‘Then you’ll love this,’ she said and took me to see her dad’s study.

If the kitchen had been colonised by the money, then the study had been irretrievably lost to literature a long time ago. Every spare centimetre of the wall space had been covered with shelves, all of which were stuffed with books. It reminded me of my dad’s record collection, which had filled up my parents’ bedroom and pushed every other activity except sleeping out into the rest of their small flat. Which was why my old bedroom was now my mum’s walk-in wardrobe and shoe store. But unlike my dad’s precious vinyl, which has to be stored vertical and absolutely upright in exactly the right sized shelves, here books spilled out onto the floor and across the big hardwood dining room table in the middle of the room that substituted for a desk. Albert Pryce wasn’t averse to using his books as coffee coasters, or to weigh down piles of hardcopy or even as an impromptu building material for shelves where they served to support even more books, an old fashioned boombox and a row of withered potted plants.

‘Have you spotted them yet?’ asked Albertina.

Since I was looking for signs that her dad was an ethically challenged practitioner, I doubted I was looking for whatever she was talking about, and I was just about to say no when I did spot them.

Most of the shelving had enough horizontal spacing to take quite tall books but one unit had clearly been custom built to take small, old fashioned paperbacks. The spines were colourful, smooth and uncracked. I knew the signs – this was a collection, not a library.

I looked at Albertina, who grinned back and said that it was OK for me to touch them.

‘The Intern is totally desperate to leave these behind,’ she said. ‘She had someone in to value them – on the sly.’