Deansbrook went through the list, and made the sort of offer you might make to a man who didn’t know what he was about. Will returned a kindly smile and a figure five times higher. They spent some time exchanging professional observations, personal reflections, and abstract musing on the concept of honesty, and finally settled on three and a half times the initial offer, or ten pounds over Will’s private take-it-or-leave-it figure.

Deansbrook mopped his brow with a grimy handkerchief, leaving a faint line of book-dust where the sweat had been. It was a hot June day and he didn’t believe in open windows. “Well, that’s settled. Are you going to tell me how you came to handle Aveston? I really would have thought they’d come to me.”

“I had the inside track, I’m afraid,” Will said with an apologetic air that wasn’t convincing, or meant to be. “I’m working with a chap who knows the family.”

“Hmph. I heard you’d taken on a partner, but I didn’t believe it. There can’t be the money in your place.”

Will ignored the accurate disparagement of his business. “Oh, it’s an unofficial arrangement. To be honest, he’s more of a—” He cleared his throat and lowered his voice, because you didn’t have to be a book dealer long to learn which were the bad words. “Bibliophile.”

Deansbrook sucked air through his teeth. “Sensible chap, though,” Will hastened to add. “Knows his stuff. Completed a very nice set of Fielding for me just the other day.”

“Hmph,” Deansbrook repeated. “How did you come by this chap?”

Will shrugged, smiled, and offered him the general list from the Aveston library to look through. That put an end to conversation for the moment, so he sat back and wondered what an answer might have sounded like.

I met him last winter when he hired a thug to smash up my shop, in order to fool me into trusting him. He was working for a shadowy Whitehall bureau then, and he lied to me non-stop, except when he didn’t; he betrayed me over and over, and spent a week trying to save my neck. We took on a criminal gang together, twice, and I’ve never worked with anyone better or worse, sometimes in the same day. And we fuck. My God, how we fuck.