-eaten gray cardigan, woolly gloves with the fingers cut off and an old Leeds United scarf. He couldn’t make much of a living out of the little shop, Annie thought, though she doubted the overheads were very high. Even in the depths of winter a one-element electric fire was the only source of heat.

Norman Wells glanced up from the paperback he was reading and nodded in Annie’s direction. He seemed surprised when she showed her warrant card and spoke to him.

“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” he said, taking off his reading glasses, which hung on a piece of string around his neck.

“I’ve been here once or twice.”

“Thought so. I never forget a face. Art, isn’t it?”

“Pardon?”

“Your interest. Art.”

“Oh, yes.” Annie showed him a photograph of Luke. “Remember him?”

Wells looked alarmed. “Course I do. He’s the lad who disappeared, isn’t he? One of your lot was around the other day asking about him. I told him all I know.”

“I’m sure you did, Mr. Wells,” said Annie, “but things have changed. It’s a murder investigation now and we have to go over the ground afresh.”

“Murder? That lad?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Bloody hell. I hadn’t heard. Who’d…? He wouldn’t say boo to a goose.”

“Did you know him well, then?”

“Well? No, I wouldn’t say that. But we talked.”

“What about?”

“Books. He knew a lot more than most kids his age. His reading level was way beyond that of his contemporaries.”

“How do you know?”

“I…Never mind.”

“Mr. Wells?”

“Let’s just say I used to be a teacher, that’s all. I know about these things, and that lad was bordering on genius.”

“I understand he bought two books from you on his last visit.”

“Yes, like I told the other copper. Crime and Punishment and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”

“They sound a bit advanced, even for him.”

“Don’t you believe it,” Wells protested. “If I hadn’t thought him ready I wouldn’t have sold him them. He’d already been through T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, most of Camus and Dubliners. I didn’t think he was quite ready for Ulysses or Pound’s Cantos, but he could handle the Portrait, no problem.”

Annie, who had heard of these books but had read only the Eliot and a few of Joyce’s short stories at school, was impressed. So the books she had seen in Luke’s room weren’t just for show; he really did read and probably even understand them. At fifteen, she’d been reading historical sagas and sword and sorcery series, not literature with a capital L. That was reserved for school and was tedious in the extreme, thanks to Mr. Bolton, the English teacher, who made the stuff sound about as exciting as a wet Sunday in Cleethorpes.