“Giles, Giles,” I said. “You’re hopeless.”
He started at my voice, and then looked slightly relieved to see it was only me.
“Hopeless?” he repeated.
“Here we go to all the trouble of implicating you in the most shocking crime Caerphilly has seen in generations, all for the sake of enhancing your public image as an edgy, hip kind of guy,” I said. “And you go and ruin it all by spending your Sunday chained to a desk doing paperwork?”
“Oh, is that what all this is in aid of?” Giles said, with an expression that I’m sure he intended as a smile, though it came off as more of a grimace. “If it’s all the same, I’d just as soon return to my old image as a boring fuddy-duddy.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “Speaking of which, may I borrow your faculty directory? I need to track down a suspect.”
“By all means,” Giles said, astonishing me by pulling the directory out of a pile of stuff without much hunting. “Looking for anyone in particular?”
I was opening my mouth to explain when the phone rang.
“Sorry,” he said, gesturing to the phone. “It’s the department chairman. I really ought to …”
“Want me to leave?” I asked, reaching for my purse.
“No, no,” he said, with his hand over the mouthpiece. “Please don’t; I want to ask you something, and he’s probably just calling about tomorrow’s faculty meeting. Dr. Snyder,” he said, into the phone. “How are you?”
Unfortunately, Giles was wrong. For the next fifteen minutes, I heard his side of what was obviously a chewing-out by his department head. Not fair, really; it wasn’t Giles’s fault that the police unjustly suspected him of murder. Still, I felt bad, being present to witness his embarrassment. I made a motion to leave at first, but Giles waved me back into my seat. I pretended to be absorbed in the faculty directory for ten times as long as it took me to find and copy down Professor Schmidt’s address, and when I grew tired of rereading the names of the stuffed shirts who had it in for Michael, I turned to the nearest bookshelf and feigned an intense interest in its contents.
Though once I made the effort to focus on the titles of the books, I found they were rather interesting. I deduced from the few authors’ names I recognized—E.C. Bentley, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and S.S. Van Dyne—that I was seated next to Giles’s collection of Golden Age mystery writers. I scanned the shelves for R. Austin Freeman and found him right at my elbow.
I’d seen these books before, of course, at least a dozen times when I’d visited Giles’s office. But without the added interest of being associated with a murder, they hadn’t particularly attracted my attention. Like most of the books in that section of the shelves, they were rather nondescript. So many faded linen bindings in muted shades of blue, brown, green, and red, with the occasional battered dust jacket, and now and then an empty space where a book was in use. The gentle patina of dust over everything further softened the colors. The whole effect was oddly soothing, rather like the bookshelves of some of my elderly relatives—except that many of Giles’s books were neatly wrapped in plastic Brodart covers to protect them, while my relatives’ vintage libraries were allowed to fade au naturel. I counted forty-eight volumes by Freeman, though some of them seemed to be different editions of the same title. The English and American editions, I suspected. I’d have opened a few to check, but I wasn’t sure how Giles felt about people handling his treasures. Maybe I was overreacting to the protective plastic covers, but they did seem calculated to repel casual inspection.
I found myself wondering if he read them or just collected them, and also how much he treasured them for their own sake and how much for what he thought they said about him—that despite his rather mild and pedantic manner, he wasn’t a stuffy old dinosaur like so many of the department’s faculty. That he was, in fact, hip and cool, though in a low-key, bookish manner.
It worked for me. I liked Giles’s office almost as much as his study. Apart from the familiar, comforting presence of the books, I liked the bits of academic clutter he had scattered about. Here a Civil War vintage sword—the English Civil War, of course—there a Tudor coin, or a battered piece of pottery that Julius Caesar might have held. Whenever I grew impatient with Giles, I reminded myself that underneath the slightly stiff exterior was the man with the wit and erudition to create this office.
Perhaps I appreciated his office all the more today because usually an even layer of dust covered everything, and today, the dust had clearly been heaved around by the police search. I saw clear spots and spots where the dust had been piled up like a snowdrift by moving objects around. Nearly every knickknack stood near but not precisely on the clear spot where it had been resting for months or years before the police arrived. Strangely enough, this added to the room’s charm.