And the next day, there he was, in a beige detective’s trench coat, as if he had got wind of the crime and arrived to investigate. I watched him dart a glance towards the history section, where a gap remained that would not be filled automatically, since no record of the book’s sale existed. I noticed him notice and tried not to give myself away by smiling too hard.

Frustratingly, he looked younger if anything IRL than in the photos. He was a broad-shouldered man, shorter than me, but then I am six foot two; he might have been six foot himself, and he walked tall, pushing his shoulders back and rolling them as he browsed the fiction table, as though he was working out the knots in his back from a hard morning’s word-processing. I had already picked up that he was a good-looking man from my trawl through his headshots. A touch of the dandy too – a pink shirt and suede boots. Light-brown hair that might have been dyed, I suppose, but looked natural, thick enough to be swept back in a floppy parting. There was a sighing brutality to him; he held up a book and seemed to look through it into some disgraceful scene from his past; he grimaced and I thought he might tear the thing in two; but he placed it back on the pile and glanced around the shop, as though he was looking for someone.

I was distracted from him then by a customer who couldn’t find the philosophy section downstairs. When I came back up Andrew was embracing his daughter. I knew it was his daughter, illogically, because she looked a little like Emily, with the same straight dark hair and pale cheeks. She was so blemishless that you could have described her as plain, not that there was anything unattractive about her face; it was fresh out of the box, unmarked. She may have had the same blue eyes as he did, I don’t know, because I was only concentrating on how she put her hands on his shoulders and reached up to kiss his cheek, like well-bred girls did to Daddy to thank him for what his money did for them. I looked at her quite arrogantly, I suppose, confident of my ability to see the transparency of things, as though the soul was something that could be peered at through a closed window, like a puppy in a back seat waiting for its owner to come back.

*