“This is very plush.”

“Libraries have been monstrously overfunded these past thirteen years,” I said. “The librarians had to take industrial action when the city council threatened to have gold taps put in the washrooms. Mind you, that will all change. I think you’re getting some of our funding.”

“Fifty million that I know of,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow. Fifty million was a third of our budget. “But we have to fund the Special Library Services out of that,” she added.

This made it a lot easier—Wexler’s team was expensive.

“Tell me,” she continued, “do you think Colonel Wexler is mad?”

“Yes, but in a good way. Got anyone on your staff yet?”

“A few trigger-happy nutters who were too mentally unstable even for SO-5. I told them to sod off—I want to keep gratuitous violence inside books, where it belongs.”

“Very wise. Your watch is slow.”

She looked at me oddly and pulled up her sleeve. The watch was a Reverso—the face was hidden. She flipped it over. “You’re right. How did you know?”

“I can hear it tick. And it’s ticking slowly. Not important. Anything on the ‘stolen thirteenth-century codex’ question?”

She pulled out a small pocketbook and turned to a page marked with a rubber band. “Possibly. Out of the eighty-three reported bibliothefts over the past month, only two had the same modus operandi. One in Bath and another in Lancaster. Exactly the same. Torn-out pages, then destroyed, but with the rest of the book left untouched.”

“Both by St. Zvlkx?”

“Bingo. The first a gazetteer of taverns in the Oxford area that give credit and the second a list of credible excuses to give your bishop if he thinks you’re misappropriating church funds— neither of them valuable nor particularly rare.”

“That links the books,” I said, wondering if Jack Schitt had been there on each occasion. “What are your thoughts?”

“I did some research into St. Zvlkx, and I was struck by a recurring theme in his life.”

“You mean his stealing, debauchery, embezzlement, drunkenness and the total absence of pastoral care or moral rectitude?”

“I was thinking more of his meanness. St. Zvlkx was notoriously tight-fisted. It was said that Augustus IV, the ‘Bouncing Bishop’ of Salisbury, joked that his idea of eternity would be dinner with St. Zvlkx and Kevin of Kent, waiting for one of them to pick up the tab.”

“So?”

“Zvlkx would never have used fresh vellum in his books, because it would cut into his drinking funds. He probably used secondhand books, dismantled them, scraped the vellum clean and then reused them. It’s only a guess, but I think the thief was looking for palimpsests.”

I could see what she was getting at. A palimpsest was the ghostly image of the original writing that was just still visible on the reused sheet of vellum. If the writing was from a long-lost book, it would be of inestimable value.